Battle Over Rights Continues

According to an article in the Washington Blade, Dan Furmansky of Equality Maryland blamed Judicial Proceedings Chairman Brian Frosh (D-16) and the Senate leadership for the death of the transgender rights legislation this year:

Furmansky said the Judicial Proceedings Committee chair, Sen. Brian Frosh (D-Montgomery County), initially was reluctant to call for a vote on the bill despite a 2006 campaign pledge to support such legislation.

“Senate leadership did not want this bill on the floor for fear of a filibuster, which we think was highly unlikely,” Furmansky said.

Frosh called a vote March 23 to decide whether the measure should go before the full Senate, where activists expected it to pass.

“We had the vote count on the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate,” Furmansky said. “We had the votes.”

But the measure died in committee, 6-5, when Sens. Norman Stone Jr. (D-Baltimore County) and C. Anthony Muse (D-Prince George’s County) joined the committee’s Republican members to kill it.

Furmansky said Muse’s vote came as a surprise because the legislator had repeatedly committed to Equality Maryland lobbyists and others that he would support the bill.

Muse did not respond to the Blade’s repeated attempts to contact him.

Sen. Lisa Gladden and Dana Beyer, a former candidate for the House in District 18 who now works for Montgomery Councilmember Duchy Trachtenberg, still characterized this as a step towards eventually gaining passage of the legislation:

Sen. Lisa Gladden, the bill’s author, said this year’s measure nonetheless marked a step forward.

“Although this bill was voted down, we made tremendous progress on educating the committee and the members of the General Assembly on this important issue, and we will reintroduce and pass this bill next year,” she said.

Equality Maryland board member Dana Beyer, who is transgender, agreed. She vowed to keep working with Gladden and others to pass the measure.

“We’re almost there in Maryland,” she said, “and I’m hopeful that we will reach our goal next year.”

In truth, even final passage of this legislation will largely be symbolic, albeit an important one since symbols matter in terms of indicating public acceptance and government pressure. However, stopping discrimination really takes greater understanding which brings a change in attitude on the part of the public. Even with discrimination laws, discrimination can still easily occur. It just tends to get obscured with people being less direct about the reasons for acting in a discriminatory manner.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan continues his campaign against the Human Rights Campaign as an ineffective, secretive, and dogmatic lobby for lesbian and gay rights at the national level. I've often joked that HRC often seems more like a logo than a movement. However, Republican control of Congress certainly made it more difficult for them to gain support in Congress. This year will be a real test for HRC as one might expect them to have greater success in passing anti-discrimination legislation with a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate.