Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez this
week reiterated his support for the LGBT community as he seeks to
become the next Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair.
In an interview with the Washington
Blade, Perez was asked about his plans for LGBT issues at the
DNC.
“My plan is what my plan has been for
the last 25 years of being a civil rights lawyer and a labor rights
lawyer: To continue to make sure that the LGBT community has a
meaningful seat at the table,” Perez
said.
“That’s what I did when I worked
with Sen. Kennedy. That’s what I did at the Justice Department.
When I worked with Sen. Kennedy, I was one of the staffers who wrote
the original version of what became the Matthew Shepard & James
Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. I started working on that back
in ’95.”
“When I went to the Civil Rights
Division, the first hearing I testified at was the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act [which would prohibit LGBT workplace
discrimination], the bill that I worked on with Sen. Kennedy. When I
was back at the Civil Rights Division in 2009, the work we did on
bullying, especially the Anoka-Hennepin case was a landmark because
we hadn’t done a bullying case at the Department of Justice
involving the bullying of LGBTQ communities, and when I got to the
Labor Department, making sure that we expended the reach of the
landmark executive order, the anti-discrimination order from the
1960’s relating to discrimination by federal contractors that
didn’t protect the LGBTQ community, and we changed that. It was
incredibly important.”
“So, throughout my life, I have
always fought for equality and opportunity for the LGBTQ community
and if I have the privilege of being elected, past is prologue, the
best way to judge what someone is going to do in the future is look
at what they’ve done in the past and I’m very proud of my history
with partnership with the LGBTQ community because everybody in this
country deserves to be treated with dignity, and I have personally
been involved in hate crimes cases where somebody was brutally
assaulted or murdered simply because of their gender identity or
sexual orientation. And that has no place in the American fabric.
None whatsoever. So I’ve seen the impact of discrimination
firsthand in the work that I’ve done and it’s part of my DNA,”
he added.
Perez and former Minnesota Rep. Keith
Ellison are considered the front-runners to win Saturday's election.