According to the Huffington Post, President Obama will sign an executive order on Monday barring federal contractors from engaging in employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The decision comes after pressure from religious, civil rights, and LGBT advocates that the president not yield to demands of religious conservatives to include the exemption. (Link to my prior posts)
The president reportedly will not, however, rescind a Bush-era executive order permitting religiously affiliated contractors to make employment decisions based on religion, as urged in a letter earlier this week.
As I discussed with Columbia Law School’s Kara Loewentheil on bloggingheads, even though the executive order will not include the exemption, there will still be a gray area with the Bush era executive order still in place, as well as a Bush-era Justice Department memo that permits hiring discrimination by religiously affiliated contractors.
