Thank you from the bottom of my genes

[COMMENTARY]  Most sincerely, thank you, Congress, for doing the right thing for once. You voted almost unanimously across both houses to make it illegal to discriminate based on genetic information when it comes to health insurance and employment, passing the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, into law.

Two hundred and seventy-six years after this country was born, it’s about time. If we are all created equal, endowed with the same human rights by virtue of being human, it shouldn’t matter whether I am a human with Type I diabetes, or with cystic fibrosis, or Marfan Syndrome, or Down Syndrome, simply because the zygote I once was drew the short straw with these attributes. My rights are not severed, remain inalienable, even if I should have the bad fortune to have Type II diabetes or cancer in my family’s gene pool that only becomes manifest with time and inadvertent exposures to environmental triggers that trip up my inherently bad genes.

Continued -But here’s where I get down right maudlin with thanks: I’m a woman because of my genetics.

My cousin is gay — because of my cousin’s genetics.

My father is brown-skinned and has a heart condition — because of his genetics.

My descendants could be gay, female and brown-skinned, because that’s in our gene pool. But they may not be, since genetics can be a crap shoot.

No matter; none of us now nor in the future should suffer discrimination in employment or health insurance by virtue of genes over which we have no control.

One of the youngest members of my extended family is female, descended from a brown-skinned man and a Marfan Syndrome woman, and has Down Syndrome.  (She’d have hit the 5 horse box superfecta if she were gay, too.) No one can say she’s not entitled to health insurance despite her increased risk for heart problems due to her genetics.

I thank you for finally acknowledging that she, too, has the same inalienable rights as all other humans.

It’s about time; I’m just wondering, though, when the enormity of what you’ve done is going to sink in, bringing buyers’ remorse.

It took more than a lifetime since women won the right to vote and more than two lifetimes since African-Americans were emancipated before one of either of their kind could reasonably expect to be president — despite their genetics. The 1964 Civil Rights Act is still not settled firmly when women can’t reasonably expect to be paid equitably for equal work, as an overwhelmingly XY-endowed Senate so firmly reminded Lily Ledbetter and all XX-endowed humankind only a couple of weeks ago.

And I know you have not yet fully realized that being gay is likely determined in part by genes, as indicated by studies on birth order and genetic markers.

For these reasons I suspect it’s going to be a very long while before GINA becomes well and truly settled law — but thank you anyhow for trying from this portion of the human genome.