Library to host discussion on advancements and dilemmas in LGBT rights
A Bates College professor is coming to Burbank to talk with residents about how LGBT rights have advanced, and in some cases, regressed over the decades.
Professor Stephen Engel, chair of politics at the Maine-based college, is looking to chat with residents at the Buena Vista Branch Library on Thursday about his recent book, “Fragmented Citizens,” and discuss how there is still more to be done to make LGBT people “full citizens” in the United States.
Engel explained that the status of a citizen, such as one that is a part of the LGBT community, is dependent on where a person lives in the United States, the era in time and the issue at hand, such as marriage, healthcare or children’s rights.
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“Depending on all of those contextual distinctions, your status as a citizen and your rights and responsibilities that follow from it varies over time,” he said. “That’s the notion of a fragmented citizen, that your citizenship is broken or fractured depending on those elements. My hope is to talk people through some different ways of thinking about what that means.”
While those in the LGBT community can now marry and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military has been lifted, Engel said that people can still be fired for identifying as being gay or transgender.
“What you see in the U.S. is the dilemma of, ‘I got married on Sunday and can get fired on Monday,’” he said. “That’s not just an issue of federalism, that’s an issue of how policy changes over time and the way[s] in which policy changes are always kind of partial.”
Engel used gays in the military as an example, explaining that although “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is gone, the federal government has yet to figure out how to establish spousal protection for gay couples.
“The main dynamic of the book is to show that as you move toward an area of equality on a given issue, that might expose previously unseen qualities of inequality on another issue,” he said.
The LGBT community isn’t the only group of American citizens affected by, what Engel calls, this “two steps forward, one step back” in policy change toward equality.
He pointed to U.S. amendments regarding slavery and the rights of African Americans that passed decades ago.
“Yeah, we passed the 13th, 14th and 15th [amendments,] but then we had Jim Crow [laws] for 100 years,” Engel said. “Or we passed those amendments and then you get the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s. There’s a lot of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ in terms of inclusion, and I think that’s also true with LGBT individuals.”
Engel will speak at 7 p.m. on Thursday at the Buena Vista Library, 300 N. Buena Vista St., Burbank.
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Anthony Clark Carpio, anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com
Twitter: @acocarpio
