Speaking Tuesday at an event, House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from San Francisco, promised
to make passage of an LGBT protections bill a top priority if
Democrats retake control of the House.
Pelosi made her remarks at the John F.
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She said that
passage of the Equality Act was personal for her.
“It isn’t in our ‘For The People’
agenda because it doesn’t get that specific, but there’s one more
because it’s personal for me that I really want to do, and it’s
called the Equality Act,” Pelosi said. “The Equality Act expands
ending discrimination against LGBTQ people and women and adding that
to the Civil Rights Act.”
First introduced in 2015, the Equality
Act seeks to prohibit anti-LGBT discrimination in seven key areas,
including credit, education, employment, federal funding, housing,
jury service and public accommodations, by effectively expanding the
Civil Rights Act, originally approved in 1964.
Drew Hammill, a spokesperson for
Pelosi, told the
Washington
Blade that passage of the Equality Act would be a “top
priority.”
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the
nation's largest LGBT rights advocate, called the need for federal
LGBT protections “critical.”
“Discrimination is a real and
persistent problem for far too many LGBTQ Americans, and more than 50
percent of LGBTQ Americans live in states that lack LGBTQ-inclusive
statewide protections,” said Stephen Peters, an HRC spokesperson.
“It’s imperative that Congress end this patchwork of protections
by passing the Equality Act – crucially important federal
legislation that would finally add clear, comprehensive
non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people to our nation’s
civil rights laws.”