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Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will no longer be the keynote speaker for a gay rights group's fund-raising event after facing intense lobbying from transgender activists angry over the group's stand on a federal gay rights bill.
Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will no longer be the keynote speaker for a gay rights group's fund-raising event after facing intense lobbying from transgender activists angry over the group's stand on a federal gay rights bill.
Villaraigosa was scheduled to headline the Human Rights Campaign dinner on August 2 in San Francisco.
The Washington, D.C.-based organization is one of the nation's most prominent gay rights groups and has so far donated over $500,000 to defeat a November ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage in California.
Transgender activists and their allies have been angry with the group since its endorsement of a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that excludes transgender people from protection. While an earlier version of ENDA did cover transgender people, the exclusionary version was introduced with the thought that it had a better chance of passing, and that version did indeed pass the House of Representatives last fall. HRC supported both versions of the measure.
Matt Szabo, Villaraigosa's spokesman, said the mayor's decision to not attend the event was more a byproduct of the controversy surrounding HRC's stand on ENDA rather than a snub of the group itself, reports the AP.
According to Szabo, when Villaraigosa agreed to appear at the dinner, he was unaware that the San Francisco Labor Council had urged its members to boycott the event. Attending the event would have put the mayor in the position of having to cross a union picket line. (The Advocate)
