This will be a week of the administration trumpeting its gay rights record. | GettyClose
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE and JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 6/16/14 12:19 PM EDT Updated: 6/17/14 3:18 PM EDT
President Barack Obama’s 2014: “pen and phone” — and politics.
Monday, the White House announced Obama will sign an executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
This will be a week of the administration trumpeting its gay rights record, with Obama appearing Tuesday night at the Democratic National Committee’s annual LGBT Gala in New York. Thursday, the Justice Department is set to release a report detailing all the ways it has broadly interpreted the Supreme Court’s United States v. Windsor decision which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last year.
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The White House will host a meeting Thursday afternoon about the executive order and the report, which will identify Social Security and veterans affairs benefits as the two areas where the federal government has not been able to apply the Windsor decision, according to sources briefed on the plans.
That will come as the anti-gay marriage National Organization for Marriage on Thursday holds its own march from the Capitol to the Supreme Court, followed by a gala dinner at the Willard Hotel.
For LGBT advocates, the executive order is so important that they call it the third leg of the stool of Obama’s revolutionary record on gay rights, along with repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and backing same sex marriage. For Obama and Democrats, it’s a fresh way to try to energize the LGBT community and liberals heading into the midterms.
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The White House made the unusual move Monday of announcing that Obama had asked for the order to be drafted, though activists say Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told them the Justice and Labor departments had vetted a version of the order two years ago. A White House official said the advance notice was due to the “intense interest” in the topic.
“The action would build upon existing protections, which generally prohibit federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” the official said. “This is consistent with the president’s views that all Americans, LGBT or not, should be treated with dignity and respect.”
The order would cover 28 million workers overall, and what advocates estimate is one in five LGBT employees nationally.
“This is a signal to the ‘rising electorate’ needed to turn out in midterms (LGBT, African American, Latinos and young people) that there’s a reason to come out and vote,” Winnie Stachelberg, an executive vice president for the Center for American Progress said in an email, “so it’s helpful for sure.”
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The delay over the final text is seen by some who’ve been watching developments closely as due to the upcoming Supreme Court’s decision on the Hobby Lobby case, on the religious exemption for businesses to claim leeway from Obamacare’s contraception mandate. If the court were to issue a broad exemption, LGBT advocates worry it could have implications for their community as well, by potentially enabling employers to justify discrimination by saying their religion does not approve of LGBT people.
Activists expect that the White House will wait to issue the executive order until after that decision arrives — expected by the end of the month — and that sexual orientation and gender identity will be written into the existing executive order language about workplace discrimination in a way that addresses the decision.
The White House did not comment on what role Hobby Lobby is playing in officials’ thinking.
Signing the order would fulfill a promise that dates back to Obama’s days as a candidate, but that lingered through the first term and has been tabled since Jarrett told advocates in a 2012 meeting that they’d have to keep waiting until after the re-election campaign.
They’ve kept waiting since then, watching with a what-about-us frustration as the president announced in his State of the Union in January that he’d lead by example and raise the minimum wage for government workers, then in April that he’d lead by example and sign an executive order on pay equity for government contractors — all while repeatedly calling for Congress to pass the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which would cover much of the same legal ground.
That bill has passed the Senate but been stalled in the House, though advocates hope that the executive order will now increase political pressure on Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his conference to hold a vote.
“While the specifics of this executive order are not yet clear, I believe it must include the same religious protections that are included in the bipartisan Employment Non-Discrimination Act that passed the Senate,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). “ENDA strikes a good balance to ensure that discrimination based on sexual orientation will not be tolerated, but also that one of our nation’s fundamental freedoms — religious freedom — is still upheld.”
Stachelberg, who’s spoken often with the White House about these issues, praised the administration’s “careful consideration of this issue and its strong commitment to widening the circle of opportunity,” saying that brings, “the goal of true workplace fairness for all Americans is closer than ever before.”
But for all the breadth of that record, Obama managed to get overshadowed on endorsing same sex marriage by Vice President Joe Biden, whom many in the LGBT community credit with having accelerated the president’s own timing by unexpectedly voicing his own support two years ago in a “Meet the Press” interview. Even last week, during a screening of a new movie about the court battle to repeal California’s Proposition 8, a clip of that Biden interview drew heavy applause from the audience, while a clip of Obama endorsing gay marriage was greeted mostly with silence.
The executive order should help Obama reclaim some of the attention for being the one whose administration has racked up so many victories for the LGBT community that many were wary even criticizing the delay. Beyond repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the gay marriage endorsement, advocates have widely praised how the Justice Department has continued to respond to Windsor.
All that will matter to the LGBT community, advocates say. But it will also matter to the voters Obama is trying to turn out in the midterms.
“There’s absolutely no doubt that this president has fulfilled 99.9 percent of his promises to the LGBT community, and this is yet another important example of that,” said Fred Sainz, the vice president for communications at the Human Rights Campaign. “I wouldn’t simply apply this to LGBT people. I think it sends a message to progressives overall, much like you saw his support for marriage excite them.”
Jarrett celebrated the imminent action with a post on Twitter. “Executive action to ban fed contractors from discriminating against #LGBT workers is good for America & for business #WorkplaceEquality,” she wrote.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the lead sponsor in the Senate of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, welcomed the White House’s plans and called on Boehner to hold a vote on ENDA — which passed in the Senate late last year — so that discrimination protection would apply to Americans in all workplaces.
“Most Americans don’t know that it’s still legal in many states to fire someone for their sexual orientation or gender identity,” Merkley said. “That’s because it not only defies common sense, it goes wholly against who we are as a nation. No more excuses. It’s way past time for Speaker Boehner to allow ENDA to have a vote in the House. No one should be fired because of who they are or whom they love.”
Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/obama-lgbt-nondiscrimination-executive-order-107900_Page2.html#ixzz34vX4zdvC
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