Is it possible that anyone as radical as Martha Coakley could have moved to the left recently? We have found one example of this...
Men dressed as women lobby for their "rights" at the Mass. State House.
Martha Coakley is now with them! [Photo: MassResistance.]
A few years back, Coakley didn’t see the need for the “Transgender Rights and Hate Crimes Bill” (H1728, formerly H1722) now pending in the Massachusetts legislature. (See our detailed study of the bill here.) By 2008, she decided to testify in its favor. Since the national GLBT lobby was then starting a huge push on the transgender issue, she apparently decided she had to join them publicly to continue to get their financial support.
Coakley is a very tough lady, and not easily intimidated by 6’3” guys in skirts sharing the women’s restroom, or “phallic women” sharing their locker room.
Men dressed as women at "transgender rights" lobby day at State House, April 2009. [Photo: MassResistance.]
From the homosexual news source, Edge Boston (3-7-08):
Marc Solomon, the campaign director for MassEquality, one of the organizations leading the effort to pass H.B. 1722 [now H1728], praised Coakley’s leadership on the issue. "When Martha Coakley stands up for something, she fights for it and we are so proud and gratified to have her fighting for equality for transgender people in Massachusetts. It’s a sea change from where we’ve been in the past. It’s so great to have the attorney general - the lead civil rights spokesperson in Massachusetts - fighting on behalf of our community." …
Coakley’s stance continues her record of commitment to equal treatment for LGBT people under the law. She regularly expressed support for marriage equality on the stump during her 2006 campaign for attorney general, in addition to identifying same-sex domestic violence as an issue to which she as attorney general would be more responsive.
In May 2007, a month before the legislature was to take a decisive vote on an anti-gay marriage amendment, Coakley came out swinging against the measure during a speech to the Mass. Lesbian and Gay Bar Association. … [See Coakley’s entire speech here.]
Despite those strong stances, however, Coakley’s position on adding explicit protections for transgender people to the state’s civil rights laws was less comprehensive until now. Asked about including protections based on gender identity and expression in state law during a 2006 interview with Bay Windows, Coakley supported including such protections in the state’s hate crimes law but stopped short of endorsing the same changes to its anti-discrimination statute, stating that her own understanding of the law’s intent is that gender identity and expression were protected already. (A Massachusetts Superior Court judge has used statutory bans on discrimination based on gender and disability to rule in favor of a transgender woman who had been fired from her job when she began transitioning.)
"If we either had incidents that were unaddressed or a court decision that said it didn’t I would certainly be supportive of strengthening the statute if we needed to," Coakley said at the time. "I do know it’s hard to get statutory changes; it would take a while to do it. So I’m a big believer in unless it’s broken let’s work with it. And maybe we develop case law, we develop whatever it is we need to." [Emphasis added.]
