Remembering Senator Kennedy

On October 3, 1996 Senator Ted Kennedy gave the keynote address at the Pride Agenda’s Fall Dinner in New York City. He was a surprise stand-in for Senior Adviser to the President George Stephanopoulos, who at the last minute was unable to fly up from Washington, D.C.

Senator Kennedy got a standing ovation that night from the 1100 people in the Grand Hyatt Ballroom when he walked on stage, and he received thunderous applause many times throughout his speech.

The Senator’s appearance in 1996 came at a terribly disappointing time for the LGBT community. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) had shockingly gone down in the U.S. Senate by just one vote on September 10. That same day, in a second slam to LGBT Americans, the Senate passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). A few days later on September 21, President Clinton announced his decision to sign DOMA into law. Senator Kennedy led the unsuccessful fight on the floor to pass ENDA and he condemned the passage of DOMA.

Senator Kennedy gave us hope that night in the ballroom, just as he had so many times before.

When few politicians from either political party would say the word “AIDS” in the 1980s, Senator Kennedy did. He was not embarrassed to stand with us in fighting AIDS when just about every other politician was at best afraid to say anything and at worst just plain happy we were dying. And he was more than just words – he was action. From his post on the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee he made sure government started providing funding for research, treatment and prevention.

Senator Kennedy told us that night he’d never stop fighting for us and he never did. And he told us to never give up and we never will. While support for our issues is broader today than it was in the 80’s and the 90’s, we’ve obviously still got a lot of work to do.

Thank you Senator Kennedy for making our lives better in so many measurable ways. Thank you for playing such a critical role in putting America on a path that will, with continued hard work, win us our equality.

There is hope and it now resides in us.

Rudy Giuliani Then and Now: Hate Crimes and Non-Discrimination

Hate Crimes

Rudy Giuliani’s reversal on the need for a federal hate crimes law is one of our biggest disappointments in where he now stands on LGBT issues as a candidate for President. In case you missed it, here’s one of his campaign operatives telling the Christian Broadcasting Network that Giuliani no longer supports passage of a federal law.

A former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a former Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Justice Department responsible for supervising all the U.S. attorney offices’ law enforcement agencies, and a Mayor who made fighting crime a centerpiece of his time in office, Giuliani’s new position on hate crimes seems antithetical to everything he stood for in the past.

We posted his 2000 press release where he announced his own hate crimes initiative, which came just a few months before New York State finally passed a statewide law. In the press conference he held (that we attended to show our support), Giuliani announced the formation of a Hate Crimes Task Force for NYC and put over $5.0 million in taxpayer dollars behind it so that the NYPD and the City’s District Attorneys would have the funding they needed to investigate and prosecute possible crimes motivated by bias. He also said, as you can read in his release, “I call upon the State Legislature and Congress to enact hate crimes legislation that recognizes the severity of hate crimes and imposes the appropriate penalties.”

Given that hate crimes legislation passed the House of Representatives this year by a vote of 237-180, the Senate by a vote of 60-39 and the White House has said it will veto the measure, this is no academic issue. It’s before our federal government right now.

Hate crimes against LGBT people continue to spike up across America and we need Republican voices speaking up on why a federal law is important, but Rudy Giuliani’s voice is no longer there because he changed his position during the heat of the campaign primary season.

What does this say about Rudy Giuliani? We’ll leave that to you to decide, but I think you can figure out what we think about it.


Non-Discrimination

While NYC already had a law banning discrimination based upon sexual orientation when Giuliani was Mayor, we did not have protections in NYC for transgender people or a statewide law addressing either sexual orientation or gender identity and expression discrimination.

As Mayor, Giuliani frequently spoke about his support for the then-pending statewide Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA). I myself heard him state his support for SONDA each time I attended his annual Pride event in June at Gracie Mansion. And you can hear a reporter and one his openly gay political appointees, Chris Lynn, talk about Giuliani’s support for SONDA and hate crimes legislation in this video clip we posted last week on YouTube.

While support for non-discrimination legislation was a major part of his schpiel on gay issues whenever he spoke to our community, support for transgender non-discrimination protections was not. He and NYC Council Speaker Vallone blocked pending legislation amending the City’s human rights law to provide protections based upon gender identity and expression. It took Bloomberg becoming Mayor for trans discrimination to be outlawed.

So where is Rudy Giuliani on pending federal non-discrimination legislation for LGBT Americans, known as ENDA, another issue that is before Congress right now?

He’s silent. Despite the many times he spoke passionately as Mayor about there being no room in NYC for discrimination and the need for a statewide non-discrimination law, he’s nowhere to be found on federal non-discrimination legislation protecting LGBT Americans.

Perhaps he'll still articulate his views on this critically important civil rights issue. We hope so. We’ll be sure and let you know if he does.

For more on Rudy Giuliani, go to “The Giuliani Files” on the Pride Agenda website.

New York House Delegation vote on ENDA

Before we do our morning sweep, we thought you'd like to know how New York's 29 House members voted on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which passed 235-184 yesterday evening and provided workplace non-discrimination protections based upon sexual orientation, but not gender identity. We'll probably be making a few additional comments about the vote and the debate later today, so stay tuned.

Important to note about the vote tally is that the five Democrats voting "No" on ENDA did so because the bill failed to provide comprehensive non-discrimination workplace protections for LGBT Americans, namely protections for transgender people. That means only three of the twenty-nine New Yorkers -- King, Reynolds and Walsh -- are opposed to any protections in the law for LGB Americans (and presumably T Americans as well). Another interesting fact is the "Yes" vote by Kuhl. In 2002 as a State Senator, he voted "No" on the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, which makes his vote on ENDA a reversal of his position from back then.

For the complete vote tally on ENDA, go here.

Here's the New York vote:

Voting Yes

Ackerman (D)
Arcuri (D)
Bishop (D)
Crowley (D)
Engel (D)
Fosella (R)
Gillibrand (D)
Hall (D)
Higgins (D)
Hinchey (D)
Israel (D)
Kuhl (R)
Lowey (D)
Maloney (D)
McCarthy (D)
McHugh (R)
McNulty (D)
Meeks (D)
Rangel (D)
Serrano (D)
Slaughter (D)

Voting No

Clarke (D)
King (R)
Nadler (D)
Reynolds (R)
Towns (D)
Velázquez (D)
Walsh (R)
Weiner (D)

Vote on non-inclusive ENDA coming this week

The House Rules Committee voted late last night to advance the non-transgender inclusive version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to the floor for a full House vote. Many believed that a vote would happen today, but it now looks like it will come either tomorrow or Thursday.

HRC, which had previously been neutral on the revised bill, came out in full support of the version that was advanced to the floor last night. HRC's position was released in a letter today put out by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which was sent to all House members and explicitly stated an endorsement of the non-inclusive bill. The letter noted that the decision to move forward without protections for the trans community was "extremely difficult." In the end, HRC's Joe Solmonese told Gay City News Editor Paul Schindler, "we felt that in the long term interest of the community and the movement it should not be defeated."

Along with HRC, a vast array of progressive organizations, unions and religious groups signed the letter endorsing the bill, including: the NAACP, AFSCME, National Education Association and the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism.

The Advocate also announced the findings of an HRC-financed poll released today, which said that 70% of LGBT Americans (I'm not sure how many "T"s were asked) support passing a non-inclusive ENDA over passing no bill at all.

***UPDATE: Gay City News gets NGLTF Executive Director Matt Foreman's reaction to the advancement of the non-inclusive ENDA: "At no time during the African-American Civil Rights movement were light-skinned African Americans or dark-skinned African Americans left behind. What is being lost is that we need to be working for the best law, not a bill that can be passed today."

ENDA troubles

The White House's Office of Management and Budget has put out its official position on ENDA and cites religious freedom and protecting the Defense of Marriage Act as two major reasons why the bill would be vetoed if it made it to the president's desk.

Also, The Hill reports that freshmen Democrats have led the charge to kill the Baldwin Amendment, which would reinstate trans-inclusive language in the bill. Without it, ENDA is a sexual orientation non-discrimination bill, not an LGBT-non discrimination bill.

House Education & Labor Committee Chairman George Miller said that the amendment would not go forward if House Democratic leadership did not believe that it had the votes to pass.

The House vote on ENDA was postponed earlier this week and has yet to be rescheduled.

Weiner on ENDA

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Queens/Brooklyn) spoke on the House floor last night about the need to pass a trans-inclusive ENDA. He's the first member of the New York Congressional Delegation to do this, and we applaud him for his leadership on this issue. We hope other New York Members of Congress follow suit.

Also important--Rep. Weiner stated that if the Baldwin Amendment should fail, members should not vote to pass the stripped version of the bill--not accept "half the loaf," as he put it--and wait until Congress was in a place to pass a bill that would include GLB and T. He points out that House action on the bill is likely to be symbolic anyway (because of Bush's threatened veto).

Transgender-less ENDA advances

The House Education and Labor Committee today advanced the non-transgender inclusive ENDA bill to the House floor. The Gay City News has the most complete coverage.

Four New York Representatives are on the committee. Only Yvette Clarke, Democrat of Brooklyn, voted no to sending the bill to the floor. The remaining three: Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of Nassau; Timothy Bishop, Democrat of Suffolk; and Randy Kuhl, Republican of Southwestern New York all voted to send the non-inclusive bill to the floor.

Three other Democratic Representatives opposed advancing the stripped version of the bill. They were: Rush Holt of Princeton, NJ; Linda Sanchez of Los Angeles, CA; and Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland, OH.

Rep. Tammy Baldwin plans on introducing an amendment on the floor to add gender identity language to the bill, but it's unclear as to whether or not the votes are there to approve the amendment.

Read House Education and Labor Committee press release on the vote here.
Read Committee Chairman George Miller's statement on the vote here.

More press/blog coverage of today's committee vote here, here, here, and here.

Pride Agenda response to decision by House Leadership to strip ENDA of trans protections

We just put out this statement on ENDA and wanted you to know about it:

“Promise on ENDA was not kept,” says Pride Agenda’s Van Capelle

Statement by Empire State Pride Agenda Executive Director Alan Van Capelle
September 28, 2007

“We do not agree with the decision of the House Leadership to vote on a non-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

Congressman Barney Frank should have tried harder. It appears taking out protections based upon gender identity in ENDA was his call. He made the wrong call. It does not reflect what the LGBT community wants. Speaker Pelosi promised LGBT Americans that the House would pass a trans-inclusive ENDA. The promise on ENDA was not kept; we are upset and disappointed.

Our community was ready to do the education that was required with the House of Representatives to get it to a place where it could be comfortable passing a bill that protects all of our community, even if it meant a delay in the vote. We were not given that opportunity when these last minute concerns came up.

The Pride Agenda is committed here in New York State to passing the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, known as GENDA (A.6584/Gottfried, S.3753/Duane), which will provide not only workplace protections based upon gender identity and expression, but also protections from discrimination in housing, public accommodation, credit and other areas of everyday life.

We will be looking to our Legislature to take GENDA up and pass it in 2008. Transgender New Yorkers should not have to wait one more day for the protections they so desperately need.”

HRC speaks on ENDA - it appears we will have two bills

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has just released a statement saying that there will apparently be two bills - one providing workplace protections based upon sexual orientation and another based upon gender identity.

It goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway -- there will be plenty of discussion within the LGBT community about this decision.

The Pride Agenda is committed here in New York State to passing the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, known as GENDA (A.6584/Gottfried, S.3753/Duane), which will provide not only workplace protections based upon gender identity and expression, but also protections from discrimination in housing, public accommodation, credit and other areas of everyday life.

While HRC's statement appears to be on their blog, they're not allowing for responses. But they are asking everyone interested to email them at hrc@hrc.org. We encourage you to take them up on it.

ENDA update

Whether or not the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) remains trans-inclusive appears to still be up in the air. There are strong indications, though, that it may very well become a bill that provides workplace protections based just on sexual orientation with a new stand-alone bill being introduced that provides workplace protections based upon gender identity. The first would be voted on next week in the House of Representatives and the second would be on a "to-be-determined" track.

Again, though, the situation is still somewhat fluid, even though the Washington Post said today in an editorial that two separate bills are about to be introduced in the House Education and Labor Committee. We know for a fact that there are a number of efforts continuing today to try to keep ENDA trans-inclusive.

To make sure Congress understands that many in the LGBT community are against this, the Pride Agenda and many other LGBT organizations around the country have sent action alerts to their supporters urging them to contact their U.S. Representative to let them know they’re opposed to an ENDA without trans protections.

Yesterday, when it became apparent that an effort was underway to strip the gender identity piece out of ENDA, a number of groups sprang to action. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force coordinated and issued a statement on behalf of nine national LGBT groups. Ours came out minutes later. Other statewide groups like Garden State Equality and Equality Texas also issues statements yesterday. These twelve groups represented the first to go public about their opposition to passing ENDA without being trans inclusive. More statements have come out today and we know more will be issued on Monday.

This morning, The Advocate posted an article quoting HRC’s Brad Luna saying "The indication we are getting from the Hill is that the leadership will possibly move forward with a new version of ENDA that does not offer explicit protections for gender identity.” Luna also expressed HRC’s disappointment at the decision.

Steven Adamske in Congressman Barney Frank’s office has said, “My boss’s recommendation is to go forward with an historic ENDA bill and then, in the very near future, work on improving that bill, as has been done with every single civil rights bill that has been passed in the last 40 years.” Apparently Frank believes a trans-inclusive ENDA will result in a nasty floor debate and provide a wedge issue to Republicans.

For the record, more than a third of the U.S. population currently lives in a state or locality that provides workplace and other protections based upon gender identity and expression, including red state cities like Dallas, Tucson and Cincinnati. Here in New York State, 53% or 10 million New Yorkers live in localities with these protections. Fortune 500 companies are certainly no stranger to workplace protections based upon gender identity and expression – 152 of the 500 have them and the number keeps spiking up every year.

There is no controversy in any of the states, localities and companies that have done the right thing. No elected officials or corporate executives have lost their jobs -- to our recollection -- for doing this.

Congress should take it lead from the ho-hum reaction a third of the country has given to living in jurisdictions where there are protections based upon gender identity and expression. Right now, sadly, it seems that those who have gotten it in their heads the voters won’t go for this haven’t paid much attention to what the facts say around the country.