Let me be the first to welcome you onboard! Your attitude is both encouraging and refreshing, would that it were shared by more of your future Democratic colleagues.

I would challenge you on one thing though, something I hope you'll take with you into this upcoming campaign season:

The politics around ENDA and the Matthew Shepard bill are not "petty". Not in any way. The ability of American citizens to make a living and to have our families be able to seek justice if one of us is the victim of a hate crime are not petty issues either, sir. Not to us. It is the Congressional Democratic Party leadership which considers them that way.

Real lives are affected by the lack of these protections, and if Congressman Barney Frank is correct and as he stated as recently as last week that gender-variant LGBT people will once again be excluded from ENDA even with a Democrat in the White House in 2009, according to current estimates it will be another fifteen years at minimum before the rest of us will be able to enjoy the same basic civil rights as the suit-wearing, straight-looking, gays and lesbians who control the bulk of our community's wealth and political influence will once such an exclusive bill is passed.

This kind of politics is NOT petty, sir. This is people who should know better playing political games with people's lives to aggrandize themselves and their Party at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. This is our right to pursue the American Dream being used as a poker chip to help politicians to maintain and increase their own political power and influence, not caring who they harm in the process of doing so.

I'm hoping that you understand this, Mr. Neal, that you will keep this in mind as you campaign, and most of all, that we can count on you to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Thanks for listening.