Ed Kemmick
Opponents of a non-discrimination ordinance are so eager to continue discriminating against certain people that they couldn’t even wait for the proposed ordinance to be drafted.
That’s why they showed up last week when the City Council heard a request for a $25,000 donation to help fund a national conference that will be held in Billings this summer to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Not In Our Town movement.
The movement was spawned here in 1994, when Billings put on an amazing show of support for families that had been targeted for harassment by white supremacists and other hate groups late in 1993.
Former Mayor Chuck Tooley is heading the effort to organize the conference. His steering committee had nothing to do with the non-discrimination ordinance, which was proposed by the city Human Relations Commission.
City Councilwoman Jani McCall, backed by a unanimous vote of the council, formally asked city staff to draft such an ordinance, which is likely to be considered this summer.
All the ordinance would do is expand standard civil rights protection — with respect to housing, employment and public accommodations — to people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.
Opponents of the ordinance not only jumped the gun last week. They also got their history wrong. They basically argued that in 1994, all of the focus was on hate crimes rooted in racism and anti-Semitism.
One opponent said that a look at Not In Our Town’s Facebook page made it clear “that this is not the same group as it was 20 years ago. It has a completely different agenda.”
If you’re wondering what that new agenda might be, another speaker let us know: “the homosexual agenda.” Can’t we please bury that ridiculous phrase? You might as well brush off the entire civil rights movement as “the Negro agenda.”
But the larger point is that neither the message of the hate groups nor of those trying to protect people’s rights has changed in the past 20 years.
Early in 1993, nearly a year before a Jewish family’s house was vandalized, a local affiliate of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan distributed fliers at a Martin Luther King ceremony in Billings. The flier attacked what it called the “Pro-Faggot Triad,” which it identified as the Montana Association of Churches, then-Police Chief Wayne Inman and the Montana Human Rights Network.
The Klan actually referred to the latter organization as the Montana Homo Rights Network. In a similar flourish of wit, one flier said Billings had “H.E.M.R.R.O.I.D.S.,” or “Humanist Evolution Movement Recusants Reveling Obscene Immoral Deviant Sexuality.”
And in a flier distributed at the Montana Legislature in 1993, the KKK said, “We must observe and implement God’s methods to exterminate homosexuals as laid out and proscribed (sic) to us in detail by our Heavanly (sic) Father as found in His Holy Bible. Execution — Castration — Imprisionment (sic) — God’s solutions!!”
It is technically true that Not In Our Town didn’t mention hate crimes against the LBGT community in 1993 and 1994 — but only because Not In Our Town was not even founded until years later, as a national organization, and the Billings chapter of NIOT was not founded until 2010.
But in 2001, during a public forum on hate crimes in Billings, an eight-member panel that included the chief of police and the county attorney urged the Montana Legislature to extend civil rights protection to gays and lesbians.
A newspaper account of the forum said panelist Uri Barnea, then the widely known director of the Billings Symphony, “suggested the city send a symbolic message to the rest of the state by passing such a law.”
The Legislature has not acted, but Missoula, Helena and Butte have already sent that message by passing non-discrimination ordinances. Billings should do so because it is long overdue and still much needed.
There will be more distortions of history and logic when the actual ordinance is being debated, and opponents will try to portray the ordinance as something cooked up by “outside” groups promoting the “homosexual agenda.”
One minister who spoke at the council meeting last week affected to believe that he would be forced to conduct gay marriages if the ordinance became law. Not likely, since Montana unfortunately has a constitutional ban on gay marriage. That would not be superseded by a local ordinance.
I believe the ban will be superseded in time by more enlightened voters. In 25 or 50 years our descendants* will be amazed at our antiquated prejudices, which will seem as strange and inexplicable as laws that once prevented women from voting.
Tooley said the Not In Our Town movement began with the simple idea that “we wanted to stand up for our neighbors who were different.” Twenty years later that is still what this town is best known for, all over the country.
“It encapsulates our character, at least the very best part of our character,” Tooley said.
And it was homegrown, he said, promoted by local members of the Montana Association of Churches, the Billings Coalition for Human Rights and many, many individuals.
One person who will be working for passage of the non-discrimination ordinance is Liz Welch, the LGBT coordinator for the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. I suppose you could call her an outside agitator, but she is a Billings girl born and bred.
I asked her, by the way, what she thought of the phrase “homosexual agenda.” She surprised me by saying that there is in fact a gay agenda: “Security, dignity, fairness, equality, opportunity.”
Sounds pretty subversive, doesn’t it?
*Correction: In the original version of this column, I referred to “ancestors,” which has now been changed to “descendants.” And just two weeks ago, in a column about newspaper corrections, I quoted from a New York Times correction having to do with the same ancestor/descendant mistake. You live and learn. Or not.
