Heresy in Houston

The big news this week in the Bayou City is the subpoenaing of local pastors’ sermons by lawyers for the city on a witch-hunt.

But the bigger story is that what’s wrong in Houston—and many other cities, too—represents a trend with dangerous implications for democratic government as the nation becomes more urban.

Annise Parker was elected in 2009 as Houston’s first openly gay mayor, and succeeded earlier this year in passing an equal rights ordinance for the city that added the vogue “actual or perceived” dimension to the city’s nondiscrimination provision regarding “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.”

That’s the new lexicon that allows a biological male to declare he is a woman (or vice versa) for legal, constitutional and protected-status purposes—physical reality to the contrary notwithstanding.

As of presstime, political efforts by truly radical groups like NAMBLA (to allow underage boys or girls to claim themselves to be consenting adults, for example) haven’t reached critical mass in any major cities … yet.

When Houston’s city council approved Parker’s equal rights ordinance 116, local residents mobilized in opposition, gathering 55,000 signatures in a referendum petition that would force either a repeal or a popular vote.

After internally validating 31,000 signatures as belonging to registered voters, opponents submitted the petition to the city on July 3.

On July 27 the city secretary—who has sole responsibility regarding such petitions—certified it as meeting the minimum number of 17,269 signatures.

Inexplicably, the city attorney (who received a 43 percent pay raise from the mayor this year to $350,000, making him the second-highest-paid city attorney in the nation) decided to conduct his own, unauthorized review of the petition.

He disqualified more than half of the petition pages—enough that the legal threshold was not met. The mayor and the council quickly rejected the petition, after which several Houstonians sued.

It is in response to that lawsuit that subpoenas were issued to five local pastors (none of whom are plaintiffs or named parties to the litigation).

Parker has said that she didn’t know about the subpoenas beforehand, and blamed pro bono attorneys for what she said were “overly broad” requests that sought “all speeches, presentations, or sermons related to H[ouston] ERO, the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession.”

Texas law specifically prohibits “overly broad” discovery phase requests, and the state attorney general sent the mayor a letter urging her to withdraw the subpoenas.

Its willingness to infringe on religious liberty suggests the city administration has such little faith in public support of the equal rights ordinance that it’s waging an “at all costs” battle to keep it from a citizen vote. If Parker seems frightened by the specter of popular opposition, she should be, and not just because Halloween is in the air.

In three elections, her vote tally has never been more than 10 percent of registered voters.

Incredible as it seems for a city of 2 million people, voter turnout in Houston mayoral elections is nothing less than atrocious.

In her first 2009 election, Parker won in a runoff by collecting 82,175 votes, which was 53 percent of the total cast.

That’s a mere 8 percent of registered voters; hardly the stuff of which mandates are made.

In her second election in 2011, she only got 59,920 votes (of about 118,000 total)—barely 6 percent. Her zenith came in her election last year, when she mustered 97,009 votes, just shy of 10 percent of registered voters and not even 5 percent of the total population.

Contrast that with Little Rock, in which more than 56,000 city residents cast votes in the 2006 election that put Mayor Mark Stodola in office—out of a population of only about 190,000. Houston wasn’t always so apathetic. In 1970 the city had a population of 1.2 million, and in 1971 (the last year available through the city secretary’s website) 268,390 votes were counted in the mayoral election.

In 2013 the city had a population of nearly 2.2 million with 167,829 votes cast in the mayor’s race.

Why population increased 83 percent but voter participation decreased 37 percent over the last 42 years is unclear, but whatever the reason(s), it bodes ill for representative government.

Little wonder Parker might have gotten the feeling that she could do what she wanted and nobody would care; statistically nobody cared to vote during her elections.

Initiatives like Parker’s equal rights ordinance tend to have an air of narrow personal principle over practicality about them.

They are often born not of demonstrable discrimination, but of determination to make a politically correct point.

The transgendered population of Houston is tiny, and occasionally some old-fashioned types might balk at letting a man in the ladies room no matter what gender identity he claims.

But in a city with murder and assault rates twice the national average, and a robbery rate nearly four times higher, you’d think the mayor might care more about helping the many, many real violent-crime victims experiencing real suffering.

And she might—if more people voted.