Today is the day to take a stand for one of the most important pieces of legislation for our movement — the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) – HB 3017.

The Blend and other blogs are swarming to give readers the tools to tell House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that ENDA must move to a vote. The Bilerico Project, Daily Kos, Open Left, Americablog, Towleroad, Joe My God, Michelangelo Signorile, David Mixner, Daily Gotham, Culture Kitchen, Taylor Marsh, PageOneQ, Dan Savage, GoodAsYou, and many other sites are participating.

Here in North Carolina, if you do not work for a private company or organization that has its own inclusive non-discrimination policy, you can be fired by your employer simply for being LGBT. All a homophobic supervisor has to say is the equivalent of “I hate fags, and don’t want to work with one” and out you go – no questions asked, no recourse of any kind.

The bottom line is this state’s legislature has not shown it believes tax-paying, productive LGBTs deserve the same rights as other North Carolinians. Employment protections will happen at the federal level before our General Assembly will move to consider legislation of this kind.

Reps. Tammy Baldwin (on video), and Jared Polis (also on video) personally promised that the legislation would be voted on by the end of March, so there was clearly a coordinated timeline and political strategy to move the bill. Looking at the calendar, there’s not much time to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

Background

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, first introduced in 1994, would prohibit job discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. But LGBT people have never been able to achieve the enactment of the bill, known by the acronym of “ENDA”.

Last year, the Administration’s highest ranking gay official, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, indicated that ENDA was highest priority on the LGBT civil rights agenda.

“If we can get ENDA enacted and signed into law, it is only a matter of time before all the rest happens,” he said. “It is the keystone that holds up the whole bunch, and so we need to focus our energies and attention there.”

Hearings were held last Fall in the House and in the Senate to demonstrate the need for the bill, and testimony was heard on the severe unemployment, underemployment and harassment experienced by LGBT workers. Witnesses testified to the scientific studies demonstrating this.

But nothing has happened. Click here to find out why and join us in swarming Speaker Pelosi’s office.

We demand that LGBT people receive the same job rights as other people: to be able to get and keep a job based only on relevant factors, like job performance, and not on irrelevant criteria, like sexual orientation or gender identity.

There is a majority in both Houses of Congress in favor of ENDA. Now is the time to move it.

In 30 states across America, there is no law against firing someone based on his or her sexual orientation, and the same is true in 38 states for gender identity.

Please call Speaker Nancy Pelosi at 202-225-4965. Ask that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, HR 3017, move to a vote.

Please be polite, but firm.

After you call, please tell us how the call went by clicking here. If you get a busy signal or hang up, let us know that too. It’s important to record your response as we’re tallying it up.

I want to thank Dr. Jillian Weiss, blogging over at Bilerico, for organizing today’s blogswarm; she will be reporting on the responses to the swarm  – and those calls to Speaker Pelosi’s office — at the end of the day, so make your voices heard.

If you want more information on Speaker Pelosi’s position on ENDA as stated by her office, you can find it here.

Pass the word on via Twitter and Facebook; for Twitter, use the hashtag #getenda and start following @getequal