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UPDATED: After Hobby Lobby, Seven Top LGBT And Civil Rights Orgs Drop Support For ENDA

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Seven of the nation’s top LGBT and civil rights organizations today have announced they are withdrawing support for ENDA after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling.

After 40 years, the LGBT community in part has decided that not only is ENDA not good enough, it’s potentially dangerous because the legislation contains strong carve outs for religious organizations. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, ENDA could become a license to discriminate rather than the legal protection it was designed to be.

In a dramatic move today, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force announced it was dropping support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Hours later, a coalition of five LGBT legal and civil rights groups — the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), and the Transgender Law Center — made a similar announcement. (Pride at Work announced they are dropping support after this article was published — see below.)

The coalition of five groups calls their request “a simple one.”

UPDATE: HRC Charts Lone Course, Reiterates Support For ENDA Despite Religious Exemptions

“Do not give religiously affiliated employers a license to discriminate against LGBT people when they have no such right to discriminate based on race, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetic information,” the group say in a joint statement just released. “Religiously affiliated organizations are allowed to make hiring decisions based on their religion, but nothing in federal law authorizes discrimination by those organizations based on any other protected characteristic, and the rule should be the same for sexual orientation and gender identity or expression. Religious organizations are free to choose their ministers or faith leaders, and adding protections for sexual orientation and gender identity or expression will not change that.”

They say their “concerns are not hypothetical” and that “the American people oppose efforts to misuse religious liberty as an excuse to discriminate against LGBT people.”

Increasingly, this is what employment discrimination against LGBT people looks like. Take the example of Matthew Barrett.  In July 2013, Matthew was offered a job as food services director at Fontbonne Academy, a college prep high school in Milton, Massachusetts that is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph of Boston.  Fontbonne Academy has employees and admits students of various faiths. Yet, two days after Matthew listed his husband as his emergency contact on the standard employment paperwork, and despite twenty years of work in the food services industry, his job offer was rescinded.  Although nothing about the food services job involved religious rituals or teaching, Matthew was told by an administrator that the school was unable to hire him because “the Catholic religion doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage.” The current version of ENDA would authorize this sexual orientation discrimination.

The groups add that until the “discriminatory exemption is removed so that anti-LGBT discrimination is treated the same as race, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetic information under federal workplace laws,” they think “ENDA should not move forward in Congress.”

That request will likely be granted, as Speaker John Boehner has stated he believes LGBT people — as do the majority of Americans, wrongly — are already protected and can’t be fired for being LGBT. Boehner refuses to bring ENDA to the floor for a vote.

“In addition,” the coalition states, “we will oppose any similar provisions at the state and local level.  We are hopeful that the many members of Congress who support this historic, critically important legislation will agree that singling out LGBT people for an unequal and unfair exemption from basic workplace protection falls unacceptably short of the civil rights standards that have served our nation well against other types of discrimination for fifty years.  We stand ready and eager to work with them to achieve the long-sought goal of explicit, effective federal non-discrimination protections for LGBT people.”

Rea Carey, Executive Director, Task Force Action Fund, adds:

“The campaign to create broad religious exemptions for employment protections repeats a pattern we¹ve seen before in methodically undermining voting rights, women¹s access to reproductive health and affirmative action. It is time for fair minded people to block this momentum, rather than help speed it into law. We need new federal non-discrimination legislation that contains a reasonable religious accommodation. LGBT people should have the same protections as those contained in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Legal equality is legal equality.”

UPDATE I: HRC releases statement in support of ENDA

UPDATE II: Pride at Work joins in withdrawing support from ENDA

Image by Tim Evanson via Flickr

 

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FOX NEWS FAKE NEWS

Fox News Host Goes on Angry Rant ‘Undermining’ Vaccines – and Mocking Dems to Do It

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While a few Fox News hosts on Monday sprinkled bits of begrudging encouragement or support for Americans to get vaccinated, one Fox News host Tuesday morning was fully on board with attacking the COVID-19 vaccine.

“What is this to also say the vaccine is not nearly as effective against this delta variant, as they say if you look at what’s happening in Britain, they say 70% of the new cases are fully vaccinated people with the Pfizer vaccine, nobody talks about that,” host Brian Kilmeade said angrily on “Fox & Friends.”

Kilmeade is spreading false information.

The British Government on Monday announced that 60% of coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization were not vaccinated. NCRM could find nothing to support Kilmeade’s claim that “70% of the new cases are fully vaccinated people with the Pfizer vaccine,” which may be why “nobody talks about that.”

It is true that as greater numbers of people get vaccinated more vaccinated people will contract the coronavirus, as Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance said Monday.

“As a higher proportion of the population is double vaccinated, it’s inevitable that those 10% of that very large number remain at risk and will therefore be amongst the people who both catch the infection and end up in hospital.”

In the UK 68% of all adults are fully vaccinated, and 88% have had one shot.

Kilmeade was using the news that several Texas Democrats who traveled to D.C. subsequently tested positive for coronavirus. He mocked them for being on “Beta O’Rourke’s private jet that his foundation financed,” and implied that because they tested positive the vaccines don’t work, which is false, and don’t work as well against the highly-contagious delta variant, which is even more reason to get vaccinated.

On Monday Kilmeade insisted no one had any right to insist people get vaccinated and said it is not the job of the federal government to protect Americans, which is also false.

Media Matters’ Director of Media Intelligence Lis Power posted this video of Kilmeade from Tuesday morning:

 

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'GROSSLY UNQUALIFIED'

‘Ethically Questionable’: McCarthy Blasted for Stooping to ‘Disturbing’ Depths With Jan. 6 Probe Picks

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MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panelists bashed the five Republican picks to take part in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) chose five GOP lawmakers — Reps. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), Jim Banks (R-IN), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Troy Nehls (R-TX) — to serve on the investigative committee, and panelist listed a host of reasons they were unqualified to serve.

“Three of the picks [voted against certifying Joe Biden’s electoral win], and they did so after the insurrection,” said Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire. “The vote came after the rioters breached the Capitol, so it’s a clear signal here from Republican leader Kevin McCarthy as to which direction he wants to take the hearings. Sure, two of the members there didn’t do that — they didn’t vote to decertify, they did go along with the democratic process and acknowledge that Joe Biden was indeed elected president.”

Jordan stands out as particularly unsuited to the task, Lemire said.

“Jim Jordan, as we know, is one of former President Trump’s most vocal defenders and has been willing to say untruths in order to defend the president, and we know he still speaks to the former president frequently,” Lemire said. “So there’s no sense that the House speaker Nancy Pelosi will object to these picks, but we will learn more in the next day or so if that were to be the case. But I think there are real fears among Democrats this is going to be a sideshow. This is going to be more of the same from Republicans, that they will continue to latch onto the ‘big lie,’ that they will need to contest the election that there were voter irregularities, and continue to downplay what happened on Jan. 6, to try to whitewash the riot that day in order to move forward with their eyes on the midterms next fall.”

Another committee nominee was previously fired as a small-town police officer for multiple violations, including destruction of evidence.

“If Speaker Pelosi is looking for one member she may want to think about not approving, it’s Congressman Troy Nehls,” said MSNBC contributor Kurt Bardella. “This was somebody fired from the Richmond police department in Texas for not handling evidence the right way. When he was fired, the person in charge of that, who made that decision, his commanding officer sent him a letter with more than 20 documented infractions of breaching and breaking with quality. If you are not qualified to be a police department member in Texas how are you qualified to serve on an investigative committee, where you could have access to sensitive and classified information about a domestic terrorist event in the United States of America?”

“This is somebody grossly unqualified, ethically questionable and demonstrated, when given the choice to make the right decision, moral decision or his own personal interest decision that’s the side he goes for,” Bardella added. “So for Kevin McCarthy to appoint somebody to this committee with this history, who has been fired from law enforcement before, is disturbing.”

 

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News

Michigan Catholic School Says Making Students Wear Masks Would Be a Direct Affront to God

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The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals will take arguments on Wednesday on whether a Michigan mask rule violates the Constitution.

The Resurrection School in Lansing, a Catholic elementary school, argues the mandate is unconstitutional.

“The school says such a rule would violate ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’ because they say humans were made in the image of God, and masks shield that image from being seen,” Michigan Radio reports. “They also allege requiring masks poses a health or learning problem for students who have allergies, difficulty breathing, or trouble being understood when they talk through a face covering.”

There is not currently a statewide mask mandate in Michigan, although that hasn’t stopped the school from continuing to pursue its case.

On Monday, a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled a university can mandate vaccinations in another case testing the ability of educational institutions to respond to the pandemic.

 

Image by Labpluto123 via Wikimedia and a CC license

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