BuzzFeed News
On Tuesday, voters here will decide the fate of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which bans a wide range of discrimination. It was passed by the city council in 2014 and will now be placed before voters to be upheld or repealed.
But there’s a hitch: Many Houstonians simply don’t think the ordinance is about discrimination.
“I haven’t heard it bans discrimination,” Cory Alters told BuzzFeed News as he waited for the bus on a blustery Friday afternoon. With four days remaining before the vote, Alters said he had only heard that the measure required letting men and transgender women into women’s bathrooms.
“Bathrooms are the hot-ticket item — that’s what everybody is talking about,” he said. “I don’t want girls in my bathroom, and girls don’t want guys in their bathroom.”
One block down Travis Street, 44-year old Donna L., who refused to give her full last name, said the same: “I heard people saying pedophiles would be going into restrooms. That is the main thing everybody is talking about. I hadn’t heard anything else.”
Of the roughly two dozen voters BuzzFeed News interviewed in Houston, about half believed the ordinance applied solely to granting men and transgender people access to public bathrooms. Roughly a quarter knew of the law’s wider scope banning discrimination. Another quarter knew nothing about it.
The vote comes at an especially critical moment for the LGBT movement. After winning marriage at the Supreme Court in June, leaders of top organizations vowed to use the wind at their backs to pass laws prohibiting discrimination in cities, states, and eventually the whole country. A bill in Congress, the Equality Act, was introduced in July but has stagnated without a single Republican co-sponsor.
Yet the fact is, rather than expand the number of jurisdictions with such laws, LGBT activists are simply trying to defend this law already on the books in Houston. So this election, in the country’s fourth-largest metropolis, will test the LGBT movement's ability to meet their recalibrated mission and gain momentum. Losing in Houston will suggest the LGBT movement has a steeper hill to climb now that it did with marriage equality.
John Crawford, 65, is a quintessential Houston voter for low-turnout, odd-year elections, which tend to skew senior.
A man urges people to vote against the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance outside an early voting center on Oct. 21.
Pat Sullivan / AP
“The equal rights ordinance?” the Uber driver said, making eye contact in the rear view mirror. “The only thing that I have heard is that it allows men who dress up like women going into the ladies room. I heard commercials that said it would increase crime. If a person woke up one day and said, ‘I identify as a woman,’ he could just go into the bathroom to see titties or booty.”
“What else could it do?” he asked.
Called HERO for short, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance doesn’t directly address bathrooms. It bans discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, and 10 other characteristics. Some of those classes already receive protections at the state and federal level. But with HERO in limbo while it’s on the ballot, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people currently lack any discrimination protections in Houston — and covering LGBT people was a prime impetus for passing the law.
HERO covers jobs, housing, and in places of public accommodations — including hotels, restaurants, and public restrooms. As such, transgender women can’t be barred from women’s restrooms. That is the point of friction for critics, or, at least, has exposed an Achilles heel for them to attack.
Opponents latched onto the bathroom complaint when the city council passed HERO in May 2014, and they stuck with that message after the Texas Supreme Court unexpectedly ruled in July that the ordinance must be placed on the November ballot.
Now the group Campaign for Houston, has been pelting voters with a nearly singular message in ads, yard signs, and mailers: Prop. 1 would allow sexually predatory men into women’s restrooms. They dubbed it “the bathroom ordinance” and ran television commercials depicting a man trapping a little girl in a bathroom stall.
The saturation of that message — and the consistency with which it has been advanced — was perhaps nowhere more clear than when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted on Monday, “Vote NO on City of Houston Proposition 1. No men in women's bathrooms.”
The focus makes sense, given polling data. Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice University who oversaw a poll by his college and the University of Houston that was released Oct. 11, told BuzzFeed News that he tested messages to gauge persuasiveness. He found that raising the bathroom issue was the most effective means to cool support for the law. It swung nearly 7% of voters to oppose the measure.
At the time, support for upholding HERO was ahead 43%-37%, with 20% of voters unsure or refusing to say how they would vote. But Stein said turnout was especially high in early voting, particularly among Republicans, who oppose HERO, and African-American voters, who tend to be more undecided. With those factors taken into account, Stein said Friday, “I think it suggests that the ordinance might be not be upheld.”
That framing by opponents of HERO, who are outspent more than three to one, is still winning the day on city streets. Not limited to Houston, either, bathroom concerns have dominated debates and derailed — or distracted — nondiscrimination policies the past year in Ohio, Florida, California, Arkansas, and Missouri.
In other Texas cities that ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation — plus roughly 200 cities and 17 states around the U.S. — there are no clear examples of the laws being abused for men to be inappropriate in restrooms. And predatory behavior in bathrooms remains illegal in all of those places, which undermines the argument.
But those facts don’t matter, politically. Whether the LGBT movement wants the conversation to be about bathrooms or not, it is.
The message is kryptonite for some voters and lawmakers. It’s clear, particularly in Houston, that LGBT advocacy leaders don’t have a cohesive strategy for inoculating voters from the attack or pivoting away. Sure, the bathroom myth appears divorced from reality, and there is a case for ignoring it. But given its virility, it could stand in the way of more cities and states backing nondiscrimination laws — a key part of the momentum LGBT advocates are looking to use in exerting pressure on Congress to pass the Equality Act.
If Houston upholds HERO, it will be because the unprecedented investments of cash and staff to defend it. The Human Rights Campaign has shipped 34 full-time employees from its Washington, D.C., headquarters to Houston (“I don’t think we have ever had a local or state battle where we have had 34 staffers on the ground,” said president Chad Griffin). The ACLU of Texas sacrificed its entire office to become the campaign’s headquarters, even tearing down a wall to expand for an influx of campaign workers (“It was like rabbits multiplying,” laughed Terri Burke, the group’s executive director).
Houston Unites, the campaign to uphold HERO, has largely avoided addressing the bathroom issue head-on. The campaign ran a commercial with retired police officer Ed Gonzalez pointing out that the bathroom predators would remain criminals under the law.
"If I understand, part is about picking the restroom you want...I am going to vote against it because of that."
Campaign manager Richard Carlbom didn’t say how much airtime they bought for that ad. But he stressed that while it’s useful to denounce misinformation, the campaign must give voters something to support. Most of the airtime has highlighted the positive: veterans, pastors, people of color, men, and women talking about how an equitable city is good for Houston.
But it’s not clear how well that’s resonating.
“I know it covers a lot of areas — veterans of course,” Sharome Robinson, a Houston Police Department officer told me while she waited for her bus near the agency’s downtown headquarters. “I’m for some of it, and against some of it. If I understand, part is about picking the restroom you want. I am a police officer, so males entering the restrooms, that does not sit well with me. It’s not legal now, but it still happens. People follow kids into bathrooms and assault them today. But if this passes, who would have the authority to stop them? If there is no longer any rule against it, who can question that person?”
“I am going to vote against it because of that reason,” she said. “All of the other good things go by the wayside.”
A SurveyUSA poll released October 15 showed HERO up by nine percentage points — 45 to 36.
Carlbom would not disclose his group’s own polling, but he said the margin has narrowed in recent weeks, as expected, as undecided voters make up their minds. “It’s absolutely a dead heat,” he said. “Tracking polls happen every night. They show it is going to be a very, very, very close race. It shows that, you know, Houstonians have a lot of anxiety about what the opposition has said and they are sorting through it.”
Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas, sat at her conference room table and reflected on how much they should rebut the bathroom message. “We hit it hard, but we weren’t going waste our precious dollars on talking about friggin’ bathrooms when it’s a lie. Do you know what a television commercial in Houston costs? I’ll tell ya — it’s costing us over $300,000 a week. You think we are going to spend $300,000 a week to keep talking about bathrooms?”
Still, she said, she wondered if activists should have tackled the bathroom message earlier. She recalled that right after the city council passed the ordinance in May 2014, she and her husband got a mailer that showed a man with a cape covering his face leaving a women’s restroom — it said this is what HERO would do.
“Where I would fault us is not having fought back in June of 2014,” said Burke, glancing at her communications director for a green light to keep talking. “I mean, start a public education campaign right then about how bogus that is. When given the opportunity, when we were asked, we certainly said it, but we didn’t launch a campaign. And I think we probably should have in retrospect.”
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Arriving from Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, six days before the vote, Chad Griffin left the airport in time to meet donors for lunch. The president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBT organization, Griffin flew in for his group’s final push, which entailed raising enough money to keep ads on the air.
“I am cautiously optimistic,” Griffin said. “These battles are tough, these battles are expensive, and, you know, our opponents don’t fight these battles on the playing field of truth. They choose to avoid any sort of public discussion or public debate and push misleading ads, lies, the most transphobic ads I’ve perhaps ever seen to the voters — by the way, in the last 10 days, because then it is very difficult to come back and challenge that.” Instead of rebutting the ads or changing tack, the strategy seems to be just to outgun that opposition with more of the ads they’ve already made.
Griffin was set to introduce Sally Field at a private fundraiser in the lush neighborhood of Southampton that evening, but first he toured the campaign headquarters. It started with a briefing like something from a reality TV show about campaigns:
“What can we do, Richard?” Griffin asked Carlbom, the campaign manager.
“More money?” said Carlbom.
Griffin: “What is the gap that we need to raise?”
Carlbom: “Honestly, it’s $180,000.”
Griffin: “Hopefully tonight.”
Carlbom: “I sheepishly implore you to do more.”
Griffin’s group filed its own local political action committee in Houston, which raises money from donors and hands over the proceeds to Houston Unites. “We’ll have over $600,000 into this campaign, maybe $650,000,” Griffin said. That cash also accounts for the nearly three dozen HRC staff shipped into Houston, and contributes to a total budget that had surpassed $3 million on Wednesday and was on its way to $4 million by Election Day.
Houston Mayor Annise Parker, left, speaks with actress Sally Field, right, and Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin, center on Oct. 28.
Michael Stravato / AP Images for Human Rights Campaign
In contrast, their opposition has reported a fraction of that money. The two opposition PACs are both named Campaigns for Houston. One is filed with the state and another with the city, and they have reported combined expenditures of nearly $900,000, according to BuzzFeed News’s records requests and online campaign finance reports.
Griffin walked downstairs into the campaign hive. HRC brought in their own video crew, which recorded Griffin meeting staffers in red HERO t-shirts. Coffee cups and empty to-go containers mingled on folding tables with tape, pens, string, and clip boards. Volunteers with headsets attached to their cell phones pored over voters rolls and asked people how they plan to vote (definitely vote yes was marked with a “Y,” lean no “L,” not voting “V”).
Griffin circulated among the crew, who were exuberant about taking selfies with him.
Forty-five full-time campaign staffers and untold number of volunteers were coming and going, making calls, departing for neighborhood canvasses. At one point, Carlbom said, their crew drove 50 people to an early voting location.
HRC chief communications director Olivia Dalton flashed her phone in a hallway. “We just got this video of Michael Sam.” The out gay player, the first to be drafted into the NFL — he is no longer in the league — was endorsing Prop. 1 in a video. “We’ll put it out tomorrow.”
These are the standard instruments of major campaigns — ads, calls, door-knocking, van pools, videos — yet this is an exceptionally complex, well-funded, expertise-packed effort for a ballot measure in a city. Especially so when considering the Texas Supreme Court only issued the ruling that began the campaign two months earlier. It’s a testament to just how difficult, and expensive, passing a nondiscrimination ordinance is with a public vote.
“This obviously was unfortunate, and not something that anyone thought would happen,” Griffin said, referring to defending a law that was already on the books. For its opponents, “in many ways, with the success of 50-state marriage ruling, I actually think that for some of these folks it even further motivates their base.”
Griffin and HRC workers
HRC
Even if HERO passes, the size of the operation required to hold on to a nondiscrimination law in Houston raises an obvious question about whether it’s feasible to do this across the entire country. The opposition’s message is so potent that beating it through sheer force is expensive — and the LGBT movement appears largely at a loss for how to best combat it. Many states don’t offer a ballot initiative process. And their legislatures and governors’ mansions are mostly held by Republicans, most of whom remain hostile to LGBT legislation. And, the federal options for a nationwide solutions are limited and not as clean, so to say, as a resolution as the marriage cases provided.
“Houston is important because of its size, it’s important of its location, it’s important because it was one of the last major American cities to get these protections, and it’s important because our opponents are coming with a hateful and misleading campaign to try to take it away,” said Griffin.
Then the crowded office cleared out and everyone bee-lined to a new, classically designed house in Houston’s lush Southampton neighborhood.
Inside the front door of the house, where Field was about to speak, I was looking for the bathroom. Someone said it was right in front of me, but I was befuddled until a woman piped up, “You have to push on the bookcase.” There was a little handle to swing the bookcase inward to reveal a bathroom. The books, a ceramic bowl, and an ornamental bird were glued to the shelves so they wouldn’t tumble off. This spy-movie-style secret door — intentionally or not — had the effect of allowing guests at the upscale fundraiser to travel between the foyer and parlor without being forced to think about a toilet.
Bathrooms were the elephant in this house — and yet they went unspoken.
“I have a tendency to get teary when I talk about this stuff because it’s so important to me,” Field said.
“Really the whole country is listening,” she said. “They are listening. And I know the really good and productive and loving people are listening, and unfortunately those evil-minded people are also listening — and hoping that we fail.”
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