As reported by the Billings Gazette this morning, the city has released a draft of the nondiscrimination ordinance that will be the subject of a City Council work session Monday night.
Here’s the most surprising thing I noted in the draft: it prohibits discrimination not only on the basis of “sexual orientation, gender identity or expression,” but also on “Veteran’s status, political beliefs or obesity.”
Leaving aside the question of why “veteran” is capitalized, I doubt anyone will object to including veteran status in the ordinance. Who doesn’t want to protect veterans from discrimination?
But what about obesity? Shouldn’t a deeply religious landlord be free to determine whether a prospective tenant’s corpulence is genetic or based on a medical condition, as opposed to having developed as result of indulging in the sin of gluttony? We keenly await the Montana Family Foundation’s take on that issue.
And what about political beliefs? That’s seems like a potentially more explosive category than mere sexual orientation. Should a baker whose Prius is festooned with “Obama” and “Coexistence” bumper stickers have to bake a cake for the guy who drives up in an F-150 pickup plastered with “Rush is Right” stickers?
On a more serious note, the Gazette story points out that the draft NDO does differ in some respects from NDOs already adopted in Missoula, Helena, Butte and Bozeman. The most curious difference is that the Billings ordinance would require people who believe they’ve been discriminated against to first file a complaint with the Montana Human Rights Bureau.
This doesn’t appear to make much sense. The Human Rights Bureau, by state law, investigates claims of discrimination based on “sex, marital status, race, age, physical or mental disability, creed, religion, color, or national origin.”
That’s the whole point of the city’s NDO — to extend basic protections to people not now covered by state and federal nondiscrimination laws. So why ask people to waste their time exhausting remedies that clearly don’t apply to them?
The language of state law also illustrates the absurdity of the question raised by a reader who commented under the Gazette story this morning. He wanted to know why the city’s draft ordinance didn’t include “religion.” The answer is that “religion” has long been in state law, and in federal law since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In an unusual foray into seriousness, I wrote about some of these issues at greater length in my Prairie Lights column, which I will post sometime after midnight.
