Here at home, voters may have passed the Move Seattle levy (whew), but how have other local and state measures fared around the country? Ugh, not so great! There are a few bits and pieces of good news, but there’s also a lot to be disgruntled about, starting with Houston.
The story of Houston’s HERO ordinance is long and dull, but all you need to know is that the city passed a nondiscrimination ordinance covering tons of different characteristics and situations. Then conservatives challenged it, and — surprise! — ran a truly evil campaign about how trans people are scary terrible sexual predators, and they’re all men dressed as women, and they’re going to follow little girls into bathrooms.
Of course, Houston didn’t care for sex perverts in bathrooms, so they overturned the nondiscrimination ordinance — even though, in a million years, the ordinance would never have resulted in bathroom assaults. But it would have made it illegal for landlords to evict tenants for getting pregnant. Good job Houston voters!
Here’s a little more about what HERO was/wasn’t, and how a bunch of transphobic assholes tricked voters into overturning it:
There are a lot of echoes of Proposition 8 in what just happened in Houston. There was a perfect storm of a misinformed electorate, a groundswell of religious foot soldiers, and worst of all a mushy message from the pro-equality side.
While the bad guys were talking OVER AND OVER AND OVER about sex creeps in women’s bathrooms, the good guys barely mentioned it. Check out this excellent analysis of how the LGBT movement failed in Texas, written for Buzzfeed by Dominic Holden.
He quotes Texas ACLU Executive Director Terri Burke as saying that “we weren’t going waste our precious dollars on talking about friggin’ bathrooms when it’s a lie. Do you know what a television commercial in Houston costs? I’ll tell ya — it’s costing us over $300,000 a week. You think we are going to spend $300,000 a week to keep talking about bathrooms?”
Ughhhhhhh yes you have to talk about bathrooms. Remember Prop 8, when the bad guys made up a lie about “teaching gay marriage in schools”? That sunk the campaign for literally weeks until Chad Griffin got an ad on TV to refute it starring the California Superintendent of Schools. When your opponents hit you with an insane lie, you lose credibility until you refute it with a credible messenger. Whyyyyyyyyyyy is the LGBT movement’s electoral memory only about five minutes long?
Elsewhere in the country: Kentucky elected a Tea Party nut named Matt Bevin, an actual deranged millionaire. He opposes the Violence Against Women Act, says that gay marriage is the same as marrying your own children (sure), and supports cockfighting as a form free speech. (!?!?!?!?!)
But there’s some good news, too: two teabaggers lost in Michigan, in part because they were caught having an affair. Naturally, they were “family values” jackasses who poked their noses into everyone else’s private lives while engaging in subterfuge in their own. This whole story really sucks for everyone involved — cheating on a spouse shouldn’t result in an automatic loss of your job — but at least we’re rid of them.
Also: Ohio rejected a pot legalization measure, but it’s more complicated than voters simply saying “no” to weed. The measure was a complicated morass of regulation and created a weird monopoly around grow operations, so it’s likely that voters simply didn’t like how legalization would have been implemented.
Also: Oregon rejected small tax hikes to pay for public safety, road repairs, more bus service, and a new jail. So if you like to commit crimes while riding in a bumpy bus on your way to an overcrowded jail, Oregon’s the place for you!
And: Virginia’s Senate remains in the hands of Republicans, even though Democrats only needed to pick up one legislator to flip it to their side. But Democrats won Mayoral races in Charlotte, Indianapolis, Orlando, and Philly. New Jersey Democrats strengthened their hold on the Assembly, so that’s least there’s some small consolation to having to live in New Jersey. Colorado kicked out some Koch-backed school board members. And Ohio passed a plan to fix district gerrymandering — but whether it’ll actually work remains to be seen.
