Thursday, June 04, 2009

The Gender Equality Bill Is Another Victim Of This Legislative Session

Once again, the gender inclusive anti-discrimination bill is a victim of politics. Back in September, we were told that this will be “our year,” however, we got sided tracks by politics. The marriage bill to codify the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision on marriage equality was pushed ahead of our bill. The Judiciary Committee’s vote on the marriage equality bill was dragged out by a few Republicans on the committee who tried to add silly little amendments to the bill. As a result our bill was never voted on by the committee. In a last minute attempt by the Democrats to add the bill as an amendment to the CHRO bill failed because of Republican filibustering to run out the clock by trying to add amendments to the amendment.

We had hopped to have our bill attached as an amendment to another bill, but that never happen because of delaying tactics by the Republicans. The Republicans tried to add amendments to any Democratic backed bill; a bill that could have passed with little debate was dragged on for hours by the Republicans. On the CT News Junkie web site there is a blog by Christine Stuart that mentions the bill to ban exotic animals and how the “Republican lawmakers filed a number of amendments on the bill including one which would have owners of the dangerous animals drop them off at the Attorney General’s office in Hartford.” As a result of this tactic, the legislature was bogged down and many bills were never brought up for a vote this session.

An additional factor was the large budget deficit that ate up much of the legislators’ time in committees trying to work out a bipartisan compromise. As a result many good bills died by the wayside, including ours.

We will come back next year and as long as it has to take to pass a gender inclusive non-discrimination law. It took eight years to sexual orientation to the non-discrimination statutes.

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