Our queer political dreams may come crashing down. One day after legislators stalled a planned vote, The Hill reports that it may be freshman Democrats who are holding up the non-inclusive H.R. 3865:
Reps. Tim Walz (Minn.) and Ron Klein (Fla.), leaders of the class of freshman Democrats, carried a message to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday that their fellow first-term lawmakers did not want to vote on an amendment extending civil rights to transgender employees.
House Education and Labor panel Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), whose committee passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, said he told the freshman lawmakers at their Wednesday breakfast with Pelosi that the amendment did not have the votes to pass and would not be brought to the House floor.
Young politicians are afraid to vote against trans rights, but are also afraid that by not voting, they’ll doom our nation’s first gay-specific legislation.
Gay City News‘ Paul Schindler writes:
Rumors circulated on Capitol Hill that, in the face of growing numbers of Democrats unhappy with the prospects of voting either way on the bill as now written – to leave the trans community behind or to defeat the first gay rights vote ever held – leadership was weighing the option of pulling the bill altogether for the time being to regroup.
Schindler also says that House majority leader Steny Hoyer hopes to reschedule the vote for next week. Barney Frank, however, has heard nothing of the sort.
So, just to reiterate: politicians are more worried about their next election than thousands upon thousands of gay activists, politicians and journalists who oppose HR 3865. God fucking bless America!
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Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
I am not surprised at the FL congressman. The majority of the Senate and House delegation are DLC Dixiecrats in some seats that favour Republican neoconservatives.
‘
The tragedy is that transgendered individuals are brothers and sisters too, and many from within and from without use this wedge issue to divide and conquer.
This reminds me of the civil marriage laws in Europe that have now been amended to add surrogacy and adoption….always something to remind you that you are inferior to them.
This You Tube from Holland was sent to me by two Dutch lesbian married friends with surrogate children
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qf0puHJ-KM
adamblast
It’s all over. The delay announcement is this year’s ENDA death sentence.
Which means, even if we have a Democratic president next year, there will be no history of success in Congress, only failure.
Thanks, queerty, NGLTF, Tammy, and trans-supporters everywhere, for killing the first gay-rights bill that would have passed the House. I hope you haven’t killed our chances for the next eight years as well.
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
Adamblast – please reconsider the direction that your anger should be pointed toward. First of all, focus it upon all the neoconservative Republicans in Congress who oppose your right to legal documents – responsibilities and privileges given to any first class citizen.
The Democratic party is not monolithic. In the House of Representatives, the new majority was created by electing moderates and conservatives in districts gerrymandered by DeLay when majority leader to favour Republicans.
The liberals in the House of Representatives are about one third if you look at your C-SPAN station and look at important left/right votes.
It is better to lose on principle and true justice than win on betrayal and division caused by your enemies.
Transgendered Americans are part of the LGBT family and remember that when you divide and conquer, there will be no one to protect you when they come after you too.
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
Also – the Senate vote would have been interesting with very little chance of passing. The Bush veto was ready before the ink dried on the document.
So, indeed, I believe that thanks to Queerty, NGLTF and Tammy Baldwin, the true principled victory was won….over the DLC voices of polls and pragmatism.
Lena Dahlstrom
Adam, I understand you’re upset. But I’d point out even if it went to to vote and failed that wouldn’t doom a later vote. In California, Mark Leno kept bringing his ENDA bill back year after year — and each year it kept getting a few more votes until it passed.
Besides which, the Senate hasn’t introduced an equivalent bill and Bush has clearly signaled he will veto ENDA with or without gender identity/expression protections, so this was all about a symbolic vote anyway.
adamblast
I wish the Trans community well, and will support them to the best of my ability. I wish they supported gay rights as well, as they have traditionally done, but that is apparently no longer the case. A trans-free ENDA was not a “betrayal” to anyone, and certainly not to the 10 to 30 million whose lives would have been improved. Our national orgainzations have placed “big tent” politics above concrete gains for gays and lesbians everywhere.
adamblast
Lena, I would characterize this year’s ENDA struggle as both important and strategic, rather than purely symbolic. I understand why the supporters of trans-inclusion continue to try to marginalize its importance, since they are largely responsible for its failure.
Leland Frances
Once again, like the four-year old left alone with super glue, Pope RES, is sticking together things that don’t belong. His obsessive, self-identified omniscient comments on any and every thread, on any and every comment reminds me of the echolalia that constantly emanated from the “George Constanza” character on “Seinfeld.” Pope RES, what’s your opinion on sardines? Oil or mustard sauce? How about fonts? Serif or sans-serif? What’s the Gospel According to St. RES on sweaters? Ya like sweaters?
Sorry to disappoint you, Pope, but no one’s “coming for†the Ts. Quite the opposite, in fact: too many are simply ignoring them. But paying attention to them does not mandate agreeing to everything they demand. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that not every T agrees with those turning out rhetorical Molotov cocktails at ENDA United.
It’s easy for someone living in the apparent Gay Paradise of Canada to pontificate about “the true principled victory†when he is protected by job discrimination law that does not exist for millions of gays and lesbians in 30 of our states. [Though even in his Nirvana to the north, protection for everyone that might fall under the broad characterization of “transgender†is more gray.]
It’s taking a while for everyone that’s been asleep on this plane to wake up and realize their first real opportunity for even minimal job protection in 33-years of trying has been hijacked. But every day more and more are. The first thing they have to do is wave away the effects of the smoke bombs set off by the extremists in their latest nakedly shameless and ruthlessness tactic—the assertion that, “You shouldn’t care about ENDA anyway because it’s toothless.†To which the logical response is, “if it was so bad in the first place then why are those with Mad Tranny Disease willing to destroy the movement to be ADDED TO IT?”
It’s just another step in their con job. They’ll try anything, say anything, demonize anyone [Barney Quisling?] to get what they want because by simply presenting the truth that it’s a heavily flawed bill but some protection for some is better than no protection for everyone they know that more and more will refuse to support their sabotage or, as DC’s Gay & Lesbian Activist Alliance [GLAA] and Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, change their positions after giving more thought to its real ramifications for those millions of gays and lesbians who don’t have the job protections that virtually every “leader†of ENDA United conveniently has where THEY live. The loudest voices against ENDA are from Mara Kiesling, National Center for Transgender Equality, and Matt Foreman, National [No Longer?] Gay & Lesbian Task Force. They work in Washington, D.C., where no version of ENDA is needed because both are already protected by local law.
Richard Rosendall, the Vice President for Political Affairs for GLAA, “the nation’s oldest continuously active organization fighting for the civil rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders,†after convincing them to sign onto the ENDA United letter has since written:
“I think the all-or-nothing approach demanded by many activist groups regarding the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is nuts. ….We should face the reality that some among us are by temperament perpetually disaffected. They are the sort of people who believe that complex conspiracy theories are the best explanations for every calamity, and are so mistrustful of their own allies that they readily believe the worst about them. These are people who refuse to take “yes†for an answer. Like the 1960s Black Power radical Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), they would rather remain protesting outsiders than join their colleagues who are taking responsibility and moving into governance. At some point, we have to let these self-exiled people go.
This has an ideological dimension, of course. For some, any coexistence with the established order, even when it involves significant but less than perfect change to that order, is a betrayal of the cause. By contrast, most of us do not want even an armchair revolution — we just want equality under the law. Similarly, most of us who support equal rights for transgender people do not feel compelled on that account to embrace the farthest-out theories of gender. When Gabriel Rotello suggested that research points to the idea that we are all transgender, he was masking a tendentious redefinition of terms as science, as if respecting atypical gender identities requires the majority to ignore their own biology. That is like telling me that to end discrimination against Muslims I must convert to Islam.
I know better than to ascribe this radicalism to everyone with another view. That would be as bad as accusing all incrementalists of transphobia, or dismissing transgender rights altogether as if we were merely discussing academic theories and not actual people. Just as gay equality has moved closer to the vital center of American politics, so will transgender equality. It will happen faster if we do not act against our own interests by denouncing politicians for giving us only 80 percent of what we want. Should we be satisfied with that 80 percent? Of course not. We take the 80 percent and keep working. That is, unless we are locked inside an ideological echo chamber.â€
Amen.
flightoftheseabird
I agree with Adam. This bill should have been voted on in a manner that would have passed. Small victories, even seemingly hollow or not entirely what we would want, are huge moral and even bigger political victories. Yeah perhaps the senate would not have passed the bill, and definitely the president would have vetoed it, but the political victory in the house is huge. Things don’t happen in an all or nothing manner in Washington.
The right wing has learned this. They have learned how to eat away at laws they do not like with small legislative victories. Abortion is a good example. True Roe v. Wade is still in place, but abortion rights in most part of the country have been eviscerated one law at a time, one state at time.
It is time we took a page out of the right wing play book. Eat away at the laws we don’t like, one law at a time, one state at a time. Make it politically acceptable (even beneficial) to the politicos in the fly-over states to support these inclusive, anti-discrimination laws (marriage, employment protection, adoption, etc) that make this country better.
Bill Perdue
As the candidates and owners of the Democratic and Republican parties shift further to the right, abandoning the people of the US to a future of war, declining standards of living, more Katrina’s, union busting and the penalties of bigotry they’re pulling their shills and hacks with them in a lockstep dance of treachery.
The logic of the shills’ blind party line loyalty translates to support for the war, the gutting of ENDA and a whole host of betrayals. It begins by apologizing for backstabbers like Frank, Feinstein, and Pelosi. It goes on to give cover to Bush’s genocidal war, which is wholeheartedly supported by Pelosi and Clinton – the same war that entails the arming of gay murdering jihadist by the US military.
It ends with abandoning the struggle for GLBT equality entirely. “It took 99 years after the civil war to pass the civil rights act” advises one, as if any sane person would want to wait for decades. For others, the victims, transgendered people, become the criminals in their warped view; “Thanks, queerty, NGLTF, Tammy, and trans-supporters everywhere, for killing the first gay-rights bill that would have passed the House. I hope you haven’t killed our chances for the next eight years as well.”, says Adamblast in a perfect illustration of how to use the Big Lie technique, while conveniently overlooking the fact that Frank and Pelosi needlessly gutted ENDA to appease bigots in their own party and that Bush has all along planned on vetoing it.
The isolation of the apologists for the gutting of ENDA, the war, union busting, and etc. is so complete that they’ve been reduced to quoting one another and desperately ignoring their increasing detachment from vast majority of activist and activist organizations, the 300 or so groups they pretend don’t exist. Their rightward political movement is irreversible. They’ll end up in log cabins.
A Republican politician is a baboon in a people suit with a totalitarian christian attached at the hip. A Democratic politician is a Republican in drag.
adamblast
If I’m a practitioner of the Big Lie technique, you and Leland must be practitioners of the Big Bore technique, lol.
Bill Perdue
Adamblast, I’m sorry you don’t like my little studies of the cesspit we call the two party system, but one liners just don’t cut it. Our best sources of one liners on Queerty and Towleroad are the editors who dream up those headers, followed closely by Prof. VP and the Rt. Rev. Dr. RES.
I’m not in their league when it comes to oneliners.
If you get too bored by politics divert yourself with the pictures of half naked men and boys.
Just stop pushing the Big Lie pretending that the victims are the criminals. It’s preposterous.
Matt
There really were always two opposed political forces going on here on “our” (whatever THAT means) side: (A) the pragmatic, political, incremental one and (B) the all-or-nothing, uncompromising inclusion one. In the end, had (A) prevailed and an ENDA been coughed up that had the barest hope of mustering a majority, it would be (was) and ENDA-by-committee, with squirmy definitions, blatant exclusions and uncomfortable permissions. It might have passed, and Bush might, in a moment of sudden non-madness, signed it. And the bulk of the GLBT “community” (not a good word, really, since this issue has profoundly demonstrated the lack of common values) would have enjoyed imperfect, questionably substantive, but previously utterly unknown federal protections. And someday, maybe, another bill would address the “more troublesome” issue of gender (this kinda harkens back to the Brokeback Mountain thread, and the observation by someone that straight men are more comfortable with the notion of men fucking each other than loving each other — here, GLB is pretty straightforward and easy for the straight DLCDems and “moderate” republicans to understand (the, pardon me, “fucking” side); gender is a touchier issue, harder to see, harder to pigeonhole, and is therefore more like the touchy-feely uncomfortable stuff. But I digress. Sorry.). Had (B) — remember “B” back up there somewhere? –somehow managed to be brought to a floor vote, it would lose handily (again, because GLB is “easy” for liberal and moderate-left politicians to “get”; T not so much maybe), and no one gets anything, even an imperfect something.
Altogether, it’s a sad display not of outside forces using GLBTs as a wedge issue, but of GLBTs tearing each other apart in pursuit of short-term empty moral victories rather than big-picture partial victories with possibly some crumbs of benefit. It’s been said before, I’ll say it again: those fighting for freed slaves to have the right to vote didn’t stop their efforts because female freed slaves would be voteless.
And Bill, I actually liked your one-liner: “A Republican politician is a baboon in a people suit with a totalitarian christian attached at the hip. A Democratic politician is a Republican in drag.” There are probably some exceptions, but none leap to mind.
NotFooled
Does United ENDA represent the community?
by Dale Carpenter
Bay Area Reporter
In the recent debate over ENDA, it has frequently been said that “the community” solidly opposes the first-ever federal gay civil rights bill unless it includes transgenders.
The evidence for this surprising unity is the fact that more than 300 organizations have signed an online petition, available at http://www.UnitedENDA.org. “United ENDA,” the Web site boasts, “effectively communicated the strong opposition of hundreds of organizations and millions of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.”
The correctness of an all-or-nothing approach to civil rights is not determined solely by the number of organizations or people who favor or oppose it. The strategy could be wrong even if everybody supported it; conversely, it could be right even if everybody opposed it. But in a society that values representative politics, claiming that you speak for millions of people lends moral authority and democratic legitimacy to your cause.
So is it true that United ENDA speaks for the community? The answer depends on which “community” we mean.
If we mean “the community of gay and trans activists” who lead organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the answer is “yes.”
This is a select group of people, however. They are very liberal, highly educated, and unusually politically aware. They long ago bought the idea that the “T” is necessarily part of the “LGB.” This view is strongly influenced by academic queer and gender theory that, whatever its merits, is probably not widely understood or actively embraced.
This does not mean that the leaders of these organizations are wrong; their dedication to their beliefs is admirable. It is only to suggest that they may not be representative.
But, it might be answered, they lead more than 300 organizations that collectively do represent millions of members of the community. To determine whether this might be true, I looked at the organizations listed on the United ENDA Web site. The list is much less impressive than it first seems.
Some of the groups are well-known players on the national stage, like NGLTF and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. The vast majority are very obscure local and state groups. One is called “Coqsure,” described online as a “social group” in Portland, Oregon, “for people who were born or raised female who don’t presently identify as totally female.”
Missing from the list is the largest and most influential gay political group, the Human Rights Campaign. There are no gay Republican organizations listed, yet more than 25 percent of gay people regularly vote Republican in national elections.
The list is padded. The National Stonewall Democrats are there, but so are a dozen of the group’s state and local chapters, including both the Colorado chapter and that chapter’s “Transgender Caucus.” The national PFLAG organization is listed, but so are half a dozen of its subsidiaries. On and on it goes like that.
The list also includes numerous non-gay organizations, like the Alliance for Jewish Renewal and a single local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. They’re free to oppose a bill that protects gay civil rights, of course, but they don’t represent the gay community.
There are about 10 million gay Americans, of whom perhaps 7.5 million are adults. How many of them are “represented” by the United ENDA signatory groups?
One way to determine that is by asking how many active members the groups have. Unfortunately, membership figures are mostly unavailable and are often inflated when they are available, consisting of little more than a mailing list. Membership in the listed organizations also overlaps.
The active membership of most of these groups, especially the more than 70 transgender groups listed, is probably tiny. Even many of the gay groups aren’t very large. To take just one example, the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, “representing” gays in a metropolitan area of more than four million people, regularly gets fewer than 30 people at meetings.
Let’s assume very generously that the 300 groups average 1,000 non-overlapping members each. That’s a total of 300,000 people – well short of “millions” and less than five percent of the estimated 7.5 million gay adults in the country.
Do the listed groups even represent their own members? A fascinating recent article in the Washington Blade about growing defections from the United ENDA front quoted gay Democratic activist Peter Rosenstein as saying that few of the 300 groups canvassed their members before taking a stand.
For example, Geoff Kors, head of Equality California, acknowledged that his group did not poll its members. But, he added, he had received lots of supportive e-mails. Getting e-mail from people who agree with you is not a vote.
United ENDA could assert that it speaks for many in the community who aren’t members of the signatory groups. The problem with that claim is that there are no reliable polls telling us how many gay people would forego their civil rights until “gender identity” is included.
More than two-thirds of the United ENDA signatories appear to be headquartered in states or cities where gay people are already protected from discrimination. I’m confident many members of the Harvard Transgender Task Force and the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club of San Francisco fully support making gay people in Mississippi wait until ENDA is ideologically pure, but they don’t speak for anyone outside their privileged precincts.
In short, there is simply no good evidence for United ENDA’s claim that the community opposes an incremental approach to civil rights.
Bill Perdue
Another attempt to contradict reality. Will the right wing pro-Democrat Bay Area Reporter be so kind as to let us let us know when the bulk of these groups leave United ENDA and embrace the toothless Democratic version of ENDA?
*National Black Justice Coalition
*National Center for Lesbian Rights
*National Center for Transgender Equality
*National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs
*National Education Association’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Caucus
*National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Inc.
*National Lesbian and Gay Law Association
*Al-Fatiha Foundation for LGBTIQ Muslims
*Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders
*Gay and Lesbian Medical Association
*GLSEN – the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network
*Immigration Equality
*Jewish Mosaic: National Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity
*Matthew Shepard Foundation
The inescapable logic of their position as apologists for the evisceration of ENDA is driving them further right on a parallel path with the prowar, union busting Republican and Democratic parties.
Carpenter recapitulates Frances who recapitulates Carpenter who… Get over it, you’re an isolated minority of right wing apologists for the treachery of Franck and Pelosi opposed by the overwhelming majority of activist groups.
And before Frances belittles the Al-Fatiha Foundation for LGBTIQ Muslims maybe he’d like to go on one of the Arab sites and make a contribution to the GLBT safe house movement in Iraq. After all he’s a supporter of Hillary Clinton, her chief altar boy in fact, and Hillary Clinton votes for the war at every turn, and that makes it easier for Bush the Butcher of Baghdad to use the US command there to arm the jihadist death squads who hunt down and murder GLBT folk. It only seems fair.
Leland Frances
What would you know about “fair,” Comrade? You don’t attempt to answer other’s opinions or facts, you simply repeat the party line over and over. Carpenter [thanks “NotFooled”] deconstructs ENDA Insane’s phony numbers, and rather than presenting opposing facts you merely relist some of th players in their game of charades. In the absence of OBJECTIVE evidence to the contrary their is more reason to believe him than you. Even one of the toy conductors on your Trans appeasement train, Geoff Kors, head of Equality California, “acknowledged that his group did not poll its members.”
And, for the upteenth time please answer what you and your fellow ideologues continually refuse to: is ENDA something so valuable that we must all be willing to commit political suicide by killing its chances of passage by adding Ts or is it “toothless” and, thereby, not worth all of your sound and fury? Or, as the saying goes, “Park it or drive it.”