Guest post on ENDA from Congressman Barney Frank

via The Bilerico Project | Daily Experiments in LGBTQ

September 28, 2007

This guest post comes to us from Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA). Congressman Frank is one of two openly gay House members, is the Chair of the Financial Services Committee, and has been a leader in the development of the Employment NonDiscrimination Act.

Being in the legislative minority is easy – pulling together to block bad things does not require a lot of agonizing over tough decisions. Being in the majority is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have the ability to move forward in a positive way on important public policy goals. Detracting from that is the fact that it is never possible for us at any given time to get everything that we would like, and so we have to make difficult choices. But it is important to remember that the good part of this greatly outweighs the bad. Going from a situation in which all we can do is to prevent bad things from happening to one in which we have to decide exactly how much good is achievable and what strategic choices we must make to get there is a great advance. The current manifestation of this is the difficult set of decisions we face regarding the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. We are on the verge of an historic victory that supporters of civil rights have been working on for more than thirty years: the passage for the first time in American history by either house of