This Pride Month was a special one. With a severely anti-LGBTQ administration in the White House, we came to pride both to celebrate and to resist. As a community, we have won much in the past couple of years. Just two years ago we celebrated Pride as the Supreme Court announced that marriage equality would be the law of the land. But this Pride, we were reminded that those gains are still fragile, and that in order to keep them we need to continue to put pressure on those in power who would take them away from us.

The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was also a win for LGBTQ people. We saw uninsurance rates of low and middle income LGBTQ people drop 35 percent. But Mitch McConnell and senate Republicans have proposed the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), which could repeal Obamacare and cause 22 million people to lose their health coverage.

Many of us vividly remember what it's like to be left out of the nation's healthcare priorities. This June, Pride at Work along with the AFL-CIO honored Essex Hemphill, a poet and activist from Chicago who died in 1995 at the age of 38, to HIV complications. He was one of 41,000 who died from HIV/AIDS related causes that year. As a community we stood up. We formed coalitions. We went to protests. We staged die-ins. We resisted.

Obamacare was a huge step forward in securing healthcare access for those most vulnerable in our community and in the United States. We reject the Senate's attempts to dismantle it. Let's celebrate Pride 2017 with resistance!

The Senate healthcare bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), would cause 22 million people to lose their healthcare coverage. LGBTQ working people would be some of the most impacted. Working Americans deserve high-quality, affordable healthcare, and I stand against Trumpcare, the BCRA, and all other attempts to deny people healthcare coverage.

Signed,

[Pride at Work members]