Tag Archives: gay rights

Meet the 32 Senate Republicans Who Voted to Continue LGBT Discrimination in the Workplace

by sreg2 Posted on November 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Thursday afternoon, the Senate passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a landmark bill that would end decades of employment discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans. The bill moved forward with support of 54 senators who caucus with the Democrats (Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania didn’t vote because he was attending to his wife’s surgery) as well as votes from 10 Republicans, only a few months after the Supreme Court ruled that the government must recognize same-sex marriages. But most GOP Senators came out against it, and House Speaker John Boehner has promised to oppose the bill, which means it will likely be killed in the House.

“One party in one house of Congress should not stand in the way of millions of Americans who want to go to work each day and simply be judged by the job they do,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “I urge the House Republican leadership to bring this bill to the floor for a vote and send it to my desk so I can sign it into law.”

It’s already illegal for companies to discriminate against Americans on the basis of age, disability, gender, race and religion. ENDA would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list, protecting LGBT workers from being fired or denied benefits and promotions based on their sexual identity. (An amendment pushed by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.)â&#128;&#139; makes it so that religious entities that don’t comply can’t be penalized.) Various incarnations of this non-discrimination bill have been brought forward since the 1970s, but this is the first time the Senate has passed one. In 1996, it missed the mark by one vote, and in 2009 and 2010, the bill was held up over the inclusion of transgender employees.

Even though Boehner has opposed the bill, citing that it would lead to “frivolous litigation“—the Government Accountability Office found there’s no evidence that would happen—there are still some Republicans who’d like to see it brought for a House vote, including Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), who told The Washington Post that he expected it would get the support of at least three dozen House Republicans, which was enough to pass the bill in the House in 2007. He noted, “Younger voters would be much more accepting of the Republican Party if we were to adopt legislation of this type.”

That’s a sentiment that GOP Senators Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), and Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.)—all of whom voted for the bill—got behind. Thirty-two Republican Senators did not agree (three others didn’t vote). Here’s a list of everyone who voted against it:

Republicans Who Voted Against the Employment Non Discrimination Act:
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)

Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.)

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.)

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.)

Sen. Daniel Coats (R-Ind.)

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho)

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

Sen. Michael Enzi (R-Wyo.)

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)

Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.)

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.)

Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.)

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.)

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)

Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho)

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.)

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.)

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.)

Republican Who Didn’t Vote:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.)

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)

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Meet the 32 Senate Republicans Who Voted to Continue LGBT Discrimination in the Workplace

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ENDA Set to Pass Senate and Then Die in House

by Billy Zane Posted on November 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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ENDA, a bill that would bar employer discrimination against gays and transsexuals, got 61 votes in the Senate this afternoon. That’s enough to overcome a filibuster, so presumably it will pass sometime in the next few days. This is great news, but it’s not clear to me why it matters in any substantive kind of way:

Because of opposition in the Republican-controlled House, passage there seems unlikely. Speaker John A. Boehner reiterated his objections to the bill on Monday, releasing a statement that said he believed it would invite too many lawsuits.

Elsewhere in the House on Monday, however, there was an encouraging development for supporters of gay rights. Representative Michael H. Michaud, Democrat of Maine, said that he is gay, becoming the seventh member of Congress to be openly gay, lesbian or bisexual.

As encouraging developments go, that’s unfortunately kind of lame. It’s certainly not going to do anything to change the minds of the tea partiers who are dead set against this legislation.

So….am I missing something? Or is this pretty much just a symbolic victory?

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ENDA Set to Pass Senate and Then Die in House

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GOP Congressional Candidate Told Gay Citizens to Go "Back to California"

by AlexisKVH Posted on November 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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It would be tough to find a political office-seeker less prepared for the job he’s running for than Alabama congressional candidate Dean Young. Asked by the Guardian last week to identify the current House majority whip, the Republican suggested House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who left his old post almost three years ago. Quizzed on the current treasury secretary, Young identified Henry Paulson (who left four years ago) and then Tim Geithner (who left his post 10 months ago). Young, who also called President Obama’s country of origin “the $64,000 question,” didn’t go so far as to suggest that the Gettysburg Address is where Lincoln lived, but that’s probably because no one asked.

On Tuesday, Young will face off against former state Sen. Bradley Byrne in a runoff for the Republican nomination in the special election to replace former GOP Rep. Jo Bonner, who resigned to take a job at the University of Alabama. (In March, Mother Jones reported that Bonner had gone on an all-expenses-paid African safari under the auspices of investigating Al Qaeda’s ties to poaching.) In a deep-red district, the runoff winner is all but assured a spot in Congress—which means that Young, who held a narrow lead in the final poll of the race, could soon be headed to Washington.

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GOP Congressional Candidate Told Gay Citizens to Go "Back to California"

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How Many Senate Republicans Will Vote for LGBT Discrimination?

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on November 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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By Tuesday morning, Congress will either make progress on a long overdue piece of anti-discrimination legislation or, as public opinion continues to swing away from the homophobia of yesteryear, a cadre of Republican senators will have stamped their distaste for LGBT rights into the history books.

The Senate is set to vote Monday evening on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), which would offer employment protection for LGBT workers. All 55 Senate Democrats support the bill and four Republican senators have indicated that they’ll be voting for it. No one quite knows if ENDA has the necessary 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, but it seems likely that at least one more Republican will side with the Democrats (one of the unknown holdouts, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), endorsed same-sex marriage earlier this year after revealing that his son is gay). But the majority of Republicans still oppose the bill, with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) terming it “reverse discrimination.”

It’s been a relatively good year for LGBT rights in the US. In June, the Supreme Court overturned the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act, granting federal recognition to married same-sex couples. California, Maryland, Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island all began marrying same-sex couples in 2013, with Hawaii possibly joining that list by year’s end. But the fight for LGBT rights is still an ongoing battle in this country. Employers can fire their employees for their sexual orientation or identification in most states. National law bars employers from dismissing workers based on race, sex, or nationality, but transgender people aren’t protected in 33 states, while 29 states lack laws to prevent gay, lesbian, and bisexual people from being unjustly fired. These protections aren’t just symbolic; LGBT people still suffer high rates of employment discrimination, with 15 to 43 percent of gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers reporting that their sexual orientation had negative ramifications for their careers.

Barack Obama penned an op-ed for The Huffington Post over the weekend urging congress to pass the bill. “It’s offensive,” the president wrote of the current lack of legal protections. “It’s wrong. And it needs to stop, because in the United States of America, who you are and who you love should never be a fireable offense.”

ENDA last came up for a vote in 2007, when it passed the House by a wide margin, only to die in the Senate. Democrats again tried to pass the bill when they controlled both chambers in 2009 and 2010, but held up ENDA over disputes contesting the inclusion of protection for transgender people.

If a bipartisan Senate coalition passes ENDA this week, odds are slim that the bill, which still has to get past the House, will become a law. Meanwhile, House Republicans are considering legislation that would allow anyone to discriminate against married same-sex couples.

Update: On Monday morning, John Boehner’s office reaffirmed the House Speaker’s past opposition to ENDA, ruling out any possibility that the bill will become law as long as he continues to lead House Republicans. “The Speaker believes this legislation will increase frivolous litigation and cost American jobs, especially small business jobs,” his spokesman said.

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How Many Senate Republicans Will Vote for LGBT Discrimination?

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Election Over, the Mormon Church Quietly Re-enters the Gay Marriage Fight

by DonnaWahl Posted on October 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Reports that the Mormon Church had given up the fight over gay marriage were premature. Earlier this year, Mother Jones and other news outlets noted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was making a concerted effort to mend its tortured relationship with gay members and their families and to stay out of divisive political fights over gay marriage. The church sat out virtually every state ballot measure on the issue in 2012, helping assure that marriage equality bills passed in Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and elsewhere. It launched a website, mormonsandgays.org, to urge better treatment of LGBT members. Mormons even marched in pride parades in Salt Lake City.

Now that the 2012 election is over, and Mitt Romney, the nation’s most famous Mormon, is no longer running for president, it seems the church is back in the ring. This week, the Hawaii state legislature began a special session to consider a bill that would legalize gay marriage in the state. The church is actively working to kill that measure.

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Election Over, the Mormon Church Quietly Re-enters the Gay Marriage Fight

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Watch the Governor of Pennsylvania Compare Gay Marriage to Incest

by dla@kk2.pl Posted on October 4, 2013

Mother Jones

On Friday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) was asked by a reporter a Harrisburg’s CBS affiliate to clear the air about his views on same-sex marriage, after a legal brief filed on behalf of his administration compared same-sex marriage to letting 12-year-olds get married. But Corbett, who had previously called the comparison “inappropriate,” wasn’t in an apologetic mood. Instead, he offered up a comparison of his own. “It was an inappropriate analogy—I think a much better analogy would have been brother and sister, don’t you?” Commence awkward silence.

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Watch the Governor of Pennsylvania Compare Gay Marriage to Incest

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Ted Cruz: "We Need 100 More Like Jesse Helms"

by olekdd3 Posted on September 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz started off his Wednesday speech on foreign policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation with a confession: His first political contribution was a $10 contribution to the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), when he was 10. Then he followed it up with a plea. “We need 100 more like Jesse Helms,” he said.

That Cruz would praise Helms while delivering Heritage’s annual Helms Lecture is hardly unusual. And the two do share an extreme skepticism of the international community—Helms as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Cruz as Texas’ first solicitor general. But Helms, who passed away in 2008, was an emblem for more than just conservatism. At a time when Republicans—including Cruz—are emphasizing the need to broaden the party’s base, the first-term lawmaker and rumored presidential candidates is embracing one of the upper chamber’s most notorious bigots.

Helms is perhaps best known for his 1990 “Hands” ad, which helped push him past his Democratic challenger, African-American Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt. But Helms’ proud bigotry cut much deeper, and with devastating consequences for public policy. Helms believed gays were “weak, morally sick wretches” and argued that “there is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy”—motivating factors behind his push to block funding for research into HIV at a time when the epidemic was killing tens of thousands of people in the United States alone. He described AIDS education as “so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up.” Jesse Helms was a bad person in a uniquely terrible way that increased pain and suffering for countless individuals. He even opposed appointing lesbians to high-ranking government offices. (Cruz, for his part, criticized a 2012 GOP primary opponent for attending a gay pride parade.)

Helms’ racism was unmatched on Capitol Hill. He got his political start by bashing interracial marriage and accusing the spouse of a political opponent of dancing with a black man. As a senator, he blasted the Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress” and dismissed the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill as “the University of Negroes and Communists.” In 1983, he filibustered the 1983 effort to create a Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. The infamous “Hands” ad almost felt gratuitous.

And then there’s this: Shortly after Carol Moseley-Braun became only the second African-American since Reconstruction to be elected to the Senate in 1993, she got an elevator with Helms and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. Helms began singing the opening lines of “Dixie,” and then he turned to Hatch: “I’m going to make her cry,” Helms said. “I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.”

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Ted Cruz: "We Need 100 More Like Jesse Helms"

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Talib Kweli Stands His Ground

by rikkiqlyons Posted on August 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Earlier this summer, when George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, there were marches across the country. But the protests largely faded out, folding in on themselves before they had a chance to create any lasting change. One place that isn’t true is Florida, where a group calling itself the Dream Defenders took over the state capitol building, and called upon GOP Gov. Rick Scott to support the Trayvon Martin Act. The bill was an attempt to address racial profiling, the state’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, and zero-tolerance policies in schools that funnel kids into the criminal-justice system.

The Dream Defenders were able to gather a lot of national and high-profile support. Among the bigger names who turned out to support their cause was the Brooklyn-based rapper Talib Kweli, among the most enduring and successful “conscious” hip-hop artists of his generation. I caught up with Kweli last week for a chat that ranged from his new album (Prisoner of Conscious), to stop-and-frisk, feminism, and homosexuality in the hip-hop community.

Mother Jones: What made you want to go to Florida to support the Dream Defenders?

Talib Kweli: Harry Belafonte hit me to the Dream Defenders and I liked what they were about. When I asked them how I could help their movement, they said, “You can help by coming down here; you can tweet.” But I was like, “That’s easy, what else can I do?” What I like about Dream Defenders is they’re taking all the fly shit from activism—they’re taking the right energy from civil rights, from black power, from Occupy Wall Street, all these movements, the Arab Spring. They’re not protesting, they’re not demonstrating; they’re just coming with a plan for action and they’re not going anywhere until the governor addresses their plan.

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Talib Kweli Stands His Ground

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Private Manning’s Next Battle: Gender Transition in Prison

by Toni Tolve Posted on August 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Shortly after being sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning announced a decision to live as a woman and switch to the name Chelsea. Manning released a letter to the Today show Thursday morning that said, “As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.” Manning requested being referred to with the feminine pronoun, except with official mail sent to her at Fort Leavenworth, the Kansas prison where she will serve her sentence.

Manning now faces some unknowns with gender transition, including what will likely be a difficult battle to receive hormone therapy, which she indicated in her statement she wants to begin as soon as possible. Officials from Fort Leavenworth confirmed they do not provide transgender inmates with treatment beyond psychiatric care.

Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, told Today he hopes Forth Leavenworth will decide to provide Manning with the hormone treatment; if not, Coombs said he will “do everything in his power to force them to do so.” Coombs did not provide details to Today about his plans for legal action, but during a press conference yesterday following Manning’s sentencing, he said he is “going to become the smartest person on ensuring that a soldier who is in confinement, who has gender dysphoria, gets appropriate medical treatment.”

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Private Manning’s Next Battle: Gender Transition in Prison

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NJ Governor Chris Christie Signs Ban on Gay Conversion Therapy

by rxynvjw5xg Posted on August 19, 2013

Mother Jones

On Monday, Christie signed a bill that prohibits licensed therapists from practicing “reparative therapy” on minors—controversial treatment that “fixes” gay teenagers by supposedly turning them straight. Here’s Christie tweeting about it:

California became the first state in 2012. In June, the New Jersey legislation passed both houses of the state legislature with bipartisan support. “Government should tread carefully into this area, and I do so here reluctantly,” Christie said. “However…I believe that exposing children to these health risks without clear evidence of benefits that outweigh these serious risks is not appropriate.”

The governor has taken heat from LGBT rights activists before; he vetoed same-sex marriage legislation (vowing to do the same for the next one that came for his signature), and was harshly critical of the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act last June. But on the issue of reparative therapy, Christie finds himself in the company of gay rights activists, as well as medical and scientific experts, who emphasize the damage (suicidal thoughts, severe depression) done by reparative therapy. This pseudoscientific practice can include the use of vomit-inducing drugs and electro-shock treatment aimed at ridding patients of non-heterosexual impulses and desires.

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NJ Governor Chris Christie Signs Ban on Gay Conversion Therapy

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