From the Texas Tribune: Comparing Nondiscrimination Protections in Texas Cities

Five cities in the state - all big ones - have discrimination ordinances based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

- Click here for the story.

Despite a recent loss in Houston over the city's embattled anti-discrimination ordinance, gay rights activists across the state can still claim successes in enacting protections elsewhere. There are now 10 Texas cities with populations of more than 100,000 that have some rules or legislation in place to protect residents or city employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

For at least a decade, Dallas, Austin andFort Worth have had comprehensive ordinances offering lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents some degree of protection against discrimination in employment, housing and other public areas like buses and restaurants.

San Antonio passed a similar rule in September 2013 and was followed by Plano, where the city council voted in December 2014 to extend its nondiscrimination policy to include protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.

From the Houston Chronicle: HERO supporters lead opponents in new poll - Ordinance's opponents say issue turns on small number of votes, but those in favor claim growing momentum

For those of you in 2306 who are writing on this issue in the upcoming election. Notice that the key is likely to be turnout. Also note that positions on the issue do not cut across typical ideological lines.

- Click here for the story.

With both campaigns ramping up spending before Election Day, supporters of Houston's contentious equal rights ordinance are leading opponents by 6 percentage points, a new poll shows. 

Overall, 43 percent of respondents to the KHOU/KUHF poll released Sunday supported the ordinance, 37 percent opposed it, and 18 percent were unsure of their stance. The poll offers some empirical heft to the prediction in many political circles that the fate of the ordinance will turn on a relatively small number of votes.

Broken out by race, black residents were the most evenly divided on the issue, with 40 percent in support, 39 percent opposed and another 20 percent undecided. Rice University political scientist Bob Stein, who helped run the poll, said black voters may be the most malleable on the issue leading up to Election Day. 

"The largest proportion of undecided voters are African-American," Stein said.

"Otherwise, generally, we tended to see that people had staked out their positions on this issue and felt very strongly one way or the other."

Proponents of the law heralded the poll as a sign the ordinance is picking up broad support. The campaign Houston Unites reported about $1.3 million in donations during the most recent fundraising period, more than doubling critics' haul. "Yet another poll shows the momentum is on the side of the treating everyone fairly and equally under the law," campaign manager Richard Carlbom said in a written statement.

Opponents, however, viewed the poll as evidence that the race will be close and that there's opportunity to sway the bloc of undecided voters. "We're going to be very aggressive and expose this ordinance for what it really is," said Jared Woodfill, the group's campaign spokesman. "What this race will really prove is who has the better turnout model."

Political scientists have said they expect the embattled law's presence on the ballot to drive up the usually low voter turnout in November, potentially a factor in the open mayor's race.

The Texas Supreme Court hears arguments from the oil industry against the right of Houston to regulate pollution.

State limits on local autonomy have been in the news all year - mostly in the legislature - but now the judiciary weighs in. An industry group wants Houston's clean air ordinance declared unconstitutional

The case is called BCCA Appeal Group Inc. v City of Houston.

- Click here for the oral arguments before the Texas Supreme Court.
- A description of the case from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
- Case file.
- Houston’s environmental protection ordinances go to the Supreme Court.

- Some detail from the Texas Tribune: Houston Argues for Right to Regulate Pollution.

Two ordinances passed by the city of Houston to regulate air pollution reflect the spirit of the Texas Clean Air Act and state environmental regulations and should be allowed to stand, lawyers for the city argued on Wednesday before the Texas Supreme Court.

The ordinances, passed in 2007 and 2008, require industrial polluters to register with the city and follow state emission guidelines, at risk of being fined. The local rules are necessary, attorney Robert Higgason argued on Houston's behalf, so the city can plug gaps in environmental enforcement left by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
“The point of all this is to protect the public and the environment, to have clean air, and the TCEQ, for the Texas Clean Air Act, envisions that it be vigorously enforced,” Higgason said. “This is what the statute makes reference to — cities being allowed to enact and enforce their own ordinances to achieve the goal of the Texas Clean Air Act.”
BCCA Appeal Group, a coalition of industrial facility owners including ExxonMobil, the Dow Chemical Company and ConocoPhillips, has sued to strike down the ordinances, arguing Houston is exceeding its authority under state law.

“The Legislature has already addressed what cities can do to address this problem...and they’ve turned what should be an administrative and civil regime, that should be consistently applied, into a local criminal statute,” BCAA attorney Evan Young argued. “To convert it from something very different from what the Legislature intended degrades and erodes the meaning of the act.”

Bathroom references in anti- HERO campaign tap into deep seated differences between liberals and conservaties

A Houston Chronicle commentator makes the following - correct - observation about the use of bathroom references in the campaign against the ordinance which would protect people in Houston from discrimination in employment and housing among other things based on a host of items including sexual orientation (being gay or trans gendered).

- Click here for the article.

A personal question today: How do you feel about public restrooms?

Do you see them as useful facilities whose benefits far outweigh the occasional untidiness?

Or, are you so disgusted by public restrooms that you avoid them at all costs, entering only in the case of an emergency, and then, only with pinched nose and value-sized pump of anti-bacterial lotion?

Your answer may reveal something about your politics, according to Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. The more grossed out you are by public restrooms, the more conservative you are likely to be - and vice versa.

This is why bathrooms are the perfect tool for social conservatives trying to defeat Houston's equal rights ordinance.

The author touches on recent research that suggests that a person's ideological outlook may be genetic - or if not - based on deep seated emotional responses to the outside world.

- From Newsweek:

Conservatives and liberals really are wired differently. Scientists can accurately predict whether a subject is left-wing tree-hugger or a right-wing gun-toter based on how their brains respond to certain images, a new study in Current Biology has found.

P. Read Montague, a scientist at Virginia Tech, said his experiment was inspired by data that shows political affiliation, like height, can be inherited. "I the same sense that height is highly genetically specified, it's also true that it's not predetermined by genetics; nutrition, sleep, starvation, dramatic physical injury, and so on can serve to change one's ultimate height. However, tall people have tall children, and this is a kind of starting point [for the experiement]," he said.

Montague and his colleagues asked subjects to look at positive, negative, and disgusting images and examined functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of their brains. His team found that conservatives' and liberals' brains behave differently when confronted with disgusting imagery. "Disgusting images, and the mutilated body of an animal especially, generated neural responses that were highly predictive of political orientation. That was true even though the neural predictors didn't necessarily agree with participants' conscious rating of those disturbing pictures," the authors of the study said.

The test proved surprisingly accurate. "A single disgusting image was sufficient to predict each subject's political orientation," Montague said. "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other functional imaging experiments in our lab or others."

But wait! There's more:

- Liberal or conservative? Brain responses to disgusting images help reveal political leanings.
- Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting.
- Liberal or conservative? Reactions to disgust are a dead giveaway.

Catching up on the HERO ordinance

Here are a  few links for 2306 students who are thinking about  writing about the controversy over the "Houston Equal Rights Ordinance" aka HERO. I posted the following in a previous post, but am re-posting for convenience.

- Texas Monthly: Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance, Explained.
- City of Houston: Equal Rights Ordinance.
- Chron: Texas Supreme Court says city must repeal HERO or put it on ballot.

Here a few more, with emphasis on the emerging campaign for and against it. So far it seems that access to women's bathroom is a dominant theme for opponents of the measure.

- Houston Press: SO, THE ANTI-HERO "BATHROOM BILL" ADS HAVE FINALLY STARTED...
- Campaign for Houston.
- Houston Chronicle: HERO ballot fight presents challenge to GLBT Caucus.
- Houston Chronicle: In first radio ad, HERO opponents press bathroom issue with women voter

I'll add more on a regular basis - and I;ll try to get a timeline together soon so we can see how this issue has morphed recently.

Wage theft vote scheduled for Houston city council

Salon reports on the vote - which was one of the items Mayor Parker announced would be on her agenda when she was re-elected last week:

“It looks like we do have the votes that we need to pass this, and there has been a lot of interest from council members across the aisle,” Laura Perez-Boston, who directs the Fe Y Justicia (Faith and Justice) Worker Center, told Salon Monday. Still, Perez-Boston said the group was “worried about” the impact of recent testimony against the bill by business groups. “So you know, we’re just trying to make sure that council members are really listening to their constituents,” she said, “and seeing the value of how putting this type of a protection in place would really protect responsible businesses, working families, and just the general economy.” She noted it was also possible that a member would use a “tag” to delay the vote for a week.

As I’ve reported, wage theft scrutiny and activism is on the rise, spurred in part by the growth of non-union low-wage workers’ groups using media, legal, political and workplace pressure to try to improve jobs. Chicago last year passed one of the country’s strongest municipal ordinances to address the issue, threatening convicted wage theft violators with the loss of their business licenses. In interviews with advocates, academics and the progressive National Employment Law Project in 2008, 68 percent of low-wage workers in the country’s three largest cities reported wage theft in the prior week. The term can refer to legal violations like requiring workers to work off the clock, or not paying overtime. University of Oregon labor economist Gordon Lafer wrote in a report last month for the progressive Economic Policy Institute that the statistics suggest “the amount of money stolen out of employees’ paychecks every year is far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience stores robberies in the country

Chicago passed a similar ordinance earlier this year:

“Now the bosses are going to know that the workers have rights, too,” said Maria Garcia, a member of the labor group Arise Chicago, which spearheaded the campaign to pass the law. Interviewed in Spanish, Garcia said she’d experienced wage theft at both of the past two restaurants where she’d worked.

“Wage theft” encompasses a range of offenses. Garcia said that in her case, it had included unpaid overtime and hourly rates below the minimum wage. The term was popularized by labor activists seeking to stir moral outrage at the all-too common issue: “Wage theft” suggests that refusing to pay wages that workers have earned is a form of robbery, rather than a mere accounting dispute. Recent years have seen increasing traction for campaigns to strengthen wage theft penalties and remedies. Those efforts have also inspired a counter-attack: Last year, Florida Republicans and big businesses pushed a bill that would have overridden local wage theft measures. “We believe the existing court system is the best place for these claims,” a spokesperson for the Florida Retail Federation told the Huffington Post.

But in Florida, business groups have gone to the state legislature to try to override these local ordinances.

Labor’s wage theft efforts elsewhere have provoked pushback from big business. As Lafer noted in his EPI paper, Republicans in the Florida Legislature repeatedly tried to override local wage theft ordinances like a landmark law passed by Miami-Dade County, which created a streamlined process for wage theft claims and offered wronged workers double damages. The message of such preemption efforts, Lafer argued to Salon, is “we don’t want you to have any viable mechanism by which to get back wages that were stolen from you.”

San Antonio v Texas

I don't have nearly enough on conflict between the state and local government, though there's plenty of material.

The latest is the conflict between the city of San Antonio - which recently passed an ordinance adding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to the city's non-discrimination code. - and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who has stated that he might sue the city based on his belief that the law is an unconstitutional violation the rights of speech and religion.

It is often suggested that the major cities in the state of Texas are more liberal than the state as a whole. The fact that they tend to be more tolerant of alternative lifestyles is evidence. Abbott is running for governor, so its safe to assume that anything he does as attorney general is done with an eye towards the governor's mansion. Will a specific activity help enhance his support among the groups he is hoping to back his campaign? Those groups do not necessarily have the same pull in the major cities.

The NYT provides some detail for the conflict. most of it seems tied into the politics surrounding next year's statewide elections than the substance of the ordinance:

All of the major statewide elected positions are open contests in the Republican primary. And while voters do not head to the polls until March, many Republicans seeking statewide office have seized on San Antonio’s ordinance in what some see as a way to appeal to the grass-roots conservatives who make up the bulk of the electorate in the party’s Texas primaries.

“It is Republican statewide candidates signaling their base that they are true and trustworthy conservatives,” said Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “When you’re running for statewide office, you don’t control what the San Antonio mayor and Council do. So all you’re really doing is taking an ideological position that you then project toward the Republican primary electorate, so that they can see that you’re a social conservative and you are manning the ramparts against undesirable social change.”

For background on local non discrimination ordinances across the nation click here.