My mother introduced the first LGBTQ rights bill to Congress. Let's make her proud. Much has improved for LGBTQ Americans since my mom, Bella Abzug, fought for them in Congress. But America still has a lot of room to grow. Forty-seven years ago this month, my mother, Bella Abzug, introduced the nation’s first gay rights bill in Congress. It would have amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to included lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans. My mother, ever the pioneering reformer, saw the clear and urgent need for addressing discrimination that far too often destroyed people’s well-being and lives. While much has improved for LGBTQ Americans since that spring day in 1974 – with growing opportunities for living openly and in safety, for marrying and for serving in the nation’s military – discrimination remains a daily reality for many in our communities. For nearly a halfcentury, however, Congress has failed to follow my mother’s lead to extend equal nondiscrimination protections to all LGBTQ people – despite polling showing overwhelming and bipartisan support across the nation for doing just that.
Anti-LGBTQ discrimination is not some abstract or political football. Instead, it has profoundly damaging, real-life and often lifelong consequences for LGBTQ Americans. More than 1 in 3 LGBTQ folks, according to a 2020 Center for American Progress survey, experienced discrimination of some kind – perhaps in public spaces, on the job, in schools and in their own neighborhoods – in the previous year, with that number rising to over 60% among transgender people.
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