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Republican House Speaker John Boehner to Resign From Congress
Hours after crying while watching Pope Francis speak, Republican House Speaker John Boehner announced today that he would leave office in late October, The New York Times reports.
While his decision to leave office is not thought to be a religious epiphany, Boehner, who is a practicing Catholic, has long fought against LGBT interests.
He supported the now-defunct Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade the federal government from recognizing legal same-sex marriages, and called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would provide discrimination protection for LGBT workers, “unnecessary.” He repeatedly refused to bring ENDA to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, despite the support of a majority of Americans for the protections the bill sought to provide, and the legislation’s historic, bipartisan passage through the Senate in 2013.
Despite his conservative attitudes toward LGBT equality, the Ohio Republican had difficulty unifying his party’s increasingly conservative members and was facing pressure to avoid another government shutdown, according to The Times.
In a powerful illustration of the right-wing’s opinion of Boehner, attendees at the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council’s annual “Values Voters Summit” erupted in prolonged cheers when Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio announced Boehner’s resignation at the conference in Washington, D.C., this morning.
As The New Civil Rights Movement noted, “the crowd stood, applauded, and screamed with glee, demonstrating the sheer hatred they have for the Ohio congressman who often stood in between their extremist agenda and preserving the workings of Congress.”
In recent weeks, Boehner’s party members, who currently hold a majority in Congress, had pushed the Speaker to advance a bill that did not de-fund Planned Parenthood (an effort blocked by Senate Democrats on Thursday), and several were trying to force Boehner to resign from office, reports The Times.
Watch Boehner’s resignation announcement below.
Elizabeth Daley
www.advocate.com/politics/2015/9/25/republican-house-speaker-john-bohner-resign-congress
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