President Barack Obama signed an executive order today that prohibits federal contractors from discriminating against workers based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Labor Secretary Tom Perez explained,

My colleagues in the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs have enforced the government’s nondiscrimination laws for federal contractors for years. Their work ensures that contractors and subcontractors doing business with the government don’t use taxpayer money to discriminate in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or status as a protected veteran. With this executive order, it will also include America’s LGBT workers.

We still need to go further. Passage of federal legislation to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity would mean that all workers across the country would enjoy these protections. But with Congress failing to lead on this issue, the president is taking the initiative as part of this Year of Action.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act passed the U.S. Senate last fall with bipartisan support but is going nowhere in the Republican-controlled U.S. House.

Justin Sink noted in his report for The Hill that the president still wants Congress to pass that bill, although “some gay and civil rights groups have abandoned ENDA over concerns stemming from the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.” After the jump I’ve posted more background on that aspect of today’s news. While the Hobby Lobby ruling ostensibly was limited to a religious exemption from the contraception mandate in the 2010 health care reform law, it’s likely to have more far-reaching effects.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread. I’ll update this post if needed with Iowa political reaction.

From Justin Sink’s July 21 report for The Hill:

“I firmly believe that it’s time to address this injustice for every American,” Obama said, urging gay rights activists to “keep putting pressure on Congress to pass federal legislation that resolves this problem once and for all.”

But some gay and civil rights groups have abandoned ENDA over concerns stemming from the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. The organizations expressed concern that the religious exemption included in the Senate version of the bill could be exploited by employers to discriminate against LGBT individuals.

Those groups say that, if the law were interpreted as it was in the Hobby Lobby case, which allowed some privately held companies to opt out of paying for birth control coverage in their healthcare plans, hospitals, nursing homes, and universities could institutionalize discrimination.

The president’s executive order signed Monday does not include any additional exemptions for religious entities, beyond one implemented during President George W. Bush’s administration that allows religiously affiliated contractors to favor members of their faith when making hiring decisions.

Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, announced on July 8,

After much soul searching, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund has decided to withdraw its support for the current version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. As one of the lead advocates on this bill for 20 years, we do not take this move lightly but we do take it unequivocally – we now oppose this version of ENDA because of its too-broad religious exemption.

Frankly, it is becoming harder and harder for me, for us, to tolerate our own moral and political inconsistencies by protesting the Hobby Lobby decision, then advocating for the current ENDA with its broad religious exemption, and then insisting that the president not include a broad exemption in the upcoming executive order protecting LGBT people working for federal contractors. How can we demand that a woman have coverage for reproductive healthcare at a company but support a bill that allows a lesbian cafeteria worker in the religiously affiliated hospital next door to be fired from her job? […]

We are also deeply concerned that ENDA’s broad religious exemption will serve as a template – a new floor, not a ceiling – not only for our work on LGBT nondiscrimination across the country, but also for other issues that affect our community deeply including marriage, access to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, and access to other reproductive health services. We are well aware that there are many states with zero protections for LGBT people. This weighs on us heavily, as does the fact that many LGBT people would be at risk of having no protections with this broad religious exemption. We will all need to double down to move forward on nondiscrimination laws in the states where none exist as we push for federal protections with a fair and equal religious accommodation.

Our decision to change our position on ENDA comes also from a recognition of just how far we have come as LGBT people and as a country in the last 20 years. When ENDA was first introduced in 1994, had ENDA passed – even with a broad religious exemption – we may very well have been celebrating in the streets. Passing any ENDA in the 1990s would have served as a catalyst for the movement. After all, there were zero LGBT-specific supportive federal laws; only nine states had sexual orientation nondiscrimination laws, only one of which included gender identity; and “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act cast a shadow on our potential freedom. Making compromises on ENDA over the years was about seeking out even the most rudimentary protections. Our efforts were not misdirected given the time. Today, however, is not 1994, and we have since had many catalysts for progress.

Later the same day, several other groups that have long advocated LGBT equality followed suit. From Michelle Garcia’s July 8 report for The Advocate:

[T]he American Civil Liberties Union announced this afternoon that it would also drop its support for the bill.

The announcement was also cosigned by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Transgender Law Center. A joint statement from the groups says that the current version of the bill, allowing religiously affiliated employers the ability to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity, has “long been a source of significant concern to us,” but the Supreme Court’s decision on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby has made it clear that religious exemption provisions are “no longer tenable.”

The organizations say that after decades of introducing multiple versions of a bill to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, the country is due for a suitable one. They say that if this bill were to be passed and signed into law in its current state, it would still leave many LGBT workers without workplace protections.

“Moreover, it actually might lessen non-discrimination protections now provided for LGBT people by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and very likely would generate confusion rather than clarity in federal law,” they wrote Tuesday. “Finally, such a discrimination provision in federal law likely would invite states and municipalities to follow the unequal federal lead.”