Could Rep. Polis Try to Push Gay Anti-Discrimination Bill to House Floor for Vote?

One of the less-libertarian
efforts by gay
gamer dad Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) has been taking up the
leadership reins to get the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
(ENDA) finally passed after years and years of failure. This law,
which would ban private employment discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation or gender identity, has passed the Senate but is
going nowhere in the Republican-controlled House. An attempt to
draw more conservative support for the legislation by providing a
fairly broad religious exception caused a
backlash within the gay community, and several activist groups
dropped their support in the wake of the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court
ruling (the fact that the actual text of the ruling doesn’t simply
give employers freedom to discriminate however they want on the
basis of religious beliefs has been ignored).

Polis is now attempting to change the religious exemption to
make it more restrictive by using the language from Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, so the exemption would be limited to
actual religious institutions.

The Washington Blade in D.C.
thinks this move may be an attempt to use a discharge
petition to take the legislation to a floor vote despite House
Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) refusal to bring it up. The
publication notes:

A discharge petition for an ENDA with a narrow religious
exemption would be consistent with what House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared during a news conference this month when
she said he had a “plan” for ENDA that she couldn’t disclose at the
time. 

The Blade, though, may be overanalyzing the
possibilities, as discarge petitions are rare and don’t often
succeed. After getting vague, non-committal responses from both
Polis’ office and Pelosi’s office, the Blade notes that
the Republican co-sponsor of ENDA, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
(R-Fla.), would not sign a discharge petition. The petition
requires a majority of House members to sign on, which means a
significant number of House Republicans would have to be willing to
publicly embarrass Boehner for not allowing ENDA to come to a vote.
While gay anti-discrimination laws are publicly popular, and more
and more Republicans are declaring support for them, I’m not sure
we’ve reached a state where Republican House members are going to
be willing to fracture the party even further on this, especially
with the tightened religious exemptions.