Saturday, November 7, 2015

The Truth Behind the Defeat of Houston's HERO Ordinance


On Nov. 3rd, 2015, the LGBTI community nationwide was handed one of the most significant defeats it has suffered in recent years, a setback of such significance that activists and pundits alike are still scratching their heads in confusion.  In a year that has seen progress as diverse as nationwide marriage equality, the full acceptance of transgender military personnel, and the defeat of rogue county clerk Kim Davis, my hometown of Houston, Texas became the epicenter of one of the ugliest examples of backlash in the history of the gay rights movement.  

On Nov. 3rd, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, a set of anti-discrimination laws that had been previously passed by the Houston City Council, and which were already in effect in the city of Houston, were forced to a public referendum and resoundingly defeated by a margin of 70% to 30%.  
The series of missteps that led to this catastrophe are not my focus here, but the context is important.  Immediately upon passage of the ordinance by the city council, a group of far right evangelical ministers began collecting signatures to overturn the ordinance or force it to a referendum.  Our local and statewide equality organizations did nothing.  Our openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, sought to halt that effort by voiding as many signatures as possible, then shot that effort in the foot by subpoenaing sermons of the pastors in question.  In the meantime, the suit to void the invalid signatures was bungled by the County Attorney's Office, and the Texas Supreme Court, always stalwart in their support of LGBTI rights, declared that the ordinance must be repealed or placed on the ballot.  The November 2015 ballot.  An off-OFF year election in which turnout was expected to be only 20% of registered voters.  

No, my focus here is on the failure of the campaign to defend the ordinance, a campaign oddly misnamed "Houston Unites," as the goal of the campaign was never to unite any part of Houston with any other part of Houston, and rightly so.  The goal of the campaign was to turn out progressive, liberal, primarily minority, already predisposed pro-HERO voters to the polls.  This approach is a common-sense one, and one that should have worked.  The campaign set up its infrastructure in August of this year.  It brought in activists from all over the country who have a tremendous amount of expertise in running pro-equality campaigns, including Richard Carlbom, a Minnesotan who successfully ran that state's campaign for marriage equality.  People were here from California, from Washington D.C., from St. Louis, Missouri.  The wonderful organizer that I worked with most closely was a dedicated, energetic young man from Raleigh, North Carolina.  All very smart people.  All people of great talent.  

All people who have very little understanding of Houston.  Or of Texas.

If you are not from a place like Texas, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or South Carolina, and you have never lived in such places, even knowing the reputation that the Deep South has among the rest of the country, it really is impossible for you to understand the depth of the hatred and loathing that many southerners feel for gay people, and particularly for transgender people.  Those here in the South who hate us gay people have always seen us as "the other," a menacing, diseased, perverted coven set upon taking everything that belongs to them, destroying their freedoms and eating their children.  And now, since the advent of marriage equality, that sense of doom is even MORE palpable, as though the minute hand of the "gay nuclear clock" had been pushed forward 5 minutes.  So the anti-HERO forces, unfettered in that they did not have to worry whatsoever about being offensive, political correctness, or people's self-esteem issues, created a campaign of pure hatred.  And it was brilliant in its simplicity.  We will label the entire transgender community as pedophiles and child rapists.  We will tap into the paranoia of those deep-seated haters who vote in EVERY municipal election.  We will create an enormous, bold-faced lie that male sexual predators will be able to use the ordinance as a defense for attacking women and children in bathrooms.  And our ONLY strategy will be to tell that lie, over and over and over again.

And it worked.  

Was there a way to counteract this?  Was there a way to fight against this?  In short, was there a way to win?  Of course there was.  But that strategy would have involved getting right down in the mud with the opposition, fighting each dirty blow with another dirty blow, countering every lie, not with just the truth, but the truth about how voting against the ordinance would actually HURT minority people--gay people, black people, Hispanic people--in a very real and tangible way.  In other words, scare tactics of our own.  "A NO vote is a vote for a restaurant owner to refuse service to a black person."  "A NO vote is a vote to fire someone who marries his or her same sex partner."  "A NO vote is a vote to fire a woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock."  But did Houston Unites employ any of those tactics?  Sadly, no.  There was a tremendous emphasis on the part of the campaign on people feeling good about themselves.  The television and radio commercials had a "pleasant" air to them, as though we were saying "we're nice, and you're nice, and the ordinance is nice, and you should be nice and vote for it."  At meetings, we were encouraged to put the pronouns we wanted to be used to refer to us on our name tags, as though that had anything to do with the battle at hand.  The scripts given to us canvassers did not include the words "lie," or "bigotry," or even "consequence" or "result."  (True confession: I never followed the script.  At every door I told people, especially minority people, the brutal truth:  you can be fired for no reason, and a federal lawsuit is a check for $10,000, and the bathroom LIE--is a LIE.  Not a "misrepresentation."  A LIE.)  One opponent on whose door I knocked said he was voting against the ordinance because he was a Christian.  I had to remind him that "Christian" is a religion, and covered by the ordinance.

I'm not afraid to fight dirty when my rights are at stake, and frankly, I have no patience with activists who are consumed with making people feel good, and worrying about self-esteem, and pulling punches for the sake of appearances.  There are two old sayings.  One is "Always take the high road."  And the other is "Losers take the time to climb all the way up to the high road--winners head straight for the finish line, even if it takes a steamroller to get there."  I hope when all the smart, experienced folks from Houston Unites return next year to fight this battle again, they will come with a steamroller.  Because right now the nation's fourth largest city is the only major municipality in the United States without an equal rights ordinance in effect.  And that's a label that I don't want to wear.

In the interest of fairness, here is the link to the press release from Houston Unites addressing the defeat of the ordinance:  http://houstonunites.org/herorepeal/



2 comments:

  1. John, you are so right, we should have hit this harder and stronger, I said months ago we need to come out strong and stop being nice. we should have been focusing on the other 14 issues and not spend so much time on the bathroom issue. We should have gotten other groups behind us, and should not have made this a GLBT issue

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't think you understand it at all John. I really don't. I don't live in Houston (I'm outside it) so I couldn't vote one way or the other on that issue but you're pointing at the people who focus on hate (and they exist, I'm not debating that) and saying that they are the ones who defeated this while I see a lot of people who simply weren't convinced that another law or ordinance needed to be passed to protect the majority of the people listed in this one. The part where people could clearly see that most of the things this ordinance did to protect people was already covered by federal law shouldn't be underestimated. The lion's share of this is already covered and a lot of people can see this. It's obvious. The oppositions focus on the bathroom issue was laughable to me and I get why you are focusing on it but I still wouldn't have voted for the ordinance if I'd been able to. I was not convinced that it was necessary. Something in the opposing campaigns kept jumping out to me and that was that while the opponents tried to make it only about the bathroom foolishness the supporters tactics were entirely about avoiding that. I kept seeing ads focusing on how this protects black and Hispanic people. Race is already protected. Pastors talking about protecting religion when we all know that you can't throw a rock in Houston without hitting a church. Religion isn't being discriminated against and it's already protected. Veterans, really? Nobody discriminates against veterans. Every time you turn around someone is proclaiming that they support our troops and veterans. The supporting ads made a great case for how little this was needed by talking only about groups that were already well protected. Laws exist and people don't want anymore laws. I think that the next time this goes around the ordinance should be less broad, less "all inclusive" and avoid redundancy. Then it should focus on the people who aren't covered and the campaign to support it should not be afraid to focus exactly on that. Like I said I don't really have a dog in this fight. I just wanted to let you know that not everyone who wasn't for this was worried about the bathroom bullshit.

    ReplyDelete