The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that Rep Barney Frank "ripped into what he called self-defeating ideological purists on the left who are unhappy with the Democrat-led Congress over issues such as the Iraq war and dropping transgender people from a job discrimination bill."

Frank said

The question is: Can we govern responsibly? And governing responsibly means working with everybody, listening to and exchanging views with the people who care passionately ... but then as you go forward with the goals, taking reality into account. People who then denounce those who take reality into account ... make it impossible for us to govern.

This raises the question: how was the political reality that gays and lesbians deserve protection from employment discrimination but transgendered people don't created? Is this Frank's own reading of the body politic? Did some co-sponsor say to him "I'll sign on, but only if you remove that clause about transgendered people"?

I have no way of knowing what went on in Frank's head, or what corridor conversations occurred. But the effect of inclusion of transgendered folks in such a bill on its chances of passage strikes me as marginal. What is more likely to happen, as we've seen over and over with Congresses over the last eight years, and even longer, is that a liberal-sponsored bill gets watered down more and more with amendments, and then goes down to defeat anyway, or gets filibustered, or in the best case, gets vetoed and the attempt to override fails narrowly. If that is what's going to happen here, why not do not only part of the right thing, but all of the right thing?

In fact, it may be the case that transgendered people are more accepted by society than gays and lesbian, not less. By certain (misguided) standards, some of them are attempting to conform to "nature's dictate" that sex only occur between men and women, by changing their gender to conform to their attraction.

As for the "reality" that the electorate wants the Congress to back down from challenging the Bush administration on the Iraq war, this so-called reality was created out of whole cloth by Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush, et. al.

Sorry, Barney, I like and applaud the work you do, but the "reality" of politics is that you have to fight for what is right.