The U.S. House of Representatives is getting ready to vote on the misleadingly titled No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 3) today. As early as noon, your representatives will be deciding whether or not to take away insurance coverage for abortion from millions of women. You can watch the debate in real time on www.cspan.org, or follow our twitter feed for live updates.

Yesterday, we discussed the mean-spiritedness that pervades this bill. As the House edges closer to passing this attack on women, we thought we'd remind you about the basics:

• H.R. 3 singles out and excludes abortion from a host of programs that fulfill the government's obligation to provide health care to certain populations. It would permanently deny millions of women, including Native Americans, federal employees, Peace Corps volunteers, poor women and women in federal prisons, access to abortion care except in very limited circumstances. These discriminatory policies should be repealed – not made into permanent law.
• H.R. 3 manipulates the United States Tax Code to penalize a single, legal, medical procedure: abortion. In particular, it penalizes small businesses and middle-class families. It would deny small businesses tax credits designed to make health insurance affordable to all Americans if the insurance they provide includes abortion coverage. And it imposes a tax increase on women who need abortion care by excluding it from health savings accounts, medical savings accounts, and flexible spending arrangements.
• H.R. 3 would eliminate abortion coverage in the health insurance exchanges created by health care reform by denying the subsidies at the heart of health care reform to women and families who want to purchase plans that offer coverage for the full range of reproductive services women need. Congress rightly rejected this kind of ban when it passed health care reform; H.R. 3 tries to resurrect it.
• H.R. 3 would make permanent a provision that violates Washington, D.C.'s, autonomy and forbids the local government from choosing for itself whether to use its own locally raised non-federal dollars to provide coverage for abortion for its low-income residents. If you're curious how the District feels about that, ask Mayor Vincent Gray, who was arrested in protest last month after D.C.'s right to care for its own citizens got traded away to cement the budget deal.

H.R. 3 is nothing less than a direct attack on a woman's ability to make personal, private medical decisions. Tell your representative that Congress needs to stop playing politics with women's health and reject H.R. 3.

(Originally posted on the Blog of Rights.)

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 was the second day of the ACLU's fact-finding mission in Puerto Rico to document and draw attention to civil liberties and human rights violations that have been occurring there.

The delegation spent the morning meeting with Miguel Muñoz, University of Puerto Rico (UPR) interim president, and Ana Guadalupe, chancellor of UPR's Río Piedras campus. They were joined by Puerto Rico American Actress, Rosie Perez, and by retired Puerto Rican professional baseball player, Carlos Delgado.

In the afternoon the delegation met with José Figueroa Sancha, Superintendent of Police of Puerto Rico; Max Perez Bouret, Auxiliary Superintendent for Administrative Affairs; and the six members of the newly formed task force for civil rights reform. Later, the delegation will meet with majority and minority members of the Puerto Rico Senate and House of Representatives.

Read more updates on the status of the Fact Finding Mission.
View pictures of delegation.
Read about Day One of the Fact Finding Mission and view pictures.

Late last week, the U.S. Department of Labor took an important step forward for its transgender employees by adding gender identity to the department's internal equal employment opportunity (EEO) policies. The Labor Department will now explicitly prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity, as well as pregnancy, under existing bans on sex discrimination.

In announcing the updated EEO policy, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said, "I am expressing my personal commitment to ensure that the U.S. Department of Labor is a model workplace, free from unlawful discrimination and harassment, which fosters a work environment that fully utilizes the capabilities of every employee."

In addition to the recently updated Labor Department EEO policies, beginning in January 2010, the federal government started to list gender identity in the EEO policy for all federal jobs on www.usajobs.gov. By explicitly including gender identity as a protected class under EEO policies, the federal government made an important commitment to protecting transgender federal employees and took a significant step toward ending employment discrimination of LGBT people in the federal workforce.

Also of note, the three federal agencies and departments that have the greatest responsibility for protecting federal employees from discrimination on the job — the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division — have all adopted internal EEO/non-discrimination policies that offer similar protections to their transgender employees. Included in this growing list as well are the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Postal Service.

Increasingly, federal agencies and departments, combined with an ever-growing list of private companies, as well as various state and local governments, are all arriving at the same conclusion — that a person's gender identity or sexual orientation has absolutely no bearing on the ability to be a great employee. However, while this is a promising trend in the country, it remains legal to fire or refuse to hire someone for being lesbian, gay or bisexual in 29 states, while transgender workers can legally be denied or refused jobs in 37 states.

The need for Congress to pass the long-overdue Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA - H.R. 1397 and S. 811) could not be stronger. It is simply jaw-dropping that in our country in the year 2011 there is a group of people who, when they go to work, are forced to deny their families and loved ones and hide who they are for fear of losing their livelihood. ENDA will allow all American workers who stand side-by-side at the workplace and contribute with equal measure in their jobs to also stand on the same equal footing under the law by prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in most American workplaces.

While the struggle for passage of ENDA continues in Congress, steps like those by Secretary Solis and the Labor Department help add important protections for current and future transgender employees, and send the unmistakable message that anti-LGBT employment discrimination has absolutely no place in the federal government.

(Originally posted on the Blog of Rights.)