Okay… Let’s get political
Hello my dear readers,
Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
A lot has happened in the past month. Most of it has involved politics. I don’t know how often everyone else here reads the news, but being the millennial that I am, I check the news all of the time. I have my monthly subscription plan to The (succeeding) New York Times to help keep me updated on all of the terrible things going on in American politics. One thing in the news that has caught my eye is the latest order of Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Sessions has ordered that the justice department take the stance that Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect LGBTQ citizens.
When Sessions did this, he was undoing the work of the former attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr, who had ordered that Title VII would protect transgender people from discrimination. This was not the original intent of the bill, as it was written in 1964 and being openly transgender in 1964 was extremely rare due to the violent hatred of anything that was not “normal” back then. However, Holder’s interpretation of Title VII was a modern one. Title VII says that it is illegal for an employer to discriminate based on sex. Holder interpreted the use of the word sex to mean sex assigned at birth. Using his line of thinking, Title VII can be applied to transgender people because the key factor for outing a trans person is their “legal sex.” (Legal sex and the idea of sex itself are both useless to our society, but that’s a topic for another day.) It was also argued that the usage of the word sex could protect non-hetrosexual people. This interpretation is very vital to the protection of LGBTQ Americans. Sessions disagreed with Holder’s position, so he issued a memo to the Department of Justice ordering them to stop using Holder’s interpretation, essentially making it legal for employers to fire LGBTQ Americans regardless of wha
Former A.G. Eric Holder.
t their state’s law says. Because the federal law is contradicting the state law in this situation, the federal law takes precedent. This is the same way of thinking that makes every marijuana distributor in a “weed-friendly” state a criminal who could be put to death for their crime of mass distribution of a Schedule 1 drug. With this line of thinking being put into legal use, no LGBTQ citizens are safe from being fired. I could walk into work tomorrow and be told to go home because I am openly queer. No citizen who is openly LGBTQ is safe from being fired.
In case you, my dear reader, cannot tell, I am very upset about this issue. So upset, that I am writing an entire post about it. Now, you may have noticed my repeated use of the words “Americans” and “citizens.” I am using these words to emphasize the fact that Jeff Sessions is willing to discriminate against his own fellow Americans for what? Religious purposes? General bigotry? Let me be very clear about something: This is an attack against LGBTQ people. I do not understand how this is deemed as acceptable. We are supposed to move forward as time marches on, not backwards. There is no justification for this besides hate. The entire point of how our laws and rights are set up is for them to be interpreted differently as time goes on. The Second Amendment was most certainly not intended to protect the right to own a pistol, but at the moment that is how we are interpreting it. (Please note: I am not in favor of someone owning a pistol, but that is the way people are currently interpreting The Second Amendment.) Times change, and our interpretations are supposed to change with the times. To say that LGBTQ people do not deserve the right to not be fired for being themselves is nothing more than hatred disguised as policy.
Sorry, that got a bit depressing. There is hope. There is still some hope. Organizations like The Human Rights Campaign and The ACLU are doing everything they can to reverse this order and fight for the rights of LGBTQ Americans. Our founding fathers believed that we are all created equally. No one should have to hide in the closet out of their fear of losing their job. If anyone reading this feels as passionately as I do about this, then I would urge you to consider donating to the HRC or the ACLU. Thank you for reading.
Blessed Be,
M
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Category: Transgender Opinion, Transgender Politics
About the Author (Author Profile)
M is an 18-year-old agender person who lives in Pennsylvania. They about to enter senior year of high school. Their preferred pronouns are they/them. Their favorite things are music, poetry, and dogs. M is an aspiring writer, activist, and psychologist. They look forward to being a part of the TG Forum community, and would love to share their perspective of the world.Subscribe
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Well done. If one ever wondered why evangelicals and the Falwell camp supported an “adulterer” and candidate of questionable character, you are now seeing the pay off for that support promised in a closed meeting, or in political terms, a quid pro quo. Mike Pence as his VP running mate, a bigot whom Trump said would hang “those people”, meaning us, was also a nod to the religious right wing base of the party.