well, he didn’t say they *won’t* say a thingi read that as him making a rhetorical point.  my problem with the quote is that he connected DADT repeal directly to DOMA repeal when the most obvious connection (to me anyways) is to ENDA.  after all, both DADT repeal and ENDA are “open employment” policy bills.  
i’m surprised that HRC and Equality Matters both came out at the same time talking about marriage equality when at the federal level it seems clear to me that we’re so much closer to passing ENDA.  and anyways congress won’t touch DOMA because they & Obama must see if falling via the courts so they are undoubtedly hoping to avoid that fight altogether.

HRC’s actions already show they believe what Fred Sainz believes……especially regarding trans people. Like you, I couldn’t help but notice his implicitly saying that trans people shouldn’t be granted “the full set of rights” right off the bat, too.
Whether HRC is politically stupid enough to actually back him up remains to be seen. Given their track record, though, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they did…

My first reaction was…Someone needs to put down the crack pipe.

ENDA is not like DOMA or DADTWhile Sainz is of course wrong about ENDA passing without effort, there is no right to work in America. Even affirmative action, employment nondiscrimination laws based on gender and ethnicity and religion have not changed the fact that women are still paid less than men, the glass ceiling is firmly in place, African Americans have the highest unemployment rates and the lowest salaries.
Marriage and service in the military by qualified Americans are constitutional rights. Loving v Virginia court case, the Supreme Court ruled that marriage is a fundamental constitutional right. The California court ruled that denial of the right to serve in the military because of sexuality is unconstitutional.
To make sure that ENDA does not end up like the meaningless affirmative action and employment nondiscrimination laws, the LGBT community needs to network with the Fortune 500 corporations that already have nondiscrimination policies in place, and let these trillion dollar corporate lobbiest push Congress for equal hiring practices, because that is in their best interest to hire the best and the brightest.    

Inappropriate at best.I agree with the underlying sentiment – someday, in some far off future, LGBT equality will be a given no matter what the path to getting there is.
That doesn’t mean that without serious people doing serious work it will happen in our lifetime, nor that if everyone who cares just gives up and waits around there won’t be more Spanish Inquisitions, Nazi ovens, or whatever the technical terms for executing gay people in Arab and African countries is before that day comes.
For one of us peons out here in the wilderness, “It’ll happen no matter what” may be a (naive) but valid flag of hope to wave, especially when judges get ousted or kids are killing themselves or NOM spends another million or two on hate.
But from someone whose JOB it is to NOT sit around, and to make the inevitable happen in the foreseeable future, this is incredibly inappropriate, or at least phrased VERY poorly.

HRC needs to be marginalized……and eliminated as any kind of go-to spokes-group for LGBT civil rights.
The bill hasn’t been signed.  Certification could take months, or never come at all.  Recommendations could include anything from segregation of gays and lesbians from certain assignments and postings, all the way up to banning them from entire branches — or altogether.  The law specifically omits any requirement gay and lesbian servicemembers be free from discrimination or have a right to challenge harassment or discrimination based on their sexual orientation.
And as Autumn mentions, transgendered folks get bupkiss out of this whole exercise.
Is this quasi-repeal a positive step?  Absolutely.  Unfortunately, it just takes us back to the spring of 1993, when the Clinton Administration was preparing new regs to allow open service, and Congress went ape-s**t and passed a law to stop it.  Unfortunately, nobody recognizes that even if the Obama administration enacts some form of open service, the next administration will have full legal authority to reverse it.

Looks like Fred Sainz isn’t the only one who needs to put down the crack pipe…Go ahead and put your trust in those trillion dollar corporate lobbies. After all, they always have the best interests of their current and potential drones employees in mind, don’t they?

HRCI know that it’s the popular stance among Blenders and other communities of politically minded LGBT folks to disparage HRC as an “out of touch” group of brown-nosers who don’t give a whit about achieving equality so long as they keep raking in the checks from A-Gays and getting invited to the White House to chat with Mr. Obama.
However, when I was watching the presser immediately following the cloture vote on Saturday, Joe Lieberman called out Solmonese by name and thanked him for his behind-the-scenes leadership on this issue.  I don’t recall his exact words, but it was in the “we wouldn’t be here without you” vein.
Is it possible that there are negotiations and conversations that take place between the Human Rights Campaign and power brokers in Washington that actually do result in tangible good for the community?  Things that folks outside the Beltway (and we “civilians” inside it) will never know about?
I’m prepared to be flamed for this comment, and that’s okay.  But for the record: I don’t think that HRC is a perfect organization, and I was fully supportive of my friends Jamison Green and Donna Rose when they broke ties with HRC following the ENDA debacle a few years back.  But I really do wonder if in the big picture, the HRC actually does more good than harm, even if Mr. Solmonese does like his Dolce & Gabbana suits.
When he announced in February that DADT would be repealed this year, he took quite a ribbing from the Blend; I was fully expecting him to be mocked relentlessly if his prediction turned out to be false.  But it wasn’t.  It’s still 2010, and Congress passed the repeal.  Is it perhaps time to give HRC a break for a couple of days, and just say ‘thank you’ for whatever might have been accomplished in DC?  Just askin’.

corporations ahead of the equality curve unlike meganYou are the one smoking crack if you don’t think these corporations are the ones who can get ENDA passed. They are ahead of the curve in equality – and it is in their best interest to offer benefit packages to LGBT employees which is why they do that. They are in a position to lobby Congress with money the LGBT community will never have. Now put your crack pipe away, reboot your computer since you obviously have used up all your brain cells, get your head out of your ass, and get with the program.

Yes, HRC are good little Dem Whoresgiving lap dances to their corporate bosses and taking all the credit when anything happens.  It’s disgusting.

Watch out for the slash and burn…It really doesn’t matter what HRC does or doesn’t do to a number of folks on the Blend, they exist to gin up the haters.
Tick-tock until the word “privilege” is thrown out without the least bit of introspection.

HRC snert in the room

I thought the same thing (both points)It was much easier to get domestic partnership benefits at our company when we could point to a non-discrimination policy and note the discrepancies in treatment…
Same goes for the work I’m currently doing to get full coverage of trans health benefits.
I can’t wait to see the first gay or lesbian family / troop homecoming reunion… that kind of image will be a potent weapon in the next round of battles.

None of the whores I know act like HRCtry a new metaphor, please.

people with heads up their ass in the roomidiot in the room – don’t you get it – the corporations are the ones who can make this happen for us – this has NOTHING to do with HRC who has done NOTHING for ENDA. Fortune 500 companies are hiring LGBT people. Fortune 500 companies are giving LGBT employees benefit packages. LGBT groups have formed within these corporations. These corporations know it is in their best interest to give LGBT employees domestic partnership benefits. They know that it is in their benefit to have these nondiscrimnination policies. WTF is wrong with you that you don’t get that they are the ones who lobby congess for everything and we need to make them do the heavy lifting on this. The argument against ENDA is that corporations don’t want to do what they are already doing. Now get your head out of your ass and think about this.
Unless of course you prefer the failed tactics that have not done one thing to get ENDA passed.
Oh no people with their heads up their ass in the room  

Let’s all tone down the rhetoric please…Name-calling or calling for appendages to be pulled out of places is counterproductive and off-topic.
And for the record, the Corporate Equality Index survey (which is conducted by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation), has probably been one of the more important tools over the last decade in progressing LGBT-inclusive corporate policies.

The Dems want HRC to “lead”because, as long as they get a pen and the occasional photo op, like the Rental Truck Equality Momorandum event on the Stonewall Anniverasry, they are happy.
Out, in-their-faces activism made this bill happen, not 1,000/plate parties where Joe’s pic is up on a screen line some kind of queer “Big Brother.”
But the Dems dont like us pushing like that, holding them accountable. They wants us happy with the occasional memo and Joe photo op
Thanks, no….We’ve had enough of the administration trying to use HRC to opiate us.

They don’t want their competitors doing it tooIt gives them a competitive advantage. The last thing they’d want is to have that advantage removed via Federal law.
They prefer others to go along, fat, dumb and happy, discriminating and wasting some of the best talent in the country – it allows them to cherry-pick, and offer fewer benefits and lower salaries to talented people who consider themselves fortunate to have any job at all.
So don’t expect anything other than opposition by the Big Guys to ENDA, while they themselves behave quite differently. It’s all about the bottom-line.

I have a love-hate relationship with the HRC.I know what they do on the positive end for T-people (which includes the CEI), and I know what they have done which has been — well, couching it in understated terms — less than positive for T-people.
Careful messaging matters. I don’t know if I over-reacted to the language in the WaPo article, but Sainz comments coming days after after so many in trans community are either somewhat saddened or angered that the freedom, equality, and justice of trans people weren’t addressed in the DADT repeal legislation…well, that was pretty disheartening to me.
Again, messaging matters. The messaging wasn’t good here.

I’m sorry but (here comes “the privilege card”)only a white man would think in this way.
One very visible symbol of oppression comes down and two or three less visible symbols of oppression takes it place (they don’t screen you out for the color of your skin anymore, but if you have one of those black sounding names…)
Americans don’t deduce much of anything on their own without being prodded to do so. Period. On anything.

I don’t think DADT repeal would have happened……without hard work by lots of organizations and grassroots individuals working on the issue.
And that’s my point. People had to say something about repeal of DADT; people had to work for repeal of DADT; Congresspeople had to act to see the repeal of DADT.
Frankly, I know external pressure on the LGBT organizations mattered, as well as on legislators, and that pressure made a diffence. I know that direct action made a differnce on DADT being repealed.
I think the message should be loud and clear to the HRC that saying or doing nothing isn’t acceptable when it comes to the freedom, equality, and justice for LGBT community. Mr. Sainz’s comment to the WaPo reporter was unfortunate because it implied saying nothing regarding ENDA was okay.
I hope Mr. Sainz was taken out of context, and that what he said in broader context was more activist oriented.

“Is it possible that there are negotiations …?”Anything is possible, Eric.  Anything.  It’s possible the Conference of Catholic Bishops secretly lobbied for repeal.  Highly doubtful, but possible.  It’s possible that Fred Phelps, Rupert Murdoch and George Rekers did, too.  But unless you have definite information that such negotiations took place, raising this particular possibility is pointless and probably counterproductive.  If the best defense of HRC you can come up with in concocting imaginary scenarios about what’s possible, why bother at all?

Exactly on point.It’s probably the case that ending DADT will have the effect of breaking down a lot of ugly stereotypes.  But that will take years and years to sink in with a lot of the public (maybe even a majority), and even then it won’t necessarily translate into equality legislation, possibly for decades, and quite possibly for a lot longer than that.  And even then the stereotypes will persist in a lot of unpleasant ways.

Really silly to say it will happen “magically”but it is probably true that will make it easier to pass ENDA and will also help undermine DOMA both in the courts and in terms of someday passing repeal (if that hasn’t become a moot issue due to court rulings, whenever that gets taken up).

Scrap it!It’s time the Holy Grail of ENDA is put on the scrap heap!
Why? First, because the damn thing was first introduced in 1994. If we couldn’t get it passed by not, then it never will be.
Second, ENDA only covers employment. Not equal access, not housing, just employment. That’s like ordering a full course meal, getting the appetizer and told to leave the restaurant.
Instead of trying to drag ENDA through Congress for the nth time, we need to start focusing on adding gender identity and sexual orientation as an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is the only way to ensure that everyone will be protected… even cisgender men and women!

I know too many Good Straight Allies (TM) who oppose any court actionOf course, those Good Straight Allies (TM), unlike the Real Good Straight Allies, oppose any legislation correcting the situation until there are plebicites won at every level in the country saying that the homophobes and Christian Fundamentalists are okay with us being treated well.  
I’m not sure if the next step is inclusive ENDA or inclusive Open Service (remember the repeal of DADT =/= Open Service).  I somehow suspect that we’ll go from non-inclusive DADT repeal to inclusive ENDA to Open Service to inclusive Open Service long before any action on DOMA.