Broccoli and Civil Rights

My son is reaching the age where everything is a negotiation. “Finish your supper,” I tell him.

“How about one more piece of broccoli?” he asks.

I study his plate, calculating what he’s already had. “Five more.”

“How about three?” he counters.

“No, five,” I insist, though I tell myself I’ll settle for four.

It’s tough, however, knowing when to hold the line and when to cut him some slack. There’s a point at which too much insistence on my part leads to more intractability on his. Sometimes I feel like giving in, if only to finish the meal and move on to other things.

I had such negotiations in mind while thinking about the debacle shaking the LGBT activist community right now, the removal of gender-identity and -expression protections from the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) making its way through the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and openly gay Representative Barney Frank took out these protections based on their calculations that the bill wouldn’t pass with them, and that an ENDA with only sexual-orientation protections was better than no ENDA at all.

I see this as a shameful abandonment of the transgender community. It also means the resulting ENDA will have fewer teeth even for LGB individuals. Many times, discrimination because of sexual orientation occurs because someone dresses or behaves in ways that don’t conform to traditional gender expectations. “I don’t care if she’s a lesbian, as long as she comes to work in makeup and a skirt,” could be a common refrain. Without protections in ENDA for gender identity and expression, we won’t have a leg to stand on, whether in pants or panty hose.

It’s one thing to give in on a piece of broccoli. Civil rights are another matter.

I’m a realist. I’ve watched enough West Wing to know that often, hard tradeoffs have to be made when enacting legislation. At some point, however, we leave the original spirit far enough behind that we have to ask ourselves whether it is worth moving ahead with a shell of a bill, or to maintain the bill’s integrity and our own, even at the risk of losing.

While the removal of gender identity and expression is by far the most worrying of the changes to ENDA, 365gay.com also reports that the new version of the bill says employers’ refusal to extend equal health insurance benefits to spouses and partners of employees cannot be considered sexual-orientation discrimination. The old version said states and local governments could require such benefits for partners when they were provided to spouses. The previous version also limited religious exemptions, whereas the new version has a blanket exemption that includes, for example, hospitals and universities run by faith-based groups.

Speaker Pelosi has just announced she is delaying markup of the bill until later this month (it was supposed to happen tomorrow) in order to “allow proponents of the legislation to continue their discussions with Members in the interest of passing the broadest possible bill.” This is a good sign. The Stonewall Democrats are asking people to sign a petition in support of the original ENDA. I urge you to do so as well, or to write independently to your representatives.