Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez this week reiterated his support for the LGBT community as he seeks to become the next Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair.

In an interview with the Washington Blade, Perez was asked about his plans for LGBT issues at the DNC.

“My plan is what my plan has been for the last 25 years of being a civil rights lawyer and a labor rights lawyer: To continue to make sure that the LGBT community has a meaningful seat at the table,” Perez said.

“That’s what I did when I worked with Sen. Kennedy. That’s what I did at the Justice Department. When I worked with Sen. Kennedy, I was one of the staffers who wrote the original version of what became the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. I started working on that back in ’95.”

“When I went to the Civil Rights Division, the first hearing I testified at was the Employment Non-Discrimination Act [which would prohibit LGBT workplace discrimination], the bill that I worked on with Sen. Kennedy. When I was back at the Civil Rights Division in 2009, the work we did on bullying, especially the Anoka-Hennepin case was a landmark because we hadn’t done a bullying case at the Department of Justice involving the bullying of LGBTQ communities, and when I got to the Labor Department, making sure that we expended the reach of the landmark executive order, the anti-discrimination order from the 1960’s relating to discrimination by federal contractors that didn’t protect the LGBTQ community, and we changed that. It was incredibly important.”

“So, throughout my life, I have always fought for equality and opportunity for the LGBTQ community and if I have the privilege of being elected, past is prologue, the best way to judge what someone is going to do in the future is look at what they’ve done in the past and I’m very proud of my history with partnership with the LGBTQ community because everybody in this country deserves to be treated with dignity, and I have personally been involved in hate crimes cases where somebody was brutally assaulted or murdered simply because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. And that has no place in the American fabric. None whatsoever. So I’ve seen the impact of discrimination firsthand in the work that I’ve done and it’s part of my DNA,” he added.

Perez and former Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison are considered the front-runners to win Saturday's election.