LGBT Community Wins Big In Recent Popular Votes

As the fight for marriage equality nears a likely end this June, the broader fight for LGBT equality will shift to anti-discrimination protections. In the last couple of days, two votes have taken place with this as a central issue.

Votes of the citizenry on anti-discrimination ordinances have not gone so well in the past. Fayetteville repealed its in December. Springfield repealed its last month. But in the past week, the trend of popular votes against equality was bucked.

We begin in Arkansas. In February, the Eureka Springs city council passed an anti-discrimination ordinance covering employment in companies that have contracts with the city that bans discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity. This was a challenge to SB 202, which invalidates local anti-discrimination ordinances on grounds/attributes not covered in state law. Signatures were collected to force a veto referendum, but the voters backed the council.

From The New Civil Rights Movement:

The tiny resort town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, has voted overwhelmingly to retain the town's non-discrimination ordinance. The LGBT protections were adopted by the city council in anticipation of a new state law that forbids communities from extending any LGBT protections not offered by the state. After the state legislature passed that onerus law, Eureka Springs put its new ordinance up for a popular vote.

Of the 1700 registered voters in Eureka Springs, 4029TV reports that there were 579 votes in favor of keeping the protections in place and only 231 votes against the new ordinance, which requires all vendors doing business with the town to have in place an LGBT non-discrimination policy.

It is unclear how state officials will respond to the town's act of defiance.

And the success stories don't end there. A less known vote was the Anchorage mayoral election on May 6. This was a run-off between Democrat Ethan Berkowitz and Republican Amy Demboski. The former supports LGBT equality. The latter does not. The Human Rights Campaign reports on the election's outcome:

Exciting news out of Alaska today as Ethan Berkowitz claimed victory in the Anchorage mayoral race with a resounding 59% of the vote. According to election officials, the early turnout for the election was one of the biggest in Anchorage history.

Berkowitz, who Alaskans Together for Equality endorsed, has been a strong supporter of LGBT rights, consistently speaking in favor of adding a non-discrimination ordinance to Alaska’s largest city.

“This is our Anchorage,” Berkowitz said at last night’s victory party. “It doesn’t matter if you’re straight or gay or lesbian or transgender.”

He was up against Amy Demboski, who touted an adamantly anti-LGBT agenda, including her opposition to adding non-discrimination protections to Anchorage law. The campaign took several negative turns as she and her supporters attempted to use Ethan’s support of non-discrimination laws to attack him and turn out their voters.

Clearly, it didn’t work.

It's barely a month since the failed vote in Springfield, and less than six months since the failed vote in Fayetteville.

And already, this moral arc is starting to bend.