Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) no longer believes that it should be legal to discriminate against LGBT people in employment and housing — but he still does not back federal legislation to remedy the problem.
Bush was asked by a gay employee at a San Francisco tech startup he visited on Thursday about his position on legislation to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, Time reported. Bush responded by denouncing discrimination in general, but also diminishing the need for legal protections and saying they should be only enacted at the state level.
“The fact that there wasn’t a law doesn’t necessarily mean you would have been discriminated against,” Bush told the worker. Studies have shown that between 15 percent and 43 percent of gay people have experienced some form of discrimination and harassment in the workplace and 90 percent of transgender workers reported experiencing some form of workplace harassment or mistreatment.
Bush then invoked the “religious liberty” argument made by anti-LGBT organizations, suggesting that while a florist should have to sell flowers to everyone, they should not be obligated to do so for a same-sex wedding.
Pressed on whether he would back new legislation to address the fact that 28 states lack laws protecting against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and 31 lack laws protecting against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression, Bush suggested that this issue should not be a federal one. “I think this should be done state-by-state, I totally agree with that,” the former governor responded. In January, he made a similar “states rights” argument, suggesting that states should not be obligated to allow same-sex marriages.
Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, of course, gives Congress the power to pass laws that regulate interstate commerce precisely to insure uniformity. The U.S. Senate passed an LGBT employment non-discrimination law in 2013, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) blocked it from getting a vote in the House of Representatives.
Over Bush’s eight years as governor of Florida, he consistently opposed LGBT protections in his own state. In 1994, he wrote that “we have enough special categories, enough victims, without creating even more,” and that “sodomy” should not “be elevated to the same constitutional status as race and religion,” comparing gay people with “polluters, pedophiles, pornographers, drunk drivers, and developers without proper permits.”
Earlier this year, Bush’s spokeswoman told BuzzFeed that his sentiment “from 20 years ago does not reflect Gov. Bush’s views now, nor would he use this terminology today.”
Update:
The International Business Times reported that the gay employee who asked the question was Jake Poses, the company’s vice president of product. “I appreciate him saying I shouldn’t be discriminated against, but I do believe that if he had more conviction about it, he should [deal with it federally], Poses said, adding, “I probably will not vote for him.”