After the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act two weeks ago, gay activists (and not just in Florida) cautioned that there were still plenty of issues to contend with for the LGBT community.
One of them would be the passage of the Employment of Non-Discrimination Act, better known as ENDA.
This morning the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in the U.S. Senate is expected to approve the bill, which would extend to LGBT people the federal employment protections against discrimination that are currently available to people based on characteristics like race and religion.
The larger question is the bill's odds of passing in the entire Senate, which would then put the onus on the House of Representatives. 21 states have such laws on the books; Florida and 28 other states do not.
Meanwhile, we'll be back down in St. Petersburg today for a couple of events as the campaign season is in full bloom. Monday night we watched the candidates for City Council in District 4 engage in battle, and afterwards spoke with one of them, taxi cab driver Richard Eldridge.
Although it doesn't get too much attention this summer, but the budget cuts known as the sequester have resulted in fewer meals for seniors, less financial aid for scientific research and poorer natural disaster preparedness. It's the latter that has become political fodder here in Florida now that the National Guard is taking a furlough day a week for the next couple of months. Yesterday D.C. Democrats took a shot at Pinellas Congressman Bill Young for not voting for an alternative to the sequester.
And thanks for reading this by the way. Despite the hype about how more people are getting their information from the Internet than ever before, a Gallup poll released yesterday showed that when it comes to getting news and information, TV remains king in America.
