Mr. President, Sign ENDA Executive Order; Call On Congress To Pass ENDA
GetEQUAL LGBT activists have been pressuring President Obama to sign an executive order extending non-discrimination for LGBT workers employed by federal contracts, while hoping  Obama will call on Congress tonight to adopt ENDAÂ
On Sunday and the eve of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, GetEQUAL activists once again returned to direct action pressure tactics in pressing the White House to enact a federal executive order by extending workplace anti-discrimination protection to LGBT workers on federal contracts, and by staging “ENDA Executive Order” actions across the street from the White House, joining with the Maryland Light Brigade (see photograph above).
GetEQUAL ‘s direct action is always intended to bring attention to unjust situations confronting the LGBT community and in this instance, to pressure President Obama to keep his promise made during the 2008 campaign that he would sign an Executive Order extending job protection to LGBT workers on federal contracts. Â And why specifically for federal contracts? Â Because government funded federal contracts employs nearly a quarter of American workers and constitutes about 20 percent of the US annual GDP–a sizable chunk of the American economy.
This is nothing to sneeze at because LGBT workers in America have no federal protection from discrimination (except for those  workers in federal agencies that have been extended protection by an executive order).
Indeed, there is a huge undefended workplace without any legal redress in most of America if you are fired for being lesbian, gay or bi-sexual or transgender (see Center for American Progress report for a comprehensive overview).
Negotiating the workplace discrimination for LGBT Americans is a daily mine field, fraught with justifiable fear.  And yet, Congress has failed to muster the votes to adopt the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, although it has been introduced in every Congress since 1994 and has sizable public support for such a measure.
During the months leading up to President Barack Obama’s re-election last November, America’s LGBT groups united around the issue, pressing the President to take action and sign the executive order.  But the White House and the Obama re-election campaign pushed back (even though the campaign sought sizable amounts of cash from the gay community) making the point repeatedly  that the President would not sign such an executive order before the election.
In recent days, there has been a flurry of news stories emanating from White House statements which have included a statement issued by White House spokesman Shin Inouye who told The Washington Blade on Sunday “…that we do not expect that an executive order on LGBT non-discrimination for federal contractors will be issued at this time. We support ENDA and we will continue to work to build support for it.† However, in a Washington Post story, also appearing on Sunday, cited unnamed White House sources who said that the President maybe reconsidering his earlier decision not to issue the executive order, if Congress fails to pass ENDA, a more comprehensive set of workplace protections.
With “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” repealed and in an ongoing implementation process and the Defense of Marriage Act before the U.S. Supreme Court for review next month, the only other major LGBT legal barrier that remains, is the passage of ENDA by Congress.
A serious commitment to passing ENDA legislation is not evident anywhere–not in the White House, or in the Congress and not even evident among leading organizations within our own community.
In this endeavor, all roads lead to the Human Rights Campaign, which controls the federal legislative agenda on LGBT issues, and it also appears to be satisfied with the status quo: Â the White House says they are building support for the measure with no evidence to substantiate this repeated mantra; no Congressional hearings have been held in a number of years; no public education efforts have been launched in using compelling stories of those who have suffered job discrimination; and no serious lobbying efforts have been launched to schedule a vote in the Senate, which has a decent chance to win a whipped vote and create a public record of accountability.
In reviewing the workplace issue landing page of the Human Rights Campaign website, information about the ENDA measure is buried and requires two additional clicks to access it. Â Clearly, ENDA does not have a visible priority at HRC either.
Without a serious campaign on workplace discrimination, the stories of workplace injustice that exists in the LGBT community remains invisible, unknown and without legal redress, as long as the status quo remains the political sine quo non of the day. Â What is the Human Rights Campaign waiting for to work a vote in the Senate and bring the stories of LGBT American workers to Capitol Hill? Â Are they waiting for Gallup polls to rise to 75 percent support for workplace protections for LGBT persons?
Indeed, a public education campaign is sorely needed based upon the 2011 Center for American Progress polling data on the issue revealed  that 9 of 10 people think there’s already a federal law barring LGBT discrimination.
Complacency and politics as usual is an approach that  GetEQUAL rejects outright. Indeed, we embrace the Obama expression of the “urgency of now” on pushing for passage of a federal workplace anti-discrimination measure.  It is urgent to address this unacceptable dark reality of so many of our sisters and brothers.  They live in fear and many are forced to remain in the closet or mislead people about who they truly are–it is a living hell and it is unacceptable.
As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail:  “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
This is the right time to push and pressure President Obama relentlessly to sign an ENDA Executive Order. Â This the right time to push for Congressional hearings and votes on ENDA in the Senate and shame the House into action. Â GetEQUAL has forcefully acted to bring LGBT workplace discrimination to the attention of President Obama and we will continue to demand action from our government, elected officials and of organizations in our community. Â Join us and become a partner in this righteous endeavor to demand and achieve full equality for LGBT Americans and their families under federal law in all civil matters.
Images courtesy of GetEQUAL
Tanya L. Domi is chair of the board of directors for GetEQUAL.
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Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a top potential Trump vice presidential running mate pick, revealed in a forthcoming book she “hated” her 14-month old puppy and shot it to death. Massive online outrage ensued, including accusations of “animal cruelty” and “cold-blooded murder,” but the pro-life former member of Congress is defending her actions and bragging she had the media “gasping.”
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem writes in her soon-to-be released book, according to The Guardian which reports “the dog, a female, had an ‘aggressive personality’ and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.”
“By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going ‘out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life’.”
“Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, ‘grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another’.”
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“Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like ‘a trained assassin’.”
Except Cricket wasn’t trained. Online several people with experience training dogs have said Noem did everything wrong.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling the young girl pup “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”
“It was not a pleasant job,” she added, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
The Guardian reports Noem went on that day to slaughter a goat that “smelled ‘disgusting, musky, rancid’ and ‘loved to chase’ Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.”
She dragged both animals separately into a gravel pit and shot them one at a time. The puppy died after one shell, but the goat took two.
On social media Noem expressed no regret, no sadness, no empathy for the animals others say did not need to die, and certainly did not need to die so cruelly.
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But she did use the opportunity to promote her book.
We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.
If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,… pic.twitter.com/bKhpUkchHV
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 26, 2024
Attorney and legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold says Governor Noem’s actions might have violated state law.
“You slaughtered a 14-month-old puppy because it wasn’t good at the ‘job’ you chose for it?” he asked. “SD § 40-1-2.3. ‘No person owning or responsible for the care of an animal may neglect, abandon, or mistreat the animal.'”
The Democratic National Committee released a statement saying, “Kristi Noem’s extreme record goes beyond bizarre rants about killing her pets – she also previously said a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to carry out her pregnancy, does not support exceptions for rape or incest, and has threatened to throw pharmacists in jail for providing medication abortions.”
Former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a co-host on “The View” wrote, “There are countless organizations that re-home dogs from owners who are incapable of properly training and caring for them.”
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson blasted the South Dakota governor.
“Kristi Noem is trash,” he began. “Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO. Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent.”
“She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog,” he added. “Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable. We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch. You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit. Unsporting and deliberately cruel…but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”
Melissa Jo Peltier, a writer and producer of the “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan” series, also heaped strong criticism on Noem.
“After 10+ years working with Cesar Millan & other highly specialized trainers, I believe NO dog should be put down just because they can’t or won’t do what we decide WE want them to,” Peltier said in a lengthy statement. “Dogs MUST be who they are. Sadly, that’s often who WE teach them to be. And our species is a hot mess. I would have happily taken Kristi Noem’s puppy & rehomed it. What she did is animal cruelty & cold blooded murder in my book.”
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President Joe Biden gave an nearly-unannounced, last-minute, live exclusive interview Friday morning to Howard Stern, the SiriusXM radio host who for decades, from the mid-1990s to about 2015, was a top Trump friend, fan, and aficionado. But the impetus behind the President’s move appears to be a rare and unsigned statement from the The New York Times Company, defending the “paper of record” after months of anger from the public over what some say is its biased negative coverage of the Biden presidency and, especially, a Thursday report by Politico claiming Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is furious the President has refused to give the “Grey Lady” an in-person interview.
“The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau,” Politico reported. “Getting the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview.”
“In Sulzberger’s view,” Politico explained, “only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
But it was this statement that made Politico’s scoop go viral.
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“’All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,’ one Times journalist said. ‘It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.'”
Popular Information founder Judd Legum in March documented The New York Times’ (and other top papers’) obsession with Biden’s age after the Hur Report.
1. The media turned Robert Hur’s amateur assessment of Biden’s memory into a political crisis.
Collectively, the @washingtonpost, @nytimes, and @WSJ have run 66 articles quoting Hur: a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”
But when the transcript of the Biden interview… pic.twitter.com/cExzjuKeYz
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 14, 2024
Thursday evening the Times put out a “scorching” statement, as Politico later reported, not on the newspaper’s website but on the company’s corporate website, not addressing the Politico piece directly but calling it “troubling” that President Biden “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”
Media watchers and critics pushed back on the Times’ statement.
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“NYT issues an unprecedented statement slamming Biden for ‘actively and effectively avoid[ing] questions from independent journalists during his term’ and claiming it’s their ‘independence’ that Biden dislikes, when it’s actually that they’re dying to trip him up,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch.
Froomkin also pointed to a 2017 report from Poynter, a top journalism site published by The Poynter Institute, that pointed out the poor job the Times did of interviewing then-President Trump.
Incidentally, when the NYT got a chance to interview Trump, they went belly up. https://t.co/fW5kx5868d pic.twitter.com/LbrhfYMtqf
— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) April 25, 2024
Others, including former Biden Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, debunked the Times’ claim President Biden hasn’t given interviews to independent journalists by pointing to Biden’s interviews with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and a 20-minute sit-down interview with veteran journalist John Harwood for ProPublica.
Former Chicago Sun-Times editor Mark Jacob, now a media critic who publishes Stop the Presses, offered a more colorful take of Biden’s decision to go on Howard Stern.
This is the equivalent of putting a bag of dog poop on the New York Times’ doorstep and setting it on fire. https://t.co/RhGbHH9pU2
— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) April 26, 2024
The Times itself just last month reported on a “wide-ranging interview” President Biden gave to The New Yorker.
Watch the video and read the social media posts above or at this link.
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Donald Trump’s Friday morning claim Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is “heavily guarded” so his supporters cannot attend his trial was torched by a top CNN anchor. The ex-president, facing 34 felony charges in New York, had been urging his followers to show up and protest on the courthouse steps, but few have.
“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! Getting ready to do my Courthouse presser. Two minutes!” Trump wrote Friday morning on his Truth Social account.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins supplied a different view.
“Again, the courthouse is open the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on trials days, is easily accessible,” she wrote minutes after his post.
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Trump has tried to rile up his followers to come out and make a strong showing.
On Monday Trump urged his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, while complaining that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”
On Wednesday Trump claimed, “The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present. If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”
After detailing several of his false claims about security measures prohibiting his followers from being able to show their support and protest, CNN published a fact-check on Wednesday:
“Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away ‘thousands of people’ from the courthouse during his trial; only a handful of Trump supporters have shown up to demonstrate near the building,” CNN reported.
“And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that ‘for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.’ In reality, the designated protest zone for the trial is at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and, in addition, people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings.”
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Noem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
CNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial
‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
News3 days ago‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
News3 days agoJustices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
OPINION2 days agoPresident Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
OPINION2 days agoNoem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
News2 days agoCNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial