NOVEMBER 5, 2015
Sorry, everybody, but I’m about to go on a rant, because I’m really pissed.
On Tuesday, Houston voters overwhelmingly rejected the city’s year-old anti-discrimination law, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), which protected Houston residents from discrimination in 15 different areas, including, race, age and sexual orientation. It’s a pretty benign ordinance, and a similar law has been working smoothly in 9 other Texas cities, so why was it so soundly rejected in Houston?
Part of the reason might be that it was strongly backed by Houston’s gay mayor Annise Parker, who has faced anti-gay opposition throughout her term. Forces determined to overturn HERO presented it as solely a gay-rights law and a continuing attempt by Mayor Parker to push her dreaded “gay agenda.” But it’s 2015, and attempts to simply take rights away from gay citizens have become less and less successful at the ballot box. The anti-HERO forces needed another angle, and they found one in another class which HERO protects: the transgender community.
In a series of some of the most disgusting political ads in recent memory, the anti-HERO forces presented the transgender community as a group of perverts who want to use public bathrooms to ogle or do God knows what to little girls, and this law would let them molest your daughter! When the bathroom angle began to get traction, the opponents laid it on thick referring to the equal rights ordinance as Houston’s “Bathroom Ordinance,” and upping their scare tactic rhetoric. Here’s the text of one notorious ad warning of what the law will allow:
“Any man at any time can enter a woman’s bathroom simply by claiming to be a woman that day. No one is exempt. Even registered sex offenders can follow women and young girls into the bathroom, and if a business tried to stop them, they’d be fined.”
The camera then follows a young schoolgirl complete with backpack into a bathroom stall where she is confronted by a large man who closes the door behind them. Every statement in the ad is untrue, and its presentation is absolutely revolting. And absolutely effective. HERO lost in a landslide 61% to 39%. What’s more disturbing is that anti-gay forces will see these successful ads as a road map to repealing equal rights ordinances all over the country.
Yes, I blame Houston voters. But I blame our side even more, because we blew it.
I know it’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback from my ivory tower in California, but I’ve been following this race closely over the last few weeks. Any election where the rights of a minority are voted on by the majority gets my attention. And my heart sunk as I watched the pro-HERO forces make the very same mistakes that marriage-equality proponents made in our Prop 8 election in 2008.
Back then our pro-gay side aired warm fuzzy ads about tolerance, thinking that would do the trick, while the anti-gay groups successfully scared the electorate that, if same-sex marriage was legal, your kids (!!!!) would be taught in school that such an abomination was normal. (They love using kids to scare parents.) Fortunately, the marriage equality side learned from those mistakes and began to see election victories all over, leading up to this year’s Supreme Court ruling. Then the folks in Houston forgot all those hard-learned lessons and unfortunately followed the playbook of the failed Prop 8 model.
Worse, even though we now have more allies in other communities, the pro-gay forces did little to rally them. According to Michelangelo Signorile’s reporting in The Huffington Post, the pro-HERO side had zero big ad buys in Spanish-language media and little outreach to the Latino community in a city that is 44% Hispanic!!!! There was the same little outreach with the African-American community, and Houston is 24% black. No outreach to veterans, women or the disabled, among the very groups which this law had protected. Nor was there any warning from our side as to the financial impact on Houston if the city becomes known as a haven for anti-gay bigotry. Crickets.
To quote the title of Signorile’s latest book, as for our equal rights struggle “It’s Not Over.” Yes, it was remarkable that marriage equality is now the law of the land, but men and women can still be fired in most states simply by being gay. LGBT kids are still being bullied in school. And ugly attempts to reverse our hard-earned rights can still be successful, even in as cosmopolitan a city as Houston. The fight is ongoing, and warm & fuzzy ads simply don’t cut it anymore. Tuesday was a painful reminder of that hard fact.
