From Blue Jersey, Congressman Rob Andrews (D-NJ), chairman of the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) subcommittee of the House committee on Education and Labor, talks about the future of ENDA.
What’s striking about this conversation are the same four things that have been coming up seemingly everywhere:
1) Politicians don’t think very highly of trans people (certainly, not highly enough of them to take a chance by publicly supporting transsexual Americans’ right to not be fired for being trans).
2) It seems clear that ENDA won’t become law this year, but politicians still feel the need to remove trans people from the legislation, to gain some sort of “moral victory” in the form of getting legislation to the floor of the Senate. (Indeed, given that the Democratic leadership says that it’ll come back for trans people shortly, such a “victory” hardly seems to be paving the way).
3) Civil rights laws never protect everyone, so why start now? (Zuh?)
4) Trans people really need to educate people, and show that they’ve got a coalition behind them, if we’re going to included them. (Which strikes me as odd, given that’s pretty much what’s unfolded the past week).
Originally published at Forked Tongue and a Dirty House
