What follows is the full text of Representative Barney Frank's Oct. 9 speech on the floor of the House of Representatives regarding sexual orientation and gender identity:
From:
www.thomas.loc.gov
The SPEAKER pro tempore ( Mr. Mahoney of Florida ) . Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Massachusetts ( Mr. Frank ) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, let me do what I think you cannot do under the rules and reassure your constituents in Florida that you have not become a Tennesseean when they weren't looking. I believe the gentleman from Tennessee left the chair, and we do now have the gentleman from Florida in the chair.
Mr. Speaker, I want to address today a very important issue that is generating an intense discussion among a fairly small segment of people who follow things, and it seems to us it's not healthy and that we ought to have a broader discussion, both of the specific issue, which is a question of how to protect people against discrimination based on their sexual orientation and at some point I would hope their gender and their gender identity, and also how do political parties relate to those in the population who are the most passionate, the most committed and the most legitimately zealous about their feelings, often on one particular issue to the exclusion of a broader set.
Before I came to Congress in 1981, former Members, the gentlewoman from New York ( Ms. Abzug ) , gentleman from Massachusetts ( Mr. Tsongas ) and others, in the House filed legislation to make it illegal to discriminate against people in employment based on their sexual orientation; that is, they would have made it illegal in the same way that the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal based on race, but in a different statute for a variety of reasons, for people to be fired, for people to refuse to hire people, for people to be denied promotions or in other ways discriminated against in the job based on their being gay or lesbian or bisexual. That was, and has been, the number one legislative goal of gay and lesbian, bisexual people for more than 30 years.
In many States subsequent to that enactment, that introduction, laws were adopted to do that. Wisconsin was the first in 1982; Massachusetts, the State I represent, the second in 1989. Many States now have it.
As we kept that fight up in the face of a good deal of opposition and as we began to educate people as to why the prejudice against people based on our being gay or lesbian or bisexual was, in fact, invalid as a grounds for economic discrimination, movement expanded to cover people who are transgendered, people who were born into one sex physically but who strongly identify with the other sex and who, in fact, choose to live as members of the sex other than the one they were born in, often but not always having surgery to enhance that new life.
We are at a differential stage in public understanding of these issues. We've been dealing explicitly and increasingly openly with prejudice based on sexual orientation for almost 40 years, since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and since then.
The millions of people that talk openly and to take on the prejudice against people who are transgendered is newer. It is also the case that prejudice begins with people reacting against those who are different from them in some way. People are rarely prejudiced against their clones. So we have this situation where there is more prejudice in this society today against people who are transgendered than against people who are gay and lesbian, partly because we have been working longer at dealing with the sex orientation prejudice; partly because the greater the difference, the greater the prejudice is to start, the more people fail to identify, the more they are put off by differences, especially when those differences come in matters of the greatest personal intimacy.
We should be clear that as we talk about matters of human sexuality or the human sexual characteristics we touch on the most sensitive subjects that human beings will deal with.
So where we are today is that earlier this year, after years of our introducing the bill which we call ENDA, the Employment Non- Discrimination Act, to ban discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation, we added this year for the first time a provision that would also have banned discrimination based on gender identity as we have designated it, i.e., against people who are transgendered.
We began dealing with the transgender issue earlier in the context of the hate crimes legislation, and legislating against hate crimes, it's easier to do than sexual orientation. It is less intrusive, and it is easier to make the argument that assaulting people and destroying their property is wrong than it is to say that refusing to hire them is wrong. I think they're both wrong, but obviously, there is a distinction in this society. One is a serious criminal issue; one becomes civil.
We originally encountered difficulty in broadening hate crimes to include people of transgender. I first talked about that in 1999. I remember having to explain to people what we were talking about.
Recently, we were successful earlier this, under the leadership of the Speaker of the House, in getting legislation through the House that expanded the hate crime protection, not just based on sexual orientation, but based on people being transgender. The Senate followed suit; although one of the leading senators engaged in that effort noted that whereas, when the Senate voted on that dealing solely with the sexual orientation issue, there were 12 Republican supporters, this year there were only eight. Eight turned out to be just enough to get us 60 votes to break a filibuster, but there was a fourth or one-third of Republican support even on hate crimes which is the easier one.
Continued at www.windycitymediagroup.com/HouseContnd20071010.html
