TCDailyPlanet.net – By Andy Birkey , Minnesota Monitor
In the next few days, the U.S. House is likely to pass legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination against gays and lesbians. But pressures from Republicans and groups opposed to homosexuality have resulted in the Democrats proposing a watered-down bill that would leave out transgender people. Those groups purporting to speak for Christians are purposefully distorting the issue through assertions that religious liberties will be violated if transgender people are given protections to work in jobs that they are qualified for.
Minnesota’s experience with workplace nondiscrimination laws, the most progressive in the nation, has shown that conservative religious sensibilities and employment discrimination can coexist.
Last week, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., bowed to pressure from Republicans and conservative Democrats and stripped transgender protections from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Republicans were set to introduce an amendment stripping the bill of the protections for transgender people, and a poll of Democrats showed that, with those protections, the bill would likely lose. “It became very clear that while we would retain a significant majority of Democrats, we would lose enough so that a bill that included transgender protection would lose if not amended and that an anti-transgender amendment would pass,” Frank wrote in a message to bloggers late last week.