I mean even if it should luck up and pass its going to be a vetoed so why waste time on a badly written bill.Wait till a bill that includes every one can be passed and then put Barney and Tammy to the screws and make them inclued all of us.

"Help us, Obi-Wan Obama, you’re our only hope."

This isn't the ENDA you're looking for.

No, really.

Trust me. It *really* isn't.

I have a bad feeling about this.

Somewhere, standing over the LGBT body politic, a mythical figure holding a stick and carrot is waving it. The carrot has been labelled ENDA, of course and the sleeping mass that is the Queer community begins to stir yet again.

Between the possibility of filibuster and the certainty of a sustainable veto, there is no chance of ENDA passing in any form. Nevertheless, it is critical to try and introduce the trans-less ENDA now to serve the purpose of a Siren leading the LGBT community to the rocks, creating internal confusion and division yet again, and silencing increasing demands from Queer America for candidates that acually embrace our agenda.

The Dems gets the majority of LGBT's believing that the Demorcatic party is the party of their cause and their only hope for equality. We are sold the insidious concept of crumbs from the table, incrementalism if you will. It silences complaints about the very last incidence of incrementalism, sacrificing the Hate Crimes act to pass a spending bill for a war that the Dems were elected to end.

The Dems get a lot out of the gesture with very little risk. The trans-less version has passed the House already and can go quickly to the Senate floor. It will be headling news for a bit til it dies through filibuster or from conservative Dems being too afraid to support it in an election year. We need not even bother with the President's possible reaction.

Incrementalism, the new political tocsin, is not even served, but dividing an active part of the Dem's base and rendering it less politically effective in terms of a collective ability to pressure for equality is very neatly accomplished. Our enthusiasm at supporting candidates, the "most supportive" (save Kucinich) of whom is only willing to offer is second class status is whipped up as we cheer"the histpric moment" of failing to get a Hate Crimes act or any form of ENDA.

And,for the historically minded: The incrementalists frequently toss up the civil rights movement as an example of how it always has been with us. It definitely was at one time. In the late 1860's, the women abolitionists who worked hard for ending slavery and frequently risked their lives, opposed extending the vote to non-whites without extending it to women, and did so loudly believing that they would be forgotten and their cause now opposed by the newly enfranchised. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was particularly vehement on the subject, feeling hugely betrayed by those she and her sisters had risked so much for. But, just as has been promised to the T community, women did in fact get the vote. They simply had to wait another 60 years.