By Gary Barlow

Staff writer

The proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act remained mired in controversy last week as U.S. House leaders put off votes on a gay-only version of the bill as well as an amendment that would add gender identity protections.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had promised a vote Oct. 24 on ENDA and the gender identity amendment but that vote was postponed after objections from some members of the Democratic caucus in the House.

As CFP went to press there was no vote scheduled on either bill and Democratic House leaders were huddling over whether votes would take place this week or at any point this year.

Sources on Capitol Hill said the objections to bringing ENDA to a vote were coming from progressive Democrats in the House who were responding to GLBT community opposition to passing a version of the bill that protects gays and lesbians from employment discrimination but doesn’t include gender identity.

Pelosi and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), ENDA’s chief sponsor, were also being urged by some House Democrats to put off a vote on an amendment by Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) that would add gender identity protections back into ENDA before a House vote on the measure. According to The Hill, a Washington political newspaper, those Democrats were telling Pelosi and Frank that they don’t want to go on the record on a vote for gender identity rights just before facing reelection.

ENDA had included protections based on both sexual orientation and gender identity until late last month, when Frank removed the gender identity language from the measure, saying that there weren’t enough votes to pass the bill unless it only protected gays and lesbians.

That set off a firestorm of criticism from the GLBT community. More than 300 GLBT groups formed a coalition urging that ENDA be defeated unless gender identity protections were reinserted. The coalition included most national and statewide GLBT groups, including Equality Illinois. The one notable exception was the Human Rights Campaign, which has maintained publicly that it supports a gender-inclusive ENDA but won’t actively oppose the non-inclusive version.

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said late on the morning of Oct. 30, as she waited in the Capitol for word from the meeting of Democratic leaders, that Pelosi and Frank were being forced to consider postponement of a vote on ENDA this session because “they don’t have enough votes for the main bill right now.”

“They are losing more and more progressive votes as legislators hear from their GLBT constituents that they just don’t want this bill,” Keisling said. “We’re all still unclear why leadership is so desperate for a bill nobody wants.”

Keisling said the congressional calendar makes it more and more difficult to schedule a vote on ENDA after this week. Postponement would give GLBT advocates more time to lobby for support for a gender-inclusive version of ENDA.

Even if the House passes ENDA this fall—in any version—it’s highly unlikely to become law. The Senate is not expected to pass it this year and even if it did, President Bush has said he would veto it.