St. Louis Unanimously and Quietly Passes One of Strongest Gay Rights Laws in U.S.

While voters in other cities have loudly debated and sometimes rejected civil rights protection for homosexuals, St. Louis has quietly adopted one of the strongest gay-rights laws in the nation.

The ordinance, passed unanimously by the city’s Board of Alderman, drew so little attention that its adoption went unreported for two months until the St. Louis-based Lesbian and Gay News-Telegraph carried a story it its Dec. 3 issue.

“One doesn’t think of St. Louis as being in the progressive rank of cities,” said Jim Thomas, editor of the News-Telegraph, which is distributed in five states. But he said of the law’s passage: “We didn’t even have to fight, or even work much.”

The law bars discrimination in housing, credit, employment, education and public access on the grounds of physical or mental disability, race, religion, family status and sexual orientation.

“It clearly is one of the strongest laws of the 130 we have in the United States,” said Robert Bray, a spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C.

Laws in many other cities and states are less comprehensive, he said. Some may protect homosexuals from housing discrimination, for example, but not job discrimination.

Only 260 miles away, in Kansas City, a religious group is calling for repeal of a civil rights law that, although it doesn’t bar homosexual discrimination, could be amended to do so. It was during debate of the Kansas City measure that St. Louis’ new law was first widely mentioned.

The St. Louis board included a clause in its law to prevent it from being repealed by referendum, said James Wilson, the city’s lawyer.

Bray said that was unusual and praised the move.

“Once you have granted civil rights, you can’t take them away by popular vote,” he said. “Women would still be in the kitchen; blacks would still be on the plantation.”

Mary Ross, the alderwoman who introduced the measure, said she wasn’t trying to be a trailblazer. She simply wanted to update the city’s civil rights protections.

“I think we covered, hopefully, everybody in this legislation (who) could possibly be discriminated against in one manner or another, and that is the intent,” she said. “It is not a gay-rights thing.”

Ross said she wasn’t lobbied on the issue and hasn’t received any complaints.

The law also created a civil rights commission, which has the power to investigate, fine violators up to $500 and jail them for up to 90 days.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the city’s only daily newspaper, reported on the law Dec. 13, explaining that Ross and other officials described it as a routine update to keep St. Louis eligible for federal grants.

“I think the fact that it passed without any rancor speaks well for the board and the city,” Thomas Villa, president of the Board of Aldermen, told the News-Telegraph.

Since then, there have been no letters to the editor, but the Post-Dispatch carried an editorial Dec. 20 saying that, although the law “rightly adds sexual orientation to the factors that are protected from discrimination,” there should have been an opportunity for more public debate before it was passed.

Elsewhere, 1992 was a seesaw year for gay-rights laws, with opponents nationwide complaining that such laws create special rights for homosexuals.

Voters in Colorado approved a measure repealing anti-bias laws protecting gays from discrimination and banning all of the state’s cities from passing any future laws. A judge blocked that amendment from taking effect Friday, saying it may well be unconstitutional.

Denver District Judge Jeffrey Bayless judge blocked the measure until a lawsuit challenging it is decided--probably not before late this year.

Voters in Tampa, Fla., overturned a city ordinance protecting homosexuals, and in Louisville, Ky., the city’s aldermen defeated a proposal to amend a civil rights law to protect homosexuals.

In Oregon, voters defeated a ballot measure that would have branded homosexuality “abnormal and perverse,” while voters in Portland, Me., turned back an effort to repeal their city’s gay-rights law.

City commissioners in Miami Beach, Fla., also voted to bar discrimination against homosexuals, and California Gov. Pete Wilson signed legislation to protect gays and lesbians from job discrimination.