Confused Questions

[eredien]

Weirdquark posted about how LGBT federal workers are losing their job protections. Here's the article.

Bloch said that the while a gay employee would have no recourse for being fired or demoted for being gay, that same worker could not be fired for attending a gay Pride event.

In his interpretation, Bloch is making a distinction between one’s conduct as a gay or lesbian and one’s status as a gay or lesbian.

“People confuse conduct and sexual orientation as the same thing, and I don’t think they are,” Bloch said in an interview with Federal Times, a publication for government employees.

Bloch said gays, lesbians and bisexuals cannot be covered as a protected class because they are not protected under the nation’s civil rights laws.

So...I'm a bit confused.
He's recognizing the fact that there's a difference between conduct and sexual orientation: you don't have to be gay, for instance, to go to a pride parade.

But he's saying that you can be fired for being gay, but not for acting gay? Political protests are okay, but being gay while working for the federal government is not?
I don't get this at all.

And the last line really makes me steamed. I read it as: "Because you're not explicitly protected under civil rights laws, as other groups are, we can't help you--and this administration won't be passing those laws anytime soon if we can help it. Oops!" Is that a correct interpretation, or fair? Is there something I'm not understanding, here?

I hope so, because otherwise this is dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

Comments

[weirdquark]

No, I think you're understanding it perfectly. Unfortunately. Except I'm getting a "so there" instead of an "oops", but that's just because these people make me paranoid.

And you're not the only person to look at this and think it's dangerous. The federal government keeps pushing programs that deny rights and protections to gays.

I keep wondering what would happen if a straight person and a gay person both went to a gay pride parade. Bloch says they'd both be protected. But if their boss asks why they went and the straight person says, oh, because I have some gay friends but I'm straight and the gay person says, oh, because I'm gay, guess who gets fired.

Does it make anyone else wonder if they're going to start passing out little armbands with pink triangles? You know, because we wouldn't want to fire straight people because they went to a gay pride parade and their boss thought it meant they were gay.

[q10.livejournal.com]

presumably, the regulations are also such that you can in principle single out straight people who think queer people are deserving of protections (or straight people who don't especially like queer people, or anybody who isn't bi, or whatever).

[emerald-scales.livejournal.com]

Does this mean I could get fired for being a dragon? >'0..0'

[mithent.livejournal.com]

I don't think it even needs to be stated that this Bloch is plainly a letter-of-the-rules rather than spirit-of-the-rules person... if you follow his line of reasoning, you can be fired for liking opera music, just because the law doesn't say you can't do that to opera-music fans. I expect you'll excuse me the following.

WHAT THE *@#! IS PEOPLE'S PROBLEM WITH OTHERS BEING LGBT? IT DOESN'T AFFECT THEIR LIVES!

Ahem.

[batshua]

It scares them.

[q10.livejournal.com]

the point, as i understand it, is that there are certain people hired for the specific purpose of handling complaints about improper firings, where 'improper firing' is a technical term defined by statute (or more accurate defined by bureaucrats in accordance with statute). what i think is being said is that the statute is fucked up, and that the bureaucratic regulations are obligated to mirror that fact. i don't know enough to know whether the conclusions in this particular case is warranted, but it seems reasonable that people whose job it is to enforce laws should only enforce the laws that actually exist, even if additional ones should exist and don't.