GENDER IDENTITY WAR COMES TO GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

Proposition 8 in California, Amendment 2 in Florida: these “same-sex” electoral battles have now come to the “liberal” city of Gainesville Florida, home of the University of Florida. Besides boasting such “firsts” as the NCAA football championship of the Florida Gators and a self-assumed title as the solar energy capital of the U.S., Gainesville could conceivably be another first, at least in the state of Florida: the first municipality, apparently, in which civil rights protections (essentially in employment and housing) once established could now be dis-established.

The trouble began year when the Gainesville City Commission decided to extend its civil rights coverage from gays and lesbians to trans-gendered as well, and opened a can of worm for themselves in trying to legislate the thorny question of whether male or female bathrooms and gymnasium training room would be patronized by the trans-gendered. The Commission created the problem by deciding that, for these purposes, a person’s gender would be determined by that person’s “inner feeling” as to being a male or female. This set off the local purity police and they began to circulate a petition to rescind the Commission’s action, and their petition was apparently signed by those who thought their proposed Amendment to the city’s laws would deal only with that bathroom issue and that, in signing the petition, they were acting to “protect” women and children from predator males who might enter women’s facilities on the pretense of “feeling” female when they were actually predator males out to do predatory mischief. They collected 6379, just enough signatures to get them on the ballot for Gainesville’s municipal elections on March 24, 2009. The sponsor of this legislation was, in the usual fashion of such organizations, called Citizens for Good Public Policy although, as we shall see, the policy being promoted might appear anything but “good” to any one with any respect for civil rights.

The trouble with the “good policy” people started when the details of their Amendment began to percolate through the public consciousness as it became apparent that it would not simply eliminate trans-gendered protection, the supposed source of the organization’s concern, but would eliminate coverage as well of any category of people not covered in the Civil Rights Law of the State of Florida, a law which, guess what, does not cover gays and lesbians. So the proposal would clearly do two onerous things: (a) it would remove civil rights coverage from a large category of people, “civil rights in reverse” and (b) it would limit the ability of a Florida city to make its own laws with respect to civil rights. Many people who had signed the petition, thinking it was merely acting to protect women and children in bathrooms, attempted to remove their signatures from the petition, but apparently the Supervisor of Elections did not deem that people could so “un-sign” themselves, and the proposal remains on the ballot of the March 24 as Amendment 1.

To oppose the amendment, local human rights groups established a campaign organization called Equality is Gainesville’s Business, shrewdly exploiting a factor in some anti-discrimination campaigns, the sense of a business community that such practices are not good for business where they are practiced as when, for example, in New Orleans during the school desegregation crisis in in the 1960s, local businesses took the stance that a bad reputation for the city would hurt their bottom line of business profit. After some early flirting with Amendment support, the local Chamber of Commerce did indeed come round to that perspective and became one of the organizational endorsers of Equality is Gainesville’s Business. I have myself worked with the campaign to round up several hundred individual “no” endorsers, centered on the highly “open and inclusive” church I attend, the United Church of Gainesville whose pastors and Social Justice Committee have given strong support to the Equality campaign.

What are prospects for the election’s outcome? With an openly gay Commissioner, Craig Lowe, heading the campaign committee and with the official public opposition of the Mayor and all Commission members to the Amendment, and with Gainesville’s reputation as a relatively liberal city, a notable “blue” (Democratic) voting spot in a (usually) Republican state, it might appear that the election is a slam dunk to defeat the opposition. But wait, this is what many thought about Amendment 2, the notorious amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as between a “man and a woman,” which many said that, even in conservative Florida, could not reach the necessarily 60% of the vote for passage, when it in fact did pass by a whisker in last November’s election…despite the state’s electoral majority for Obama. So Florida and presumably Gainesville will vote against their more liberal instincts, especially if a particularly nasty fear campaign is waged which mobilizes voters who might not usually vote, but will turn out to protect their way of life against abortionists, atheists and those who would take their guns from them. Especially may this be the case in an “off-election” in which there is nothing else on the ballot except another non-controversial amendment and a couple of not-very-consequential City Commission races. And Citizens for Good Public Policy certainly does not hesitate to turn on the fear factor. One public mailing I have seen, to one of the 10,000 (inflated number) of those who signed the petition, shows a little black girl cowering behind the door of a toilet stall while a heavy-footed “man” stands in a threatening posture just outside the door with a message to vote Yes and send this person back out where “he” belongs. So a cliff-hanger election may well impend, and trend-watchers from outside Gainesville might well watch this election as a bellwether for things to come in Florida and in the nation.

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist