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Kevin Durant face-palm. #gomavs #mffl 23 pt lead. by rondostar
This may explain why the Democrats got away with not passing the Employee Non-Discrimination Act when they controlled both houses of Congress, and why there’s no dull roar in the land for its passage. Supported by the same percentage of voters, across all categories, as repeal of DADT was at the height of the campaign, here’s the problem:
9 of out 10 voters erroneously think that a federal law is already in place protecting gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination. A similar number of voters also did not know whether their state had a gay and transgender workplace discrimination law. These numbers show the huge disconnect between voter perceptions about workplace protections and the realities that gay and transgender people face on the job.
No matter how high up in the stratosphere support for enacting workplace non-discrimination laws is, if almost all Americans think those protections already exist, then there will be no pressure — at all! — on legislators to enact such provisions.
Seventy- five percent of likely voters say they favor “protecting gay and lesbian people from discrimination in employment,” while 73 percent say they favor these protections for “gay, lesbian, and transgender people.” The responses are essentially identical.
Why bother taking a tough vote, or subjecting members of the Democratic caucus to a tough vote, as long as voters think it’s illegal to discriminate against LGBT people in hiring and the workplace?
This is one place our national organizations have badly failed, with their laser focus on DADT repeal, DOMA repeal, and marriage equality: Americans already think it’s illegal to discriminate in the workplace. And yet, look at how many people experience discrimination at work:
As CAP recently reported, studies show that anywhere from 15 percent to 43 percent of gay people have experienced some form of discrimination and harassment at the workplace. An astonishing 90 percent of transgender people report some form of harassment or mistreatment on the job. Nearly half of transgender people also report experiencing an adverse job outcome because of their gender identity. This includes being passed over for a job (44 percent), getting fired (26 percent), and being denied a promotion (23 percent).
It’s impossible to get Congress to pass a law the American people almost unanimously already believe exists. This is a profound failure on the part of national organizations, and they should be held accountable for it. Americans don’t care about passing ENDA: they already favor it very strongly and they almost all think it’s already law.
How can we move forward in that political environment? Nothing will happen when almost all Americans say, “Sure, that’s why I am glad it is law.”
24 Comments
Really a profound failure, because almost everybody has a workplace; the number of people affected by ENDA vastly outstrips those affected by DOMA or DADT or UAFA.
Essentially, it’s everyone.
Wow. Now those are some scary numbers. Thanks for the facts, Teddy.
The absence of leadership, from the Dems in general & from O in particular, was all the more striking, as they would have had to run like Usain Bolt to get to the front of the parade on gay issues. I mean, everybody else was ready.
Their failure to act was one of my ‘What’s the point?’ moments. I never did re-up with the Party.
I was gobsmacked. Really astonishing numbers.
What it means, I suppose, is that there are some people who don’t support ENDA who think it’s the law anyway — 16% or so? (90% minus 74%).
Weird.
Probably 9 out of 10 Americans haven’t faced discrimination due to orientation or identity. People aren’t very empathetic until actually exposed to such things.
Some “fierce advocate”, huh? I don’t think that means what he thinks it means.
I confess my ignorance on this issue and always thought the “sexual harassment” laws also protected gays and transgenders against discrimination on the job. Maybe others thought the same. So, thank you for increasing my awareness on this issue.
That surprises me less; I don’t give the average Faux-watching homophobe much probability of being well informed to begin with.
I really, really hate to say this but it was similar to the AIDS situation. When rich folks started dying from it in Texas back in my medical research days, then Shazam! there was money for my lab to look into it. I even visited the special facility outside of Austin and they were busy as bees on the topic. The letter bombs scientists did not help matters and our research facilities had to increase security. Attacking the NIHers (hello, many of the researchers were Gs and Ls had to be closeted to even be in the labs) was just plain stupid. Ignorance and apathy slows down finding solutions and deploying assistance to those who need it but throwing hatred on top of that and it takes an immense amount of fancy foot work and skill to be helpful to anybody. Why folks want to poke themselves in the eye, shoot themselves in the foot and light their hair on fire is beyond me.
Tom Tomorrow
Betcha nine out of ten people, when you count their circle of family and friends and colleagues and peers, know what it means to be affected by these things.
In the end, all you need is a grasp of reality and a sense of fair play.
Thanks for explaining a possible reason so many people think this is law now. I had not thought of that. But, you are correct: it seems like it might be covered under sexual harassment, doesn’t it? But it’s not. People clearly don’t know that, though.
Appreciate your comment.
But this isn’t really about empathy, is it?
I thought it was about information. That 9 of 10 Americans think discriminating against gays and transgenders was illegal surprised me. Of course, Americans apparently think 25% of our countrymen & -women are LGBT.
Oh, yes. Your post was about information, not empathy. But Margaret and I digressed into a discussion of empathy and stuff. (I am constantly amazed by poll results showing that most Americans live in a parallel uiniverse. Or possibly at the bottom of a well.)
“This is one place our national organizations have badly failed, with their laser focus on DADT repeal, DOMA repeal, and marriage equality”
Why the failure (or lack of focus) of the national orgs on this issue as opposed to the others… simple lack of pressure due to the 9/10 misperception?
BTW, the HRC link via “profound failure” near the end of your post mis-identifies a House co-sponsor of ENDA as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (D-FL)… I was more surprised by her sponsorship than the mis-identification.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed how a lack of equanimity does affect an individual’s ability to perceive unqualified information (not yet to be determined to be fact) or recognize/discern the facts from the fictions. The mind can shift from clarity and in and out of states of confusion, impenetrable denial and the places in between in an instant. It’s an amazing thing to just sit and observe– like the weather.
More evidence the HRC is simply a subdepartment of the D Party.
This is one place our national organizations have badly failed, with their laser focus on DADT repeal, DOMA repeal, and marriage equality: Americans already think it’s illegal to discriminate in the workplace.
You know that’s a good point, I never understood why gay civil rights were split into these different lanes (DADT, DOMA, ENDA, state marriage equality) instead of simply amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation or even simpler, amend the existing definition “on the basis of sex” to be inclusive of sexual orientation, notwithstanding any other provision of law (which means it’d override any existing law it conflicted with).
Maybe that amendment would have been narrowed (say, on the marriage issue) to get a Senate majority in the last Congress.
Or maybe paradoxically, victory would have required broadening the amendment’s terms (Tom Geoghegan has been advocating for years that union organizing be added to the Civil Rights Act) but it was as senseless to pursue civil rights on separate tracks from the existing Civil Rights Act as it was to pursue healthcare reform on a separate track from the existing Medicare system.
I propose a plausible mechanism for this phenomenon, if it exists.
The radical-reich screams so loudly during the process of passage (through their corporate media propaganda network) that the populace simply concludes that the bill has passed.
When I joined the Gay Activists Alliance of New York, right after Stonewall, one of our first orders of business was to get the city to pass basci civil rights legilation for gays and lesbians. In other words include sexual orientation along with race, religion etc. as being protected for jobs and hiring. I left New York for Los Angeles in 1976 and it wasn’t until several years after that that New York passed the civil rights laws we fought for.
Out chief opposition, as always, was the world’s larges,t welathiest and thoroughly lawyered pedophile cult aka. The Catholic Church.
As Diderot said “Man will not be free until the last LKIng is strnagled with the entrails of the last Pope.”
I’ve come across this confusion. In the cases I’ve encountered, the people thought gays were protected from workplace discrimination because the Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed adding GLBT to the groups protected. This is because all the other groups who have historically been protected under Hate Crimes law(since 1964) are also protected from other forms of discrimination, so the person thinks it must be the same for GLBT. It goes without saying that if a group is targeted enough with violence to be added to the Hate crime list, that they would also be discriminated against in the workplace as a group and need protection there.
The ENDA bill did NOT include protection for transgender people. There was a big discussion of this at AMERICAblog a couple of years ago, initiated by John Aravosis, who worked on the legislation. It was felt by John and others who worked on the bill that including transgenders would be a step too far for legislators. John’s and others’ attitude: We (GLBs) had to wait decades for our rights – transgenders can wait their turn. There was an astonishing amount of ignorance about transgenders displayed in the comments, with many posters confusing them with transvestites or saying that transgenders faced no discrimination because they were straight. It was an ugly discussion, with just a few voices of reason.
I did not think that GLBT rights are protected by law already, quite the opposite.
But this is the first time I have heard of ENDA. At least that I can remember.
Conservatives have a well-tuned propaganda machine – that I call the “crap factory” – but if liberals have a messaging machine of similar scale, I haven’t heard about that either. In the past few years I have slowly expanded my news sources, but it is all arbitrary and piecemeal.
There was a movement, from outside the Beltway, when Obama was first elected to put together One Big Gay Bill, to create change on Capitol Hill on ALL our issues. It was quickly and scurrilously put down by national organization ‘experts’ in DC who poo-pooed the idea because each of these issues is handled by a different Congressional committee.
The reaction at the time seemed like the worst kind of old group-think to me. Now we’re doing each issue at a time, taking an entire Congress to get each one done, and only accomplished within supermajority D Congresses. It’ll take a generation to get everything done at this rate.
Yes, that is true about this bill that almost passed while Bush was President.
The new ENDA, sometimes referred to as iENDA (for inclusive) now includes all GLB & T, with references to ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression.’ This bill was re-introduced in the Democratic Congress when Obama was president but we were told by Madame Speaker that DADT came first, and that Congress could only do one gay thing at a time.
For whatever reason, I do not know.