Gay voters should blame themselves for Prop 8, not black Californians.
Smart LGBT leaders knew our campaign couldn’t make Prop 8 a “gay” issue.
Must we appear as churchgoers or nationalists to deserve our rights?
In part, Prop 8 failed because of inept LGBT leadership.
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By Ron Schlittle
Friday, August 06, 2004
THIS IS A year of turning momentous corners for the GLBT civil rights movement,
and we all understand it has been a long time coming. Today we are poised to
turn another important corner, and I am proud to say that PFLAG is playing a
leading role.
With recent reports of yet another horrific murder of someone for being gay,
and in this case 18-year-old Scotty Joe Weaver in Alabama was also known to
occasionally wear a dress, it is time we insist upon clear language in civil
rights and legal protections legislation that expressly covers sexual orientation
and gender non-conformity.
Unlike so many of our struggles, this is a corner we can turn for ourselves
if we would simply decide to do it.
Four years after the membership of Parents Families & Friends of Lesbians & Gays
voted to formally include our transgender friends and loved ones in our mission
statement, our board voted in September 2002 to adopt a simple but profound
policy: “PFLAG can only support legislation that provides express inclusion
of all who are included in our mission statement.”
At the time we knew of only one other national organization that had taken
a similar bright-line position requiring express transgender inclusion language
in civil rights and legal protections legislation if they were to endorse it:
the National Organization for Women.
Since then we have learned that 24 additional national LGBT or LGBT-supportive
organizations have emphatically made clear they want to support a federal Employment
Non-Discrimination Act that has specific inclusion of transgender people.
Of those organizations, 11 are today on record that they will only support
an ENDA that includes such language.
This is a remarkable shift in just two years. We at PFLAG say that it is about
time. And we vigorously call upon others to follow.
WITH ALL DUE respect to those who have worked so hard over the years on iterations
of ENDA and the federal hate crimes bill, much has progressed in our collective
understanding of both how and why the workplace discrimination and hate-motivated
abuse faced by our GLB friends and family members are so closely intertwined
with the discrimination and abuse confronting people who are transgender or
gender non-conforming.
In our safe schools work, PFLAG-ers point out that so much of what we understand
as anti-gay hostility is rooted in cultural expectations for gender expression.
This poisonous mindset takes root long before children even have a notion of
the true meaning of sexuality.
Yet the price inflicted by peers and adults alike for failure to conform to
proscribed gender characteristics has long been endemic and is widely accepted
as perfectly OK.
Such rigid gender expectations, enforcements and reinforcements profoundly
harm all young people with unrealistic and potentially damaging demands and
punishments.
We underscore this corrosive impact an anti-LGBT climate has on everyone.
This anti-LGBT status quo in schools mirrors the larger society where it must
be condemned as equally unacceptable.
SINCE PFLAG’s TRANSGENDER-inclusive policy position was adopted, we
have not looked back. Our organization has firmly resisted calls for political
expedience that increasingly ring hollow.
We have worked with our allies; like-minded organizations at the national,
state and local levels, as we identify appropriate words that best express
transgender inclusion. We have been gratified to see several local and state
policy efforts succeed, such as the fully LGB & T inclusive hate crimes
bills in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Missouri.
Workplace and hate crimes bill in Congress have languished for years now despite
the shortcomings of categories covered.
At the same time, we have witnessed authentic “revolutions of awareness” playing
out around the country, exemplified by both private sector and public policy
successes.
The list of Fortune 500 companies that now offer protections based on sexual
orientation, according to the Human Rights Campaign, numbers an impressive
389. Forty-one of those include transgender coverage.
Until policy makers are asked to consider why particular language is in a
bill, what it means, the motivation to become educated is limited.
We call upon the rest of our LGBT advocacy and allied organizations, at every
level, to help our movement turn this corner. It is at our peril if we don’t.
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