Apr 17, 2009  |  By: Amy Cavanaugh  | COMMENTS     

Maryland’s legislative session drew to a close this week with two victories for gay rights supporters, but activists and legislators expressed anger and disappointment that a transgender anti-discrimination bill failed.

An effort to add gender identity to state laws barring discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations and credit died after the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee repeatedly delayed taking action on the proposal.

“It’s very disappointing that we didn’t pass the gender identity anti-discrimination bill,” said gay state Sen. Rich Madaleno (D-Montgomery County), the Senate sponsor of the bill.

“Equality Maryland had come in so strongly to move the bill forward, having laid the groundwork for really the whole year, and I thought we had made great progress.”

But the Senate committee never took an up-or-down vote on the measure before the General Assembly adjourned Monday.

Dan Furmansky, Equality Maryland’s former executive director and current legislative consultant, blamed Senate President Mike Miller (D-Calvert and Prince George’s counties) and Sen. Brian Frosh (D-Montgomery County), chair of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, for derailing the bill.

“It’s my belief that Senate leaders, including the Senate president and ... Sen. Brian Frosh, did not want this measure on the Senate floor and they made sure that the measure stayed in committee rather than putting it for a vote,” he said. “There’s no logic to the notion that Sen. Frosh could not have brought the bill for an up or down vote.”

Frosh told the Blade last week that he put the bill up “three different times and the committee has declined to vote each time.” He also said that despite years of lobbying and educational efforts from LGBT activists, the measure remains “a contentious issue.”

“Frankly, I had hoped the House — and I was told the House — would go first this year,” he said. “So we waited for some time.”

But Madaleno said that when it became apparent that there were enough votes to pass the measure in the Senate, “it got caught up in what I would describe as nonsensical amendments that succeeded in derailing the bill by confusing the issue” in committee.

“The amendments were bizarre,” he said. “They started to come up with never-before-seen, what-if scenarios … and some of the Republicans tried to turn it into a constitutional amendment as a way to force the issue on the ballot, even though in the long history of civil rights in Maryland, we’ve never resorted to that sort of maneuver for any other group of people.”

Madaleno said that while he wasn’t at the voting session, he heard Sen. Nancy Jacobs (R-Cecil and Hoard counties) wanted to make the issue a constitutional amendment, and some people were “worried about the various employment scenarios.”

A legislative aide for Sen. Jacobs did not return a call by Blade deadline.

“Early on, we heard a lot of what I would describe as the ‘bathroom panic’ concern,” Madaleno said. He noted that the measure was amended to remove public accommodations.

“We did it to try to be as clear as possible that we weren’t talking about public restrooms or locker rooms,” he said. “We tried to focus clearly on employment and housing, where we had very compelling testimony and a very strong argument for why this bill was necessary. The other side started to come up with all of these never-experienced-before, what-if scenarios that to me demonstrated a clear lack of understanding and empathy for this issue.”

But there were some clear victories scored for gay Marylanders. One passed bill allows members of same- and opposite-sex couples to inherit a dead partner’s property without paying an inheritance tax.

Furmansky said the bill, which was drafted to benefit same-sex couples, was amended to include opposite-sex couples to make the measure more palatable to lawmakers.

“Some legislators are more comfortable supporting these kinds of rights if they apply to couples across the board,” he said. “Equality Maryland’s position is that the more people who are protected the better, though obviously we recognize the irony that heterosexual couples at least have the option to legally marry.”

The bill next heads to Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s desk. Shaun Adamec, a spokesperson for the governor, said that O’Malley would sign the bill.

Another victory for gay rights supporters came in O’Malley’s fiscal year 2010 budget, which grants the partners and dependents of gay public employees health, dental and prescription drug benefits for the first time. The budget passed both chambers.

Madaleno said the domestic partner benefits were secured “without really a peep from the other side.”