WASHINGTON, D.C.— Today in a White House ceremony, President Obama signed a sweeping executive order protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers from job discrimination. The order, profoundly consequential in its own right, dramatically underscores President Obama’s own LGBT legacy of achievement, unmatched in history: three landmark pieces of legislation; 90 significant policy or regulatory changes, including the largest conferral of rights in history to LGBT people via the implementation of the Windsor decision; and 15 federal judicial and seven ambassadorial presidrappointments.
President Obama began the ceremony by saying, “Many of you have worked for a long time to see this day coming. You organized, you spoke up, you signed petitions, you sent letters — I know because I got a lot of them. And now, thanks to your passionate advocacy and the irrefutable rightness of your cause, our government — government of the people, by the people, and for the people — will become just a little bit fairer.”
In the executive order, President Obama explicitly protects transgender federal employees from workplace discrimination by amending an order issued by President Bill Clinton banning sexual orientation discrimination within the federal workforce. In the same order, President Obama set strong new standards for federal contractors, which employ 20 percent of the American workforce. In so doing, the Obama administration has guaranteed that 14 million more American workers will be protected from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
In the part that applies to federal contractors, the Obama administration declined to create a separate carve-out or standard for LGBT employees. Instead, the President elected to narrowly amend Executive Order 11246, first signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965—placing sexual orientation and gender identity on equal footing with race, color, religion, sex and national origin, and thus making these protections virtually politically impossible for a future administration to undo.
These two acts can be viewed as the keystone act of a concerted, six-year effort by the White House to dramatically advance the cause of LGBT equality. When President Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the Human Rights Campaign presented him with the Blueprint for Positive Change—a checklist of actions the Obama administration could take to change the lives of LGBT Americans for the better. In the years since, President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and leaders within every cabinet agency have spearheaded and achieved unprecedented progress on almost every front.
During his speech President Obama stated that the order was not only the right thing to do, but it was good for business, “Equality in the workplace is not only the right thing to do, it turns out to be good business. That’s why a majority of Fortune 500 companies already have nondiscrimination policies in place. It is not just about doing the right thing — it’s also about attracting and retaining the best talent. And there are several business leaders who are here today who will attest to that.”
In response to the executive order, HRC president Chad Griffin issued the following statement:
“With this action, President Obama has cemented his legacy as a transformative leader. Consistently, this administration has taken unprecedented and historic executive actions to advance LGBT equality in this country and around the world.
“The focus now shifts to the House of Representatives, where the Employment Non-Discrimination Act must be brought to a vote by the House leadership. A bipartisan coalition of Americans is standing behind LGBT equality, a bipartisan coalition of our elected leaders should be doing the same.”
Viewed in full, President Obama’s legacy of achievement is unmatched in history: three landmark pieces of legislation; 90 significant policy or regulatory changes, including the largest conferral of rights in history to LGBT people via the implementation of the Windsor decision; and 15 federal judicial and seven ambassadorial appointments.
To loud applause, just prior to signing the order, the president concluded his speech by saying, “For more than two centuries, we have strived, often at great cost, to form “a more perfect union” — to make sure that “we, the people” applies to all the people. Many of us are only here because others fought to secure rights and opportunities for us. And we’ve got a responsibility to do the same for future generations. We’ve got an obligation to make sure that the country we love remains a place where no matter who you are, or what you look like, or where you come from, or how you started out, or what your last name is, or who you love — no matter what, you can make it in this country.”
Today’s federal contractor executive order is broadly supported by the American public. A 2011 poll of likely voters conducted for HRC by GQRR found that 73 percent favored such an order and support was strong regardless of age, race, education, political ideology, and a number of other demographics.
Under Executive Order 11246, first issued by President Johnson in 1965, companies contracting with the federal government for $10,000 or more in a single year are prohibited from discriminating against employees based on race, color, religion, or national origin. His order built on prohibitions on race discrimination in various federal contracts issued by prior presidents, as far back as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that predated broader civil rights protections. In addition, since 1967, the executive order has also prohibited discrimination based on sex.
