Controlling The Purse Strings

Who controls the purse string controls you and you have to dance to their tunes.

We are a small cash strapped community, we face high unemployment and underemployment and it takes money to bring about change so we are at the mercy of those who “support” and sometimes their wishes do not correlate to our needs.

Top LGBT Leaders Are Divided Over Compromising On The Bathroom Fight
Conservatives have blocked LGBT nondiscrimination bills by claiming transgender people pose a threat in women’s restrooms. How to break the logjam? Some LGBT leaders say it’s time to support bills that cover housing and employment, but not public accommodations — and largely avoid the bathroom issue. The second article in a BuzzFeed News series on transgender rights in America.
BuzzFeed
By Dominic Holden
October 25, 2016

On Aug. 1, two dozen of the country’s top LGBT activists held an invitation-only phone call to hash out a disagreement that had pitted them into two camps.

After winning marriage equality in 2015, many of them envisioned passing LGBT nondiscrimination laws nationwide — but they hit roadblocks. Conservatives have argued those policies would let transgender people prey on girls in bathrooms and force Christians to sell wedding cakes to gay couples. The bills foundered in state legislatures and Congress. By August, the leaders were fractured over how to break the logjam.

On the 90-minute call, one faction argued they could make gains with Republicans by accepting a compromise. In particular, several supported a bill in Pennsylvania that would ban LGBT discrimination in workplaces and housing — but not in public places, like restaurants and stores. Many on the call believe this could emerge as a model for other swing states where they’ve hit barricades — namely in Ohio, Florida, and Arizona.

By dropping public accommodations from the bills, they would mostly avoid the bathroom issue and religious objections. Transgender people, like LGB people, would be covered in housing and employment. But such a deal would allow, for example, business owners to reject gay customers and require transgender women to use male facilities.

That sort of concession breaks from years of consensus among LGBT leaders, who have tacitly agreed that civil rights bills in state legislatures or Congress should be all-inclusive. Anything less, the orthodoxy has gone, could betray transgender people who bear the brunt of discrimination in public.

This is, in a sense, a fight for the future of the LGBT movement and even a battle over whether organizations can remain fully funded.

One key player is the Gill Foundation, which gave more than $6.5 million to LGBT causes in 2014, the most recent year for which it has disclosed financial records. Gill and several groups that receive its grants, including Freedom for All Americans and the National Center for Transgender Equality, contend this sort of compromise may be their only shot of winning civil rights for millions of LGBT people at the state level in the next decade, even if those gains are incomplete. Leaders of those organizations say they can return to these legislatures in the future to finish the job of passing public accommodations when the issue becomes more palatable.

The Gill Foundation helped pay for Connecticut’s effort to pass the gender inclusive non-discrimination bill; ctEQUALITY received a grant from the foundation to pay for hiring staff, they were one of two organizations that gave grants ctEQUALITY.

But now the Gill Foundation wants to ram legislation down our throats that does not include public accommodation in the non-discrimination laws and to my great disappointment NCTE is willing to go along with this. I am friends with Mara but I think this is wrong and sometimes we have to stand up to bullying. And that is what it is, bullying. Some of the largest LGBT organizations are rolling over to the Gill Foundation and it is surprising the organizations that are not dancing to the foundation’s tune.

But groups across the field, including the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign, have argued the short-term gain approach could amount to entering a box canyon. It may take years to pass laws that provide public protections in the future — if ever. And leaving them out may even send a message that discrimination in public is acceptable.

The ACLU took the Gill Foundation head on by pushing a public accommodation bill and the foundation said,

The group added that passing the bill could show “public accommodations for LGBT people is politically toxic,” and “perhaps most troubling, that LGBT advocates are willing to compromise away public accommodations protections that are perhaps most acutely needed by the transgender community.”

The fallout from this letter led the Gill Foundation, which supports the compromise, to tell the ACLU not to apply for another grant. And in more than a dozen interviews with BuzzFeed News, several normally outspoken activists talked about the divide in hushed tones — or they refused to speak at all. The ACLU declined to provide comment for this article in any capacity.

When your major funder say jump they jump.

I don’t know the extent of the funding that the Foundation gives NCTE but I hope that they will realize that the Foundation is wrong and try to raise their funding from other sources.

The strategy of passing public accommodation latter does not work!

Gill and the other groups cited Massachusetts as a case study in effective incrementalism. Lawmakers enacted nondiscrimination laws in 1989 and 2011, but only passed a bill protecting transgender people in public accommodations this year. The memo called this a “capstone.”
[...]
Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, told BuzzFeed News that as a general matter, “I am very concerned that it would take an extraordinary period of time to come back and pass a law concerning public accommodations alone.”

I would like to point out that New York state passed SONA in 2002 and we were promised they would come back for us and pass Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), well that has never happened. Instead Governor Andrew M. Cuomo introduced regulations banning discrimination against us and the Empire State Pride Agenda declared victory and wiped their hands of us.

I would also like to point out that 32 states have sexual orientation protection and only 18 have laws protecting us. So what makes them think anyone will come back for us? The gays and lesbian will stop their donations and never comeback for us.

Take a stand against bullying by Gay Inc.!

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Update 5:10 PM

Can you imagine if the Supreme Court said lesbians can marry but not gays what the up roar would have been?

Or if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Title III--Desegregation of Public Facilities didn't get included in the act and the Civil Rights Act only banned housing and employment discrimination based on race and allowed discrimination of public accommodation based on race. It would have made the whole Civil Rights Act unacceptable, well why is it alright for us to be left out?

Will the Gill Foundation leave out public accommodation for all LGBT people or just for us?