by Molly Ivors
Social and political change, we are often told, must be incremental. Grandma Dorcas, living in Peoria, might drop dead if, say, troops came home from Iraq all at once, or everyone suddenly had health care coverage, or, corporations weren't persons, or we impeached the president and vice-president. Certainly, it would cost any person who voted for these measures any chance of elective office ever ever again.
The conventional wisdom of our media tells us that the denizens of Earth-W would never have been forced to pass Defense of Marriage laws, or drag uppity blacks on chains behind pickup trucks, or blow up federal buildings if only the Democrats had been more reasonable and measured in attempting to expand rights and protect minorities.
Bullshit.
Justice is justice, and caving to the base instincts of the howling masses is always a mistake.
House Democratic leaders are strongly considering dropping anti-discrimination protections for transgender persons from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, after an internal Democratic head count on Wednesday found that the bill would likely be defeated if it included the trans provision, multiple sources familiar with the bill said.
The current version of the bill calls for banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, terms that are defined in the measure to include gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender persons.
As of late Wednesday, it appeared likely that the trans provision would be removed, setting up a potentially divisive fight within gay activist circles over whether or not to support an ENDA bill that excludes trans people.
Apparently, congressional Democrats have decided that it's okay to extend employment protection to gay men and lesbians, and even those wacky bisexuals, but once you get to transgendered persons, well that's just icky. But who defines "icky"? If we allow bigots to draw lines between what is and isn't appropriate behavior for other people, we're essentially sanctioning bigotry, or at least allowing it to determine the legal status of people whose health and happiness depends on a broader social will to grant them equal protection under the law. (FWIW, all the major Dem presidential candidates support including TGs in ENDA and hate crimes legislation.)
Removing transgendered persons from ENDA is a huge controversy in the GLBT community, as demonstrated by this poll at 365 Gay: slightly more than half of their readers support Barney Frank's move to exclude TGs. As one man put it to me, "I'm a gay man and I've waiting long enough." Okay, but TG's stood with the gay movement as ENDA was formulated, and it seems pretty cold to snub them now, when they are so close. (As Pam notes, a great many companies have already signed onto ENDA, even with the TGs included.) I guess I don't see why this is the dividing line. Charles Parnell once famously declared that no nation had a right to say to another nation "thus far and no further," and I would argue that this is also true of individuals, particularly in such a deeply personal area as gender identity.
Speaking of Ireland and Parnell, this whole sorry affair reminds me far too much of the relationship between the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Irish nationalist movement. At least since the Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, nationalism and Catholicism went hand-in-hand in Ireland: religion became the marker of distinct identity for the natives of Ireland, and supporting the priests and Catholic Emancipation were key nationalist goals. And they won. In 1829, most of the major Penal Laws were lifted, but the larger goals of Irish self-determination were put off. This division really bore fruit fifty years later, when the priests of Ireland chose to take a hard line against Parnell when he was named as the correspondent in a divorce case involving one of his MPs. It's hard to overestimate the bitterness of this event, as any reader of Joyce knows, but its seeds were sown much earlier: as Joyce's John Casey says, "Didn't the bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn't they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in the confession box?" When they attacked Parnell, the priests of Ireland were carrying water for the British, much as those who attack Hillary Clinton from the left do today. In Ireland, they delayed independence by a good 40 years, and when it came, it was the Fenians and their descendants who brought it, not the Irish Catholic Church.
Divide and conquer is the oldest game in the book, and for those who say "protection for me but not for thee," I say "Feh."
Note to Wingnuts and cowardly Dems: ENDA is not Edna.
