After Arkansas enacted an odious law last week that effectively keeps any jurisdiction in the state from passing nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people, finger-pointing ensued.
A timeline of events was recounted in a Washington Post piece titled, "That anti-gay bill in Arkansas actually became law today. Why couldn’t activists stop it?" The implication, if not explicitly stated, was how could a movement with a $50-million-annual-budget organization like the Human Rights Campaign fail so miserably at blocking the bill? The answer came in an update at the end of the article:
An HRC spokesperson notes that the HRC’s Arkansas chapter was on record against SB 202 since it was introduced into the Arkansas legislature in early February.
In the mind's eye of HRC, being "on record" against something is worthy of note—perhaps they even believe it qualifies as a campaign. It does not. And I would like to be very clear here that no local spokesperson or field staff in Arkansas should be held accountable for the missteps of those at the national headquarters in Washington, DC.
This was not simply a defeat on one bill in one state, but rather the failure to mount a national campaign that demonstrates what LGBT discrimination looks like to the American people. I wrote about the need for such a campaign repeatedly last year as a columnist for The Advocate, gently nudging our national organizations and HRC, in particular, to articulate such a vision in the wake of Arizona's religious "freedom" bill, SB 1062, and then again after LGBT issues gained no visibility in the midterms. But subtlety has been useless. So here it is: HRC's failure to leverage its considerable resources to come up with something more than an article aggrandizing itself in the New York Times is nothing short of pathetic.
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That 2014 article, titled "Gay Rights Push Shifts Its Focus South and West," indicated that HRC would be opening field offices in Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas. To its credit, it clearly did open up a field office—or at least hire a representative—in Arkansas. Then it seemed to leave the local office dangling in the wind as SB 202 swept through the state legislature. (Fortunately, HRC rallied to help successfully kill a separate antigay bill in Arkansas that came on the heels of SB 202.)
But Arkansas' SB 202 required a strong, swift, and national response precisely because it's part of a national strategy that anti-LGBT hate groups are executing nationwide. In many ways, the Arkansas bill was the worst of the lot, because it blocked any future nondiscrimination protections from being enacted statewide. Such a law already exists in Tennessee, and Texas is currently working on passing a similar bill. Meanwhile, the religious "freedom" bills that are newly popping up around the country often seek to ensure that people who deny services to LGBT people for religious reasons cannot be sued. Though these measures vary from state to state, overall more than a dozen anti-LGBT bills that are intended to either make it harder to protect LGBT Americans from discrimination—or easier to discriminate against them—are currently working their way through state legislatures.
Now, in most states, LGBT Americans have no recourse anyway because federal law does not protect them in employment, housing, or public accommodations the way it does other minorities on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex. While 18 states provide LGBT workplace protections, only some of them (and a patchwork of local jurisdictions) have enacted housing and public accommodations protections.
What this means is that gay people can marry in far more states (37) than they can count on job security in if they, for instance, display a wedding picture on their desk. By my count, 17 of the states where same-sex marriage has been legalized also provide no nondiscrimination protections whatsoever for gay and transgender residents.
But even in the marriage equality states that do protect LGBT residents from discrimination, only about a handful of cases have cropped up where same-sex couples have sued someone for refusing them service. A Washington florist, a Colorado baker, and a New Mexico wedding photographer are the most prominent examples, and those cases have gotten plenty of play in the national media. In fact, anti-LGBT groups are presently doing a masterful job of turning the very few people who have been subject to some type of accountability for discriminating into sympathetic victims of pushy gays.
In truth, the cases are so few that when the former governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, ultimately vetoed the state's religious "freedom" bill last year, she said she could find no instances in her state were someone's religious beliefs had been compromised.
“I have not heard of one example in Arizona where a business owner’s religious liberty has been violated,” Brewer said, explaining her decision to veto the bill at a February 26 press conference.
In other words, it was a bill in search of a problem. Meanwhile, nearly 500 LGBT residents in the state over the last four years had filed discrimination complaints with Lambda Legal, an LGBT legal group. Got that? Zero actual people felt their religious beliefs had been violated, while almost 500 LGBT people had experienced some form of discrimination.
Yet somehow, the right is totally winning the messaging war here. Indeed, a recent Associated Press poll found that although more Americans support marriage equality (44 percent) than oppose it (39 percent), 57 percent also think it should be perfectly legal for people to refuse service to same-sex couples.
It's mind-boggling. But since HRC has failed to mount a national campaign to publicize the multitude of ways in which gay and transgender Americans get cut of housing or fired from jobs or refused service or harassed, I'd like to revisit one recent campaign that successfully elevated the stories of same-sex couples who faced separation before DOMA was overturned.
These were couples where a U.S. citizen couldn't sponsor their foreign-born partner for residency because the federal government wouldn't recognize their marriage. Some of them remained in the U.S. while living in fear of deportation, some of them separated and conducted long-distance relationships, and some of them chose to move to a country that would recognize their marriage even if it wasn't their desire to leave the U.S.
Though the issue was eventually alleviated by the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Windsor that gutted DOMA, Immigration Equality spent several years prior to the ruling building momentum for a legislative fix. (In the interest of full disclosure, I also worked as a consultant for the group for a little over a year.)
The person who executed the media campaign to raise the profile of these heart-wrenching situations was Steve Ralls, former communications director for Immigration Equality, and, prior to that, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. I asked him to pick several important stories he placed in the media that helped raise public awareness, generate more media attention on the issue, and rally lawmakers to the cause. Here's what he sent me:
1. A Gay Mom Faces Deportation, People Magazine, April 2009
In 2009, People Magazine featured Shirley Tan and Jay Mercado in their print edition. The article, published just as Sen. Dianne Feinstein was considering whether to introduce a private Senate bill that would allow Shirley to remain in the U.S., wasn't just unique because it portrayed a gay immigrant family. It was also meaningful because it marked one of the first sympathetic portrayals of any immigrant family in a magazine with deep reaches into middle America.
Shortly after the article appeared, Feinstein announced that she would, indeed, take legislative action to stop Shirley's removal from the country.
2.
Bill Proposes Immigration Rights for Gay Couples, New York Times, June 2009
In June 2009, Julia Preston wrote the New York Times' first story on the issue, previewing the first-ever Senate hearing on the Uniting American Families Act and noting that few other bills had ever bypassed the subcommittee process and gone straight to a full hearing before. That coverage, in turn, helped pack the Senate hearing room with Capitol Hill reporters, spawning the first "wave" of coverage surrounding Immigration Equality's legislative work on the bill. The media push was instrumental in earning the steadfast support of Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chaired the Judiciary committee and took the lead on the bill all the way through to the final debate surrounding inclusion of LGBT families in comprehensive immigration reform.
3.
S.F. gay married couple loses immigration battle, San Francisco Chronicle, August 2011
The case of Bradford Wells and his husband, Anthony Makk, was another critical tipping point in the debate over LGBT-inclusive immigration reform. Bradford and Anthony were featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article that drew nationwide attention to their case, and the issue in general. The public reaction to the initial story was so overwhelming that the Chronicle ended up writing numerous stories about the couple's ordeal. In fact, their story was one of the most "clicked" articles at the Chronicle website for that entire year, and reporter Carolyn Lochhead followed their journey from start to finish. As a result, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi became an aggressive advocate for Bradford and Anthony, and the larger issue, every step of the way.
4.
Federal marriage law may force deportation of many immigrant gay spouses, Washington Post, December 2012
An incredible example of the power of stories to change public opinion on an issue is evident in the Washington Post coverage of Kelly Costello and Fabiola Morales. The women, who were fighting to remain together even as Fabiola battled multiple sclerosis, helped to enlist Maryland lawmakers in Immigration Equality's work and, even more importantly, resulted in Kelly being invited to the State of the Union address in 2013, which led to additional opportunities to highlight her story.
These four articles track how one organization brought attention to a virtually unknown problem and helped build legislative support for it.
The Human Rights Campaign surely has the resources to find sympathetic stories just like these, poll test messaging, and develop a campaign that demonstrates why nondiscrimination protections are so important to LGBT Americans across the country.
Right now, the movement is playing the game on the terms that right wing conservatives have dictated to us. We are combating these bills one by one—battling public perception in the states they have chosen and fighting the language of the legislation they have written. Articulating a grand vision for LGBT equality alongside a well executed media campaign would put the movement back on offense. That work should have begun a year ago after we dodged a bullet in Arizona. But better late than never.