Mar 27, 2009  |  By: Lou Chibbaro Jr.  | COMMENTS     

The leaders of a nonprofit LGBT donors group in Florida are calling on members of Congress to introduce a far-reaching omnibus LGBT rights bill that combines all of the gay- and transgender-related bills that have been pending before Congress, some for as long as 30 years.

Called the Equality & Religious Freedom Act, the combined measure also includes new provisions, including a clause that requires the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions and domestic partnerships legalized by states.

“We decided that asking for our rights incrementally was not enough,” said Juan Ahonen-Jover of Miami, a gay philanthropist and co-founder of eQualityGiving.org. “We feel the less you ask for, the less you get.”

Ahonen-Jover and his partner, Ken Ahonen-Jover, retained LGBT-rights attorney Karen Doering to draft the proposed bill after arranging for her to conduct extensive legal research on whether the bill should create a freestanding law or amend existing civil rights statutes.

Doering, a former staff attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said she concluded from her research that it would be better for the omnibus bill to amend existing civil rights laws, including the landmark U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She and a corps of activists organized by Juan and Ken Ahonen-Jover decided that the omnibus bill should amend a series of existing civil rights, disability and education laws by adding the protected categories of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to those laws. The existing laws now bar discrimination based on race, gender, religion and ethnicity, among other categories.

Under the proposed omnibus bill, the limited employment protection provisions for gays and transgender persons in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, which is pending in Congress, would be reintroduced as amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Doering said.

But the proposed omnibus bill goes much further than ENDA by adding sexual orientation and gender identity and protection provisions to more categories in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other civil rights laws that ENDA’s sponsors in Congress considered too risky to include in ENDA.
Among them are protections from discrimination in housing and public accommodations, such as hotels and restaurants, and in the ability to obtain credit.

“If you think about it, why should we be excluded from those protections?” said Juan Ahonen-Jover. “We agree with President Obama and the people who elected him. They want fundamental change, and we need to change our thinking on these the bills that are supposed to protect our rights.”

The draft Equality & Religious Freedom Act released last week on the eQualityGiving.org web site also includes: language repealing the Defense of Marriage Act; a provision repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell;” a provision incorporating the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act; and a provision incorporating the Uniting American Families Act, which would give the same immigration rights to foreign-born same-sex domestic partners of American citizens that currently are given to heterosexual foreigners married to Americans.

The Human Right Campaign has argued in the past that lumping several gay rights bills together makes it more difficult to pass a combined measure because members of Congress who oppose one part of such a measure would likely vote against it. Such lawmakers would vote for a narrower bill that doesn’t include the provision they oppose, HRC and other groups have argued.

“The underlying objective of this proposed approach is laudable,” said Trevor Thomas, an HRC spokesperson. “There is a long list of legislative priorities that need to be achieved, but packaging all of these ideas together will not make passage easier.”

Thomas said HRC is advocating for the individual bills that the proposed omnibus measure would combine into a single bill.

“In fact, re-packaging this legislation would require us to rebuild the support that the existing bills have garnered over the years from civil rights, labor, and business groups,” he said, requiring “all this hard work” to be restarted. “What we need is a lot of hard grassroots work and all hands on deck.”

Drew Hammill, a spokesperson for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said Pelosi would work with gay U.S. Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Jared Polis (D-Colo.) to identify the legislative strategy that has the best chance of success.

“The speaker has long been committed to equality and is aware of the numerous proposals that would bring us closer to greater equality — a goal that she shares,” Hammill said.