Transgender Federal Employee Wins Major Discrimination Case

Tamara Lusardi

Here in Virginia, gays and transgender Virginians have ZERO non-discrimination protections under state law.  While we can now legally marry, we can nonetheless be fired from our jobs at will and face discrimination in housing and other realms.   At the federal level things aren't much better except now federal employees and employees of federal contractors are being held to non-discrimination requirements.  Today, a major victory was won by a transgender federal employee who had faced discrimination and harassment.  It goes without saying that the Christofascists will be hyperventilating and let out spittle flecked rants that they have now lost the right to discriminate in federal employment situations.  Here are details on the case from the Washington Post:

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel on Thursday announced a landmark determination that the Department of the Army engaged in “frequent, pervasive and humiliating,” gender-identity discrimination against Tamara Lusardi, a veteran and civilian Army software specialist who transitioned from male to female.

Lusardi was working in the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (“AMRDEC”) in Redstone, Ala., when she transitioned from male to female in 2010. During that time, the Army improperly restricted her restroom usage, referred to her with male pronouns and by her birth name and stopped giving her work, the OSC said in a report released Thursday.

In a telephone interview from Alabama, Lusardi, 49, who served in the Army from 1986 to 1993, including in Desert Storm, said she was called “sir” and “it” by co-workers and management after she legally changed her name, driver’s license and security clearance and began dressing as a woman.   Lusardi was also required to use a single-user, gender-neutral restroom, out of concerns that other employees might feel “uncomfortable” sharing a restroom with her.

The OSC, a federal investigative and prosecutorial agency, said that coworker preferences alone “cannot justify discriminatory working conditions,” since it could reinforce the very stereotypes and biases that nondiscrimination laws are intended to protect against. According to the report, Lusardi should be able to use bathrooms designated for her gender identity.

The case is part of a broader push by the federal government and the OSC to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees in the government.

In July, Obama signed an executive order banning workplace discrimination against millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees of federal contractors and the federal government. The executive order prohibits firing or harassment of federal contractors based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and it bans discrimination against transgender employees of the federal government.
 
In response, the Army agreed to provide training to correct and prevent future discrimination, the OSC said. It also now permits Lusardi to use the restroom associated with her gender identity.

The Army did not respond to further requests for comment, but it agreed to the OSC’s recommendation to provide workplace diversity and sensitivity training, with a specific focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues.

Ken Cuccinelli to Rallied Last Night with Gay-Bashing, Abortion-Hating, Home-School-Loving Group"

Ken Cuccinelli has been whining about Terry McAuliffe's ads which correctly point out Cuccinerlli's - or should we say Kookinelli's - extremist positions on gays, contraception, abortion, and the desire to divert funding from public education to religious schools.  Kookinelli has claimed that McAuliffe's "lying about him."  So what did Cuccinelli do last night?  He attended a gala at The Family Foundation, an organization that leads the Christofascist effort in Virginia to create a far right theocracy.  In short, he just confirmed every one of the statements in McAuliffe's campaign ads.  And better yet, Cuccinelli appeared with lunatic Ted Cruz who is out to destroy America's economy and is responsible for some 170,000 Virginians being on furlough from their jobs.  Here's how the Washington Post editorial board described the gathering of extremists:

We invite you to come and listen to Ted Cruz . . . and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and to be among the more than 1,000 politically-active conservative Virginians. Come be inspired and meet like-minded Virginians who share your traditional values, and hear one of the conservative movement’s most significant national leaders, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.

SO READS the invitation on the Web site of the Family Foundation, the gay-bashing, abortion-hating, home-school-loving group whose annual gala dinner will be held Saturday night in Richmond. If the event serves as a sort of homecoming for Virginia conservatives, Mr. Cruz is this year’s homecoming king. That has left Mr. Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, squirming.

[For Cuccinelli] to align himself with like-minded Republicans, who have pushed Congress to its current impasse, risks infuriating everyday Virginians, to say nothing of the state’s 170,000 federal civilian employees, who dislike the government shutdown much more than the health-care law.That’s why Mr. Cruz, the architect of the current showdown in Congress and the tea party’s champion, is a problem for Mr. Cuccinelli.

[H]is handlers have been at pains to emphasize that the Family Foundation dinner is not a campaign event [even though it is]. He continues to heap scorn on the health-care law, while suggesting, sotto voce, that he opposes the shutdown.

We suspect that if Mr. Cuccinelli or Mr. Jackson were in the Senate, rather than on the statewide ballot this year, they would have no trouble siding with Mr. Cruz and the other conservative absolutists who have forced the government to its knees. There is very little in either man’s background to suggest they’d embrace pragmatism over what they regard as principle.

By contrast, Virginia has benefited from statewide elected officials who have tended to govern from the middle, whatever their ideological preferences.

In Virginia few groups are more frightening in their threat to religious freedom for all and control over one's own body and relationships than The Family Foundation.  If they had their way, these folks would implement a modern day Inquisition.

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800,000 Face Furloughs; a Million More Are to Work Without Pay

With its large number of federal employees, Hampton Roads will feel a real bite economically from the GOP's forced shut down of the federal government.  The financial pain in Northern Virginia will be even worse.  With Virginia's statewide elections only 35 days away, I truly hope those on the fence will realize that Virginia cannot afford to have GOP extremists in the offices of governor, Lt. governor and attorney general.   The Virginia GOP's ticket is, in fact, even more extreme than the saboteurs in the GOP controlled House of Representatives.  If Virginians want to send a message to both the Tea Party and the GOP as a whole, they need to defeat Ken Cuccinelli, E.W. Jackson, and Mark Obenshain by a landslide.   The New York Times looks at the coming furloughs and expectations that people work without pay thanks to GOP extremists:

The impasse meant that 800,000 federal workers were to be furloughed and more than a million others would be asked to work without pay. The Office of Management and Budget issued orders shortly before the midnight deadline that “agencies should now execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations” because Congress had failed to act to keep the federal government financed. 

“They’ve lost their minds,” Mr. Reid said, before disposing of the House bill. “They keep trying to do the same thing over and over again.” 

The federal government was then left essentially to run out of money at midnight, the end of the fiscal year, although the president signed a measure late Monday that would allow members of the military to continue to be paid. 

“You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job,” Mr. Obama said in the White House briefing room as the clock ticked to midnight.

It was far from certain that Republicans could remain unified on their insistence on health care concessions if a shutdown lasted for some time. Asked whether Republicans could hold together through the end of the week, Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia, one of the more conservative members, answered: “I don’t know. I don’t know.” 

Mr. Reid laid into Mr. Boehner and put the blame for a shutdown solely on his shoulders. “Our negotiation is over with,” he said. 

“You know with a bully you cannot let them slap you around, because they slap you around today, they slap you five or six times tomorrow,” Mr. Reid, a former boxer, continued. “We are not going to be bullied.” 

In addition to criticizing Mr. Boehner, Mr. Reid excoriated what he called the “banana Republican mind-set” of the House.

 The Washington Post has details on what will happen with federal workers:

Federal workers will get an e-mail or phone call from their supervisors by Monday telling them to report for work or remain at home.

Those who would not be working would get a few hours Tuesday morning to come into the office to secure their files, send e-mails and put things in order before signing off. It would be illegal for them to conduct any work until they were called back to their jobs.

A government shutdown this week would jeopardize the paychecks of more than 800,000 federal workers who could be told to stay home. The federal government has more than 2 million employees. Those workers who remain on the job as well as active military would be entitled to their salaries, but might not be paid on time. 

"They can't guarantee [the workers] will be paid on time," Junemann said. "They are pretty comfortable with the statement that everybody who works will be paid eventually." Those furloughed might be paid, but Republicans could move to block that.

The OPM publication states that employees cannot substitute paid leave for furlough time and that even previously scheduled paid time off must be canceled "because the requirement to furlough supersedes leave and other paid time off rights."

Again, I hope federal employees in Northern Virginia who find themselves on forced unpaid leave will go to the polls on November 5th and send the Virginia GOP's ticket down to a resounding defeat and that they will tell exit pollers why they made sure to vote for the Democrats.

 

Paul Ryan’s Budget Plan Hits Federal Workers

In addition to Florida, Virginia is being billed as a critical swing state.  That being the case, one has to wonder whether or not Mitt Romney factored in Virginia's large number of federal employees, both in vote rich Northern Virginia and in the greater Hampton Roads area.  As I have noted before, the demographics of Virginia have changed to the point where if one wins the urban crescent from Northern Virginia south through Richmond and then southeast to Hampton Roads, it really doesn't matter if all of the knuckle dragging Neanderthals and Christofascists in the rest of the state vote for the other guy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at what Paul Ryan's budget would do to federal employees, a critical piece of Virginia's voting base.  Here are excerpts:

The spending plan proposed by Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Mitt Romney’s pick as the Republican vice presidential candidate, has drawn strong opposition from federal employees.

Under the proposed House Republican budget, which Ryan sponsored as chairman of the Budget Committee, savings from the federal workforce would total $368 billion over 10 years. The two-year freeze on basic federal pay rates, scheduled to expire at the end of this year, would be extended through 2015 for a total of five years.

“The Path to Prosperity,” as the budget plan is named, also calls on federal workers to make an unspecified “more equitable contribution to their retirement plans,” which means higher costs to employees. Additionally, the federal workforce would be cut, through attrition over three years, by 10 percent, which equals more than 200,000 positions. 

Because the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Justice and Homeland Security have so many employees, the majority of the eliminated positions would come from these agencies, all of which are related to national security.

The plan drew strong opposition from employee organizations when it was announced in March. American Federation of Government Employees President John Gage said the retirement savings means workers would “face massive cuts to the retirement benefits promised when they were hired.”

Gage also said “it is fundamentally wrong for federal employees to be required, yet again, to serve as the Automated Teller Machine for the nation. Enough is enough.”

National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen M. Kelley said the authors of the budget apparently “don’t know, don’t understand or don’t care about the key role federal employees play in helping keep our nation safe, ensuring that our food and medicines are safe and effective, that our air and water are safe, and performing so many other services that people not only expect and want, but need, as well.”

And Joseph A. Beaudoin, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said, “Ryan’s belief that it is permissible to penalize middle-class federal workers, who protect Americans and keep our nation moving forward, is frightening.”

Ryan's falsely named "Path to Prosperity" budget plan may bring prosperity to some - i.e., the 1% - but not for most of us.  And not for federal employees.

The GOP's Phony Worship of Ronald Reagan

It's mind numbing to hear all the references by today's Republicans who claim to give adulation to Ronald Reagan even though were he to run for office with the positions he held, Reagan would likely go down to defeat at the hands of the Christofascist/Tea Party base of today's GOP.  The hypocrisy of these pretend worshipers of Reagan is only exceed by the hypocrisy of the child rapist protecting Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.  On a host of issues, Reagan would be anathema to today's GOP base.  A somewhat tongue in check column in the Washington Post looks at how Reagan would have to be "genetically re-engineered" to conform to today's insane and  extremist Republican Party.  Here are highlights:

Party officials have been making the pilgrimage to the Reagan Library this year to express their wish to re-create the great man. “I believe boldness and clarity of the kind that Ronald Reagan displayed in 1980 offer us the greatest opportunity to create a winning coalition in 2012,” vice presidential aspirant Paul Ryan said at the library last week.

Also making the trip were VP hopefuls Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. “Like Ronald Reagan, I believe in what this country and its citizens can accomplish,” the latter declared. “The America I speak of is the America Ronald Reagan challenged us to be.”

The man they hope to join on the ticket, Mitt Romney, once boasted that he was “not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.” Now he says the party’s standard-bearer should be in “the same mold as Ronald Reagan.”

But before they go filling that mold by mapping the Reagan genome, Republicans may wish to consider some genetic flaws that party scientists should repair in the cloning process. To make the Reagan clone more compatible with today’s Republican Party, a bit of genetic engineering may be in order:

AFL-1  Reagan’s AFL-1 gene, on the labor chromosome, has a mutation that made him susceptible to workers’ rights. He said of unions: “There are few finer examples of participatory democracy.” He said the right to join a union is “one of the most elemental human rights.” And he said collective bargaining “played a major role in America’s economic miracle.”

EPA-4  Reagan’s EPA-4 gene, on the regulatory chromosome, has a protein that can summon anti-industry sympathies. He signed a law establishing efficiency standards for electric appliances and an update to the Safe Drinking Water Act punishing states that didn’t meet clean-water standards.

SSA-2 and MDCR-1  These related genes, on the long arm of the retirement chromosome, are problematic. Reagan expanded Social Security in 1983 and imposed taxes on wealthy recipients. He also signed what was at the time the largest expansion of Medicare in its history.

DEBT-1, DEBT-2, DEBT-3  A trio of abnormalities on the fiscal chromosome caused Reagan to increase taxes several times after his initial tax cut, to embrace much higher taxes on investments than current rates and to sign 18 increases in the federal debt limit.
 
SPND-1, SPND-2, SPND-3  These Reagan mutations, in the same sector as the debt mutations, created a genetic predisposition to expand the federal government. Reagan enlarged the federal workforce and the federal budget, added the Department of Veterans Affairs (one of the largest Cabinet agencies) and pursued a military buildup that would be impossible under spending limits proposed by congressional Republicans.

EITC-1  For all his talk about welfare queens, Reagan had a gene on the compassion chromosome that led him to champion the earned-income tax credit, a program for the working poor that takes more children out of poverty than any other program. Budgets proposed by today’s Republicans would cut or eliminate the credit. A related abnormality caused Reagan to say that bus drivers should not pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than millionaires — one of President Obama’s tax proposals opposed by current Republicans.

By today's standards in the GOP, Reagan would be described as a tax and spend liberal Democrat.  My goodness, he might even be called a Communist!  Today's lunatic GOP base definitely has a very selective memory of the real facts about Reagan and his 8 years as President.

Obama DOJ Argues Against Motion To Dismiss DOMA Challenge

In a move long over due, on Friday the Obama Department of Justice filed a brief in federal court employee Karen Golinski's federal court challenge, supporting her lawsuit seeking access to equal health benefits for her wife. Golinski correctly maintains that DOMA is unconstitutional - something that the human resources department of the federal court for which Golinski works agreed with. The filing by the DOJ is a direct confrontation to a filing by counsel for the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group's Republican members which asked that Golinki's lawsuit be dismissed. In its brief, the DOJ admitted the federal government's "significant and regrettable role" in discrimination in America against gays and lesbians. The full brief can be found here. Chris Geidner with Metro Weekly has a great article on the DOJ action which I recommend be read in its entirety. No doubt Tony Perkins, Marcus Bachmann and his lunatic wife, and other mentally disturbed Christofascists will be hyperventilating and the spittle will be flying fast and furiously. Here are some story highlights:
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[T]he Department of Justice filed a brief in federal court employee Karen Golinski's federal court challenge, supporting her lawsuit seeking access to equal health benefits for her wife and arguing strongly that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional in terms unparalleled in previous administration statements.
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DOJ acknowledged the U.S. government's "significant and regrettable role" in discrimination in America against gays and lesbians. The summary of the DOJ argument that Golinski's case should not be dismissed begins simply: "Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, 1 U.S.C. Section 7 ('DOMA'), unconstitutionally discriminates."
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The filing signed by Christopher Hall, a trial attorney with DOJ, responds to the June 3 filing by the lawyers for the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group's Republican members asking the federal court in San Francisco to dismiss Golinski's lawsuit. That June 3 filing was the first in which Paul Clement -- the outside lawyer hired by the Republican leaders to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court -- presented a substantive defense of the law.
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Unlike in other cases where DOJ has stopped defending DOMA in accordance with President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder's decision that Section 3 of DOMA -- the federal definition of marriage -- is unconstitutional, DOJ lawyers today made an expansive case in a 31-page filing that DOMA is unconstitutional.
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Today's filing does more than acknowledge the federal government's role in discrimination, going on to detail specific instances of anti-gay and anti-lesbian discrimination, including the 1950 Senate resolution seeking an "investigation" into "homosexuals and other sexual perverts" in government employement and President Dwight Eisenhower's executive order adding "sexual perversion" as a ground for "possible dismissal from government service," in the brief's words. It also details the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Postal Service in investigations seeking information about government employees suspected of such "perversion."
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The brief goes on to describe anti-gay and anti-lesbian state and local discrimination, as well as private discrimination, before discussing other considerations made by courts when deciding what level of scrutiny should be applied to laws classifying groups -- including immutability; political powerlessness; and whether the classification bears any relation to, as the brief puts it, "legitimate policy objectives or ability to perform or contribute to society."
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DOJ's lawyers conclude that heightened scrutiny applies and argue how, under that heightened scrutiny, Section 3 of DOMA should be found to be unconstitutional. Heightened scrutiny, the brief details, would require that Section 3 is substantially related to an important government objective. DOJ states: "Section 3 fails this analysis."
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In addition to the DOJ filing, Golinski earlier today filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that there are no factual disputes in her case that require a trial and that the court can and should decide the case in her favor on the legal issues alone.
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It's amazing for once to see the government arguing what I have argued over and over again, including in the Moore v. Virginia Museum of Natural History case which fell on deaf ears at the Virginia Supreme Court.

Christianists Foaming At Mouth Over Obama Gay Rights Memo

All too predicatbly the Christianists and professional Christian crowd are hyperventilating over Obama's signing of his memorandum today that extends a handful of legal rights and benefits to LGBT federal employers and their families. The professional whiners have their panties in a major knot and are bloviating that this grant of a handful of rights/benefits approximates marriage. The charge is ridiculous and disingenuous, but would one expect anything less from these folk? A handful of rights versus some 1000+ rights/benefits. Pretty poor approximation to marriage if you ask me. Here are some highlights from U.S. News & World Report:

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Conservative Christian groups criticizing the president's memorandum extending certain benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees are alleging that the president is approximating the benefits of marriage —that he's basically creating "marriage light." It's an interesting line of argument because polls show that most Americans support benefits for gay partners but oppose gay marriage.

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Here's a statement today from Concerned Women for America President Wendy Wright: "Barack Obama's order...attempts to elevate relationships outside of marriage as if they are the same as marriage. Marriage provides unique benefits to individuals, families, and society that cannot be replicated by any other living arrangements. Marriage helps nurture children and reduces social and financial costs to society by promoting healthy behavior. Federal funds should not be a political tool to elevate partner arrangements to be treated similar to marriage."

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And here's a statement from Family Research Council President Tony Perkins making a similar marriage-based argument against Obama's executive memorandum: President Obama's expected Executive Order extending benefits to homosexual partners appears to be a violation of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and clearly violates the spirit of the federal law which defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman as husband and wife. In 1996, DOMA passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate and was then signed by President Clinton.