It is my pleasure to announce to the community that the language in the Indianapolis Human Rights Ordinance that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is now enforceable, exactly as is the language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex or race. Let me explain:
In 2005, led by City/County Councilors Jackie Nytes and Scott Keller, the council adopted an amendment to the Human Rights Ordinance adding discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity to the list of prohibited motives. This action was the conclusion of a year-long campaign involving every group in the LGBT community and many from outside. The degree of cooperation was remarkable and the determination to keep the campaign inclusive, of gender identity, inspiring. Bil Browning headed the coordinating committee and deserves credit for pursuing inclusion in both the campaign and the ordinance, although the community never wavered in its determination to keep the proposed ordinance inclusive of gender identity.
The one blemish on the victory was the prevalent opinion that, because of an interpretation of “home rule” in Indiana, the new addition could not have the force of law, could not be enforced by a law suit. And there the matter has remained for the past years. The promised chaos did not materialize. In that time, there has been no test of the ordinance, nor of the interpretation, but inclusiveness has been the expectation in Indianapolis, and in other jurisdictions in Indiana that have adopted similar ordinances. Property managers, human resources officers, real estate brokers and many other professions are told, when they receive training, that sexual orientation and gender identity are not acceptable grounds for discrimination, in employment or housing, in our city.
And then, in the last legislative session, the Indiana General Assembly adopted a bill that purported to prevent, for example, the city of Bloomington, from adopting a minimum wage higher than that adopted by the state. Many people objected on that basis, but the bill passed and was on its way to becoming law, when the mayor of Indianapolis complained that the wording of that bill would remove protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity from his city’s Human Rights Ordinance. As we have seen, there was some serious doubt that such protection was enforceable, but that did not come up in the public discussion at that time.
Human rights activists, Democrats and others of my acquaintance exploded claiming that the original bill was merely a ploy to remove any semblance of LGBT rights from the state. As we shall see, if that was the case, the perpetrators are singularly inept. The passion, I think, blinded the LGBT and Human Rights communities from paying attention to what was going on.
The other thing that happened was that Brian Bosma, Speaker of the House, and David Long, President pro Tem of the Senate, immediately said that such was not the intention, and that they would fix it; immediately. While my friends were pursuing their frenzy, I was interested that the legislative leaders did not say that the issue in question was controversial, but market forces dictated that we cater to the desires of large companies and others who wanted to recruit people to come to Indiana or to retain them. They simply said that it was unintentional, and wrong, and would be fixed.
The other remarkable thing was that they did not say that they would propose some unspecified fix in the next session. They proposed a precise fix, named an existing bill into which they would insert it, so that the fix would be law before the offending bill took effect.
And there it lay, until I got involved in a discussion that brought up the whole problem of the unenforceable ordinance. And I thought: how do you pass a law in the General Assembly that makes a city ordinance unenforceable, but at the same time, not affected by a law that says it cannot be enforced. That the new law would have advertised the weakness of the ordinance would be damage of a sort, but how could the legislature fix that?
The answer is: it could not. So I looked up the language of the fix. It is black and white: on the request of our Republican mayor, the Republican Speaker of the House, and the Republican President Pro Tem of the Senate passed a bill, and the Republican governor signed it into law that clearly and unambiguously empowers the City of Indianapolis and all similarly situated “units” (I think that is the term of art) to add any categories they like to lists of protected categories in their ordinances. Since that law was enacted to save the clause about sexual orientation and gender identity, it surely must include those very categories. In other words, the LGBT inclusive language in the Indianapolis Human Rights Ordinance has exactly the same weight as the language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex or race.
I am happy to make this report to the community. I do suspect, and have for a long time, that making gay rights, or anything, a partisan issue tends to make meaningful, enduring progress more, rather than less, difficult. I have maintained for some time that my goal is that equality be a Hoosier value (and I believe that it is) rather than a purely Democrat or Republican value.