HOUSTON-In a victory for social conservatives, voters in the nation’s fourth-largest city on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure to extend nondiscrimination protections to gay and transgender people.
Advertisement
Opponents focused their campaign on one part of the ordinance related to use of public bathrooms by transgender men and women they alleged would open the door for sexual predators to go into women’s restrooms.
Supporters of the ordinance, including Houston Mayor Annise Parker, a lesbian, have called the “bathroom ordinance strategy” highly misleading and a scare tactic, CBS News reported, and warned that repealing the law could jeopardize major events like the Super Bowl planned in Houston for February 2017. And they branded the equal-rights ordinance with a seemingly unassailable acronym: HERO. “I’m glad because we know that it shouldn’t be done”. The ordinance also has received support from other members of Houston’s religious community.
The ordinance would ban discrimination in city employment and city services, city contracts, public accommodations, private employment and housing based on criteria including an individual’s sexual orientation and gender identity. Chairman Paul Simpson talked repeatedly throughout the night about how this ordinance and the conservative candidates running for mayor and city controller brought out not only voters, but massive numbers of volunteers who generated even more voter turnout.
“Houston voters do not want men in their women’s bathrooms”, said the Rev. Dave Welch, head of the Houston Area Pastors’ Council, which is the leading opponent of HERO.
The Christian Examiner reports that one of the five Houston pastors who was subpoenaed by Parker, Ed Young, the pastor of Houston’s Second Baptist Church, said during a sermon in September that upholding the ordinance would leave those who oppose it vulnerable to “something that is absolutely godless”.
Houston residents were to vote Tuesday on the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance.
“Houston has become a rallying cry for Americans exhausted of seeing their freedoms trampled in a politically correct stampede to redefine marriage and sexuality”, said Mr. Perkins in a statement.
Advertisement
Weighing in against the ordinance was former Houston Astro and Texas Ranger slugger Lance Berkman. “Voters in Houston showed values still matter, and they were clear in their opposition to Proposition 1”. Under the city charter, the petition should have prompted an immediate repeal or a vote of the residents. “If the ordinance is defeated, I think you’re going to see a lot of unity as people exhale and say let’s get back to what we do best, which is to be tolerant of other people’s views but also business and liberty”.
