Homosexual rights activists and trial lawyers are one step closer to their dream come true: A provision in the Equal Employment Opportunity Act that will cover sexual orientation.
From the Associated Press:
The House on Wednesday approved the first federal ban on job discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
Passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act came despite protests from some gay rights supporters that the bill does not protect transgender workers. That term covers transsexuals, cross-dressers and others whose outward appearance does not match their gender at birth.
The measure would make it illegal for employers to make decisions about hiring, firing, promoting or paying an employee based on sexual orientation. It would exempt churches and the military.
After the 235-184 vote, supporters are expecting a tough fight in the narrowly divided Senate, where Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy plans to introduce a similar version.
A veto from President Bush is expected if the proposal does pass the Senate. The White House has cited constitutional concerns and said the proposal could trample religious rights.
Backers of the House bill proclaimed it a major civil rights advance for gays. “Bigotry and homophobia are sentiments that should never be allowed to permeate the American workplace,” said House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C.
The decision by Democratic leaders to exclude protections based on gender identity created sharp divisions in the party and among gay rights activists.
Republicans, meanwhile, said the bill could undermine the rights of people who oppose homosexuality for religious reasons and lead to an onslaught of dubious discrimination lawsuits.
“This is, frankly, a trial lawyer’s dream,” said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn.
Protections for transgender workers were in the original bill. But Democratic leaders found they would lose support from moderate and conservative Democrats by including transgender employees in the final bill.
“That’s a bridge too far,” said Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. “It’s better to take it one step at a time.”
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, however, said excluding transgender workers was shortsighted.
“As we have seen in many states, the failure to include the transgender community in civil rights legislation from the beginning makes it more difficult to extend protections later,” said Nadler, D-N.Y.
Rep. Barney Frank, one of two openly gay members of Congress and an important supporter of the bill, urged colleagues not to let the dispute over transgender workers doom an important gain in civil rights.
Frank, D-Mass., said he hoped the bill would send a message to “millions of Americans who are gay and lesbian that they are not bad people, that it is not legitimate to fire them simply because of who they are.”
He also pledged to continue to fight for a bill to protect transgender workers.
Job discrimination based on factors such as race, gender and religion are banned under federal law. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have laws against sexual-orientation discrimination.
Only nine states specifically protect transgender people from discrimination: New Jersey, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Mexico, California, Illinois, Maine, Hawaii, Washington. The District of Columbia has a similar law.
By January, laws also will be in effect in Iowa, Vermont, Colorado and Oregon.
So, is it true that it will be a civil offence to oppose homosexuality based on religious, moral, or ethical grounds?
(N.B.: At present, the classes protected by the EEOA are Race, Sex, Religion, National Origin, Familial Status, and Vietnam War Era Veteran status.)
WAC
19 comments
November 8, 2007 at 11:56 am
Karen
No, it’s not true.
(Although there is no such thing as a moral or ethical basis for opposing homosexuality in itself, only religious. It is your unsupported claim that your religion IS the basis of morality and ethics which gives that illusion.)
Just as it is not a civil offense to oppose pregnancy, and yet it is not permissible to fire a woman because she gets pregnant.
Just as it is not a civil offense to hate black people, and yet it is not permissible to base hiring and firing decisions on skin color.
Just as it is not a civil offense to think women are not as smart as men, and yet it is not permissible to base hiring and firing decisions on sex.
That is such a transparent claim, and it’s telling, how eagerly the anti-gay faction in this country has picked it up and run with it.
November 8, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Will Cubbedge
Karen,
Your allagories are as weak as your philosophy.
There are moral and ethical basis to oppose homosexual conduct. Both atheistic societies (the Soviet Union) and pre-Christian ethicists (Aristotle) opposed homosexual conduct as a violation of ether the civil order of the Natural Law because it is universally repugnant to the sentiment of civilized people as well as non-procriative.
As for your weak allegories, it is easier to tell if someone is black, or pregnant, or a woman, than it is to tell if someone is gay. The first three are self-evident; the fourth relies on a subjective standard. Courts shouldn’t deal with subjectivities, only facts and the law. Enshrining the protection of a subjective class may very well open new horizons to avaricious lawyers. That’s my point.
WAC
November 8, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Karen
By the way, this is not “a dream come true”. A dream come true would be the religionists in this country realizing:
1) that they have no right to enact private religious beliefs into public policy
2) that whatever they believe about God’s plan for men and women, there is no grounds in our shared reality for calling homosexuality immoral, and
3) My children are right where they belong – with their parents – and doing fine, thanks for asking, and it’s none of their business how one, two, or five people raise a child they aren’t related to, barring actual abuse or neglect.
Seriously. That would be a dream come true. And guess what – at that point, they might get so used to minding their own business that there wouldn’t be a problem with discriminatory hiring practices!
November 8, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Will Cubbedge
Furthermore,
The congressman’s point in saying that this could mean an end to religious/morallity based discrimination based on sexual orientation was not a concern about an end to personal dislike. Rather. it concerns an institution holding a moral or ethical position that excludes homosexuals based on moral/ethical/religious grounds (i.e. a church.) Then, the state would be telling a church how to manifest its belief, which would be counter to the First Amendment.
WAC
November 8, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Will Cubbedge
As to your list:
1) Hogwash. Majority rules in a democracy. Period.
2) What the hell is a “shared reality?”
3) The “dream come true” thing was facetious. Except when it comes to trial lawyers. If I could make all my money and never have to supply positive evidence to a court again, it would be my dream come true. 🙂
WAC
November 8, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Karen
Are you saying that I am not a civilized person? Because it’s not repugnant to me, so clearly it’s either 1) not repugnant to all civilized people or 2) I am not civilized.
And who says sex is only moral if it’s procreative? The ear’s “Natural Law” purpose is auditory, and yet no one says it’s repugnant to use it for hanging glasses on. These are all weak excuses for a “natural” but despicable illogical hatred for anything different from the norm.
November 8, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Karen
Furthermore… what?? Churches are exempt, they’re free to fire people for being gay, no matter how despicable that is. Your right to believe I’m acting immorally, and your church’s right to believe the same, are intact. You just can’t refuse to hire me for a job you publicly advertise, based on that belief, since it’s all in your head.
1) Good thing we don’t live in a democracy! We live in a constitutional republic. I have rights.
2) Not “A” shared reality. “The” shared reality. Your worldview includes some stuff about Jesus. A pagan’s might include some stuff about tree spirits or something. All of our worldviews include gravity, because that’s part of shared reality.
3) There doesn’t have to be positive evidence of being gay, you’re right. But there DOES have to be positive evidence that the hiring decision was based on sexual orientation – real or perceived.
Your worldview includes some junk about Jesus rising from the dead. That is not part of our shared reality.
November 8, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Karen
Oops, edit failure.
November 8, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Karen
By the way, I hope you are not holding up Soviet ethics as something we should emulate – and pre-Christian societies were not clearly anti-homosexual at all. The slightest bit of research into the matter and you will find a dizzying array of societal attitudes and interpretations of gender, biological sex, sexual acts, procreation, marriage, and their interrelationships. I’m actually not aware of any culture without Abrahamic influence that condemns same-sex sexual activity outright.
November 8, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Karen
I will, however, revise my statement.
There is “such a thing” as an ethical basis to oppose homosexuality, but such arguments are far too easily countered to be taken seriously as a basis for our laws. Our vision, for instance, has a ‘natural’ purpose of enabling our own survival (by seeing food and danger), but it is not a transgression for someone to watch a sunset, nor is it immoral to be colorblind.
There is also “such a thing” as a moral basis to oppose homosexuality, but it is a basis that western culture rejects: that the State’s or the Race’s or the Species’ interests and authority come before the individual’s autonomy.
November 8, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Lydia Cubbedge
Karen,
Obviously, I am not in charge of this blog. However, based on your rather hateful summing up of the Resurrection of Christ, I think it only fair to warn you that the chances of you being banned are getting greater and greater.
Furthermore, you come from an utterly anti-objective truth standpoint. This makes it well night impossible to actually argue with you. Argument is an exchange of ideas in order to arrive at a logical, truthful conclusion. If you do not believe in one truth, if you say that it is based in one’s perception of reality, etc., you can’t have an argument.
In addition, you have strayed from the initial point of this post. What is at stake is what you could call the “slippery slope.” How far can the state go? These are the beginning labor pains, if you will, of ultimately not allowing religious institutions to state that the reject the idea that homosexual sex is good. That is the issue at hand. It has already come to pass in Canada, and while we have the Constitution to uphold religious freedom, it is scary to have the State get that close to what the Church can say or do.
If you are itching for a fight about the morality of homosexual sex, homosexual “marriage” etc., feel free to drop an email. You come from a subjectivist, anti-religion bias, and it’s nice to see the gloves coming off. Your thinly veiled hostility proves that the most tolerant people in the world never tolerate a worldview, particularly a religious worldview, that is different from their own emotional, subjective, “I want things my way” worldview.
November 8, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Will Cubbedge
Shared Reality: And all this time I thought there was only a real reality. Huh.
WAC
November 9, 2007 at 7:10 am
karen
Will:
That is, in fact, what I believe. It is those who insist upon the objective reality of their supernatural imaginings that make it important to distinguish between what we can *all* agree on – shared reality, including such wonderful things as science – and what is “reality” only insofar as certain people believe it is. Another word for it is “observable truth”.
You insist that your notion of God the father, Jesus the son, and the Holy Spirit is part of objective reality, and I insist the opposite. Neither of us can be proved wrong or right. This God of yours is, therefore, not a part of shared reality (which I believe is just… reality.)
Since despite what Lydia thinks, I do believe in objective truth, one of the worlds’ religious views is right and all the rest are wrong. It’s possible that it’s you, and it’s possible that it’s me, and it’s possible that it’s the Wiccans or whatever. All I’m doing is taking the subset of all the things we agree on and observe together and saying, hey, maybe we should base our actual laws on THAT, and let people do whatever they want beyond that to please their respective Gods.
November 9, 2007 at 8:38 am
karen
Lydia,
I like your husband, and I enjoy arguing with him. I believe in the importance of directly engaging, person-to-person, with the people who believe that R and I are bad people whose relationship is bad for society and who should not raise children. If you will not admit that your objection is merely private, along the lines of your objection to me being dismissive of “the Resurrection of Christ”, and has no place in public policy due to the religious freedom afforded by our society, then this is, in fact, what you are saying about me. Who is really being hateful here?
I am not a Christian, and therefore I do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I respect your right to believe that he did, but I will not pretend that I don’t find that belief somewhat ridiculous. I will not capitalize his pronouns. I will not act like it is a perfectly reasonable thing to believe, like I am the one on whom the burden of proof should fall if I do not agree. If you can only stomach dissent that is sugarcoated, I suppose you will have to not read my comments and/or convince your husband to ban me.
“Furthermore, you come from an utterly anti-objective truth standpoint. ”
No, I don’t. You imagine that I do, based on the fact that I will not accept your religious beliefs as objective truth.
“Argument is an exchange of ideas in order to arrive at a logical, truthful conclusion. If you do not believe in one truth, if you say that it is based in one’s perception of reality, etc., you can’t have an argument.”
Yes, and that’s why the Christian injection of “my God is the source of truth and goodness” into every discussion makes it so difficult for us to have a conversation. I do not believe that truth is a matter of one’s perception of reality. I simply refuse to go along with your insistence that your religion is part of “real” reality, until such a time as it becomes observable and objective.
“These are the beginning labor pains, if you will, of ultimately not allowing religious institutions to state that the reject the idea that homosexual sex is good.”
Sure, in the sense that red light laws are the beginning labor pains of ultimately not allowing people to drive – in other words, not in the slightest.
To illustrate: it is not illegal to have premarital sex in this country. It is illegal to refuse to hire someone or fire someone because they are cohabitating. And yet, somehow, it is not illegal for churches to decry what they call “fornication”.
Another counterexample: it is illegal to fire black people because they are black. And yet, a church is well within its rights to claim that God made black people lazy (see: the Mormons.)
And another: it is illegal to fire a Catholic because of anti-Catholic sentiment, and yet it is not illegal for a protestant church to say that Catholicism is wrong.
Your claim is completely baseless and hysterical. I apologize if by pointing that out, I appear “hostile”.
“It has already come to pass in Canada.”
No, it hasn’t. Where do you get this idea? Here: Anglican church in Canada votes to not bless same-sex unions. How is this possible if Canadian churches are not allowed to express anti-gay sentiments? Please back up this claim. What I believe is happening is that you are conflating “not winning the civil marriage argument” with “being silenced in the pulpit”.
“it is scary to have the State get that close to what the Church can say or do.”
I’m sure it would be, if that were happening.
I am not anti-religion. I am just *a different religion*, one that doesn’t claim objective truth status without evidence, and I am anti-religionist. I am hostile, not towards you and your husband, but towards the idea that your private religious beliefs make me objectively immoral.
November 12, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Will Cubbedge
Karen,
You will not accept the existence of any objective truth, unless it is of your own devising.
You have demonstrated this time and time again.
Our beliefs can’t make you immoral. That is ridiculous.
In parts of Canada, the state has created a cause of action against anyone saying anything about the immorality of homosexual conduct. Canadian religious officials have been successfully sued in Canada for preaching against the immorality of homosexual conduct. The evident goal of such legislation is to chill free speech.
Be extra-nice to my wife. Or else.
WAC
November 12, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Karen
Will,
Actually, I do accept and even insist on the existence of objective truth. I just believe the way to it involves the use of reason and empathy – equipment we all have – and that’s it. No books of ancient prophecy and law, no 2000-year-old hierarchies of authority, no holy men. Just the universal qualities that make us human and the discoverable rules of the universe.
Perhaps you could back up your claims about Canada? Regardless, churches are clearly excepted in this law, because we’re very clear on religious freedom and freedom of speech here. You can’t incite violence, but look at the much-maligned ACLU defending Fred Phelps’ right to be a complete jerk. Your fears are unfounded, your right to declaim my inexplicable immorality to all and sundry, secure.
Your beliefs don’t make me immoral. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Until you can come up with a rationale that does not hinge on your religious beliefs, but instead speaks persuasively to the universal qualities I mentioned, you have no more business illegitimizing and maligning my relationship with your votes than a Mormon does outlawing coffee. “Hot drinks are not for the belly” – oh, it’s very clearly condemned – but only if you accept the authority of the Mormon church.
I have been as just as polite to your wife as she has been to me. In fact, I have tried to be a very polite and pleasant, if impassioned, guest here. However, reading your recent post, I see that my contributions are not as welcome as I thought. I will respectfully take my leave. Best wishes for the future and the new baby.
November 13, 2007 at 12:14 am
Will Cubbedge
Karen,
Fair thee well!
N.B.: What you call “objective truths” are merely facts. The Truth lies apart from, and is distinct from, simple scientific facts that are knowable through the process of reason. When reason and faith are taken into account, then you can know the Truth.
“And the Truth will set you free.”
Adios,
Will
November 13, 2007 at 9:45 am
karen
The independently discoverable, universally applicable elegance of cause and effect – observation and measurement – hypothesis and experiment – metaphysics and the internal consistency of any given logical system – it’s far more than “simple scientific fact”.
It’s the continuous search for truth, tempered with the understanding that any knowledge we think we have, no matter how well supported, is only temporary – just waiting for a counterexample to make us rethink the entire thing.
And then, to complete the picture: love.
That’s the observable, objective truth of all of our lives.
And now I’m *really* taking my leave 🙂
November 13, 2007 at 11:39 am
Will Cubbedge
The name of your god is Reason.
You put your faith in it, as I put my faith in the God of Abraham.
You are, at heart, no less religious than I am. However, your religion (known as hedonism) allows you justify anything you want to.
Just don’t pretend that your religion is any more “reasonable” than mine.
WAC