By Katie Halper • @kthalps • 10 years ago

Breaking: ENDA’s latest supporters (includes The President)

obama-best-1024x664It’s not every day that the president of the United States stands up for transgender rights.

Today, the Senate will be voting on ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would make workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity illegal. Currently, while it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, disability or sex, it is perfectly legal to fire a lesbian, gay, or bisexual person for the crime of being a lesbian, gay or bisexual person in 29 states. And it’s A OK to fire a transgender person for people transgender in 33 states.

This morning Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) came out for ENDA, which makes it likely that the bill will pass the Senate. Heller joins the entire Democratic Caucus and Republicans as well as Republican senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Mark Kirk (Ill.) who support ENDA.

But last night, ENDA received a push from the President himself. President Obama urged Congress to pass ENDA in a blog post on the Huffington Post, writing:

Americans ought to be judged by one thing only in their workplaces: their ability to get their jobs done. Does it make a difference if the firefighter who rescues you is gay — or the accountant who does your taxes, or the mechanic who fixes your car? If someone works hard every day, does everything he or she is asked, is responsible and trustworthy and a good colleague, that’s all that should matter.

Read the whole post here.

Screen Shot 2013-10-28 at 11.13.50 PMKatie Halper started identifying as a feminist at the age of 5 when she attended her first pro-choice rally and began calling out the musicals she watched instead of cartoons for being “prejudiced against women.”  She realizes this is a ridiculous photo. 

 

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Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City’s Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comic, writer, blogger, satirist and filmmaker based in New York. Katie graduated from The Dalton School (where she teaches history) and Wesleyan University (where she learned that labels are for jars.) A director of Living Liberally and co-founder/performer in Laughing Liberally, Katie has performed at Town Hall, Symphony Space, The Culture Project, D.C. Comedy Festival, all five Netroots Nations, and The Nation Magazine Cruise, where she made Howard Dean laugh! and has appeared with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon and Jim Hightower. Her writing and videos have appeared in The New York Times, Comedy Central, The Nation Magazine, Gawker, Nerve, Jezebel, the Huffington Post, Alternet and Katie has been featured in/on NY Magazine, LA Times, In These Times, Gawker,Jezebel, MSNBC, Air America, GritTV, the Alan Colmes Show, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once) and the National Review, which called Katie “cute and some what brainy.” Katie co-produced Tim Robbins’s film Embedded, (Venice Film Festival, Sundance Channel); Estela Bravo’s Free to Fly (Havana Film Festival, LA Latino Film Festival); was outreach director for The Take, Naomi Klein/Avi Lewis documentary about Argentine workers (Toronto & Venice Film Festivals, Film Forum); co-directed New Yorkers Remember the Spanish Civil War, a video for Museum of the City of NY exhibit, and wrote/directed viral satiric videos including Jews/ Women/ Gays for McCain.

Katie is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, and New Yorker.

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