Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I speak now to a bill we will introduce this Wednesday, the Equality Act. The Equality Act will be introduced by a group of us in the Senate and by another group led by Congressman Cicilline in the House. It is an appropriate moment for us to ponder in this Chamber why this piece of legislation is part of our American journey toward the vision of opportunity for all and why we all should be supporting this beautiful legislative proposal. My involvement in the Equality Act began in my home State of Oregon, when I was serving in the legislature there, and we had the question of how can we change the systematic discrimination against our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. How can we give them the same opportunity everyone else has? So we came together and said we should do an Oregon Equality Act, an Oregon Equality Act that would create the same basic protections the Civil Rights Act has for race and gender and ethnicity. We went about doing that. I was the speaker. I worked very hard to make that happen, and we succeeded. We ended discrimination in Oregon based on who you are or whom you love. Discrimination should be ended across the whole country. I arrived here in January 2009, and I was assigned to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--the Health Committee. I asked Senator Kennedy if I could possibly serve on this committee to help fight for health and education and labor, and he arranged that.…”