Going For The Whole Enchilada

Rather then step-by-step, these guys think that if you ask for everything, then you'll get it.

Gay donors propose omnibus rights bill

Ahonen-Jover and his partner, Ken Ahonen-Jover, retained LGBT-rights attorney Karen Doering to draft the proposed bill after arranging for her to conduct extensive legal research on whether the bill should create a freestanding law or amend existing civil rights statutes.

Doering, a former staff attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said she concluded from her research that it would be better for the omnibus bill to amend existing civil rights laws, including the landmark U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She and a corps of activists organized by Juan and Ken Ahonen-Jover decided that the omnibus bill should amend a series of existing civil rights, disability and education laws by adding the protected categories of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to those laws. The existing laws now bar discrimination based on race, gender, religion and ethnicity, among other categories.

Under the proposed omnibus bill, the limited employment protection provisions for gays and transgender persons in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, which is pending in Congress, would be reintroduced as amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Doering said.

But the proposed omnibus bill goes much further than ENDA by adding sexual orientation and gender identity and protection provisions to more categories in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other civil rights laws that ENDA’s sponsors in Congress considered too risky to include in ENDA.

Among them are protections from discrimination in housing and public accommodations, such as hotels and restaurants, and in the ability to obtain credit.

“If you think about it, why should we be excluded from those protections?” said Juan Ahonen-Jover