Obama Pens HuffPo Op-ed Supporting ENDA, Gets Slammed By Pro-ENDA Org
Our nation’s 44th president, Barack Obama, will go down in history as the first sitting president to support same-sex marriage, and as the president who has done more for the LGBT community than all of his 43 predecessors combined. What the history books likely won’t mention is how he often did it only after being cornered, or pushed, or very slowly — after the political calculations were made and it was regarded as “safe.”
So while the President’s op-ed, “Congress Needs to Pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” published late last night in the Huffington Post is a welcome call to action just hours before the Senate will hold its first vote on ENDA in years, some are calling it too little, too late.
Writing that “who you are and who you love should never be a fireable offense,” the President notes:
Americans ought to be judged by one thing only in their workplaces: their ability to get their jobs done. Does it make a difference if the firefighter who rescues you is gay — or the accountant who does your taxes, or the mechanic who fixes your car? If someone works hard every day, does everything he or she is asked, is responsible and trustworthy and a good colleague, that’s all that should matter.
Obama’s “blog post is a little late and nowhere near as important as the impact President Obama could have by leading through example and creating a strong federal policy that our tax dollars will not be wasted on anti-LGBT harassment and discrimination,” Freedom to Work’s founder and president, Tico Almeida, told Buzzfeed just hours after Obama’s op-ed was published.
“President Obama has provided years of underwhelming leadership in the fight against LGBT workplace discrimination,” Almeida added. “He should move beyond these mere words and take long overdue action to protect LGBT Americans from harassment and discrimination at the corporations that profit from federal funds.”
“The President’s blog post brags that his administration ‘prohibited discrimination in housing and hospitals that receive federal funding,’ but conveniently ignores that the President has neglected his own written campaign promise to take that same step with federal funding to combat LGBT workplace discrimination,†Almeida said. “In less than the time that it took to write this blog post, the President could have signed an executive order to give strong LGBT workplace protections to millions of Americans.â€
Chris Geidner at Buzzfeed notes President Obama “does not mention a 2012 decision from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finding that the ban on sex discrimination found in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes a ban on anti-transgender discrimination. The EEOC ruling in Macy v. Holder is not definitive, as only the Supreme Court can provide a definitive answer to the question of the scope of Title VII, but the Department of Justice has since adhered to that ruling in applying discrimination claims brought by a federal employee and the EEOC has done so in cases of private employers. Obama, however, claimed in the blog post that ‘right now, in 2013, in many states a person can be fired simply for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.'”
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Image:Â Official White House Photo by Pete Souza via Flickr
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