National
Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?
GOP frontrunner supports ‘equal rights in employment’


Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has previously endorsed ENDA (Blade file photo by MIchael Key)
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s recently stated support for “equal rights in employment” for gays is raising questions about whether he supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act — as well as the extent to which he would back other LGBT rights issues.
The current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination said he backs employment protections last week during an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan as he noted gay appointments made during his time as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.
Asked which gay rights he favors, Romney replied, “Well, equal rights in employment, equal rights in — for instance, as the governor, I had members of my team that were gay, I appointed a couple of judges, who, apparently, I find later, were gay.”
Romney didn’t say whether he thinks these protections should be instituted through legislation or some other manner.
A Romney campaign spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to the Washington Blade’s request for comment on whether the remarks mean that the the candidate supports ENDA, pending legislation that would bar job discrimination in most situations for LGBT Americans in the public and private workforce.
Romney’s support for employment rights — through ENDA or otherwise — is unusual for Republican presidential candidates early on during the primary season. Candidates usually veer hard right to win support among social conservatives who participate in Republican primaries. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, for example, have said they would reinstitute “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” if elected.
Still, support for ENDA from Romney would be consistent with a previously articulated position he held in 1994 when he was running against the late Sen. Edward Kennedy for his seat representing Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.
In a letter to the Log Cabin Republicans, Romney recalled earlier conversations he’s had with the group and said he would be a co-sponsor of ENDA and would seek to expand the provisions in the legislation.
Additionally, Romney pledged to “make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern” and said Kennedy, who was known as a champion of LGBT rights in the Senate, would be unable to make that promise to the LGBT community.
“We have discussed a number of important issues such as the Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which I have agreed to co-sponsor, and if possible broaden to include housing and credit, and the bill to create a federal panel to find ways to reduce gay and lesbian youth suicide, which I also support,” Romney wrote.
It should be noted that the version of ENDA that was pending before Congress at the time offered protections based only on sexual orientation and didn’t include language protecting transgender people in employment.
Romney also said the then-recently enacted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law was the compromise that was a step in the right direction and “the first in a number of steps” that will ultimately lead to open service in the U.S. military.
According to a 1994 article from Bay Windows, Romney also articulated support for ENDA during a public meeting of the Massachusetts Log Cabin Club with his then-Republican opponent, John Lakian. The meeting between Republican candidates and the gay group was hailed as a milestone for LGBT rights in Massachusetts.
“I will fight against discrimination of any kind throughout our system,” Romney was quoted as saying. “I don’t know exactly where you legislate and where you don’t legislate or how you make that work and where you don’t. But I am not limiting my support of equal rights for all people just to [U.S. Rep.] Barney Frank’s legislation in the area of employment. I would be happy to continue the fight in other areas such as credit and housing.”
Romney reportedly touted that Bain & Company, a Boston-based management consulting firm whose board he chaired, had explicit directions regarding equal employment opportunity in hiring and promotions.
But Kara Suffredini, executive director of MassEquality, said the support that Romney expressed for ENDA in 1994 doesn’t square with his later actions as governor and predicted he wouldn’t keep his promise to support the legislation.
“That’s all the same stuff that he said when he ran for governor in 2002, and then once he was governor, I mean, do a Google search, and you’ll find out how quickly he positioned himself as anti-LGBT in order to benefit his own political career,” she said.
Suffredini predicted that Romney would be “pretty bad” for the LGBT community as a whole as president because of the inconsistency with which he addressed LGBT issues as governor.
“I would say based on his record as governor here that the only thing consistent about Romney’s relationship with the LGBT community is how inconsistent he is,” Suffredini said.
Suffredini said during his campaign as governor, Romney pledged to sign a civil rights bill for the LGBT community. However upon taking office, she said he took several anti-gay actions, such as abolishing a governor’s commission on LGBT youth, which the legislature later reinstated; rescinding an executive order prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation; and discouraging the Massachusetts Department of Public Health from releasing data on public health disparities.
Romney also struck a markedly different tone on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on Monday during the Republican presidential debate compared to what he expressed in his 1994 letter to Log Cabin.
“I believe it should have been kept in place until conflict was over,” Romney said, invoking an argument that opponents of repeal employed when legislation that would end the military’s gay ban was pending before Congress.
Romney’s position on ENDA could become a more prominent issue as he advances through the Republican primaries.
Romney remains the front-runner in the Republican presidential field among potential participants in the early primaries. According to recent polls from Public Policy Polling, Romney leads by six points in Iowa, 23 in New Hampshire, nine in South Carolina and 15 in Nevada.
Further, Romney could be the Republican presidential candidate who has the strongest chance against President Obama in 2012. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published last week, Romney leads Obama in a head-to-head contest by a margin of 49-46.
R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of the National Log Cabin Republicans, said his organization would hold Romney to his promises on ENDA should he win the Republican nomination and go on to challenge President Obama in 2012.
“Gov. Romney recently stated on CNN he opposes discrimination and supports equal rights in employment,” Cooper said. “We hope he would stand by his pledge from 17 years ago to prevent discrimination in the workplace and support ENDA.”
While Romney’s position on most LGBT issues may have changed over the years, on one issue he has maintained consistent opposition: same-sex marriage.
During his interview on CNN last week, Romney reiterated his previously stated opposition to same-sex marriage.
“What happened was that the gay community changed as to what they wanted,” Romney said during the CNN interview. “When I ran for governor, one of the big issues was marriage, gay marriage. My opponent said she would sign a bill in favor of gay marriage. I said I would not, that I opposed same-sex marriage. At the same time, I would advance the — if you will — the efforts not to discriminate against people who are gay.”
According to Bay WIndows, Romney stated his opposition to same-sex marriage at the Log Cabin forum 17 years ago when he was seeking the Republican nomination in the U.S Senate race.
“I stand with Gov. [Bill] Weld on that,” he was quoted as saying, “and say that in my view it is not appropriate to authorize legally same-sex marriages and I will continue to endorse that view.”
In 2003, After the Massachusetts State Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage rights for gay couples, Romney backed various state measures that would have rolled back marriage rights for gay couples in the Bay State. Romney also voiced support for a U.S. constitutional amendment known as the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban same-sex marriages throughout the country.
Additionally, Romney renewed enforcement of a 1913 law preventing out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts to prevent gay couples from coming into the Bay State to wed. The law has since been repealed by the state Legislature.
Suffredini recalled that as governor, Romney “positioned himself as a national leader” during this time when the first state in the nation was attempting to advance marriage rights for gay couples.
“He did everything he could here to prevent marriage equality — even going so far as to resurrect what we call here the 1913 law, basically an anti-miscegnation law, which hadn’t been enforced in decades,” Suffredini said. “He resurrected it specifically in his words to prevent the spread of same-sex marriage to other states, and what it did was it prevented gays and lesbians from other states from coming here and marrying.”
Fred Sainz, the Human Rights Campaign’s vice president of communications, said Romney’s frequent position changes on LGBT issues make it difficult to predict how friendly to the LGBT community he’d be as president.
“It’s hard to know which Mitt Romney will show up,” Sainz said. “He’s gone back and forth more on issues of equality than a revolving door at a hotel and appears willing to say whatever the audience in front of him will want to hear.”
Still, some remain hopeful that Romney will continue his support for ENDA. Sainz said the decision for Republican candidates on whether or not to support ENDA should be easy.
“It should be a no-brainer for Republican presidential candidates to support legislation that allows all Americans to work and support their families,” Sainz said.
Federal Government
Treasury Department has a gay secretary but LGBTQ staff are under siege
Agency reverses course on LGBTQ inclusion under out Secretary Scott Bessent

A former Treasury Department employee who led the agency’s LGBTQ employee resource group says the removal of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) from its discrimination complaint forms was merely a formalization of existing policy shifts that had already taken hold following the second inauguration of President Donald Trump and his appointment of Scott Bessent — who is gay — to lead the agency.
Christen Boas Hayes, who served on the policy team at Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) from 2020 until March of this year, told the Washington Blade during a phone interview last week that the agency had already stopped processing internal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints on the basis of anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
“So the way that the forms are changing is a procedural recognition of something that’s already happening,” said Hayes. “Internally, from speaking to two EEO staff members, the changes are already taking place from an EEO perspective on what kind of cases will be found to have the basis for a complaint.”
The move, they said, comes amid the deterioration of support structures for LGBTQ workers at the agency since the administration’s early rollout of anti-LGBTQ executive orders, which led to “a trickle down effect of how each agency implements those and on what timeline,” decisions “typically made by the assistant secretary of management’s office and then implemented by the appropriate offices.”
At the end of June, a group of U.S. House Democrats including several out LGBTQ members raised alarms after a Federal Register notice disclosed Treasury’s plans to revise its complaint procedures. Through the agency’s Office of Civil Rights and EEO, the agency would eliminate SOGI as protected categories on the forms used by employees to initiate claims of workplace discrimination.
But Hayes’s account reveals that the paperwork change followed months of internal practice, pursuant to a wave of layoffs targeting DEI personnel and a chilling effect on LGBTQ organizing, including through ERGs.
Hayes joined Treasury’s FinCEN in 2020 as the agency transitioned into the Biden-Harris administration, working primarily on cryptocurrency regulation and emerging technologies until they accepted a “deferred resignation” offer, which was extended to civil servants this year amid drastic staffing cuts.
“It was two things,” Hayes said. “One was the fact that the policy work that I was very excited about doing was going to change in nature significantly. The second part was that the environment for LGBTQ staff members was increasingly negative after the release of the executive orders,” especially for trans and nonbinary or gender diverse employees.
“At the same time,” Hayes added, “having been on the job for four years, I also knew this year was the year that I would leave Treasury. I was a good candidate for [deferred resignation], because I was already planning on leaving, but the pressures that emerged following the change in administration really pushed me to accelerate that timeline.”
Some ERGs die by formal edict, others by a thousand cuts
Hayes became involved with the Treasury LGBTQ ERG shortly after joining the agency in 2020, when they reached out to the group’s then-president — “who also recently took the deferred resignation.”
“She said that because of the pressure that ERGs had faced under the first Trump administration, the group was rebuilding, and I became the president of the group pretty quickly,” Hayes said. “Those pressures have increased in the second Trump administration.”
One of the previous ERG board members had left the agency after encountering what Hayes described as “explicitly transphobic” treatment from supervisors during his gender transition. “His supervisors denied him a promotion,” and, “importantly, he did not have faith in the EEO complaint process” to see the issues with discrimination resolved, Hayes said. “And so he decided to just leave, which was, of course, such a loss for Treasury and our Employee Resource Group and all of our employees at Treasury.”
The umbrella LGBTQ ERG that Hayes led included hundreds of members across the agency, they said, and was complemented by smaller ERGs at sub-agencies like the IRS and FinCEN — several of which, Hayes said, were explicitly told to cease operations under the new administration.
Hayes did not receive any formal directive to shutter Treasury’s ERG, but described an “implicit” messaging campaign meant to shut down the group’s activities without issuing anything in writing.
“The suggestion was to stop emailing about anything related to the employee resource group, to have meetings outside of work hours, to meet off of Treasury’s campus, and things like that,” they said. “So obviously that contributes to essentially not existing functionally. Because whereas we could have previously emailed our members comfortably to announce a happy hour or a training or something like that, now they have to text each other personally to gather, which essentially makes it a defunct group.”
Internal directories scrubbed, gender-neutral restrooms removed
Hayes said the dismantling of DEI staff began almost immediately after the executive orders. Employees whose position descriptions included the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were “on the chopping block,” they said. “That may differ from more statutorily mandated positions in the OMWI office or the EEO office.”
With those staff gone, so went the infrastructure that enabled ERG programming and community-building. “The people that made our employee resource group events possible were DEI staff that were fired. And so, it created an immediate chilling effect on our employee resource group, and it also, of course, put fear into a lot of our members’ hearts over whether or not we would be able to continue gathering as a community or supporting employees in a more practical way going forward. And it was just, really — it was really sad.”
Hayes described efforts to erase the ERGs from internal communication channels and databases. “They also took our information off internal websites so nobody could find us as lawyers went through the agency’s internal systems to scrub DEI language and programs,” they said.
Within a week, Hayes said, the administration had removed gender-neutral restrooms from Main Treasury, removed third-gender markers from internal databases and forms, and made it more difficult for employees with nonbinary IDs to access government buildings.
“[They] made it challenging for people with X gender markers on identification documents to access Treasury or the White House by not recognizing their gender marker on the TWAVES and WAVES forms.”
LGBTQ staff lack support and work amid a climate of isolation
The changes have left many LGBTQ staff feeling vulnerable — not only because of diminished workplace inclusion, but due to concerns about job security amid the administration’s reductions in force (RIFs).
“Plenty of people are feeling very stressed, not only about retaining their jobs because of the layoffs and pending questions around RIFs, but then also wondering if they will be included in RIF lists because they’re being penalized somehow for being out at work,” Hayes said. “People wonder if their name will be given, not because they’re in a tranche of billets being laid off, but because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
In the absence of functional ERGs, Hayes said, LGBTQ employees have been cut off from even informal networks of support.
“Employees [are] feeling like it’s harder to find members of their own community because there’s no email anymore to ask when the next event is or to ask about navigating healthcare or other questions,” they said. “If there is no ERG to go to to ask for support for their specific issue, that contributes to isolation, which contributes to a worse work environment.”
Hayes said they had not interacted directly with Secretary Bessent, but they and others observed a shift from the previous administration. “It is stark to see that our first ‘out’ secretary did not host a Pride event this year,” they said. “For the last three years we’ve flown the rainbow Pride flag above Treasury during Pride. And it was such a celebration among staff and Secretary Yellen and the executive secretary’s office were super supportive.”
“Employees notice changes like that,” they added. “Things like the fact that the Secretary’s official bio says ‘spouse’ instead of ‘husband.’ It makes employees wonder if they too should be fearful of being their full selves at work.”
The Blade contacted the Treasury Department with a request for comment outlining Hayes’s allegations, including the removal of inclusive infrastructure, the discouragement of ERG activity, the pre-formalization of EEO policy changes, and the targeting of DEI personnel. As of publication, the agency has not responded.
U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court to consider bans on trans athletes in school sports
27 states have passed laws limiting participation in athletics programs

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear two cases involving transgender youth challenging bans prohibiting them from participating in school sports.
In Little v. Hecox, plaintiffs represented by the ACLU, Legal Voice, and the law firm Cooley are challenging Idaho’s 2020 ban, which requires sex testing to adjudicate questions of an athlete’s eligibility.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described the process in a 2023 decision halting the policy’s enforcement pending an outcome in the litigation. The “sex dispute verification process, whereby any individual can ‘dispute’ the sex of any female student athlete in the state of Idaho,” the court wrote, would “require her to undergo intrusive medical procedures to verify her sex, including gynecological exams.”
In West Virginia v. B.P.J., Lambda Legal, the ACLU, the ACLU of West Virginia, and Cooley are representing a trans middle school student challenging the Mountain State’s 2021 ban on trans athletes.
The plaintiff was participating in cross country when the law was passed, taking puberty blockers that would have significantly reduced the chances that she could have a physiological advantage over cisgender peers.
“Like any other educational program, school athletic programs should be accessible for everyone regardless of their sex or transgender status,” said Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project. “Trans kids play sports for the same reasons their peers do — to learn perseverance, dedication, teamwork, and to simply have fun with their friends,” Block said.
He added, “Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth. We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”
“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Tara Borelli. “Everyone understands the value of participating in team athletics, for fitness, leadership, socialization, and myriad other benefits.”
Borelli continued, “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last April issued a thoughtful and thorough ruling allowing B.P.J. to continue participating in track events. That well-reasoned decision should stand the test of time, and we stand ready to defend it.”
Shortly after taking control of both legislative chambers, Republican members of Congress tried — unsuccessfully — to pass a national ban like those now enforced in 27 states since 2020.
Federal Government
UPenn erases Lia Thomas’s records as part of settlement with White House
University agreed to ban trans women from women’s sports teams

In a settlement with the Trump-Vance administration announced on Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania will ban transgender athletes from competing and erase swimming records set by transgender former student Lia Thomas.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found the university in violation of Title IX, the federal rights law barring sex based discrimination in educational institutions, by “permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.”
The statement issued by University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson highlighted how the law’s interpretation was changed substantially under President Donald Trump’s second term.
“The Department of Education OCR investigated the participation of one transgender athlete on the women’s swimming team three years ago, during the 2021-2022 swim season,” he wrote. “At that time, Penn was in compliance with NCAA eligibility rules and Title IX as then interpreted.”
Jameson continued, “Penn has always followed — and continues to follow — Title IX and the applicable policy of the NCAA regarding transgender athletes. NCAA eligibility rules changed in February 2025 with Executive Orders 14168 and 14201 and Penn will continue to adhere to these new rules.”
Writing that “we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules” in place while Thomas was allowed to compete, the university president added, “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the university for future generations of female athletes.”
Under former President Joe Biden, the department’s Office of Civil Rights sought to protect against anti-LGBTQ discrimination in education, bringing investigations and enforcement actions in cases where school officials might, for example, require trans students to use restrooms and facilities consistent with their birth sex or fail to respond to peer harassment over their gender identity.
Much of the legal reasoning behind the Biden-Harris administration’s positions extended from the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that sex-based discrimination includes that which is based on sexual orientation or gender identity under Title VII rules covering employment practices.
The Trump-Vance administration last week put the state of California on notice that its trans athlete policies were, or once were, in violation of Title IX, which comes amid the ongoing battle with Maine over the same issue.
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