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Community Corner

Why the City's New Civil Rights Law is Necessary

The most important fact for the debate in Bethlehem is that there are no protections for employment discrimination related to sexual orientation at the federal or state level.

I want to respond briefly to  from my colleague Bernie O'Hare, in which important factual errors prop up some seriously wrongheaded opinions about Bethlehem's new Human Relations Commission.

My colleague is simply incorrect that the HRC duplicates federal and state protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes protections for gender identity but it does not apply to sexual orientation. The same goes for the Title IX protection against discrimination in education. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act also does not include protections for sexual orientation or gender identity, nor does the Fair Housing Act. The Obama administration issued a rule to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in federally funded and federally regulated housing programs, but it seems like a safe bet that this will be rolled back by the next Republican President.

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In the comments section of , my colleague went on to claim that each of these statutes includes sexual orientation as a protected class, and on each count he is wrong. He also cites ENDA as a protection, which is bizarre since it is only a proposed bill, which pro-equality activists have been trying to get passed for years with no success. It is hard to see how a stalled bill would be of much use to anyone in a discrimination case.

The most important fact for the debate in Bethlehem is that there are no protections for employment discrimination related to sexual orientation at the federal or state level.

Find out what's happening in Bethlehemwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

And that is what makes these local laws so important. Washington and Harrisburg have totally failed to count LGBT people among the other protected groups, despite the fact that they face persistent discrimination, as a group, in many of the same ways that other out racial and social groups do. So local governments have to pick up the slack. Think of it as local government passing the Civil Rights Act, but just covering more people. The kinds of tactics it guards against are no different than the tactics the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is designed to guard against.

If it's Big Brother government to extend the same protections to LGBT people that other out social groups receive under the Civil Rights Act, I'd ask what parts of the Civil Rights Act you disagree with?

My colleague is absolutely right that similar laws enacted in Allentown and Easton haven't purged gay-bashing from all the land, but he misses the point. The real goal here is to give people facing unfair discrimination from employers, store owners and landlords the recourse to do something about specific conflicts. It's about getting practical problems resolved.

Now, if my colleague thinks that the policy is poorly designed, or that there are too many exemptions for the law to have the desired effect,  then the appropriate response would be to narrow the exemptions. It is difficult to understand, then, why Mr. O'Hare concludes from this that the whole commission is a mistake.

Another important point, from a service delivery perspective, is that even if the HRC was redundant, having a local process means complaints can be dealt with in days and weeks, not months. Swiftness is important both for justice and for deterrence. And it also doesn't really make sense to take what are really local issues to the state and federal level if they can be resolved locally.

In addition to my strong disagreements with Mr. O'Hare on the policy, I thought the arbitrary use of a notorious gay stereotype was in poor taste, not to mention quite disgusting. (Would that we had been spared the mental image of gerbils foraging in the wilderness...)

Mr. O'Hare says he intended this as reductio ad absurdism, but it is an existing stereotype that homosexuals have more exotic or perverted sex lives than heterosexuals. None other than our Rick memorably equated homosexuality with bestiality. These kinds of negative stereotypes are loaded with meaning, and they are employed most frequently by people who want to deny LGBT people their civil rights. 

Fortunately, a majority on Bethlehem city council disagrees with my colleague, and appears set to approve the Human Rights Commission once again this Friday.

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