San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Taylor’s legacy about more than one vote
Ivy Taylor didn’t deserve it. The former San Antonio mayor and soon-to-be senior adviser with the University of North Carolina system returned to the Alamo City this past week to celebrate the unveiling of her portrait at council chambers.
After receiving a gracious welcome from her old political nemesis, Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Taylor, the first elected Black mayor in this city’s history, approached the lectern to give a short speech. Before she could say a word, shouts bellowed from the gallery.
“Shame on you, Ivy Taylor,” said Robert Vargas III, a Democratic strategist and the longtime political guru for Sheriff Javier Salazar. “Your hate has no place in the halls of San Antonio.”
Vargas’ outburst wasn’t a surprise. He had tried in vain for several days on social media to gather support for his planned protest.
In a Feb. 13 post on the Facebook page of the Rainbow Coalition of San Antonio — a group that formed in 2019 to help Nirenberg win his mayoral re-election campaign against then-Council Member Greg Brockhouse — Vargas wrote, “A portrait of Taylor is a picture of hate and has no place at City Hall.”
Ultimately, Vargas’ crusade was a solitary one, and it ended with him getting booted from council chambers.
Vargas would contend that Taylor didn’t deserve the honor she received Thursday. Wrong. What Taylor didn’t deserve was the rude treatment she received from Vargas.
Vargas’ disdain for Taylor is rooted in her 2013 decision, as an East Side council member, to vote against a municipal nondiscrimination ordinance that extended civil rights protections to members of the LGBTQ community in San Antonio.
Taylor’s vote was a bad decision, one that altered the trajectory of her career and continues to loom over her legacy. But it’s important to place that vote in a broader context.
At the time the council voted on the nondiscrimination ordinance, Taylor was in her third term as a District 2 council member. In that role, she had never uttered a word of negativity toward gays and lesbians.
In fact, in 2011, she voted, as part of an 8-3 majority, to provide benefits to domestic partners of city employees. She did this against a stormy backdrop of threats from homophobic activists that they would launch recall drives against council members who voted for the provision.
In casting her 2013 vote against the NDO, Taylor said, “I am opposed to discrimination of all forms. I believe that humans should be treated with respect and should be free from harassment for any reason.”
Taylor added, however, that she could not support the ordinance because she worried about the possibility that it might force some religious individuals “to have to choose between the law and their faith.”
The odd thing about Taylor’s vote was that the reaction against it was a delayed one.
Less than a year after the NDO vote, her council colleagues appointed her to fill the mayoral vacancy created when Julián Castro resigned to become secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The crucial vote that helped get Taylor over the top came from then-District 4 Council Member Rey Saldaña, one of the council’s most progressive voices. There were no shouts of protest against Taylor that day at council chambers.
It was only after Taylor decided in 2015 to run for another term as mayor, breaking a promise she’d made during the appointment process, that social conservatives adopted her as their champion. And that made progressives regard her as an enemy.
Realizing that her only chance to beat Democratic former state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte was to pull North Side conservatives into a coalition with East Side Black voters, Taylor cultivated an image that didn’t suit her.
At a Cornerstone Church forum, she blatantly pandered, dismissing the NDO as a waste of the council’s time.
To her credit, Taylor apologized to the LGBTQ community for that remark. She also created the city’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion to handle NDO complaints and provide training for employers and organizations on how to comply with the ordinance.
Nearly seven years after she left office, it’s easy to see Taylor as a transitional figure. She amplified the local conversation on homelessness and workforce development, setting the stage for bigger investments to come in those areas.
She also helped broker a 2016 collective-bargaining deal between the city and the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, effectively ending years of hostility between the two sides.
In a political era defined by clickbait character assassination, it’s important that we not fall into that trap in assessing Taylor. It’s fair to criticize her NDO vote. It’s not fair to use that vote to define her legacy in local politics or cast her as a hatemonger.
When assessing the former mayor, her record shows she’s no hatemonger