nondiscrimination: Last News

CNN, Ford Motor Company’s CEO Jim Farley announced to employees last Wednesday that the automotive giant had changed several of its policies.The company’s employee resource groups would stop focusing on identity and halt participation in external surveys, including the Human Rights Campaign’s “Corporate Equality Index,” which rates companies on their LGBTQ workplace nondiscrimination policies and employee benefits.“We are mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs, and the external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve,” Farley wrote in the email. He noted that the company does not “utilize hiring quotas or tie compensation to the achievement of specific diversity goals,” does not use “quotas [to] develop a dealer body that reflects the communities they serve,” has shifted the focus of employee resource groups to focus on networking, mentorship, professional development, and community service, and does not limit membership in any employee resource group to anyone based on individual characteristics.Farley insisted that Ford remains committed to creating an “inclusive workspace and building a team that leverages diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and thinking styles.”Right-wing activist Robby Starbuck posted a copy of Farley’s email on X, claiming that the company — like others — had changed its policies after he had informed them he was looking into their policies.Here is @Ford’s full statement I received this morning.

A local educational advisory body in Manhattan has adopted a non-binding resolution calling on New York City Public Schools to prevent transgender female students from playing on sports teams matching their gender identity.On March 20, Community Education Council 2, which covers a swath stretching from Lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side, approved a resolution urging New York City Public Schools to form a review committee to propose changes to the department’s current gender guidelines.Since 2019, the city has allowed transgender athletes to compete on sports teams that align with their gender identity. Critics of the current transgender participation policy argue that key stakeholders — female cisgender athletes, coaches, parents, medical professionals, and evolutionary biology experts — were either ignored or not consulted about the potential ramifications of such a policy.The resolution, which passed by a vote of 8-3, urges the school system to receive and consider input from those stakeholders when considering whether transgender student athletes should be eligible to compete in female-designated sports.The purpose of seeking that input is to ensure cisgender females are not denied opportunities to earn team roster spots, titles, awards, and scholarships, or other honors.“Girls and women lose when their hard-fought and won sports opportunities are ignored in favor of replacing sex with gender identity as a category,” said Maud Maron, the lead sponsor of the proposal.Maron is the president of “parental rights” group PLACE NYC and a former congressional candidate who earned less than 1 percent of the vote in the 2022 Democratic primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District.

Detroit Free Press.“I am so proud to be here, and I’m excited to put our state on the right side of history,” added Whitmer, who advocated for such a law when she served in the legislature from 2006 to 2015. Moss noted that equality advocates have spent the better part of five decades advocating for an expansion of civil rights protections, only to see those efforts stymied in Lansing.This was, in part, due to reticence by Republicans — who controlled the legislature for 40 years prior to November — to embrace the cause of LGBTQ equality, for fear of offending religious and socially conservative voters.“The baton has been passed generation to generation,” Moss said. “This moment is so long overdue, and too many suffered on the journey to get here.

MLive Media Group.Democratic lawmakers — who control the legislature for the first time in 40 years following the 2022 election — spoke favorably of the bill, which was one of the first six pieces of legislation they introduced on the first day of this year’s legislative session.Taken together, those six bills provide a glimpse at the party’s economic and social agenda, which includes repealing a 1931 ban on abortion, repealing “right-to-work” laws, rolling back the retirement tax for seniors, and expanding the earned income tax credit.“No one should be afraid to go to work, or school, in fear of their safety,” openly gay Rep. Mike McFall (D-Hazel Park) said of the nondiscrimination law, which liberals have argued is long overdue in a so-called “blue state” like Michigan.“It’s long past time for us to amend Michigan’s civil rights law so we can make our state a place where everyone is welcome, regardless of who they love or how they identify,” McFall added.Republicans offered a series of amendments to the bill seeking to carve out special exemptions for religious individuals or organizations, to drop gender identity from the bill, and to require individuals to use restrooms matching their assigned sex at birth.

The Associated Press.Twenty-one U.S. states and the District of Columbia currently offer gender-neutral options on official identification, including driver’s licenses.