Barney Frank: “I again want to stress that. Because from any angle you look at it, the affirmative action issue is not part of this.…”

“I again want to stress that. Because from any angle you look at it, the affirmative action issue is not part of this. The President is not seeking it. This executive order does not trigger it automatically. Advocates of nondiscrimination in the sexual orientation context oppose affirmative action, and most tellingly, as the gentleman from California has said, it is indeed precisely those who are most critical of affirmative action who insist that you can have a nondiscrimination policy without affirmative action. That is what this is. Those who argue that articulating a nondiscrimination policy automatically engender affirmative action are undercutting the anti-affirmative action argument because they are then saying, and I never know what the converse or the reverse or the adverse is, but the opposite. They are then saying that if you have one, you have to have the other. Those who want to kill affirmative action are bound to argue that you may have nondiscrimination without affirmative action. The other thing is, I do want to thank the gentleman from Arizona for bringing up this so we can once again vote on the federalism order.”