SCENES FROM AN UNRLENTING POPULAR STRUGGLE 2016-2020
____________________________
The Pink Suit
Boy with no father is dutifully attentive
To the great glass screen’s
Daily commands,
When the unrelenting persuasion
Stopped for a message not from any sponsor.
Reporters on the scene couldn’t confirm
What they instinctively knew was true, so
Doing their job of clamoring for anything
That amounts to official word,
They passed on to us two of them: “Oh No!,”
Which they heard spoken by the pretty woman in the pink suit.
And in no time the boy runs
Into the hallway, crossing two generations
And defying all propriety
To callously interrupt a sacred ritual
Of afternoon telephoning,
To recount to his PTA-organizing
And very Republican grandma
As best as his untrained five-year-old mind can
What just happened in some place called Dallas, Texas.
Any misgivings over such an impolite gesture
Vanished as she ended the call
With immediacy never again to be seen.
Seconds later, back in the living room
Where doilies draped the couch and
The Werner Sollman Jesus hung on the wall,
She consoles the boy with a light but constant embrace
And repeated assurances as all eyes are fixed on the screen
That, “It’s all right. We’ll have Johnson.”
The brave calm in her voice and her touch
Steadies herself as much as the boy,
Letting her draw comfort from a kindergartner’s innocence
While lending him her wisdom.
And as the boy ponders the words, “Oh no,”
Spoken by the pretty woman in the pink suit
In some place called Dallas, Texas,
His own primal feeling of futility
Never before graspable
Now has a two-word name.
 |
| Was Libertarian Jo Jorgensen the unintentional kingmaker? |
Though the intangibles make it impossible to prove this with simple math, here is a very conceivable scenario: If Libertarian Party presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen were not on Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona’s ballots we’d be agonizing right now over an upcoming second Trump term.
Those states have a combined 57 Electoral Votes, which, if added to Trump’s 232, would have given him 289 Electoral Votes and left Biden with 256. OMG, the thought of it.
Of course, we don’t have to think of it, except in the context of small parties’ tendencies to push the country decidedly in the opposite direction from which those parties themselves lean. (CLICK to see how a 1984 left walkout in Kentucky made McConnell a Senator.)
If the 1984 McConnell case is obscure, then do Nader and the Greens in 2000 ring a bell?
I was an organizer for Nader's Kentucky campaign in 1996, but was wary of his running four years later, and I supported the Democrats in 2000. And oh what we wouldn’t give to have two Gore-chosen Supreme Court Justices sitting where Samuel Alito and John Roberts sit today.
Of the four battleground states mentioned above, in a scenario whereby Pennsylvania still went for Joe Biden, but the other three for Trump, Biden would have 276 Electoral Votes, a win so thin as to add potency to Trump’s laughably weak legal challenges to the outcome, and subtract potency from a Biden presidency. Not a Trump win, but a much worse situation than the one we’re actually in.
So, let’s take the number crunch tour of these four states: Biden has won Georgia by 14,000 votes (2,472,278 to 2,458,250). To be sure, let’s give credit to the innovative and smart voter drive of Stacey Abrams and her Fair Fight organization -- it worked!
But let’s look at some math as well: Jo Jorgensen won 62,000 votes in Georgia, more than four times Biden’s margin over Trump in the state. The Libertarians historically have attracted voters with liberal and conservative mindsets, depending on the issue. But with marijuana legalization spreading within the major party duopoly, the Libertarians have been focusing on staunch anti-gun control and anti-tax messages, likely presenting many more Republican-leaning voters with an alternative.
Regarding left alternatives to the Democrats, there was no Green Party candidate on the Georgia ballot. As for the possibility that write-ins for Green Howie Hawkins took potential Biden votes away -- forget it, there were just 457 write in votes for president by Georgia voters.
Pennsylvania is not as clear; Hawkins also was not on that state’s ballot. Jorgensen was.
Biden won the state of his birth by 82,000 votes (3,444,794 to 3,362,693). Jorgensen won 79,000. There was a robust write-in total of 6,678 (States customarily don’t release the names of write-in vote recipients unless one of them wins).
Let’s amend our Pennsylvania scenario to see Green Howie Hawkins being on the state’s ballot and Libertarian Jo Jorgensen not being on it. That would likely have tipped the Keystone State to -- I can’t say it, but then I don’t have to.
On to Wisconsin: Biden won the state by 20,000 votes (1,630,716 to 1,610,151), while Jorgensen won 38,000. There also was no Green on Wisconsin’s ballot. There were 7,827 write ins, and Brian Carroll of the socially conservative American Solidarity Party won 5,266 votes.
A Wisconsin race without Jorgensen or the anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-death penalty Carroll is probably a race Trump wins.
In Arizona, it was close in 2020. Real close:
Biden won the state by 11,000 votes (1,672,143 to 1,661,686), while Jorgensen received 51,000. There was no Green candidate on the ballot, and there were just 551 write ins.
Those numbers spell: “Thank you, Jo Jorgensen,” as do Georgia’s and Wisconsin’s. Maybe Pennsylvania’s, too. But this sounds patronizing to the Libertarians, which is not my intent.
Nonetheless, running for office in a third or small party should be done to pursue a strategic outcome, not just to evangelize the party's doctrine.
Greens could accomplish a lot by visibly running candidates for the U.S. House and Senate. Someone of Ralph Nader or Jill Stein’s level of recognition might be able to win a House seat, or bargain with their votes to make the Democrats be more pro-environmental or pro-economic equity. They could then speak publicly for a slate of Congressional candidates in many states to gain seats and/or bargaining power for the Greens to move the Dems leftward.
But running as a third or small party presidential candidate, as said, should be done eyeing a specific outcome that advances the public policies the party advocates. That outcome cannot be intangibles such as increased visibility or rallying the populace, given the unabated rightward White House policies in the four years after Nader and Stein’s runs in 2000 and 2016.
It must be measured in how many Electoral Votes a candidate believes they can win, and how many coattail Congressional seats for their party their candidacy realistically can generate. If the honest answer is 0 to both, run for Congress instead, or help out with Fair Fight.
________________________________________________
Brian Arbenz is a political activist, observer and commentator living in Louisville, Ky. USA.
Biden won. That’s the reality. No qualifiers. No near slip up at the end that again defied the opinion polls.
The story should not be framed as Trump’s surprisingly strong performance in states where Biden was sure to cruise to a win. That pundit line thrived for a couple of days because it was rural votes that were counted first in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Philadelphia and Detroit ballots had to be forced out of post offices by judicial Heimlich maneuvers from federal judges.
When all the ballots are counted, Biden will have beaten an incumbent president by 5.3 million popular votes and he will have won more than 300 Electoral Votes.
Biden’s final win was just about as strong as the polls showed his advantage being in the last two months, though on election night and the next day, media phraseology was all about OMG, here we go again; Joe Biden will write “What Happened, Vol. 2!”
Biden’s final popular vote advantage being smaller than what polls projected simply reflects the normal leveling off of the leader’s margin when actual votes are cast, and that drop never taints a victory or the mandate of the incoming president.
George H.W. Bush led Michael Dukakis by 12-to-14 points throughout October 1988, then won the actual popular vote by eight points. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s lead over President Bush was about 8-to-10 poll points throughout the race, then he actually beat Bush by five points, 43 percent to 38, with a strong protest vote of 19 percent going to Ross Perot.
Unlike in 1976 and 1980, when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, respectively, held leads of about 30 points after their nominations, then steadily lost ground until they were in toss-up races in the final week, Biden’s 2020 performance was one of consistency -- never slipping during the general election from a solid, but not overwhelming lead.
 |
| Along the way, the author posted this meme to remind voters of the final goal. |
Of course, without a Democrat Senate majority, single payer health care and a $15-an-hour minimum wage are not going to become law in the next two years -- but would they necessarily even if the Senate were in Blue hands, or if the Democrats pull to a 50-50 tie after the Georgia run offs in January?
A Democrat majority built on wins in North Carolina and South Carolina the Democrats almost got and/or Georgia wins might well be one which could not count on Senators from those conservative states to vote for a bold progressive agenda. Susan Collins or Mitt Romney might be as willing as southern Democrats to support health care or minimum wage bills.
The next four years are unclear. Will a vastly improved Coronavirus response, a successful vaccine, and economic improvements win the voters’ goodwill, or will the the big corporate domination of our lives still keep us chained to poverty jobs?
For now, let’s appreciate the fact that we longed to truncate the Trump racist, hateful war on empathy, and by standing strong, refuting disinformation, and voting strategically, we did it.
___________________________________
Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, began resisting four years ago by attending the Women's March in Washington on 1/21/2017. That was just the start, and even with Biden as president our resistance against hate and exclusion must continue.
You have a Democratic senator who introduces a bill to curb multiculturalism in public schools. He then introduces a U.S. Constitutional amendment to make English the nation’s official language.
And to boil your blood even more, he votes for aiding the Contras (after previous “no” votes) in their war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
And Walter Huddleston is the Democrat. That was his record in 1984. Pretty hardball against then left, wouldn’t you agree?
So when he ran for re-election in November 1984, the Louisville-centered left in Kentucky wasn't going to let Huddleston's rightest sins go un punished.
They had the perfect opportunity that fall to send a message to the Democratic Party that it would lose progressive votes if its politicians went that far to the right.
For the previous eight years, the Socialist Workers Party, a left wing Trotskyist party had been operating a Louisville chapter. The national SWP had been formed in the 1930s when pro-Leon Trotsky Communists walked out of the United States’ Communist Party because of that party’s strict alliance with Stalin.
Though the left in Louisville in the 1980s was eclectic and civil-liberties oriented, giving it little natural affinity with Leninism or Trotskyism, the Socialist Workers Party’s decision to field party member Dave Welters of Louisville as a candidate in the 1984 U.S. Senate race made the perfect way to display progressives’ anger with Democrat Huddleston.
So the Welters Walkout was on!
Progressive groups got the word around rapidly: we’re voting for Dave Welters the socialist this year, not Walter Huddleston the oh-so establishment Democrat.
We’ll show the Democratic Party not to harbor anti-multiculturalism and hostility to non-English speakers!
Well, support for the Socialist Workers candidate certainly stopped in its tracks Walter Huddleston’s constitutional amendment making English the official language. Trouble is, that amendment wasn’t going anywhere - with Huddleston in the Senate or not. Neither was his attempt to cut multicultural education.
But the Welters Walkout did stop a lot that was moving forward -- like campaign finance reform and a congress free of PAC money. And an independent judiciary. And a Republican Party whose members were free to vote their conscience, even if that meant voting for a Democrat President’s health care programs and Supreme Court nominees, as Kentucky Republican Senators Marlow Cook and John Sherman Cooper had.
No more. You see Huddleston lost that 1984 race to the obscure Executive of the county government of Louisville. He lost by 5,269 votes. The progressives who ordinarily would have voted Democrat (and who still have reason to wish they had in 1984) cast 7,696 votes for Dave Welters.
 |
| Numbers don't lie -- the radical left made Senator McConnell |
__________________________________________________
In a conventional and settled community where the lower Midwest meets the upper South, the sports pages, church homilies and union newsletters were standard reading -- the Kinsey Report was not.
My mother recalled that in the late 1940s, during her college years, a certain number of bars, diners, and clubs downtown were straight by day, and gay by night.
The office worker lunch crowd never knew.
This is not to say gays were left alone -- beatings of people thought to be non-straight, as well as dismissals from jobs and exclusions from religious denominations were as common in Louisville as anywhere in a time when a homosexual orientation was considered a curable disorder and conversion therapy was mainstream.
Even the liberal, ardently pro-civil rights Louisville Times and Courier-Journal in the 1960s very rarely acknowledged gays -- still, for instance, using the boldface template “Born to Mr. and Mrs:” at the top of the daily birth listings.
In the 1970s, Louisville underwent a huge culture and arts blossoming, drawing ballet performances by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Edward Villella, and becoming a center for opera, symphonies and the nation’s largest outdoor art fair. The centerpiece was Actor’s Theater of Louisville’s Festival of New American Plays, considered the English-speaking world’s biggest yearly theatrical event.
All this as the city was reviving the United States’ largest Victorian neighborhood among its many historic districts being preserved.
And gay Louisvillians were prominent in all these aesthetic triumphs putting the city on the world’s maps.
Community leaders appreciated their endeavors -- on the condition that that H-word (or by this time, G-word) stay out of the public lexicon. One afternoon in July 1970, two Louisville women brought the word, and themselves out -- forever dislodging a community’s heterosexist complacency.
Marjorie Ruth Jones, a 39-year-old twice divorced mother of three, and Tracy Knight, 25, a flashy-dressing professional dancer, entered the Jefferson County Clerk’s office, stepped up to the counter and said they were there to apply for a marriage license.
The reactions of the county clerk and county attorney ranged from confusion to dismissive amusement, but after they turned Jones and Knight’s request down, the two women got their day in court, asking a judge to declare that the 4th Amendment’s equal protection of the law required Kentucky to issue them a marriage license.
 |
| From Jones and Knight's 1970 civil trial |
The city’s GLF disbanded in 1971, said LGBTQ historian David Williams, who once served as editor of and contributor to The Letter, a gay and lesbian newspaper.
An online history by Williams said that In 1974, the Louisville Lesbian Feminist Union was founded, publishing a newsletter and operating a community center/house on Brook Street, just off of Old Louisville.
The building had meeting space, a library, and rooms to rent for local and visiting lesbians.
“The LFU lasted only through the end of 1978, in part because of internal disputes about how separatist it should be,” Williams wrote, “but through its newsletter and myriad activities, it nurtured a larger and visibly activist community of women who continued to advocate for both lesbian/gay and women’s rights.”
 |
| Highland became the nation's first Southern Baptist church to ordain a gay man as a pastor, one of many pro-Fairness actions by religious groups in Louisville. |
“Some of these,” Williams wrote, “for example, Louisville’s Woman Works, a construction company owned and operated by all women… persisted longer than the currents of lesbian feminism that had given rise to them.”
In 1976 Lesbian Feminist Union supporters contributed $100 each to become partners in a women’s bar called Mother’s Brew, which had musical entertainment by women, as well as poetry readings and shelter space for battered women.
Louisville Realtor Jack Kersey came out publicly as gay in 1978, Williams’ history said, marking the first such move by a widely recognized mainstream business person.
By the end of the 1970s, it seemed that a thriving LGBT life co-existed with the city’s basic social conservatism, though government, schools, and corporate power hitters seldom acknowledged gays, despite Kersey’s example.
Any pretense that this was a peaceful co-existence ended in 1981 when First National Bank, Louisville’s largest, fired an employee for refusing to end his gay rights advocacy.
Sam Dorr was told by the bank he had to stop affiliating with Dignity, a group for LGBT Catholics, or quit his job. Dorr chose his conscience over his paycheck, and Louisville’s gay equality cause was moved by his example into the realm of legislative lobbying, not just existing in its own space as a niche in the city’s landscape.
Gay activists called for city and county ordinances banning discrimination, or more specifically amendments to the existing civil rights ordinances.
In 1986, the Louisville-Jefferson County Human Relations Commission, which hears discrimination complaints and recommends policy, called for a ban on anti-gay discrimination, a first by a government chartered panel in Louisville. But the influential Courier-Journal disappointed progressives by publishing an editorial asserting no evidence could show such a ban to be necessary.
Still, the HRC’s call resounded all over town. Gay rights backers formed the March for Justice in 1987, a group which held yearly marches by the same name to Louisville's downtown. They persuaded the city Board of Aldermen to pass an anti-hate crimes ordinance, pushed through by then LGBT friendly alderman Paul Bather, an African-American later elected to the Kentucky state legislature.
Shortly, LGBT activists learned that moving to the next level meant staring hate in the face. A shadowy group called Freedom’s Heritage Forum largely run by an allergist named Dr. Frank Simon began a ruthless backlash. The group derailed what had been a healthy discussion by spreading hysteria over AIDS, accusing the gay rights movement of elitism, and distributing tens of thousands of pamphlets containing false claims that gayness was tied to pedophilia.
The attempt to win passage of the Fairness Amendment failed 8-4, but LGBT activists got busier. They forged stronger ties with Louisville’s array of anti-racist groups, coming together at the Braden Center, an organizing hub in the African American West Louisville section. Helping do repairs and maintenance on the center was just their most tangible work.
Fairness volunteers helped groups like the energetic Justice Resource Center boycott, picket and lobby for fairer job opportunities for blacks, a police civilian review board, and race equity in schools.
Soon, the photos and testimonials of LGBT Louisvillians published in Fairness pamphlets featured many black and Hispanic Louisvillians, as the ranks of the movement became multi-racial. A Men of All Colors chapter (formerly Black and White Men Together) became a large contingent within Fairness.
Justice Resource Center director Rev. Louis Coleman endorsed the Fairness Amendment, as did Mattie Jones, a longtime anti-racist activist with the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression.
Bob Cunningham, another African-American activist in the Kentucky Alliance, summed up the inter-dependency of gay rights and racial equality with these words at the 1991 March for Justice:
After long applause from the thousands gathered outdoors downtown, Cunningham added: "People who are able to define you can confine you."
Union labor support, a resource not often secured in gay rights struggles, was also forthcoming after Fairness activists joined United Food and Commercial Workers strikers against a Fisher Packing plant in Louisville. The UFCW local endorsed the Fairness Amendment.
Advertising on municipal bus exteriors and in print with the words: “Fairness. We are Asking for Nothing more. We will accept Nothing Less” summed up the quest.
But another stumble happened: Paul Bather stunned the movement by withdrawing his support for the Fairness Amendment for reasons he never made clear. He said he needed more time to study all the amendment’s details in what he called a rushed process, but critics said his outside employer, another Louisville bank, may have offered him an ultimatum similar to Dorr’s 15 years earlier.
After a second try to pass the amendment failed, then a pared down version covering only employment also was defeated, skeptical media commentators began asking if the gay rights cause was just too progressive for a conservative and provincial city.
With the sting of the Freedom’s Heritage Forum’s vitriol still hurting, Fairness organizers countered with their own two-page pamphlets placed on doors or handed politely to residents encountered during yard-to-yard distributions in politically moderate neighborhoods where changing minds was possible.
The brief text of the Fairness Amendment was surrounded by boxed sections with plainly explained reasons for middle-of-the-road folks not to fear the amendment, such as:
“Churches are exempt from it -- see, it says so right here,” with an arrow pointing to the part of the amendment stating that the city's civil rights ordinances exempt sectarian religious organizations.
That calm, conversational style contrasted with the increasingly mean and menacing rhetoric from Frank Simon and the Freedom’s Heritage forum (Simon yelled at an alderwoman during a meeting that gay people were spitting in soft drinks and this would give her AIDS).
David Williams, during his tenure writing for The Letter, wrote a superb and thoroughly researched piece examining dozens of claims published by Freedom’s Heritage Forum, ranging from gays overwhelmingly being rich, to a rights ordinance in another state having prevented authorities from prosecuting a child abuser.
Williams searched back to each source cited and revealed that those and almost all other claims by the forum were made out of context or outright falsified; in one case Williams showed that the forum represented a vulgar statement in quotes threatening children with sexual assault as being part of the gay political agenda, when it was actually a line from a play.
Williams' research helped turn politicians of both parties against the once feared Simon. Simon's own fanaticism also helped do in the Freedom's Heritage Forum. Television ads by the forum were rejected by a local station owned by a conservative leaning corporation.
This was such a rare move in the money-driven 1990s broadcast industry that people shuddered to think what must be in the unaired ads.
 |
| Henderson, Ky. is one of many centers of activism for equality in the state. The historically anti-discrimination Zion United Church of Christ has led the way. |
In 1995, Larry Forgy, a right wing Republican candidate for Kentucky governor who welcomed the endorsement of Frank Simon, was defeated 51 to 49 percent by moderate-to-liberal Democrat Paul Patton. Patton told Fairness activists he would not support proposed anti-gay state legislation, and that was good enough to get Fairness and its state PAC called C-FAIR doing around-the-clock pro-Patton work in the final weeks of the race that was crucial to his close win.
The next year, Louisville Alderwoman candidate Denise Bentley, who favored Fairness, upset anti-Fairness longtime incumbent Bill Wilson, winning 57 percent of the vote.
Though there were other issues in Patton and Bentley’s wins, being for gay rights helped both, a fact that changed Louisville’s entrenched political mindset.
Bather switched back to supporting Fairness. He, Bentley and the other two black members of the Board of Aldermen now were for the amendment. Some white members also switched to pro-Fairness.
In mid-1996, an independent poll knocked the conventional wisdom over, showing the new Aldermanic support mirrored the grass roots. A remarkable 65 percent of the Louisville’s residents now favored the Fairness Amendment banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. That number was a complete turnaround from polls done in the early 1990s.
In this new ‘96 poll, a majority of the city’s African-Americans also backed the Fairness Amendment, and the amendment had a small majority of support of all residents county wide. There was no stopping fairness.
In 1998, the right wing’s last argument -- that the amendment wasn’t needed because discrimination just didn’t happen here -- also crumbled. Alicia Pedreira, an employee of a church-run day care center, was fired from her job because she was a lesbian. Though as that pamphlet noted, the city’s civil rights laws exempt church employers, Pedreria became the symbol of the good people being unfairly held back who Fairness organizers insisted all along their amendment was for.
The Board of Aldermen approved a Fairness Amendment version limited to the employment discrimination ban. Mayor David Armstrong, who as a candidate had given uncertain backing -- saying if the board should pass the Fairness Amendment, “I guess I’d sign it” -- did in fact. So in January 1999 Louisville, on the fourth try, got fair. Well, fairer.
Jefferson County government’s absurdly small board of commissioners (just three members for a county of 800,000) took the hint and passed a comprehensive ban on discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations. The deciding vote was cast by an unelected member filling out a term who kept Fairness supporters in suspense until the last minute. So by the shakiest margin, the whole county, including Louisville, had comprehensive Fairness.
With very few complaints about Louisville’s limited ordinance, and business groups in the city talking of the need to draw the “creative class” that favors inclusiveness, the Aldermen in late 1999 passed a comprehensive ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in housing and public accommodations as well as employment, bringing Louisville’s city ordinance in line with the county’s gay rights statute.
Other cities in Kentucky passed sexual orientation discrimination bans, including Lexington, the state’s second largest metro area, and the Ohio River city of Henderson, near Evansville, Ind. Though Henderson’s ordinance, which passed in 1999 by a 3-2 vote was repealed 3-2 in 2001, other medium sized and small Kentucky cities, including Morehead, Midway, Paducah, Frankfort and the greater Cincinnati city of Covington, passed bans on discrimination based on sexual orientation in the late ‘90s and early 2000s; some of those city's ordinances included protection for gender identity.
Vicco, in the Perry County mountains, drew New York Times coverage and its openly gay mayor made network TV feature shows when in 2013 the Appalachian town of 334 people became the smallest municipality in the nation to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance. Vicco’s protected sexual orientation and gender identity.
In 2003, near the end of his two-term tenure, Gov. Paul Patton signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination against the 30,000 state employees on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
Eternal vigilance, of course, is needed to keep freedom, and the long fought gay equality battles would have to be fought again, and again.
In the early 2000s, a state legislative committee defeated by one vote a bill that would ban enacting any local gay rights ordinances in Kentucky, which would have reversed 30-plus years of progress in Louisville. By that single vote, it was not sent to the full legislature and hasn’t been revived since.
So Louisville’s Fairness Amendment protections were safe, right? Well, a referendum totally unrelated to LGBT issues created a whole new hill to climb. In 2000, voters approved merging Louisville’s government with Jefferson County’s to create a Metro Louisville council and mayor.
All the ordinances of the city and its county would have to be approved again, with differences worked out, within five years of merger taking effect in 2002, or automatically expire. And Louisville was founded in 1778, a fact that made Fairness activists anxious over the potential for a colossal city ordinance book to be used as an excuse to passively aggressively kill hard won LGBT equality by not getting around to Fairness by the 2007 deadline.
And with the new Metro Mayor Jerry Abramson never having supported the Fairness Amendment during his four terms as city mayor (single-term mayor David Armstrong signed both Fairness ordinances in 1999), they wondered how fast a track the issue would be placed on in Metro Louisville.
Abramson, a charismatic and genial Georgetown University educated lawyer and classical pianist by avocation, was always figured to favor Fairness. As an alderman in the 1970s and early '80s, he had been a member of the liberal faction of the board known as Democrats for Progress.
The backlog proved no obstacle, and after the Metro Council passed a comprehensive anti-discrimination ordinance covering sexual orientation and gender identity in jobs, housing and public accommodations, Mayor Abramson signed it.
A lawsuit by a Louisville gynecologist claiming his First Amendment freedom of religion would be infringed on by preventing him from refusing to hire gay people had been thrown out by the courts in 2001. Still, the framing of discrimination as “religious freedom” through laws enacted by many states looms as a threat to Civil Rights laws overall.
But when the issue is discussed without the distraction of the religious freedom claim, Louisville is a gay-friendly place that has promptly grown comfortable with fairness.
________________________________
Brian Arbenz is a radical justice activist who lives in Louisville. He covered Louisville's Fairness struggles for progressive newspapers and magazines, as well as mainstream media.
