The Fourth Demand

In her dissent in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote, “The Court’s determination that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] RFRA extends to for-profit corporations is bound to have untoward effects. . . . The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”¹ Efforts to craft exemptions for religious businesses and organizations to avoid compliance with laws ranging from the Affordable Care Act to employment discrimination have ramped up, increasing concerns about the potential efficacy of anti-discrimination legislation. One of the best examples of this concern is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) legislation, designed to prohibit discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The most recent version of ENDA contained an organizational religious exemption, and in an historic move in the long and winding life of the legislation, major advocacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, and Transgender Law Center withdrew their support. In a joint letter, they called the provision for religious organizations “discriminatory,” and “unprecedented in federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination,” which “could provide religiously affiliated organizations—including hospitals, nursing homes and universities—a blank check to engage in workplace discrimination against LGBT people.”² Rea Carey, the executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, added that once a company can claim “biblical principles” to ban certain forms of birth control, as in the Hobby Lobby case, “it’s a hop, skip and a jump to an interpretation that a private company could have religious beliefs that LGBT people are not equal or somehow go against their beliefs and therefore fire them.”³

Taken together, the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision and the swiftly diminishing support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act place into sharp relief the connections among sexuality, gender discrimination, and labor. In particular, the moves to further define corporate entities as persons,⁴ and to extend religious protections to those entities, places women and GLBTQ people in the crosshairs of discriminatory practices. At the center of the debates over both corporate personhood, and post-Hobby Lobby RFRA exemptions, is the question of workers, and workers’ sexual autonomy and freedom. This connection suggests an opportunity for coalition building among feminist, labor, and GLBTQ rights organizations. But this is not the first such opportunity we have seen in the United States. Rather than focus on the contemporary connections articulated by feminist, labor, and GLBTQ groups, I turn here to consider an important historical moment where legislative and legal agendas constituted the heart of social movement politics and efforts for coalition. I take this historical turn in part to tell a different story from the common narrative about how different constituencies are affected only for their particular identity concerns (e.g., women for birth control, GLBTQ people for their sexual orientation or gender expression). In particular, I consider how one 1970s lesbian-feminist articulated common challenges facing both groups—women and GLBTQ people—and explore it as a potentially productive model for building similar coalition politics today.

This brief analysis examines an “abortion victory” speech delivered at a Roe v. Wade rally in Los Angeles within days of the historic ruling in 1973.⁵ There, Chicana lesbian-feminist activist Jeanne Cordova, who lived in Los Angeles and edited The Lesbian Tide, articulated a coalitional perspective that called for feminists to make the “fourth demand,” reaching for sexual freedom beyond abortion rights.⁶ Her expansive vision of sexuality centralized bodily autonomy and “choice” for straight women and lesbians at that time. Such a move marked the myriad of ways the bodies of women, women of color, lesbians, and lesbians of color were implicated by questions of bodily autonomy and choice beyond (and including) the issue of abortion.⁷ Using criminality as an identification strategy to name the common ground shared between gender discrimination and GLBTQ discrimination, Cordova pinpointed the legal stakes for women and queers that persist today. For contemporary activists and scholars confronting an identity-politics dominated approach to interpreting Supreme Court decisions and anti-discrimination battles...