Keith Robben says he was laid off because
his boss had a problem with his sexuality.
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
Jake, a 43-
year-old worker at an auto parts warehouse in Ohio, often spends his lunch break in his car. By eating alone, he doesn’t have to talk with co-workers about his weekend plans or worry about using the wrong pronoun that could reveal that his life partner of 12 years is another man. Since many of his colleagues drop gay slurs on a daily basis, it’s a topic he would rather avoid.
“It is guys being macho,” said Jake, who wanted to withhold his last name so his employer could not identify him. “But it is still definitely something I have to be conscious and worried about. And with Ohio not having any laws protecting me, I am just afraid that if there was a confrontation, the company would let me go because it creates a hostile work environment.”
With all of the momentum behind same-sex marriage, the fact that many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people lack a crucial yet basic protection often goes unnoticed: there is still no federal law that explicitly protects workers from job discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Where we are headed with marriage is fantastic, but at the same time, in over half of states you can be legally fired for being gay or transgender and no one is talking about that,” said Ineke Mushovic, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project, a research group that co-wrote a recent report about the job discrimination and the variousfinancial inequities that gay people face in the workplace.
That means even if the Supreme Court .... [...]
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