According to a 2007 poll, Americans define human rights as the rights to equal opportunity, freedom from discrimination, a fair criminal justice system, and freedom from torture or abuse by law enforcement. Despite the current political wrangling over how to reform it, a majority of Americans even believe that access to health care is a human right.
There was a time when America’s leaders echoed those sentiments. President Franklin D. Roosevelt embraced them when he told Congress, “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.” And in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act, forming the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The Commission was intended to conduct critical reviews of social needs and public policy – in essence, to be the conscience of the nation. Regardless of circumstances or leadership, the body was to operate as an independent voice for the broad range of civil rights issues facing the country.
While it is a deeply-held American belief that we’re all in this together, there has long been a truism that when the economy gets a cold, the poor get pneumonia. It’s a glib way of noting that any downturn in the economy has a disparate impact on those least prepared to handle it.
On February 20, 2010, the New York Times published an article on the “new poor,” millions of Americans struggling with long-term unemployment. As the Times notes, changes in the economy have stripped away some of the jobs that traditionally offered a path to the middle class for those with less education. “Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce.” … “Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.”
One year ago our nation, and much of this world, was in a state of panic and turmoil. Companies and industries were shedding jobs faster than we could count. The stock market was tanking in front of our eyes. Waking up every morning to look at the headlines of the newspaper was a daunting task in fear of what a new day could bring to the American people. We needed a lifeline.
And so President Barack Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on February 17, 2009. Critics have been very vocal at pointing out the persistently high unemployment rate as well as flagrant examples of waste and inefficiency. At the same time, supporters have ample evidence to defend the act—a couple million jobs saved or created, a depression averted, and billions of dollars supporting and aiding colleges and universities to invest in the future of our country. Both sides have valid arguments and substantial verification. Undoubtedly, there have been great benefits from the act, but inevitably there is also vast room for improvement in the second year of the two year plan. With a year behind us, we must look ahead and focus our attention and energy in avoiding past mistakes by demanding greater transparency, and demanding higher quality outcomes. As the White House begins to craft the new jobs bill, we must make sure the bill creates good jobs—jobs that offer living wages, provide benefits, and have the potential for long-term growth and advancement.
As seen in the chart below, that's been making the rounds, the stimulus is working. The Obama Administration, using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is touting that the number of jobs lost is lessening.
This is great news, of course, but we must ensure that new jobs are equitably distributed. That's why it's discouraging to hear that five Silicon Valley companies successfully fought a Freedom of Information request for gender and race information on their employees.
Apple, Applied Materials, Google, Oracle, and Yahoo succeeded in rebuking the request from the San Jose Mercury News with the argument that "commercial harm" would be done and business strategy would be revealed to competitors.
In his State of the Union Address, President Obama took a pivotal step towards repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Approximately 16 years later, this repeal is far overdue.
It was in the middle of the speech, in one clear sentence, that America was reminded of a federal law enacted in 1993 that rips at the fabric of our nation’s core belief in liberty and equality. President Barack Obama set a timetable to end the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy passed during former President Bill Clinton’s tenure. “This year -- this year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It's the right thing to do.”
Our troops have been in active war since 2001 – defending the United States and promoting the values of our nation. It’s simply hypocritical to send American troops to fight and often lose their lives in the name of freedom and equality, yet threaten their military status by asking them to conceal a part of their identity. Repealing this federal law would be a big step towards improving the civil rights of our nation and recognizing that being gay does not determine one’s courage, passion or work ethic.
President Obama’s State of the Union address and the Republican Response by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell each called, as they should have, for a renewed focus by government on jobs and the economy. Within that broad charge, however, there was another, more surprising, point of agreement—at least at the rhetorical level. Both speeches challenged our government to focus simultaneously on creating greater and more equal opportunity.
The President declared that “we need to invest in the skills and education of our people,” and announced initiatives that The Opportunity Agenda has long promosted, including sidestepping banks to provide increased college aid directly to disadvantaged students through Pell grants and tax credits instead of loans, doubling the child care tax credit, incentivizing job creation through our tax code, and moving forward on commonsense immigration reform.
Rampant poverty can't be written off as the result of historical accident or a worker's incompetence. It is actively cultivated by bad public policies that direct economic resources into the hands of a wealthy few. The resulting inequality creates unnecessary suffering all over the world, from the humanitarian crisis in Haiti to the alarmingly high poverty rate in the United States.
Systemic poverty in Haiti
The tragedy in Haiti is not only the result of a massive earthquake. As Richard Kim explains for The Nation, Haiti has long been one of the world's poorest nations, and that poverty has prevented the country from protecting itself against natural disasters. As Kim explains:
Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor-by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.
Kim details Haiti's struggles under the weight of colonialist debt that dates back to 1804, the year it won its independence from France. Soon after the revolution, the U.S. and France threatened a trade embargo against Haiti unless the nation of former slaves agreed to pay reparations to its former slave-masters in France. Haiti paid off this extortion with loans from U.S. and European banks. The country was still paying those loans back in the 1940s.
In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded that France repay Haiti $21 billion of these unjust payments. He was ousted by a military coup for his efforts. Even today, the emergency IMF loans that are ostensibly helping Haiti cope with the disaster are crippled by insane stipulations, such as raising electricity prices for Haiti's poorest citizens.
One-eighth of U.S. population receiving food stamps
The U.S. has been waging a quiet war against its own poor for decades as well. In a blog for Working In These Times, Akito Yoshikane highlights today's record level of poverty: One in four U.S. children are living on food stamps, while one-eighth of the entire nation is receiving them. That's over 38 million people, or more than four times the population of New York City. A poverty epidemic on this scale is a total affront to any concept of economic justice, liberal or conservative.
MLK and economic justice
Just economic policy was a critical concern for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But today's 13.2% U.S. poverty rate is actually higher than when King spoke out against it in 1968, as Rich Benjamin notes for AlterNet. The economic oppression of minorities continues to this day. While the overall U.S. unemployment rate is 10%, among black workers, the rate is an astonishing 16.2%, while Latino and Latina workers face 12.9% unemployment.
10% unemployment vs. multi-million dollar bonuses
It's impossible to tolerate 10% unemployment in any economy. But those high rates are especially cruel considering the multi-million-dollar bonuses being paid to bankers who were bailed out with U.S. citizens' tax dollars. Nomi Prins' fantastic interactive chart at Mother Jones reveals both the obscene executive pay levels and staggering federal bailouts that banks subsequently used to boost profits and banker pay.
Top bank executives scored regal paydays for nearly destroying the economy, and some of them even helped pervert the government into an enabler of banking excess. Need an example? Prins highlights Robert Rubin, who pushed through a host of radical deregulatory laws as Treasury Secretary in the 1990s, then left to take a job at Citigroup, where he reaped over $120 million before his company needed a massive bailout. There's no reason for policymakers to accept a 13.2% poverty rate while subsidizing paychecks for wealthy bankers.
What can be done?
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel convened to uncover the causes of the financial crisis, could play a key role in overturning the injustices embedded within the U.S. financial system. As Ruth Coniff notes for The Progressive, it's not simply that the bailouts saved the banks. It's that the banks are piggybacking on taxpayer-granted perks to score record profits.
Economic arguments are routinely deployed to excuse outrageous social injustices-the most common argument for the U.S. bank bailout claims that things would have been much worse for everyone if we hadn't thrown billions at the banks. There are grains of truth in the argument. If all of the banks had actually failed, the result would have been economic mayhem. But that bailout money should have come with major strings attached. There is no reason why bank CEOs, rather than taxpayers, should be reaping the rewards from profits that taxpayer funds generated.
In both global and domestic politics, severe inequality is often accepted as an economic fact, not a problem that must be solved. But the moral outrage prompted by the disaster in Haiti and the U.S. financial bailout is both real and justified. If we want to live in a just society, we cannot continue to subsidize the rich by exploiting the poor.
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Galatians 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
And what I wonder when people who claim to be faithful Christians, claim to follow a God of Love, support laws that sound like something out of the Inquisition, is ... Where in your version of the Kingdom of God are the piles of murder victims you created to get there? Where, in that Kingdom, are the unrepentant murderers?
I mean, Christians are supposed to be Christ-like. That's the claim. Jesus did not come to the planet, according to any version of the Bible, commanding his followers to hate, to be spiteful, to be cruel, to foment murder. He didn't seek out people whose sexuality he may not have agreed with to expose, humiliate or hold them out for general ridicule. Jesus dined with prostitutes and tax collectors, reserving the public ridicule for the moneychangers, the usurers and self-righteous jerks in love with praying ostentatiously in public, and even then he didn't call for them to be killed.
Christians, followers of Christ, were supposed to be mild, to turn the other cheek, to make their lives examples of peace in action. Jesus said the only two commandments a person needed to follow were to love God with their whole heart and love their brothers as themselves.
Which means that, by Jesus' own definitions, Rick Warren and his Family of bigots are sinners, filthy damn perverts, even.
Today, the public will get a look at how funds distributed through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 are being spent when the reports from agencies receiving these stimulus funds are released.
While many questions will surround the release of this information, it's likely that a critical part of this story will be lost unless we ask the right questions about this spending. Namely, is this stimulus really creating a recovery for everyone?
This is an important consideration given that many groups of Americans have consistently been left behind in ways that hard work and personal achievement alone cannot address. This was true even before the economic downturn began to affect everyone else, and it's likely that the crisis has further worsened gaps in income and assets that existed already.
To get an idea of what some Americans faced before the crisis, just look at 2007, the year before the crisis began affecting everyone:
Today is blog Action Day. In the organizers' own words:
Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.
Although The Opportunity Agenda does not directly work on climate change, the problem is so pervasive that it impacts the issues we do work on. Climate change is not an abstract phenomenon when it comes the lives of everyday people in America. There is mounting evidence that greenhouse gases are increasing the potency of hurricanes, whose impact disproportionately affects those most vulnerable in our society. And as the climate does change, it will be the poorest among us that suffer in increased fuel costs. Finally, the polluting elements that cause climate change are also most common in low-income communities of color. As a result, the health of residents in these areas is worse than those in more affluent neighborhoods.
For these reasons, climate change isn't an issue simply to be addressed by environmental groups. Social activists, too, must see the connections and address this universal concern—a step in realizing the promise of opportunity for all.
So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.
[. . .] The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.
Oh, please read the whole thing.
This is as good a time as any to remind people to read Carter's great, great speech on energy and government. The oil companies led a chorus of right-wingers who mocked him for the speech, but he was right: Carter's "Malaise" Speech
An important new book substantiates something progressives have long intuited. Published first in Britain and now headed for the United States, it's by epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson and health researcher Kate Pickett, and its title conveys its message: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
Since the French Revolution, belief in the social benefits of egalitarianism has been central to progressive thought. Now Wilkinson and Pickett have produced some hard evidence for this plank in the liberal platform. They show conclusively that the wellbeing of whole societies is closely correlated not with average income level but rather with the size of the disparity of income between the top 20% and the bottom 20%. Countries with smaller disparities like Norway, Sweden, and Japan (4 to 1) have fewer medical, mental, crime, and educational problems than countries like the Britain, U.S. and Portugal with higher disparities (7 or 8 to 1). France and Canada both have mid-range disparities (6 to 1) and place in the middle on health, education and psychological indicators. Even within American society, it's not the absolute income level of a state that determines its social wellbeing, but rather the level of income disparity. Economic inequality and social dysfunction go hand in hand, and Wilkinson and Pickett have marshaled the evidence to make the case.
It's one thing to demonstrate the social benefits of egalitarianism, and another to spell out the underlying political, economic, and psychological mechanisms that explain these findings. Only as we understand how the level of income disparity affects social wellbeing will we be able to generate the political will to undo the damage wrought by gross inequality.
The theme of equality was central to our nation’s founding, with the declaration that “all men are created equal.” Our country’s history has witnessed the gradual evolution of that core principle from a ruling class that countenanced slavery and subordination toward an egalitarian vision that embraces the inherent equality of all people. We fought a civil war in part to give life to this proposition. It is embodied in our Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under law, and in the other Civil War amendments. And epic social movements of the past two centuries have moved our country, in fits and starts, further still toward the reality of truly equal opportunity. As Abraham Lincoln said of the Founders’ vision:
“They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
It's because of this rich history that recent happenings in Nevada and California are so discouraging. First, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8's ban on same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, this week Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons vetoed a law that would give domestic partners similar rights and benefits to those enjoyed by Nevada married couples.
In a statement (PDF) released by the Governor, he writes: "My disapproval of this bill should not be taken to suggest that domestic partners are in any way undeserving of rights and protections." But this is a canard. As Justice Carlos Moreno, the sole dissenter in this week's California Supreme Court ruling, said:
"Granting same-sex couples all of the rights enjoyed by opposite-sex couples, except the right to call their officially recognized and protected family relationship a marriage, still denies them equal treatment."
He continued to say the ruling "places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities."
Granting gay couples anything but the ability to marriage is fundamentally separate and unequal. These actions in California and Nevada are a troubling trend and particularly discouraging in light of the recent advances in gay rights in so many other states.
I'll admit that I love "fake" news sources-The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Huffington Post's 236-for their willingness to cut through the spin and say what we're all thinking. My favorite, though, is The Onion. With only a headline, or even a caption, The Onion can make an insightful point about a topic that might be too uncomfortable to discuss were it not couched in a joke. An article in this week's issue, "Nation Ready to be Lied to About Economy Again," had just such a headline.
Until fall of 2008, as the stock market climbed higher, much of America genuinely wanted to believe that a rising tide was lifting all boats. But, even then, opportunity was drastically unequal. As our recent State of Opportunity in America report explained, as of 2007, African American families were three times as likely to live in poverty as White families, and eleven percent of full-time, year-round workers were living in poverty. College educated women earned just 65¢ for every dollar earned by college educated men. Latinos earned just 73¢ for every dollar earned by whites, and African Americans just 75¢. These disparities demonstrated that structural inequality and a real disparity of opportunity existed, even beneath the veneer of a flourishing economy.
There's real hope though, that the current downturn, painful as it may be, will force us grapple with the ways in which inequality undermines our economy and our fundamental values. If we emerge from this troubling time ready to be honest about persistent inequality and committed to rectifying it, then there will be a silver lining after all.
As Obama’s first 100 days draw to a close, new research shows that addressing today’s economic crisis will require reinvesting in a bedrock American principle: Opportunity. The State of Opportunity, released last week by The Opportunity Agenda, measures our nation’s progress in ensuring that all Americans, and our nation as a whole, have a fair chance to achieve their full potential. The results are sobering.
Drawing on a large body of government data, the report charts opportunity on a range of indicators—economic security and mobility, equal access, democratic voice, the chance to start over after missteps or misfortune, and a coherent sense of community—across a variety of sectors—from employment to education to housing to criminal justice and beyond. Because the most recent year for which most government data is available is 2007, the report provides a unique picture of opportunity just before today’s crisis took hold.
It shows that Opportunity was both highly uneven and highly unequal for millions of Americans before the recession that began in December of 2007. Over 37 million Americans—12.5% of our nation’s population—were living in poverty in 2007, while the rates for Latinos and African Americans were a staggering 21.5% and 24.5%, respectively. Almost 11% of full-time workers were already living in poverty that year.
Significant gender and racial wage gaps existed in 2007, with women making just 78.2% of men’s median wages, and women with a college degree earning just 65.2% of the wages made by equally-educated men. Latinos earned just 72.6% of the white median wage, and African Americans earned 75.2%. Latina women earned just 58.7% of all men. Overall, the richest 20% of Americans earned almost half (47.3%) of all income in the country, and the richest 5% earned 20.1%.
The Opportunity Agenda is pleased to announce the release of our 2009 State of Opportunity in America report. The report documents America’s progress in protecting opportunity for everyone who lives here, and finds that access to full and equal opportunity is still very much a mixed reality.
By analyzing government data across a range of indicators, this update of our 2006 and 2007 reports assesses our progress in attaining opportunity for our nation as a whole, as well as for different groups within our society. The report paints a vivid picture of opportunity at the dawn of the current economic crisis. But even before the downturn, different American communities experienced starkly different levels of opportunity. The nation has made great strides in increasing opportunity in some areas and for some communities, but many groups of Americans are being left behind in ways that hard work and personal achievement alone cannot address.
These past few years have seen an economy in turmoil, impaired financial mobility, marginal prospects for educational advancement, and a broken health care system. These conditions thwart the nation as a whole as it strives to be a land of opportunity for the 21st Century. At the same time, women, people of color, and moderate- and lower-income individuals and families are being hardest hit and left behind as they face multiple barriers to opportunity.
These barriers are a problem not only for individuals and families, but also for our economy and nation as a whole. They also present an opportunity. Addressing them now would translate to thousands more college graduates prepared for a 21st Century global economy, millions of healthier children in stronger communities, higher wages and greater productivity for American workers, far fewer mortgage defaults and bankruptcies, and far less strain on our social services and justice system. Conversely, the areas of improved opportunity revealed by our analysis represent a foundation and lessons on which to build as the nation works to restore the American dream for everyone who lives here.
As some of you may know, Greg Harris again passed a bill that would allow civil unions in the state of Illinois. His attempt last year was side-swiped by Blago's impeachment trial at the end of the legislative season which delayed the vote.
Apparently, the different now is that according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) , the Mormon Church is bringing their anti-gay crusade to Illinois
The e-mail, sent to at least one LDS ward in Illinois, was authorized by Bishop Chris Church, of the Nauvoo, Illinois 3rd Ward, and was sent out by that website's ward administrator. The messaging in the e-mail carries many of the same bigoted lies that were hallmarks of the LDS Church's campaign in support of Proposition 8 in California and Proposition 102 in Arizona. The e-mail misleads citizens in Illinois by blatantly misstating that the civil unions legislation would "empower the public schools to begin teaching this lifestyle to our young children regardless of parental requests otherwise." It goes on to issue this incendiary and inaccurate warning - "it will also create grounds for rewriting all social mores." The e-mail was uncovered by BoxTurtleBulletin.com, a website that tracks and monitors anti-gay rhetoric.
Greg Harris himself sees the national implications such a bill will have and the mounting opposition from outside groups
Our opponents now see passage of civil union legislation in Illinois as a very real threat. Some of the forces that came in from out of state to defeat Proposition 8 in California are now beginning to turn their attention to our State.
Advocates in Illinois are now gearing up for a statewide campaign with national implications for this legislation as the United States turns its attention to Illinois on the issues of equality and fairness.
I am asking that for those of you who take same-sex liberties seriously, as I do, to please track the progress of HB2234. Please contact state representatives so they know where you stand, and help counter-balance those voices which oppose basic same-sex couple equality.
While I'm fairly certain we will win this battle, I'm not willing to watch a good bill slip away, again.
In his nationally-televised, keynote speech to the CPAC conference last night, Rush Limbaugh pulled the standard conservative trick of claiming the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as a conservative birthright, under assault from progressives:
We [conservatives] love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, Liberty, Freedom. And the pursuit of happiness. Those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded. We conservatives think all three are under assault.
Limbaugh may love and revere these documents, but he clearly hasn't read them recently. Limbaugh says he's quoting the Constitution's majestic Preamble, but it says nothing close to what Limbaugh asserts. Here's its text in its entirety:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Limbaugh appears instead to be referring to the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence, but he's butchering that too. Here's that line in its entirety:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Rush adds in a fourth inalienable right to Jefferson's list - freedom - and he edits out Jefferson's grandest ideal, equality. No wonder Limbaugh likes the founding documents so much: he's edited them to his liking.
There is a serious point here, which is that conservatives often distort our Constitution and other founding documents and act as if the Founding Fathers strangely presaged the present-day Republican platform. The errors are not usually as obvious and ridiculous as Limbaugh's, but they are there nonetheless. As we've explained in more detail elsewhere, progressives need to spend far more time calling conservatives on their false and distorted claims about the meaning of our founding documents and start making more claims of our own.
In a piece for Slate.com, Timothy Noah writes about the disturbing phenomenon of putting coveted summer internships up for auction at elite private schools. Clearly this is putting those who cannot pay, but are well qualified for the position, at an immediate disadvantage. Opportunity is quite literally being sold to the highest bidder.
Internships are widely seen as a great way for students to gain valuable experience which will help them pursue a job in the career of their choice. What does it say about this country if the mere ability to put in a hard day's work is for sale?
With this in mind, The Opportunity Agenda is pleased to note our ability to offer a paid summer internship, within the communications department. For more information, click here.
It's been a big week for equality, as Congress has passed two major pieces of legislation that move the country in the direction of equal access for all Americans regardless of disability.
The major headline which you have probably heard about is the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments. These amendments restore the spirit of the original Americans with Disabilities Act, which had come under fire from Supreme Court rulings that put people with disabilities in a Catch-22 situation. As explained by Cristóbal Joshua Alex of the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights:
In one case after another, the Supreme Court whittled away at the landmark Americans with Disabilities Actby ignoring Congressional intent and narrowly interpreting the definition of disability. [. . .] This created a Catch-22 situation: if a person is able to limit the effect of having a disability, say by taking medication or using a medical device, that person would no longer be covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act and employers were free to discriminate at will. The result has been devastating. Plaintiffs lose 97% of employment-related cases under the ADA.
The absurdity played out in courtrooms across the country where judges, following the Supreme Court precedent, ruled that people with epilepsy, cancer, muscular dystrophy, mental retardation and even
blindness were not "disabled" under the ADA. But, as the bill's sponsor, Congressman Steny Hoyer points out, the ADA is not about disability, it's about the prevention of wrongful and unlawful discrimination.
The Amendments passed by an almost unheard of unanimous voice vote in both the House and the Senate. The impressive victory was a result of all stakeholders in the process, business, labor, and advocates for people with disabilities, recognizing that they were all part of the same community and could find common ground to restore the anti-discrimination protections of the law. When we unite around common American Values such as fairness and dignity, we can find commonalities with those who we might usually think of as our adversaries.
More good news came yesterday with the news that the Congress has also passed a long sought-after mental health parity bill that requires health insurers to treat mental health coverage on equal terms with physical health coverage. The legislation passed in the Senate as part of a larger renewable energy bill by a vote of 93-2, and in the House by a vote of 376-47. In the words of some of the Senators key to the passage of the legislation:
"This bill provides mental health parity for about 113 million Americans who work for employers with 50 employees or more," said Mr. Domenici, who has a daughter with schizophrenia.
"No longer will people with mental illness have their mental health coverage treated differently than their coverage for other illnesses like cancer, heart disease and diabetes."
With this bill, said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, "we are eliminating the stigma and affirming the dignity" of people with mental illness.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, said, "Mental illness will no longer take a back seat to physical illness."
Mental health parity was one of the signature issues of the late progressive champion, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died tragically in a small plane crash while campaigning for re-election in 2002. His work, and those who have continued it, demonstrate that equality, opportunity, and dignity are American, not partisan, goals.
