Salon asked me to write an article about the ENDA controversy. I went up last night, you can read it here (and all you have to do is look at some ad and you can read the article for free). Just as interesting as the article is the comments section after. Other than few people who are categorically insane, it's a really interesting discussion. You can check out the letters/comments here.
An excerpt:
Conservatives understand that cultural change is a long, gradual process of small but cumulatively deadly victories. Liberals want it all now. And that's why, in the culture wars, conservatives often win and we often lose. While conservatives spend years, if not decades, trying to convince Americans that certain judges are "activists," that gays "recruit" children, and that Democrats never saw an abortion they didn't like, we often come up with last-minute ideas and expect everyone to vote for them simply because we're right. Conservatives are happy with piecemeal victory, liberals with noble failure. We rarely make the necessary investment in convincing people that we're right because we consider it offensive to have to explain an obvious truth. When it comes time to pass legislation, too many liberals just expect good and virtuous bills to become law by magic, without the years of legwork necessary to secure a majority of the votes in Congress and the majority support of the people. We expect our congressional allies to fall on their swords for us when we've failed to create a culture in which it's safe for politicians to support our agenda and do the right thing. ENDA, introduced for the first time 30 years ago, is an exception to that rule. It took 30 years to get to the point where the Congress and the public are in favor of legislation banning job discrimination against gays. It's only been five months since transgendered people were included in ENDA for the first time....
Passage of ENDA, of any federal gay civil rights legislation, would be a huge victory for the gay community. Not just legally, but culturally. Hell, we could pass the legislative equivalent of "Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds," the famous avant-garde musical composition that contains no notes and is nothing but silence, and it would still mark the beginning of the end of our long struggle for equality. I'm not joking. We could pass a bill titled "Gay Civil Rights Law" that contained no language whatsoever. The fact that the United States Congress finally passed legislation affirming gay and lesbian Americans as a legitimate civil rights community, as a protected class of American citizens rather than a group of mentally disturbed pedophiles, would empower our community, demoralize our opposition, and forever place us among the ranks of the great civil rights communities of the past and present.
That's why James Dobson, Tony Perkins and the men at the Concerned Women for America are so hell-bent on defeating ENDA. To the religious right, ENDA without gender identity isn't a weak, meaningless bill fraught with loopholes. Our enemies know that passage of any federal gay civil rights legislation is a legislative and cultural milestone that would make it that much easier for all of us -- gays and lesbians, bisexuals and eventually even the transgendered -- to realize all of our civil rights in our lifetime.
