PUSH FOR LGBTQ RIGHTS STALLS IN SENATE
Advocates search for Republican support for the Equality Act
The long march toward equal rights for gay, lesbian and transgender Americans — whose advocates have eyed major advances with complete Democratic control in Washington — has run into a wall of opposition in the U.S. Senate.
Floundering alongside other liberal priorities such as voting rights, gun control and police reform, legislation that would write protections for LGBTQ Americans into the nation’s foundational civil rights law have stalled due to sharpening Republican resistence, one key Democrat’s insistence on bipartisanship and the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority rule.
While Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, DN.Y., hinted at a potential action this month — the annual LGBTQ Pride Month — Senate aides and advocates say there are no immediate plans to vote on the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected classes of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 alongside race, color, religion and national origin.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, DWis., one of two openly gay senators, said that she has quietly been lobbying Republican colleagues on the issue and that there has been only “incremental progress,” though efforts are continuing.
“So long as negotiations are productive and we’re making progress, I think we
should hold off ” on a vote, she said. “There may be a time where there’s an impasse. I’m still trying to find 10 Republicans.”
The House passed the legislation in February, 224 to 206, with only three Republicans joining all 221 Democrats in support. The Senate companion bill is sponsored by 49 Democrats and no Republicans. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is the Democratic holdout, and the lone Republican who had sponsored a previous
version of the bill, Maine’s Susan Collins, is not yet doing so in this Congress.
The corps of advocates who see the Equality Act as the capstone of a 50-year struggle for LGBTQ civil rights say they remain optimistic that progress can be made on a lawmaker-bylawmaker basis.
The partisanship around the issue on Capitol Hill stands in contrast to the wide-ranging support for LGBTQ rights among the public at large, in corporate
America, and even in the federal judiciary, which has delivered a string of rulings expanding those rights — including a Supreme Court decision last year that effectively banned employment discrimination on the basis of sexual identity.
But lawmakers, aides and advocates say that significant obstacles to progress on the Equality Act remain, including polarized views on how to protect the rights of religious institutions that condemn homosexuality and
Republicans’ increasing reliance on transgender rights as a wedge issue.
Schumer last month said the bill was “one of the things we’re considering” for a vote during Pride Month but added, “it’s a very busy June.” And while individual conversations are taking place, according to Baldwin and Sen. Jeff Merkley, DOre., the lead Senate author, there appears to be no organized negotiation underway as there has been on other hot-button issues.
“We’re talking about immigration, infrastructure, policing,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a key GOP figure on civil rights matters, said this month. “But not much on the Equality Act.”
The backdrop is a new Republican push to target LGBTQ rights. Advocates count at least 17 new state laws passed this year targeting the community, most of them specifically aimed at transgender Americans. When the House debated the Equality Act earlier this year, numerous Republicans came to the floor to warn of dire consequences if the bill were enacted.
Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, RGa., said passing the bill would be “opening the door for predatory men to prey on [women] in the most vulnerable of places — in shelters, changing rooms, and showers.” Many others raised fears it would put cisgender women athletes at a competitive disadvantage against transgender women, and some said it would open the door to governmentfunded abortions.
At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference Friday in Florida, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., launched an extended attack on the bill, claiming it would “mean that boys who self-identify as female are competing against your daughters and granddaughters in sports” and that “domestic abuse shelters would have to take in men who self-identify as females.”
“They say, ‘Let’s treat everybody equal.’ We have equality. We have provisions in our Constitution,” she said.