Last night, voters in Houston, Texas went to the polls and rejected their city’s new anti-discrimination law.
The vote wasn’t even close, with a full 63 percent of voters opposing the measure.
This is a big loss for Houstonians of all backgrounds.
Passed by the city council earlier last year, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO, gave 15 different classes of people protection from discrimination in public places, at their jobs, and in housing.
It was a common sense piece of legislation, the kind of thing all Americans who believe in giving everyone access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should support.
But because HERO also protected LGBT people from discrimination, conservatives had a freak-out.
They latched onto the part of the law that protected transgender people from being discriminated against in public places like bathrooms and started screaming about how it gave sexual predators a license to creep on their kids.
The usual suspects then lobbied to get the law on the ballot and pumped out fear-mongering ads.
Let’s be clear: there was nothing in Houston’s anti-discrimination law that would have allowed sexual predators to threaten anyone’s kids, full-stop, end of story.
This was the voter-fraud myth all over again, a fake and frankly bigoted story aimed solely at bringing the base out to vote for Republicans while they're in the voting booth trying to stop "evil" from happening.
The really ridiculous thing, though, is that the bathroom issue was just one tiny part of a law that also protected people like veterans from being discriminated against when they applied for jobs or public housing.
In other words, thanks to Republicans, employers in Houston can now refuse to hire someone just because they fought in the Iraq War.
So much for supporting our troops, right?
