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Edward KocheEdward Koche
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Session:         Page of 617

in the areas of housing, public accommodations and employment.

Q:

On the employment facet, what about the issue of security in sensitive government jobs, particularly federal jobs?

Have you gotten into that at all?

Koch:

Yes, I have. I supported, for example, Matlovich, who sought to stay in the Army, and made a number of statements on the floor for him. I support and am a co-sponsor of the bill introduced by Bella Abzug, which would do on a federal level what that gay rights bill does on any local levels -- ban discrimination in any of these areas that we talked about. I'm a co-sponsor of that. I think there are 22 members of the House that are co-sponsors of it. I have taken up the cause for people with spin numbers. That was one of my huge successes, where the Army had put on discharge papers secret numbers -- they were called spin numbers, separation program numbers. And those numbers, which allegedly were secret, referred to something like 435 different categories of reasons why you were discharged. You could have an adverse spin number of your honorable discharge papers, or you could have it on your dishonorable, and then all the gradations in between.

What do I mean by an adverse number? For example, they have a number which would be “suspected or latent homosexual.”





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