All In?

The Stranger has endorsed a No vote on the RTID Proposition 1 (along with the Seattle Times, but thankfully with more logic and, er, research). Their reasoning? "Rather than letting compromised politicians tell us what's possible, the people should tell the leaders what's needed: more light rail without massive roads expansion."

So what is the proper course of action for Congress regarding the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, bill? The bill would ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, but Massachusetts' democratic representative Barney Frank added language that would extend the protection to gender identity, thereby encompassing transgendered people as well. And lo, the Democrats began to balk. It is a nasty inverse parallel to our transit proposition. While our dear local leaders attached the roads to the light rail so they could lay their precious asphalt further and wider, Congressional Democrats prefer a bill without the transgendered language, believing it has a better chance of passing.

But the GLBT community is endorsing an all-or-none position on the bill, despite the fact that it might bring the whole thing down:

"We stood together and said we would rather have no ENDA than a bill that left some of us behind," the National Center for Transgender Equality told its members. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force established the ENDA Action Center to fight the bill. In an Oct. 1 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), more than 300 gay, lesbian and transgender groups said they opposed legislation "that leaves part of our community without protections and basic security."

Except for the Human Rights Campaign--who we like less and less every day (and will not stop calling us to ask for money after we donated once, despite the fact that we've told them no less than 10 times to please do so).

"The speaker's and Representative Frank's legislative path for action on ENDA, while not our choice, follows the path of other civil rights and business regulatory legislation," said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.

Seattlest is fascinated with how our culture has (barely) begun to come to terms with sexual orientation, but wow when you fuck with gender identity do you get the horns. Is federal protection against employment discrimination for gays and lesbians--something that is insanely long overdue--worth carving transgendered people out of the deal? The desired outcome is the opposite of our local RTID proposal, namely including everyone instead of splitting the transgendered issue into a separate future bill (aka, bury it), but the bottom line is the same: we shouldn't let compromised politicians tell us what is possible.

Photo from Morty Diamond's Ask a Tranny project.