Public accommodations = civil rights
T-Notes
by Robbi Cohn | April 30, 2011
http://goqnotes.com/10861/public-accommodations-civil-rights/In many states, if a bill has not been passed through committee by a certain juncture, it's considered dead. Such was the fate of Maryland House Bill 235, the Gender Identity Anti-Discrimination Act. This highly contentious bill garnered some support, but was also deemed by many to have been constructed with inappropriate language. Championed by Equality Maryland, National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), as well as by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), it mandated protections for trans individuals with respect to employment, housing and credit. Conspicuously missing, however, was one critical component of anti-discrimination legislation: public accommodations.
The case Equality Maryland and its allies made was that including public accommodations was untenable given the state of Maryland politics and the decision was made to introduce the bill sans public accommodations protections. This choice led to a trans insurrection — activists both within and outside Maryland leapt to defend the importance of public accommodations and to make the case that a bill without these critical protections was not only insufficient, but counterproductive.
