Houston Defeats Gay Rights Issues : Anti-Bias Bid Loses by 4-1 Margin in Heavy Voter Turnout

Two anti-discrimination proposals, which together were dubbed the “gay rights ordinance,” were defeated Saturday by margins of more than 4 to 1 in a heavy voter turnout.

With 96% of Houston’s 418 precincts reporting, and more than 220,000 votes counted, each measure was losing by a margin of more than 81% to 18%. About 28% of Houston’s registered voters cast ballots.

Lawyer Richard Barrett, who campaigned against the issues, called the vote “a victory for the people. It’s a victory for majority rule instead of minority rule.”

Meanwhile, Jack Valinsi of the Houston Gay Political Caucus said the margin of defeat was a surprising one, but he said Houston’s gay community would not creep off into a corner and hide.

“We look at it just as when the ERA (equal rights amendment) went down. We’ve got to regroup and go on from here. Civil rights is a lifelong struggle,” he said.

Neither ballot issue mentioned the words “homosexual” or “gay,” but residents were asked to decide whether sexual preference should be barred as a consideration in hiring, firing and promoting city employees.

Opponents insisted that approval would grant legal status to homosexuals in the nation’s fourth-largest city. Backers argued that the proposals would merely extend anti-discrimination protection.

Political analysts said before the referendum that a turnout of 30% of the voters would be almost three times above normal for an election to decide issues rather than candidates.

Proposition A would bar the city from discriminating on the basis of “sexual orientation” in its hiring, promoting or firing of employees. It was being rejected 187,175 to 42,092, or 81.6% to 18.4%, with 403 precincts counted.

Proposition B would allow the city to continue to monitor the hiring of women, blacks and Latinos but would block such record-keeping according to sexual orientation. It was being defeated by 186,370 to 40,790, or 82% to 18%, with the same number of precincts counted.

Beginnings of Movement

The movement behind the referendum was planted 13 months ago when Anthonoy Hall, a black city councilman, proposed adding “sexual orientation” to city hiring policies that already barred discrimination on the basis of “race, color, age, disability, sex or national origin.”

No action was taken until June, when a city council majority, including Mayor Kathy Whitmire, narrowly approved Hall’s idea. Opponents quickly gathered more than 60,000 signatures on petitions, forcing the council either to rescind its vote or to call an election.

The council opted for the election, at a cost of some $300,000.

Houston’s gay population has been reported at times as the nation’s second largest after San Francisco, where 15% of the 700,000 residents are gay. However, experts say that they have no way of estimating how many homosexuals live in Houston or work for the city government.

Analysts say the outcome of the vote will indicate larger trends in Houston’s political power structure, now split between the old-line conservatives, including much of the city’s business community, and a liberal faction led by Whitmire.

“If there’s ever an issue to mobilize that constituency, this is it,” Richard Murray, a political analyst at the University of Houston, said. “It will tell us something about power in the city.”

The Rev. Bill Oliver, a civil rights activist working for the proposals, also insists that the question is not one of gay rights. “It’s clearly about job discrimination in public employment,” he said.

The opponents included an unlikely alliance of such diverse groups as the predominantly black Concerned Pastors and Ministers of Houston, the Ku Klux Klan and the Houston Chamber of Commerce.

Black ministers objected to the creation of a new minority group. “Nobody yet has come up with any factual information about discrimination in jobs,” the Rev. C. Anderson Davis of Concerned Pastors and Ministers said.