Why Anti-Discrimination Laws In San Antonio Matter

In Milk, a gay teenager calls on the film's eponymous subject--Harvey Milk--for advice. He's isolated in a small town in Minnesota. This young man asks Milk--the first openly gay elected offficial in the US--what he should do.

"Get on a bus and go to any really big city," Milk counsels the young man.  What Milk doesn't--can't--know is that the boy can't walk.

At least there's a happy ending to that story within the film:  A few months later, the young man calls Milk to tell him that he's in Los Angeles with a new-found circle of gay friends. 

At that time--in the 1970's--it seemed that every young LGBT person wanted to move to L.A., San Francisco or New York--or, perhaps, Miami.  Some gay men I knew at the time--the first I would ever know--also mentioned Minneapolis as a "gay friendly" city.  Ironically, the young man in the film didn't move to St. Paul's "twin" city--which, I would think, is much closer than L.A. to his home town.

Anyway, I was thinking about all of that as I read an article someone passed on to me.  I never would have thought of San Antonio--or, for that matter, any place in Texas--as places for enlightened thinking about law and social policy related to LGBT people.  (I'll concede that I've never been to SA, and that my experience of Texas is limited to Houston and Galveston.)  But the good folks of San Antonio not only passed a truly progressive (even by SF or LA standards) anti-discrimination ordinance in September.  The best thing about the law, though, is the process that led up to it.  

That the battle to enact such an ordinance began after other cities adopted, or were in the process of adopting, anti-discrimination legislation may have been a blessing:  From the outset, the law contained language that protected gender identity and expression as well as sexual orientation.  Here in New York, it took more than two decades to get gender identity and expression included in non-discrimination laws that already covered sexual orientation as well as race and ethnicity.  Other jurisdictions had laws that protected racial or ethnic discrimination but endured protracted battles over whether or not to protect LGBT folk.

From reading the article, and doing some other research, I have learned that San Antonio may actually be more left-leaning than I'd realized.  Even so, I think the value of such a city passing such a broad anti-discrimination law is immense.  After all, it's in Texas, which much of the rest of the country--and the world--views as more prototypically American than, say, New York or California

Smaller And Meaner

When we have the most reason for optimism, we are in the most danger.

I came to that conclusion after writing my Huffington Post article about AB 1266 in California--and hearing the remarks of San Antonio (TX) Councilwoman Elisa Chan.



 


The more people realize that giving us--I mean, all people who don't confirm to societal, cultural or religious notions of gender and sexuality--the same rights as everyone else won't bring down this country or bring on the Apocalypse, the more bigots will resort to mendacity, belligerence and even violence to continue a battle they can only lose.



Ms. Chan, though, is even worse than all of those people who trot out their far-fetched "what if" scenarios (for which they can never provide even a single concrete example) to keep trans people from using public bathrooms designated for the gender in which they live.  Those people, at least, can be seen as merely clinging to an irrational fear.  Chan, on the other hand, is trying to be a local version of Ann Coulter:  Because she cannot think, let alone form a rational, cogent position, she is trying to build her career on hate and fear-mongering.  (At least, that has always been my theory about Ms. Coulter.)  As one of her advisers tells her, "It's not an economic argument; it's not a small-governnment argument; it's a social-cultural argument and you'll get the most points by taking a stand".  

While Chan herself admits that publicly saying that she finds LGBT people's lives "personally disgusting" would destroy her career, she says that she's willing to lie about her "confusion" about trans people in order to take a position against adding language that would protect them in local ordinances.

Chan is an example of something against which we need to gird ourselves:  As the number of our opponents dwindles, they will grow meaner, more dishonest, more vicious and, in some cases, more violent. They will ultimately lose, but I (and, I assume, you) want to be alive and well to savor our victory.  So, be aware!