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and the Texas Supreme Court, always stalwart in their support of LGBTI rights, declared that the ordinance must be repealed or placed on the ballot.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/

Staring the Tea Party Straight in the Eye

This nice lady is Debbie Riddle.  She is the Congresswoman representing House District 150 in the Texas House of Representatives.  She has held that office since 2002.

She is MY representative in the Texas House.

And she hates transgender people.

I have several personal philosophies that govern my activism.  Very high on the list is this:  never be afraid to go where the battle is.  Marriage equality, anti-discrimination ordinances, anti-bullying policies--these things don't come easily.  They are not achieved by "bench warmers."  So every time I get the chance, I love to seize the opportunity to engage the other side on their home turf.  Such an opportunity presented itself a few days ago.

I was at a monthly luncheon put on by a genuinely fine group to which I belong: the Spring-Klein Chamber of Commerce.  Spring is an old suburb of Houston; neighboring Klein is a somewhat newer area, younger, and with more McMansions.  Like most of Houston, it is a prosperous area; and like most of Texas, it is, on balance, conservative.  Debbie Riddle represents our area with a shotgun in one hand and a "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party banner in the other.  She was recently dubbed "the 4th most conservative representative in the Texas House," and she has sponsored every type of far right whackadoodle legislation you can possibly imagine, from our new "campus carry" law, designed to turn our state university system into one giant shooting range, to a ridiculously redundant Religious Exemption bill that accomplishes nothing, other than making sure that Ms. Riddle got to deliver one last good, hard slap across the face to same sex couples in Texas.  But the most onerous is a bill that she has been crafting and introducing on the House floor for a while now.  This bill would make it a crime for a transgender person to use the public restroom that matches their sexual identity, with a healthy fine and jail time for anyone caught doing so.  Sort of a statewide "bathroom bill," if you will.  She is, to use a phrase, a "piece of work."

I love belonging to organizations like the Spring-Klein Chamber because, while most of the members are conservative (some very) there is a keen interest in including me and my viewpoints in the name of diversity.  Some of this is a morbid fascination with "the open gay guy," and some of it is a genuine spirit of inclusiveness.  And the respect I have for the group is mutual.  So I will admit to a certain amount of glee when I discovered that Ms. Riddle was to be the speaker at the membership luncheon--with Q & A.

In all fairness, it was Ms. Riddle who brought up the bathroom bill.  In the midst of patting herself on the back for accomplishments such as single-handedly securing the Mexican border and killing public school funding, she said this.  It's not word for word, but it's very close:

"I remember a time when we didn't have to put up with nonsense like who was going to use which bathroom.  Men used men's bathrooms and women used women's bathrooms.  Now we have all these freaky people who might decide that they feel like a woman that day and want to use the women's bathroom.  Well, I don't know about you, but I don't want my 8-year-old granddaughter to see something like THAT in the bathroom.  That's why I'm working on my bathroom bill.  I don't want pedophiles in women's bathrooms, and I'm sure you don't either."

When Q & A began, I made sure she could not avoid my hand.  Courteously, Ms. Riddle came directly to the back of the room where I was sitting, and I stood up.  This is what I said:

"My name is John Lazo, and I am a member of the chamber and one of your constituents.  I should tell you up front that I am also hold a seat on the Houston Ryan White Planning Council, I am a member of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus and I am a volunteer with Houston Unites, which is working for passage of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance.  I don't have an issue with the Religious Exemption law.  It is unnecessary and redundant and was clearly intended as a rebuke to marriage equality, but I can live with that.  But please, PLEASE, before you introduce any more "bathroom bills," will you accept my invitation to meet with some of the transgender people that I am working with on the HERO campaign?  They are not freaks, and they are most certainly not pedophiles.  They are decent people who work hard, pay their taxes--and vote.  and they just want to use the restroom that makes common sense."

By this time the entire room had turned around and was staring intently at us--two people who could not be further apart on the political spectrum, eyeball-to-eyeball.  Walking away from me and returning to the front of the room, Ms. Riddle replied:  "This gentleman asks a very sensitive question.  My door is always open.  But the priority for me is and always will be keeping predators out of bathrooms."  And on to the next question she went, which was about open carry.

So to wrap up, let's try to follow the logic.  We don't want pedophiles in public bathrooms.  So the way to accomplish that is to prevent a transgender woman, who has undergone or is undergoing reassignment, and who looks like a woman, from using the woman's bathroom--the bathroom that corresponds to her gender identity.  And if that is the case, then one of two things must be true.  Either A) all transgender people are pedophiles or B) a sexual assault committed in that bathroom is the transgender woman's fault.

The beauty of the American system is that there is a process available to a citizen whose elected representative is in the business of crafting discriminatory legislation.  It's called the election process.  And my next campaign commitment is to volunteer, canvas, and phone-bank as hard as I can for whoever is running against Debbie Riddle.  Only 10,000 people actually voted in the 2014 contest that elected Debbie Riddle.  And a little truth goes a long way.