Fight for gay rights shifts to Jacksonville

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The first major gay rights showdown since Houston’s rancorous vote to repeal its anti-discrimination ordinance is shaping up in Jacksonville, the largest city in the nation whose leaders have never enacted civil rights protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Like Houston, Jacksonville is a growing Southern city where religion plays a powerful role in public life. And, as in Houston, the battle here pits a well-organized coalition of gays and business forces against energized Christian conservatives who raise issues of religious freedom and the specter of male predators in women’s bathrooms. One major difference: In Houston, voters this month rolled back an existing ordinance; in Jacksonville, for now, the issue is before elected officials.

Gay rights groups have poured tens of thousands of dollars into an aggressive effort to persuade the city council to expand its existing human rights ordinance, and to elect candidates who favor doing so.

For advocates, Jacksonville is a chance to regain momentum on the path to an ultimate goal: winning sweeping legal protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people by amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

For Christian conservatives, wounded from repeated losses in the courts culminating in the Supreme Court’s decision in June to make same-sex marriage legal nationwide, it is a chance to show that Houston was not an isolated victory.

Hundreds of people, many wearing bright orange stickers bearing the sunburst logo of the Jacksonville Coalition for Equality, a gay rights group, turned out this month for the first of three “community conversations” that Mayor Lenny Curry is convening on the so-called HRO. The expanded ordinance is not yet written but is expected to go before the city council early next year.

Inside a standing-room-only hall, where a five-member panel took questions from a moderator and then the audience, the ripple effects of Houston — where opponents’ rallying cry was “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms” — were clear.

“It’s a fact of life that predators attack women and children in bathrooms; it happens everywhere,” said one panelist, Roger Gannam, a lawyer and former Jacksonville resident who represents Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He drew jeers when he said an anti-discrimination law “will make that easier” by allowing male criminals to pose as transgender.