HRC Blog

On this final day of Women's History Month, Trish Jones, a senior vice president at Turner Broadcasting Systems and a member of HRC's Business Council, writes that the successes and lessons learned from the women's rights may have more to offer the gay rights movement in more ways than meets the eye:

Since we are all on this earth together we have no choice but to co-exist.  This isn't so difficult when we agree; it's more challenging when we don't.  How we manage our differences reveals what we are made of and sets the foundation for what we can achieve.  The struggles and accomplishments of the Women’s Movement lend insight into how we in the LGBT community might win fundamental legal protections—with the help of our straight friends. The Women’s Movement was born with the quest for suffrage and over time grew to include additional fundamental human rights issues such as safe working conditions for women, pay equity, and reproductive rights.  At each juncture in their quest for justice, women jettisoned, without apology, the limited thinking of their era about the limits to the possibility for change. In so doing, they pushed society to reconsider what was within the purview of basic human rights and won the support of men along the way.   As an advocate working to eliminate discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation or gender identity, I am inspired by this message.  It illustrates that, throughout history, when fundamental injustices are made apparent, we in America are capable of working together to clear a path to justice for all—even those who are fundamentally different from us.  As I work with scores of committed people (LGBT and straight) to advocate for basic legal protections for the LGBT community, I am often asked by others what drives me.  I find the answer in my friend of twenty years, Dr. Hall.    Dr. Hall is a middle-aged, African American, Christian woman who also happens to be a lesbian.  If faced with discrimination based on age, gender, religion or race in seeking housing, employment or health care, the law protects her.  She enjoys no such protection because she is gay.  I find this reality disgraceful.  Doesn’t our Constitution promise all Americans equal protection under the law against baseless discrimination in what our forbearers considered the most fundamental of rights: the pursuit of life, liberty and property?  Why should it be okay for an employer to fire someone from his or her job because he or she is not straight?  Is this not akin to firing someone because she is a woman, black, middle-aged or Christian?  To what do we point to justify discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity that assuages our conscience that a LGBT person is so unlike us that to deny her or him employment, housing, health care, or protection from hate-based crimes should not be illegal? As society continues to ponder these questions and grapple with the appropriate outcome, I hope people on either side of the issue will challenge each other to engage in constructive conversation about our differences.  If people agree to communicate in good faith, then maybe we can move beyond merely vilifying each other to build a genuine understanding of each other’s concerns.  Not unlike what happened as the Women’s Movement evolved, in the process of communicating we may come to discover we have something in common that is more important than the matters about which we disagree --a yearning for justice.  As this human rights dialogue progresses, the LGBT community along with our straight allies will continue to advocate for the following fundamental protections we believe should be accorded all Americans:

• A fully inclusive federal employment non-discrimination act (ENDA) that protects all Americans from being denied a job or fired because they are not heterosexual or are gender-variant;
• Protections that would ensure committed same sex partners health care coverage and decision making rights about health care decisions for each other;
• Hate crimes laws in all states that include protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and
• A federal prohibition against discrimination in housing based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

As each of us examines the genesis of our will to champion our respective causes, we should all consider the words often attributed to the provocateur Lillian Hellman:   Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?