The U.S. Senate voted Monday to consider a bill aimed at stamping out workplace discrimination against LGBT employees, a step forward for the LGBT community, university advocates said.
The measure, known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, is billed as an effort to keep employers from firing workers for being gay or transgender. The Senate voted to bring the bill to the floor, indicating lawmakers could soon vote on the proposed legislation. The full Senate will debate the bill this week, though it still needs to go through the House of Representatives, historically a graveyard for Senate legislation.
As it stands, 17 states and Washington have explicit laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or sexual identity, with another four — including this state — banning discrimination based only on sexual orientation. This state secured a victory last year when voters supported a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, and the campus community was largely supportive — 73 percent of on-campus voters cast ballots in favor of the legislation.
The university’s LGBT Equity Center Director Luke Jensen said the common thread between the campus community’s support of these issues and national support is the generational gap between supporters and detractors, and the country is in for a “big generational shift” in the years to come.
“Whether you’re looking at either of the major political parties when you look at voters under the age of 30, it’s all fine, it’s not a problem,” Jensen said. “I can’t imagine that when the under-30s are then up to the age of 60, so to speak, there would be the same kind of energy against it that there is today.”
While Jensen said he’d rather not wait for the youth to grow up to enact laws accommodating the LGBT community, he does think it is inevitable those laws will eventually come to fruition.
Jason Steel, a senior communication major, reflected the same sentiments, framing the problems addressed by ENDA as issues of equality. Steel said he was in support of the bill because continued legislation on these issues could encourage people to be more open and accepting, an approach particularly important to the university community.
“A lot of these people who might be discriminated against could be our own friends’ mothers and fathers, or our own friends themselves or even ourselves,” Steel said. “As more and more legislation comes out, people feel more comfortable coming out. Clearly there’s a lot of people who aren’t expressing their true identity. It’s important just to have people who feel comfortable being themselves.”
Bibi Ajayi, a junior communication major, said she supports the bill as well and believes members of the younger generation are more interested in LGBT legislation because they’ve grown up in a more accepting time than their parents.
“There’s all types of different people, all different people who are into different things, and everybody got along, no matter what race you were, if you were gay or straight, if you like basketball, if you like soccer,” Ajayi said. “I feel like we accept more things because we’re always around it. You get to know people for who they are and not what they are.”
The federal bill, however, likely will stumble when it gets to the House. Most of the opposition to the bill comes from lawmakers who fear that adding more provisions will encourage frivolous lawsuits by employees wrongfully claiming discrimination in the workplace when there is none, a sentiment House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) expressed in a statement explaining his opposition to the measure.
The bill includes language to encompass not only discrimination based on sexual orientation but also on gender identity, which has caused some lawmakers to balk.
Jensen said there is a lot of misinformation and scare tactics employed by the opposition to inspire doubt about whether it is worth adding protections for transgender individuals. Withdrawing support from a bill because of transgender provisions is “frequently used as an excuse,” he said. And even for this state’s own perceived openness to the LGBT community, the legislature came up short in the last session. A bill that would have prohibited discrimination against transgender individuals in housing and credit negotiation stalled in committee.
“There’s probably more distorted stereotypes and myths about transgender people than there are about lesbian and gay people,” Jensen said. “This isn’t about special rights — this is about equal rights. This is about being treated not being for who you are on the job, but for the job that you do.”
