Senator Art Haywood, whose district office is in Abington Township, was featured by The Philadelphia Inquirer today regarding his hopes for Pennsylvania to maintain its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the face of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order.
“What we look to do is to make sure that our laws here in Pennsylvania have the protections that we once relied on the federal government to produce,” Haywood said during a news conference at Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Society Hill on Thursday.
According to The Inquirer, he was “joined by clergy and activists in denouncing Trump’s recent executive orders” and “said the legislature will need to mull legislation to compensate for the president’s affirmative action directive.”
“That’s the leadership that we have, and we want to be clear, we want to support the governor in these initiatives, that he’s not alone,” Haywood said, referring to Governor Josh Shapiro.
“The just demand for equity and justice cannot be erased by the criminal President. I wear glasses. These glasses help me to see better; they show me the way forward,” Senator Haywood said in a post yesterday. “DEI are the glasses for America. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is America’s way forward.”
An Inquirer story from yesterday notes that Trump’s new order declaring that the country would only recognize two sexes contradicts Pennsylvania regulations which define gender identity as a protected class.
Title IX offers protections for transgender people and current policies specify that discrimination based on gender identity is a form of prohibited sex-based discrimination, according to the article.
Jeffrey Sultanik, who serves as solicitor for a number of Philadelphia area school districts, told The Inquirer that school districts “may be faced with the conundrum of whether you follow what the federal order dictates, or whether or not you follow what Pennsylvania dictates.”
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