When Houston HERO ordinance comes back, expect bitching about bigots’ votes to hurt people being disenfranchised https://t.co/EgxTYhvg4j
— Wonkette (@Wonkette) November 6, 2015“What is more fundamental than trying to provide access to a public restroom that is appropriate to the gender of an individual, when all they want to do is use the facilities and go on about their business?” [Houston Mayor Annise Parker] added. “All of this about pedophiles going into women’s restrooms was an out and out and falsehood, they knew it was a falsehood, and they sold a bill of goods. That’s all I can say. Masterfully played.”
There’s no way to sugarcoat this, so I’m just going to throw it out there unfiltered: If you live in Houston and you voted against the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) because you felt it was the Christian thing to do, you’re one truly miserable representative of your faith. If you believe that a “NO” vote on Proposition 1 was a vote to keep disturbed women from legally entering women’s bathrooms, you’re as ill-informed and dangerous as you are ignorant. You just voted to deny the guarantee of basic human rights to minority classes. Nice work.
Guess what, Tinkerbell? Entering the restroom of the opposite gender with evil intent has been illegal in Houston since the time Jim Crow called the Bayou City home. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you were duped. If you could have been bothered to pay attention and actually inform yourself about what Proposition 1 was designed to do, you’d have realized it has nothing to do with “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S BATHROOMS!!”
Houston Mayor Annise Parker (yes, the Lesbian Mayor) has made it clear that Tuesday’s loss to falsehoods and fear-mongering is not the last word. Houston is now the only city of any appreciable size in this country without an equal rights ordinance of some sort. No city with an equal rights ordinance has experienced increased occurrences of pedophiles and other sex offenders trolling women’s bathrooms. That canard is the invention of homophobes too lazy to recognize that homosexuality and pedophilia aren’t next door neighbors on the cul de sac of dangerous sexual predators.
No, this had nothing to do with “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S BATHROOMS!!!”…and the liars and dissemblers behind the anti-HERO campaign know it. Their victory was purchased with lies, deception, homophobic propaganda, and a lack of integrity that rivals anything the late Lee Atwater could have conjured up. Jared Woodill, Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and Lance Berkman are some of the most dishonest, hateful excuses for “Christians” you will ever have the misfortune to run across.
Hatred, ignorance, and fear triumphed in The City That Hates ©.
Sometime in the near future, a transgender teenager in Texas will attempt suicide — and maybe succeed — because vilifying people for their gender identity remains politically acceptable in America.
The hateful rhetoric of leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is the latest, ugliest example. Mr. Patrick was ebullient on Tuesday night after it became clear that Houston voters had decidedly rejected a broad equal rights ordinance that opponents maliciously and misleadingly characterized as a boon for cross-dressing sex offenders.
“It was about protecting our grandmoms and our mothers and our wives and our sisters and our daughters and our granddaughters,” Mr. Patrick said as he thanked a crowd of joyful supporters who nodded and cried “Amen!”
This was not a vote about whether or not an ordinance provides legal guarantees of equality to a number of minority classes. If it had been, I suspect Tuesday’s result would be been far different. No, it was an election about the (grossly inaccurate and dishonest) perception that HERO would have allowed disturbed men unfettered and legally sanctioned access to women’s restrooms. All they would have to do is to identify as a woman and- BOOM!- they’d be protected under the law. Except that was never the intent of HERO, nor was that sort of protection contained in the language of the ordinance. Not that the truth mattered to the anti-HERO campaign.
Of course, when you lack anything even faintly redolent of integrity or devotion to the truth, winning by any means necessary probably seems quite reasonable.
HERO, which the City Council passed 18 months ago, established sensible protections from discrimination for 15 classes of people. It would have given people with disabilities, like Mr. Abbott, a paraplegic, a mechanism to fight employment or housing discrimination. It would have given veterans, pregnant women and senior citizens a valuable layer of protection and prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin. But it was its inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity that turned a sensible initiative into a nasty national controversy.
Opponents of the law, led by Jared Woodfill, a Houston lawyer and a Texas Republican Party leader, started a well-funded campaign that equated supporting it with allowing men to use women’s public restrooms for deviant purposes. Their fearmongering, blasted on yard signs, bellowed from church pulpits and dramatized in a television ad, suggested that sexual deviants were waiting for the ordinance to kick in to sneak up on unsuspecting women in bathroom stalls.
For Far Right-wing religious zealots like Woodfill, Abbott, Patrick, and Berkman, facts didn’t matter, so consumed are they with self-righteous disdain and distaste for the LGBT community. All that mattered was finding a message that would resonate with low-information voters. That there are no documented cases of sex perverts taking advantage of equal rights ordinances to ply their deviance mattered not at all…facts, after all, are for losers and Liberals.
San Antonio passed a similar ordinance in 2013 with no increase in sexually-motivated crimes in women’s restrooms. No reasonable person could or should, as the editorial board of the New York Times put it, expect “that Houston perverts…will now drive down to San Antonio to corner women in restroom stalls.”
Houston voters were swayed by the blatant, shameless, conscious dishonesty of the anti-HERO campaign and voted for exclusion and oppression. Instead of ensuring a reasonable, well-crafted ordinance allowing for equality under the law for ALL Houstonians, voters in Houston, some of the most politically disinterested and disconnected sheeple in the country, voted for exclusion and oppression.
The haters and homophobes may have won this battle, but they’re on the wrong side of history and are destined to eventually lose the war against equality.
While the defeat of HERO is a painful setback, it is encouraging that the broader quest for equality for gay and transgender Americans is advancing steadily. On Monday, the Department of Education backed a transgender student in Illinois who is fighting for the right to use restrooms and locker rooms on campus like any other female student. It was the federal government’s latest action in a civil rights movement that is redefining how the nation views, and treats, transgender Americans.
When that movement achieves irreversible momentum — and it is a matter of when, not whether — people like Mr. Woodfill, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Patrick will be remembered as latter-day Jim Crow elders. Their demagogy is egregious because it preys on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
As opponents of the ordinance celebrate their victory this week, transgender people across the country are understandably reeling. They should take comfort in knowing that history will not be kind to the haters who won on Tuesday. In time, the bigots are destined to lose.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “the moral arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” So it is in the case of LGBT rights (or, as I like to refer to them, “human rights”), which has picked up momentum and promises only to become stronger and more inevitable and inexorable with the passage of time.
That justice may not be fully realized tomorrow, next month, or even next year…but it WILL come to pass. Love always conquers hate in the end, because while hate requires much effort and energy to perpetuate it, love is easy and requires no real effort. Hate is heavy and exacts a significant toll on those who carry it with them day to day.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The haters are still fighting to keep the inevitability of history from destroying their carefully constructed moral framework. Slowly but surely, they’re being revealed as the hateful bigots they are.
The bigots are indeed destined to lose…and more likely sooner rather than later…because America deserves better.
