The proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (known as “ENDA”)
is dead, a victim of Republican opposition, Democratic
indifference, and now the foolishness of the country’s richest and
most prominent gay civil rights organization.
Abandoning common sense, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
announced in early August that it will no longer support federal
legal protection for millions of gay workers unless the tiny number
of transgendered workers get that protection at the same time. The
decision is a slap in the face to gay Americans, who generously
fund HRC, and who will now have to wait even longer for protection
from employment discrimination.
ENDA was first introduced in Congress in 1994. From the
beginning, it has been a carefully calculated compromise between
the need for broad protection from discrimination and the practical
realities of a political world just now getting used to the subject
of homosexuality. From the beginning, it banned only employment
discrimination, not discrimination in housing, education, or public
accommodations. From the beginning, it applied only to relatively
large employers. It exempted religious employers. It banned
quotas.
And from the beginning, ENDA protected workers only from
anti-gay discrimination, not from discrimination for a host of
other reasons, like “gender identity and expression,” which would
include transgendered people.
Until this month, HRC opposed adding gender identity to ENDA. In
the judgment of Capitol Hill vote-counters, including uber-liberals
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), a
transgender-inclusive ENDA could not pass Congress. Adding
transgender protection would, in their judgment, scare off
Republican congressional sponsors already in hot water for
supporting protection for gays. That, in turn, would scare off some
moderate Democrats.
Without the support of at least a few Republicans and
moderate-to-conservative Democrats, ENDA could never pass