Houston LGBT Ordinance Fails by Wide Margin
By The Washington Post
Published on November 4, 2015
Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), designed to protect the rights of gay citizens and others, has failed by a wide margin — after a hard-fought campaign in which opponents warned it would give male sexual predators access to women’s bathrooms.
But as much as HERO’s proponents decried the vote, the proposition was rejected by a decisive majority of the citizens of the nation’s fourth-largest city. Turnout was strong among white conservatives and African Americans — demographics likely to oppose the measure, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out.“I just hope that cities across the nation are watching,” Pastor Steve Riggle of Houston’s Grace Community Church said after the vote, as Fox 26 reported. “And that leaders … will step up and stand up and stand against this thing that’s encroaching across the nation with intimidation and fear and telling people who just believe in common moral decency that they have no voice.”
The fight over what became known as the “bathroom ordinance” began last year when Houston’s city council passed the anti-discrimination measure. After it was in effect for just three months, a lawsuit demanding the city either repeal the ordinance or have residents vote on it prevailed.
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