President Barack Obama on Monday called
passage in the Senate of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)
part of a “return to common sense” on Capitol Hill.
Obama made his remarks while addressing
an Organizing For Action (OFA) audience of roughly 50 people gathered
in the dining room of Decanter, the restaurant inside the St. Regis
hotel.
ENDA, which seeks to prohibit workplace
discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,
cleared a major hurdle in the Senate on Monday.
(Related: Gay
protections bill ENDA clears cloture hurdle in Senate.)
“Slowly, surely, we're starting to
see a some common sense starting to prevail,” Obama said. “It
hasn't quite gotten over the hump, but you're starting to see it in
the Senate in particular where we had already gotten the vote on
immigration reform. Bipartisan vote, it's ready to go. We still
need help from the House, but there's still an opportunity. We're
seeing it perhaps tonight on the ENDA vote, which, you know,
non-discrimination around sexual orientations where we think we'll
probably get this done in the Senate. Again, there's going to be
resistance in the House. But the more that we can continue at a
grassroots level to speak out on behalf of the values that we care
about, they're mainstream values, the values that 60, 70, 80% of the
country believe in. They're also values that young people and future
generations believe in.”
“And so I want everybody to
understand that change in America's always been slow, and sometimes
we take a step back for every two steps we take forward. But
inexorably, the idea of a more tolerant, more prosperous, country
that offers more opportunity to more people, that's an idea that the
vast majority of Americans believe in.”