Equality

Here's a news item the media barely covered last week: the Equality Act was reintroduced in Congress with the sponsorship of more than two hundred members from both houses.

If passed, the legislation would guarantee permanent protection for LGBT Americans within the existing civil rights laws.

While nineteen states have LGBT equality codified into law, the remaining thirty-one do not. If this bill were to pass, everyone would be covered and protected.

Now conservatives, almost certainly, will not support this legislation, so its chances of passing are not good. But how will they define their opposition?

Will they try to claim it's bad for business and imposes a burden on employers? If they try to do that, American business already has a response: they're demonstrably wrong.

Concurrent to re-introduction of the Equality Act, 92 major corporations announced their support for the proposed law. And these are not small companies; their ranks include giants like Apple, Bank of America, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Xerox, and many more.

These companies recognize that LGBT equality is good for business and good for the American people. But it's not just the corporate sector -- recent polling shows that more than 70 percent of Americans favor LGBT equality.

It's time for Congress to pass the Equality Act. If you haven't already, contact your members of Congress and ask them to both support the Equality Act and work to pass it this year.