“SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT” – “SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO ANY EM
“SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT” – “SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO ANY EMPLOYMENT” – “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL,” Barbara Gittings (front), Ernestine Eckstein (fourth from front), and other East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO) members, The White House, Washington, D.C., October 23, 1965. Photo by Kay Tobin, c/o @nyplpicturecollection..On April 27, 1953, sixty-four years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order (E.O.) 10453, which gave the Civil Service Commission (the precursor to today’s Office of Personnel Management) and the heads of the federal agencies—supported by the powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the authority to investigate federal employees to determine if they posed security risks based on a broad definition of “risk” that included “[a]ny criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.”.Without explicitly referencing homosexuality, the order responded to the growing Lavender Scare, with Attorney General Herbert Brownell explaining that, “[e]mployees could be a security risk and still not be disloyal or have any traitorous thoughts, but it may be that their personal habits are such that they might be subject to blackmail by people who seek to destroy the safety of our country.” It was, as Michael Long has explained, “the first time that the federal government officially sanctioned the identification of homosexuality as a behavior threatening to national security,” and “federal agency heads increased efforts to purge their agencies of homosexuals.”.E.O. 10453 had the practical effect of officially banning LGBTQs from federal employment until 1975, when the Civil Service Commission announced it would consider applications from gays and lesbians on a case by case basis. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #Resist (at The White House) -- source link
#haveprideinhistory#resist#lgbthistory