Testimony of
Matthew Coles
Director, Lesbian & Gay Rights Project
American Civil Liberties Union
Before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions
United States Senate
Hearing on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
February 27, 2002
My name is Matthew Coles. I am the Director of the Lesbian & Gay Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. I am here for my ACLU colleagues from across the nation, and for my colleagues at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
We are the lawyers who handle most of the cases involving discrimination against lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. We are the people who represent the X-Ray technician in eastern Washington who never knew a day of peace at work and was eventually hounded out of her job by a supervisor who hated her because she was, in his words, "a faggot." We are the people who represent the shoe factory worker in Maine who, as the federal appeals court in Boston put it, "toiled in a wretchedly hostile environment," before he lost his job. We are the people who represent an inspiration choral teacher in Alabama, who thought until the day he was fired that he'd successfully kept his family life private, and whose students begged the school board to bring him back. We are the people who represent the championship volleyball coach, the hard working accountant, the talented young lawyer, the world weary mechanic, and on and on and on all of whom learned to their shock that the American promise that talent and hard work are what matter was, for them at least, an empty promise.
There is little that we can do for most of those people. If they work for government, they can claim limited protection under the constitution, and sometimes under civil service. In 12 states, they are fully protected by civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. But if like most Americans, they work for private businesses in the other 38 states, they are just out of luck.
But those people we represent are the tip of the iceberg. For most lesbian/gay Americans, survival comes down to this: separate the two most important parts of your life, work and family, so that neither ever knows anything about the other. And then pray that you never slip up.
Imagine making certain there is no trace of the most important person in your life where you work; imagine not just that she or he never appears there, but that no one who works there can ever be allowed to know she or he exists. Imagine knowing that you risk your career if you slip and mention her name, much less casually say what she thought of the show you saw on tv last night. Imagine that your future depends on no one knowing that you are married, or that you hang around with other people who are married, or go to places where married people go. Now imagine that you have to keep this up. For good. It is a balancing act that exacts a price in human emotion that is terrifying.
The answer, for both the people we represent and the vast numbers who protect themselves by splitting their lives apart, is the bill you have before you. ENDA provides what simple justice demands; that no one should lose a job because of who they are. For the people we represent and others like them, it offers a remedy. For the rest, it provides a promise that denying family is not the price of having work.
While the remedy is important, it is that promise that matters most. Civil rights laws work not because we are able to haul those who disobey them to court, but because most Americans are good, law abiding people. When we say that as a nation that no one should lose a job because of religion, most business accept that.
Most people accept it because our laws are above all, a statement about what we believe as a people. So too with a law against sexual orientation discrimination. And what we say with a federal civil rights law banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation is not that we endorse being gay, or being heterosexual, any more than our federal civil rights laws against religious discrimination endorse being Christian, or Jewish or Muslim or agnostic. A law against sexual orientation discrimination says that we really believe the American promise that every one should have a fair chance to go where their brains and guts and grit can take them. A law against sexual orientation discrimination says that we really believe in that promise, and that we want it to be real. That isn't much, and yet it is everything.
The X-Ray technician in Washington, the shoe worker in Maine, the choral teacher in Alabama, and those silent thousands, they all need the promise. We all need a federal law banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and we need it now.