Time to expand anti-bias ordinance
If Republican state Rep. Dan Bishop fired off emails last year railing against a proposed expansion of the city’s non-discrimination ordinance, we sure missed them.
Little chance of that this time around, as the City Council moves toward a second try at expanding public accommodations protections for gay and transgender citizens. Bishop, now running for retiring Sen. Bob Rucho’s seat, sent out a campaign email blast Tuesday designed to put him in the center of the fight against it.
“Radical LGBT activists” are on the march in Charlotte, he warns. They’re trying to force women and girls into bathrooms with risky “cross-dresser” men. Why, it’s straight out of the “radical transgender regime” of New York City, he insists.
Such hyperbole helps his campaign, but it hurts Charlotte. It’s a call to arms when we need calm, reasoned dialogue. And it purposely obscures the fact that this isn’t just about letting transgender people use the bathroom of the gender they identify with.
It’s also about making sure restaurants, bars and other places of public accommodation can’t discriminate based on a person’s marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
There is no evidence that such a measure risks molestation of girls and women. However, evidence abounds concerning the damaging social stigma transgender people have long confronted. Forty-one percent have attempted suicide, according to a 2014 survey from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the UCLA School of Law. Last year, 18-year-old Blake Brockington of Charlotte, an outspoken voice for transgender rights, died of an apparent suicide.
As we have said previously, transgender people aren’t fighting just for their rights. They’re fighting for their lives.
Bishop says if Charlotte expands the non-discrimination ordinance, he’ll ask the General Assembly to put the issue before local voters in a referendum. That’s what Texas lawmakers did after Houston passed such a measure. Houston voters in November defeated the ordinance after opponents cast it as a vote to keep molesters out of women’s bathrooms.
If that’s all the issue amounted to, Charlotte businesses such as Pure Pizza wouldn’t be creating gender-neutral bathrooms on their own. Businesses survive by reading the public’s mood. And the public seems increasingly unwilling to tolerate insensitivity to transgender people’s needs.
An Observer poll last fall showed 51 percent of respondents favored expanding the non-discrimination ordinance. Voters in November elected a new mayor and a City Council majority reflecting that preference.
If the council expands the nondiscrimination ordinance this year – as it should – that will hardly surprise the voters of Charlotte. For once, Bishop and other lawmakers in Raleigh should resist the urge to meddle in Charlotte’s affairs.
This story was originally published January 20, 2016 at 5:34 PM with the headline "Time to expand anti-bias ordinance."