» 2007 » December

ENDA fallout constricts Title VII claims

Rebecca — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:00:39 +0000

First, the good news. As reported at the CCH Internet Research Network,

A federal district court in the District of Columbia concluded that a male-to-female- transsexual job applicant could proceed with her Title VII sex bias claim against the Library of Congress, which allegedly withdrew its job offer for a terrorism research analyst position with the Congressional Research Service after the applicant disclosed that she was under a doctor’s treatment for gender dysphoria and would be transitioning to a female before beginning work with the agency.

That is great news as it helps to shore up job protections for transgender people.

Now the not so good news. Earlier we had posted alot about ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This act was to have employment protections for all of us in the GLBTIQ alphabet. However, the trasngender piece was pulled out in order to create a bill that had better chances of passing in Congress. That made alot of us pretty unhappy. But it appears that removing the transgender protections from ENDA may have even more far reaching consequences. Again, as reported in the same article at CCH Internet Research Network,

the court also noted that the House recently passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (H.R. 3685), which would ban discrimination only on the basis of sexual orientation, not gender identity, suggesting that as a result, the applicant’s definition of sex under Title VII might be too expansive.

The result may be that Title VII cannot be used in a way that allows protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender because ENDA had the transgender portion removed.

Christmas - it’s not just for shoppers

Rebecca — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 09:00:41 +0000

Christmas, the birth of Christ, the savior, isn’t just for shoppers. While it’s true the 25th of December is likely not the precise date of Jesus Christ’s birth, the celebration of His incarnation is one of the most important celebrations in Christendom. And this is not the same as celebrating a religeous right political action win. This is about celebrating the birth of God incarnate who actually came for all the world….men and women in all the beauty of their diversity. You can bet your Christmas fruitcake He did not come for a political party. So, with that in mind, we have brewed up a few links on, Christmas:

Merry Christmas; The Incarnation: a post we did last year on this wonderful day and what the meaning of the season is
God’s Diversity Christmas: is a wonderful post on God’s audience by Julie Nemecek
Give Mary Credit: Over at Heartlight, they give us a short, neat reminder about Mary’s faith as a woman
Should Christians Celebrate Christmas? Is a well documented, historical and analytical perspective on this topic

Merry Christmas to all our readers, coffee swillers and general hanger-oners from us at Beck’s Cafe.

First Event 2008 Blogging Bonanza

Rebecca — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:00:04 +0000

As we wrote about in our last post here. We’ve had a few problems with Beck’s Cafe. But we’ve not let the writing go stale. Instead, we’ve been blogging at the First Event 2008 Blog under the byline of “FE2008″ We’ve been having some great conversations with some of the exhibitors and speaker’s of First Event. We’ll be posting more too. So while we are fixing the Cafe up, we’d invite you to have a read over at the First Event 2008 blog.

First Event 2008 is being held this year at the Boston Marriott Peabody, January 16-20, 2008. First Event is one of the largest transgender conferences in the United States, with attendance of 600 or more during the bone-chilling New England January.

“Houston we have a problem”

Rebecca — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 01:26:38 +0000

Yep we have been having some serious problems at Beck’s Cafe. First, our beloved server, Sun, died at our co-located facility in Atlanta. Our plucky hardware team at A Small Orange, moved Beck’s Cafe over to Susan. Then we couldn’t get back in the door to do anything about it. But, A Small Orange’s crack tech team got the door open and and now here we are again. We got allotta work to do here in the next couple of months. We have to fix all the links (ick) and we have to fix the upload graphics feature, that’s all broke we have to upgrade our Wordpress to 2.3.1 and we have to upgrade the base semantic structure of A Beck’s Cafe too as that has changed…gosh.

But we haven’t stopped writing. Check our next post on First Event 2008 for news on where we’ve been perking up the prose in the meantime.