Congressional Democrats formally introduced the
Equality Act today, a bill that would essentially ban all forms of
discrimination against the LGBT community by expanding the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. The bill has 40 co-sponsors in the Senate and 155 in the
House. They are all Democrats.
The
fact that no Republican was willing to sign on to the bill at its
outset is the clearest indication that its chances of passage are even
lower than ENDA. While you could count on the fingers of one hand the
number of Republican co-sponsors of ENDA, you could at least count them:
In 2013, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Senators Susan Collins
and Mark Kirk were original co-sponsors of that iteration of the
workplace anti-discrimination bill, which — as it has for decades —
failed make it to the president’s desk.
Senator Jeff Merkley, one of the lead sponsors of the Equality Act, via Wikimedia Commons
This
lack of even token Republican support stems from the fact that
the Equality Act goes beyond ENDA in a number of ways that make it a
dealbreaker for even the most moderate of Republicans. ENDA included a
religious exemption; the Equality Act clarifies that Religious Freedom
Restoration Acts cannot be used to discriminate against LGBT people. The
Equality Act also expands the definition of public accommodations to
include almost any business; the Civil Rights Act only
classified restaurants, theaters and hotels as places of public
accommodation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Equality
Act applies outside of the workplace, barring discrimination in housing,
education and other areas of life not covered by ENDA.
As Chris Johnon at The Washington Blade noted,
some LGBT activists dropped their support from ENDA in 2013 over its
inclusion of religious exemptions. However, others are withholding
support from the Equality Act because, by aiming to revise the Civil
Rights Act and Fair Housing Act, it could allow the
Republican-controlled Congress to revise them more generally. The end
result could be a watered-down Equality Act that also weakens the Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts.
A
version of that watering down has already been proposed by Republican
Congressman Charlie Dent. His compromise legislation would pair the
Equality Act with the First Amendment Defense Act, prohibiting anti-LGBT
discrimination in housing and employment but protecting religious
organizations who oppose same-sex marriage from losing their tax-exempt
status, while expressing “the sense of Congress the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling under RFRA shouldn’t burden free exercise of religion.”
Both
of those would be dangerous concessions to give Congressional
Republicans, and conservatives more generally, who are dead-set on
carving out legal protections in as vague as terms as possible to allow
them to continue to discriminate in as many places as possible — all
while keeping the tax breaks that our governmentshouldn’t be granting them in the first place.
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