Anti-LGBT Rep. Marcia Fudge May Challenge Pelosi for Speakership

Fudge is seemingly part of  the "civil-rights-for-me-but-not-for-thee crowd"
and has voted against protecting LGBT Americans. 

Surveys have shown that 82% of LGBT voters supported Democrats at the polls in the 2018 midterm elections and many gave generously to Democrat candidate campaigns.  Indeed, in some very close Democrat victories, the LGBT vote may have won the day for Democrats (the LGBT community, including the husband and I, worked very hard for Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's winning campaign).  Enter Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge who has opposed the so-called Equality Act that would expand non-discrimination protections for LGBT individuals and women and by adding those categories to the Civil Rights Act.  Fudge now wants to challenge Nancy Pelosi - a long time LGBT ally - for Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Unlike Fudge, Nancy Pelosi wants to make passage of the Equality Act a Democrat Party priority.  I can think of few ways to more thoroughly insult and alienate the LGBT community than to put someone like Fudge in as Speaker of the House.  Some in the LGBT community have described Fudge as part of the "civil-rights-for-me-but-not-for-thee crowd."  Others have noted that the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the Amendment to the Civil Rights Act, so Fudge is an out of the mainstream outlier.  A piece in Roll Call looks at a meeting meeting between Pelosi and Fudge.  Here are excerpts:

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi met with her potential competition for the speaker’s gavel on Friday, Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, who left the meeting still contemplating a bid.

“No,” Fudge told reporters when asked if Pelosi asked her not to run. “What she asked me was basically how we could get to a point where I could be supportive.”

Asked if such a point exists, even if she opts not to run against Pelosi, Fudge said, “There is a point, yes, but it’s going to take some.”

Fudge said she used the meeting to tell Pelosi about some of her concerns, adding that she needs more time to talk to people and think about whether she will run against her. The Ohio Democrat is headed home for Thanksgiving and plans to announce a decision shortly after the holiday.

She also told Pelosi she would speak with her again after Thanksgiving, presumably before any public announcement.

Asked if the meeting encouraged her toward running, Fudge said, “No, but it didn’t discourage me either.”

If she does run, Fudge said she hasn’t decided yet whether she’d seek the caucus nomination on Nov. 28, in which only a simple majority vote is needed to be selected the caucus’s choice for speaker, or challenge Pelosi during the floor vote Jan. 3. 

Pelosi clearly is trying to avoid a floor fight.

“I think her goal is to try to quickly as possible unify the caucus, and I understand that,” Fudge said. “And that is why I thought it was important that when she asked me to come and see her that I did so.”

The conversation with Fudge was “candid and respectful,” Pelosi said in a statement.
Among the issues discussed, according to Fudge, were succession planning and “the feeling in the caucus of people who are feeling out and left behind.”

Politico reports that the Pelosi-Fudge meeting was at the behest of incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.).  Here are highlights:

Nancy Pelosi sat face to face with her potential challenger, Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, on Friday as the California Democrat continued her fight to reclaim the speaker’s gavel.

The two women huddled at the behest of incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), a key Pelosi ally and senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus who is also close with Fudge, the CBC’s former chairwoman.

Pelosi also spent Friday afternoon meeting with incoming Democratic lawmakers who during their campaigns vowed to oppose her as speaker, including Reps.-elect Max Rose (N.Y.), Jeff Van Drew (N.J.), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Haley Stevens (Mich.).

After Pelosi met with the incoming freshmen who had called for new leadership during their campaigns, some skeptics left the room expressing an openness to supporting her.

With her opponents continuing to work against Pelosi, the California Democrat's allies are hitting back in her defense.

Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky blasted Pelosi’s critics for defying “the majority voice of the caucus.” She suggested they are worse than the House Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative rabble-rousers who banded together to defy GOP leadership for years.

“The majority rules!” Schakowsky said, aghast. “The very idea of organizing without even an opponent. … They do not have a candidate.”

I'm not necessarily a Pelosi fan, but I surely do not want an anti-LGBT individual like Fudge in the position of Speaker of the House.  Similarly, I do not want an inexperienced novice in the position given that the next 2 years will require a Speaker who can play hard ball and hold Trump and other GOP misogynists to account.

2nd Circuit Not Receptive to Trump DOJ Anti-Gay Arguments

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sitting en banc heard arguments in Zarda v. Altitude Express and witnessed representatives of the Trump Department of Justice ("DOJ") argued that existing federal non-discrimination and equal rights laws do not extend to LGBT Americans. The motivation of Trump DOJ was simple: delivering on Trump's promises to Christofascists and "family values" hate groups that were made to ensure a pro-Trump turnout by evangelical Christians (using the term "Christian" very loosely if one believes in the Gospel message).  In opposition was the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ("EEOC") argued that the existing laws do apply to LGBT Americans.  Based on the arguments and the  Court's judges were less than receptive to the pro-discrimination arguments of the Donald Trump/Jeff Sessions minions.  A piece in Slate.com looks at the 2nd Circuit's cool reception to the pro-hate and discrimination advocates.  Here are highlights:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2^nd Circuit had a burning question for Donald Trump’s Department of Justice on Tuesday: What are you doing in our courthouse? By the end of the day, the answer still wasn’t clear. Something else was, though: The DOJ’s new anti-gay legal posture is not going to be received with open arms by the federal judiciary. The Justice Department’s latest wound was fully self-inflicted, as Tuesday’s arguments in Zarda v. Altitude Express should not have involved the DOJ in the first place. The case revolves around a question of statutory interpretation: whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws anti-gay workplace discrimination. Title VII bars employment discrimination “because of sex,” which many federal courts have interpreted to encompass sexual orientation discrimination. The 2^nd Circuit is not yet one of them, and Chief Judge Robert Katzmann signaled recently that he would like to change that. So on Tuesday, all of the judges convened to consider joining the chorus of courts that believe Title VII already prohibits anti-gay discrimination in the workplace. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided in 2015 that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination does protect gay employees. Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department took no position on this question. But in late July, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ DOJ unexpectedly filed an amicus brief in Zarda arguing that Title VII does not protect gay people. The 2^nd Circuit had not solicited its input, making the brief both puzzling and gratuitous. Its purpose only became apparent in September, when the DOJ filed a similarly uninvited brief asserting that bakers have a free speech right not to serve same-sex couples. Both anti-gay briefs were startlingly incoherent, seemingly the product of political pandering rather than legal reasoning. Arguments dragged on for nearly two hours, but EEOC attorney Jeremy D. Horowitz seized the upper hand early by capably explaining the agency’s three theories:

1. The “but-for” theoryThis argues that anti-gay discrimination qualifies as sex discrimination because, but for the gay person’s sex, he would not suffer discrimination. For instance, consider a homophobic employer who fires a male employee because he marries a man. But for that employee’s sex, he wouldn’t have been discriminated against and lost his job.

2. The sex stereotyping theoryIn 1989’s Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court ruled that sex stereotyping—punishing a worker for her failure to conform to gender norms—is a kind of sex discrimination. At first, courts only applied sex stereotyping to masculine women and feminine men. But as the 7^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals explained in March, gay people are “the ultimate case of failure to conform” to sex stereotypes, since men and women are typically expected to date only individuals of the opposite sex.

3. The associational sex discrimination theoryThis holds that anti-gay bias constitutes sex discrimination much like anti-miscegenation laws constituted race discrimination. When states prohibited a white person from marrying a black person, they were committing discrimination because of race. It follows that when an employer punishes a gay person for associating with a same-sex partner, he has committed discrimination “because of sex.” 

Horowitz made his case well, forcefully elucidating why “sexual orientation cannot be separated from sex.”  That set the stage for Mooppan’s appearance, which, to put it mildly, did not go well at all. Chief Judge Katzmann immediately wanted to know: Why didn’t the DOJ defer to the EEOC on Title VII, as it normally does? Mooppan’s basic reply was that the Justice Department is the nation’s “largest employer”—meaning, in short, that it has an interest in retaining its capacity to fire gay people for being gay. Katzmann . . . . wanted to know what career attorneys at the DOJ’s civil rights division think about the agency’s position. But Mooppan wouldn’t answer: “That’s not appropriate for me to disclose,” he told the judge. Katzmann looked alarmed. Now a majority of the judges looked irritated. As a general rule, attorneys are supposed to answer questions posed by the court, not dodge them as though they’re taking the Fifth. It was a terrible start for Mooppan, and both Pooler and Katzmann looked genuinely perplexed that a DOJ attorney would show such blatant disrespect. Finally, Judge Dennis Jacobs broke the impasse: “I, for one, am prepared to proceed on the assumption that you’re here,” he said. Judge Jacobs asked Mooppan whether he can refute the EEOC’s associational discrimination theory and its parallel to interracial and interfaith marriage. “When you discriminate against interracial marriage,” Mooppan responded, you are promoting “racial superiority.” When you discriminate against interfaith marriage, you are promoting “religious superiority.” That makes the comparison to homosexuality moot. When arguments concluded, it seemed inevitable that the court would agree with the EEOC, reject the DOJ’s wackadoodle theories, and find that Title VII already proscribes anti-gay employment discrimination. After Tuesday’s performance, the Justice Department’s involvement in the case may have actually swung a judge or two away from its position; its flagrantly political intrusion seemed to irk even the Republican appointees. Anti-gay activists may have taken control of the DOJ—but they seem unlikely to persuade the 2^nd Circuit that America’s gay employees don’t deserve civil rights.

Department of Justice to North Carolina: HB2 Violates the Civil Rights Act

Political whores in the North Carolina GOP who laughed off the possible consequences of their shameless self-prostitution to Christofascists may be experiencing stomach clenching - and other parts of their anatomy clenching -  despite their posturing and anti-Washington blustering after today's announcement by the United States Department of Justice that anti-LGBT HB2 violates the Civil Rights Act.   More to the point, North Carolina was given until Monday to cease enforcing the discriminatory law.   I for one sincerely hope that federal funds are stopped and that these assholes are forced to figure out how they are going will explain to voters why they threw away billions of dollars in federal funding just to pander to Christian extremists who are nearly as demented as ISIS followers.   A piece in the Charlotte Observer looks at the much increased stakes now facing the anti-LGBT bigots in the North Carolina GOP.  Here are highlights:

RALEIGH - U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX – a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.

The department gave state officials until Monday to respond “by confirming that the State will not comply with or implement HB2.”

The letter says HB2, which pre-empted Charlotte’s anti-discrimination ordinance, violates Title IX, which bars discrimination in education based on sex, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination.

If the finding is upheld, North Carolina could lose federal education funding. During the current school year, state public schools received $861 million. In 2014-2015, the University of North Carolina system got $1.4 billion.

Speaking to business leaders Wednesday night, McCrory called the letter “something we’ve never seen regarding Washington overreach in my lifetime.” . . . . GOP lawmakers also criticized the Justice Department – and President Barack Obama. 

[O]pponents of HB2 applauded the Justice Department finding.

“The letter confirms what we’ve already known – that HB2 is deeply discriminatory, violates federal civil rights law, and needs to be repealed as soon as possible,” said Rep. Chris Sgro, a Democrat who is executive director of Equality NC. “We’ve already lost $500 million in economic impact, and now we are violating federal civil rights law and risking Title IX funding.”

Again, the feds need to withdraw all federal funding if North Carolina does not comply and hang the economic disaster around the necks of McCrory and his GOP sycophants and, of course, the Christofascists who need to become social and political lepers.   The terms "Christian" and "decent people" need to become mutually exclusive in the public mindset.

Obama Administration Considers Cutting Federal Funding to North Carolina

According to a story in the New York Times, North Carolina Republicans may be about to feel severe consequence for their self-prostitution to Christofascists in the form of horrific economic damage to the state's economy and education system.  How so?  Apparently, the Obama administration is considering whether North Carolina’s new anti-LGBT law makes the state ineligible for billions of dollars in federal aid for schools, highways and housing.  Yes, that is billions with a "B".  As previously noted, the EEOC has held that anti-gay and anti-transgender discrimination violates the Civil Rights Act, so there would be precedent for holding North Carolina liable for its state wide discrimination against LGBT citizens.  Personally, I hope all federal funding is cut and North Carolina is brought to its knees economically.  Mississippi should face a similar fate.  Here are story highlights:

The Obama administration is considering whether North Carolina’s new law on gay and transgender rights makes the state ineligible for billions of dollars in federal aid for schools, highways and housing, officials said Friday.

Cutting off any federal money — or even simply threatening to do so — would put major new pressure on North Carolina to repeal the law, which eliminated local protections for gay and transgender people and restricted which bathrooms transgender people can use. A loss of federal money could send the state into a budget crisis and jeopardize services that are central to daily life.

Although experts said such a drastic step was unlikely, at least immediately, the administration’s review puts North Carolina on notice that the new law could have financial consequences. Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina had assured residents that the law would not jeopardize federal money for education.

But the law also represents a test for the Obama administration, which has declared that the fight for gay and transgender rights is a continuation of the civil rights era. The North Carolina dispute forces the administration to decide how aggressively to fight on that principle.

Anthony Foxx, the secretary of transportation, first raised the prospect of a review of federal funding in public remarks on Tuesday in North Carolina. The Department of Transportation provides roughly $1 billion a year to North Carolina. The New York Times then asked other federal agencies whether they were conducting similar reviews.

A Department of Education spokeswoman, Dorie Nolt, said on Friday that her agency was also reviewing the North Carolina law “to determine any potential impact on the state’s federal education funding.” She added, “We will not hesitate to act if students’ civil rights are being violated.”

The agency said it provided $4.3 billion to North Carolina last year for kindergarten through 12th grade as well as colleges. Any decision on federal aid would take time, experts said. Federal agencies have used the threat of lost money to pressure a handful of municipal governments in California and Illinois to change their policies and allow transgender students to use the restrooms of the gender they identify with. There is no recent precedent for the federal government’s applying similar pressure to address a state law that it sees as discriminatory. Mr. McCrory, a Republican who is seeking re-election, and other supporters of the law have been aware, but dismissive, of suggestions that the measure might endanger the state’s federal largess. Mr. McCrory’s office did not respond to messages on Friday. The Obama administration would not need to go to court to withhold grant money, but doing so would surely lead to a court fight, especially since the law is unsettled.  

Again, an example needs to be made of North Carolina - and Mississippi - to send a loud message to Republicans that the days of granting special rights to Christian extremists is over and that religious based bigotry will carry a very high cost.

Today's GOP: Anatomy of a Racist Revolution

Since the days when I grew up in a Republican family and then served on the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach for eight years, two steady trends have taken control of the party: (i) the rise of the Christofascists and the religious extremism they embody, and (ii) increasing overt racism.   True the GOP appeals to racism are often coded and in dog whistle form, but the under current has grown steadily.  In my view, the two trends are intertwined because the bulk of the Christofascists trace to the Bible Belt where for so long fundamentalist religion and racism/segregation went hand in hand.  A piece in Salon looks at the rise of racism in the GOP as a matter of policy even as it has become more coded.  The end result?  The GOP encourages most whites to vote against their own best interests by playing to racial prejudice.  Here are highlights:

How did this happen? It is certainly not because less of the population now benefits from these programs — the middle class has actually weakened since that period, and unemployment insurance and Social Security are today as important as ever. Nor is it because much of the working class woke up one day and decided to turn their backs on a system of government that had helped them achieve a better lifestyle. The reason is much more insidious than that.

The rise of modern conservatism can be traced back to the mid-sixties, as a reaction to the Civil Rights movement. In the south, the New Deal had been wholeheartedly supported by the Southern Democrats, and as Eisenhower’s quote reveals, the Republican party could not fight the movement without risking major political losses — until the federal government decided to step in on civil rights issues in the South, that is.

1964 was a pivotal year for the rise of modern conservatism. This was, of course, when the Civil Rights Act passed, and outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and ended the racial segregation that had existed for so long in the South. To southerners, this was an enormous betrayal by the Democratic party, especially from President Lyndon Johnson, who was himself a Southern Democrat. The federal government had overstepped in many minds, and this was an opening for the small government conservatives to once again capture the minds of common working class people.

In a truly opportunistic fashion, the Republican Party decided to exploit the racial fears and prejudices of much of the populace, and the Southern Strategy was born. State’s rights had been trampled on by the federal government, so the thinking went, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater ran an election based on anti-New Deal and states’ rights policies. His coded racism was successful, and it earned the votes from five southern states and his own, though he lost every other state to Johnson. Though not as aggressively conservative as Goldwater, Richard Nixon pursued a similar strategy 1968, and won all of the former confederate states, turning the south into the solid Republican territory that it remains today.

Of course, this racial force is more unconscious today than it was when the Southern Strategy began, just as the language has changed over the years. In a candid and originally anonymous interview, Reagan’s 1984 campaign director Lee Atwater described how racial language became more coded over the years:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “n***er, n***er, n***er,” Said Atwater, “[But] by 1968 you can’t say ‘n***er’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Today, while there is no doubt that a large part of the population remains willfully racist, a great number of people have also become unconsciously so, buying implicitly into stereotypes about Black Americans as dependent and lazy; and thus determined to stop social programs and limit the federal government’s influence — even if it is not to their own benefit. In a sense, much of the middle class population has been hoodwinked into voting for the interests of the top one percent because of their own unconscious prejudices.

It is hard to claim that racism is not involved with the current backlash against Obama. The fight against the originally centrist Obamacare is based on the fears that have been embedded in so much of the population today. It is a fear of the federal government — a fear that Thomas Jefferson once had, before his views seemed to become more pragmatic when elected president. The key word here is fear; modern conservatism is based on this this unpleasant emotion — an emotion that tends to induce irrational thinking. And what is more irrational than voting against your interests?

Rand Paul - He's No Jack Kemp

With continued racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri - which has trickled over into protests in other areas - the issue of race and racial discrimination is front and center in the arena of public debate.  Sadly, the Republican Party has become the party of racism and white supremacy and, worse yet, that seems to be just fine with most Republicans.  In this background, Rand Paul - would be presidential candidate - is trying to remake himself as open minded and willing to reach out to black voters and citizens.  The problem, of course, is that his current talk doesn't match with his past statements and actions.  A column in the Washington Post by a conservative columnist takes Paul to task.  Here are highlights:

Why should Republicans engage in outreach to African Americans, even though the level of suspicion is so high and the yield in votes is likely to be so low? 

Even among some reform-oriented conservatives, what might be called the Kemp project — after the late congressman Jack Kemp, who spent a career engaged in minority outreach — is viewed as a secondary concern. They consistently pitch their approach toward the middle class — in part to distinguish it from previous iterations of compassionate or “bleeding heart” (Kemp’s phrase) conservatism. The cover of the reform-conservative manifesto — “Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class” — features a lawn mower on fresh-cut grass. The conservative rebirth will evidently spring from suburban yards on a lazy Saturday morning. 

But the public critique of the GOP is not merely: “They don’t care enough about the middle class.” It is, rather: “They don’t care enough about the whole.” The Republican task is not merely to shift an impression of ­interest-group allegiance away from big business and toward suburban families (though this would be an improvement). It is to demonstrate that conservative ideology is applicable to the common good.

In this effort, outreach to African Americans is actually central. A party that does not forthrightly address the largest source of division in U.S. history and American life — now dramatized in the tear gas haze of Ferguson, Mo. — is not morally or intellectually serious. And even as a political matter, women voters, Catholic voters and younger voters would prefer a chief executive who seeks the interests of all Americans, including those unlikely to vote for him or her. A commitment to national unity is an indicator of public character.

So it is notable when a Republican presidential prospect such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky attempts to address issues of concern to African Americans. 

[B]ecause this effort is so important, it is also important to point out: The Kemp project, placed in Paul’s hands, would be an utter, counterproductive failure.

Paul has his own history. He employed, as a close Senate aide, a writer who styled himself the “Southern Avenger” and who authored a column titled “John Wilkes Booth Was Right.” This personnel decision would have been impossible to imagine from Kemp. But it points out the deep affinity between certain strains of libertarianism and the Lost Cause. While running for the Senate, Paul criticized the centerpiece of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the part desegregating public accommodations — because it conflicted with his libertarian conception of property rights.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul’s 2013 proposal for a balanced budget in five years — which would have eviscerated large portions of the federal government and weakened the social safety net — was less of a blueprint for reform than a demolition order.  

Paul has risen to prominence by employing a political trick, which is already growing old. He emphasizes the sliver of his libertarianism that gets nods of agreement (say, rolling back police excesses) while ignoring the immense, discrediting baggage of his ideology (say, discomfort with federal civil rights law or belief in a minimal state incapable of addressing poverty and stalled mobility). 

As a senator, this tactic has worked. But were Paul to become the GOP presidential nominee, the media infatuation would end, and any Democratic opponent would have a field day with Paul’s disturbing history and cramped ideology. On racial issues, the GOP needs a successor to Kemp — and an alternative to Paul.

Why the Civil Rights Act Could Not be Enacted Today

A piece in Politico looks at the political toxicity that envelops Washington and why the Civil Rights Act of 1965 could not secure passage today.  There are details in the piece but the reason why the Act could not be passed nowadays boils down to one word: Republicans.  Today's GOP bears no resemblance to the political party in which I grew up or in which I was an activist for the better part of a decade.  Today, the embrace of ignorance, hypocrisy filled religious extremism, and thinly veiled racism are the pillars of the party's current agenda.  Here are excerpts from the article:

It was a painful tableau: The bipartisan leaders of Congress linking hands in the Capitol Rotunda and swaying to the strains of “We Shall Overcome” as they commemorated the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi sang along with the crowd, but Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s lips were frozen in silent, self-conscious smiles.

The climate in today’s Washington is so different from the one that produced what many scholars view as the most important law of the 20th century that celebrating the law’s legacy is awkward for Republicans and Democrats alike. Neither party bears much resemblance to its past counterpart, and the bipartisanship that carried the day then is now all but dead.

“The Republican Party today doesn’t really honor its past,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” “The Republican Party that had been ceased to be sometime in the 1980s, and the modern party — the radical conservative party — not only has little or no interest in honoring its history, it is actively hostile to it.”

Part of the problem is this: Although the Civil Rights Act passed the Senate by 73-27, with 27 out of 33 Republican votes, one of the six Republicans who voted against it was Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who weeks later became the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer and started the long process by which the Party of Lincoln became the party of white backlash, especially in the South. Today, Republicans hold complete legislative control in all 11 states of the Old Confederacy for only the second time since Reconstruction.

The position of the GOP’s congressional wing on issues from immigration, to voting rights, to the minimum wage (while helping to rack up Republican victories in individual districts) is broadly alienating to most African-American voters. So are efforts at the state level to impose new voter identification laws or other limits on access to the ballot box that disproportionately affect black voters. All that makes it hard for today’s GOP to lay plausible claim to its undisputed legacy on civil rights.

[R]estoration of a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down last year — is given no chance of passing the House, despite co-sponsorship from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) for creating new criteria for determining which states must obtain approval from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.

“There are no real Republican leaders on civil rights or voting rights, aside from Sensenbrenner,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the Election Law Blog. “And it’s only going to get more awkward, because we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The anniversaries of all these just serve to show how different things are today.”

 

U.S. Department of Education: Title IX Protects LGBT Students

While many states give lips service to protecting LGBT public school children, in states like Virginia, true protections are nearly non-existent and time and time again we see teachers and administrators failing to act and/or looking the other way as LGBT students are bullied and/or subjected to discrimination.  Now, an announcement by the U.S. Department of Education ("DOE") may put new pressure on schools receiving federal funding to actually take action.  Specifically, the DOE's Office of Civil Rights has issued guidelines underscoring that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (“Title IX”) to the federal civil rights laws that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded education programs and activities applies to LGBT students and transgender students in particular.  The 53 page document can be found here.  Here are highlights from a statement by the National Center for Transgender Equality:

The guidance, from the Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), states: "Title IX's sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity and OCR accepts such complaints for investigation."

"This announcement is a breakthrough for transgender students, who too often face hostility at school and refusal by school officials to accept them for who they truly are," said NCTE Policy Director Harper Jean Tobin. "It is now clearer than ever that schools nationwide are responsible for ensuring that transgender students are respected and safe, and students can seek protection from the Department of Education and the courts if schools fail to do so." 

...This historic statement on gender identity is embedded in a larger guidance document on the responsibilities of schools to prevent and respond to sexual violence against any student—part of a package of guidance and resources announced by the Obama Administration today to address this widespread problem. Also being launched is a new website, NotAlone.gov, collecting resources for students and schools and reporting settlements with schools related to sexual violence on campus. NCTE applauds the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and the federal agencies involved in this effort.

"Sexual violence in schools is shockingly common in the U.S. and needs to stop," said NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling. "That the Federal Government is addressing sexual violence is so important. And it is also important, and honestly a relief, that the Department of Education is clarifying Title IX in a way that will make schools safer for transgender students."

It goes without saying that the Christofascists will not be happy and will likely view this as another instance of their religious freedom - i.e., unrestricted license to persecute others - as being  under attack.

The GOP's Continued War on Minorities

T

he hypocrisy of Republicans and others on the far right on the issue of minority rights is off the charts.  They claim in one breath that they are not anti-black or anti-minority even as they use "dog whistle" sound bites to rally the white supremacists and outright racists and do all in their power to disenfranchise minorities and whittle away at non-discrimination protections and affirmative action programs.  Sadly, it is all to typical of those who claim to honor Christian values yet lie through their teeth and view others as something less than fully human.  A piece in Slate looks at the double speak being used by the right to disguise their effort to roll back protections and make voting increasingly difficult for non-whites.  Here are article highlights:

The right has always been against race-conscious remedies to racial discrimination, touting “colorblindness” as the “constitutional” approach to making policy.

Led by figures like Hans von Spakovsky—a former Bush official who once accused the Obama Justice Department of anti-white racism—and boosted by conservatives on the Supreme Court, the right has chipped away at affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, while using their state-level clout to limit voting with strict ID requirements and attacks on early and weekend voting.

But there’s still more to do. Von Spakovsky—and his frequent collaborator, Roger Clegg of the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity—have gone after congressional remedies to the court ruling, calling it a “ ‘get out of jail free’ card to black elected officials in the South, where they can discriminate all they want against white voters.” They are prepping an assault on Section 2 of the VRA, which bars actions that cause racial discrimination in voting, even if that’s not the intent. They’ve also opened a new front in the war against civil rights laws, with an attack on the Civil Rights Act itself.

Von Spakovsky, Clegg, and Slattery focus their fire on the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which treats neutral actions with racially disproportionate outcomes as illegal, if—for example—a business or institution can’t justify a practice as necessary to the job. For them, “Eliminating such claims is therefore another way to help curb the use of racial and ethnic preferences.”

But this is ahistorical nonsense. “Disparate impact” exists because discrimination was often achieved by neutral means.

During Jim Crow, for instance, explicitly discriminatory voting was illegal. White Southerners could block blacks from using public facilities or mandate segregated businesses, but they couldn’t bar blacks from voting. Hence the poll tax and the literacy test. In theory, they were universal requirements—everyone was vulnerable to failing the test or lacking the funds to pay a tax. In practice, of course, extreme poverty and deprivation meant that ex-slaves and their descendants were most likely to fail the test or lack the funds.  

It’s for this reason that lawmakers built disparate impact into the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Title VII) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. Even today, disparate impact is critical to fairness in employment, housing, and other fields. The Obama administration has used disparate impact claims to win settlements from banks accused of predatory lending toward minorities. The simple fact is that racial bias is still alive in vast areas of American life, and most people who discriminate are too smart to broadcast their prejudice.

To von Spakovsky, Clegg, and Slattery, however, these measures are as bad, if not worse, than racism against minorities. It doesn’t matter that racial inequities move from generation to generation, propelled by the force of past and present discrimination; for these conservatives, any acknowledgment of race is racism, and anti-racist policies—like federal civil rights laws—are a zero-sum game, with whites as the losers.

Circumstances change and ideologies shift, but the message from conservatives stays the same: What happens on the ground doesn’t matter; equality under the law is sufficient for civil rights. This has never been (and isn’t) true, but then, this isn’t a matter of truth as much as it’s a question of belief.

[I]f, in other words, you think the facts matter—then you’ll reject this “colorblindness” for what it is: a reactionary excuse for doing nothing.