Source: Washington Blade
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the nation’s most prominent mainline civil rights organization, called on members of the House of Representatives today to vote for a gay-only version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

The LCCR made its views known on ENDA in a two-page joint letter signed by LCCR and six other national civil rights groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Human Rights Campaign. HRC was the only gay rights group to sign on to the letter.

It was “extraordinarily difficult” to arrive at a position in support of a gay-only version of ENDA, the letter says, because the groups strongly support an earlier version of the bill that included protection against job discrimination targeting transgender persons as well as gays.

House Democratic leaders, with the support of gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), removed transgender protections from the bill, saying they determined the bill would go down to defeat if it included a trans provision.

It is “beyond dispute that transgender employees are particularly in need of those protections,” the letter says. “They face far more pervasive and severe bias in the workplace and society as a whole,” the letter says.

“As civil rights organizations, however, we are no strangers to painful compromise in the quest for equal protection of the law for all Americans,” it says. “From the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through the almost-passed District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2007, legislative progress in the area of civil and human rights has almost always been incremental in nature,” the groups state in their joint letter.

Mara Kiesling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, which strongly opposes a gay-only version of ENDA, said the LCCR letter could be a sign that House Democrats are worried that they may not have the votes to pass the bill.

“The bill got pushed back from today until tomorrow, again, probably meaning they’re worried about votes,” Kiesling said.

A spokesperson for the LCCR could not be immediately reached. House Democratic leaders said they put off a vote on ENDA from Tuesday to Wednesday at the request of House members who wanted to travel to their home districts to vote on Tuesday, which is Election Day in most parts of the country.