Amid the cries of commendation to President Obama, there were the yawns of those who share House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) misconception of a workplace utopia. “People are already protected in the workplace,” said Boehner.

The House Speaker must not have done his homework before making a statement that was antithetical to what LGBT Americans face in their everyday lives. In 2013, the Williams Institute of UCLA found that about 21 percent of LGBT-identified Americans were discriminated against in hiring, promotion, and pay. This number jumps to 47 percent for transgender-identified employees.

Though the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that Obama has drafted in an executive order seeks to end workplace discrimination, the personal and professional spheres are often conflated when it comes to those on the margins of society. In the past, the Civil Rights Movement fought to end racial injustice in employment. In the present, the feminist movement is still rallying against the gender pay gap. And in this case, LGBT Americans are subject to oppressive work policies for their personal identities.

An individual’s sexuality or gender identity should have no bearing on their work.

This is an issue upon which the majority of Americans agree—the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2014 national survey found that 72 percent of Americans support laws that would protect gay and lesbian people from discrimination in the workplace.

However, many of those who supported such laws had something in common with Boehner: 75 percent of Americans believed that federal law already protected LGBT Americans.

What the statistics don’t convey, however, is how transformative ENDA could prove to be in advancing the LGBT movement. This perhaps largely explains why there hasn’t been more national attention devoted to the issue.

In a society where money almost always equals power, LGBT Americans are more likely to receive less pay and promotions, or to not even be hired at all. Job security, to those who are less likely to receive it, also means a secure livelihood. ENDA offers basic protection and due process, which the Constitution purportedly guarantees to all Americans. Moreover, ENDA allows marginalized identities to claim agency in the workplace—to have some degree of control over their livelihoods.

Opponents of ENDA assert that it will infringe upon religious and moral liberties. This is a politically correct way of saying that ENDA will prevent those with social clout from applying the terms ‘religious’ and ‘moral’ to simple discrimination.

The opposition’s argument recalls the Comstock laws of 1873, which were enacted to prevent ‘obscenity’ from being circulated for “immoral use.” The word ‘obscenity,’ however, is subject to the vagaries that come with time and geography. What constitutes obscenity now is arguably not what obscenity was in ancient Greece. The loose definition of the word allows it to be politicized by the powerful to be wielded against the powerless.

Words like ‘obscenity,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘immoral’ are simply entry points through which those in power can exert their prerogative. As a result, the oppressed are further subjugated and stigmatized. The injustices that the Comstock Laws brought forth are the ones that ENDA seeks to prevent.

ENDA implies a shift in power dynamics—it is taking away the control that the ‘religious’ and the ‘moral’ had over LGBT Americans’ lives in order to redirect it to the LGBT Americans themselves.