From the Baltimore Sun:
After the House of Delegates this weekend voted overwhelmingly to prohibit employer and housing discrimination for the transgendered, the bill crossed over to the Senate Monday where it landed in an unusual committee: Senate rules.
…
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said that his chamber is engaged with the budget now and is unlikely to take up the bill.
“When we are through with the budget we’ll have time to deal with other issues that might have a chance of passage,” he said after the morning session. “At this point in time I’d say the chances of passage of that bill are next to none.”
He said the Senate has raised the issue in previous session, only to see it fail. “There are not the votes to move it in committee,” he predicted.
Miller noted that his chamber “spent a lot of time” on “important social issues” earlier in the session that died in the House of Delegates. The Senate passed a landmark bill legalizing same-sex marriage, only to see their efforts wilt when votes could not be secured for House passage.
So again we see that the greediness of pushing gay marriage ahead of the morally appropriate agenda item of fully rectifying an existing anti-trans, gay-only rights legal regime kills not only any chance of fully disposing of the special right of gays and lesbians to discriminate against trans people (which, however much the Flying Marriage Monkeys of Maryland, New Hampshire, Sockpuppetland and Beyond may howl that its not so, is in reality the legal framework established by gay-only rights laws) but even any chance of passing even a bill like the incrementally transphobic HB235.
Did anyone in any way connected with ‘Equality’ Maryland even consider the possibility that, going into 2011, the principled position to take would be to legitimately bargain with state legislators by being willing to take gay marriage completely off the table in return for the minimum support necessary to enact a legitimate trans rights bill, thereby putting a stop to the evil that was unleashed on the state in 2001?
Or…
Was pushing gay marriage ahead of everything else priority one – with the diseased HB235 being the second piece of cake for dessert that they might get to snag after all of the gay marriage celebrations but, if not, then no big deal because ‘its only the trannies and what happens to them hasn’t really mattered for a decade so one more decade (or two or three) won’t really matter to the people who matter’?
In your hearts, you know who.
You all know who.
[Cross-posted at ENDABlog]