- Tulsa’s new city hall
While DART decides whether to gut LGBT protections, Oklahoma is surging ahead in gay rights.
According to Tulsa World, the Tulsa city council approved an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation for city employees. The new law passed by a vote of 6-3.
One city council member pointed out that the ordinance protects everyone, according to a report by Tulsa’s CBS affiliate.
“The policy does not just apply to homosexuals; everybody has a sexual orientation,” said Councilor GT Bynum, who introduced the measure. “If a straight city employee has a gay supervisor, this would protect him just the same.”
And in the state’s other big city, Brittany Novotny, a transgender candidate for the Legislature, reports a record fundraising week for her campaign. There are also two openly gay candidates for the Oklahoma Legislature, Tom Kovach in Norman and incumbent Al McAffrey in Oklahoma City.
Meanwhile, Texas has no out members of its Legislature and only one openly LGBT candidate, Pete Schulte, running this year.
I still like Canada…
Is Oklahoma outshining Texas on gay rights?
Can you write about Oklahoma? Can you write about Texas? Do you feel the need to create comparisons? Creating a headline like the above tells me the writer is addicted to self-pity. Can all of the staff at the Voice outshine the writer on self respect? Yes. Intelligence? Yes.
Uh yeah not quite. And I think that only pertains to Tulsa’s own city gov’t hiring policy. It isn’t a citywide ordinance.
Right. As I said, it’s a city ordinance passed by the city council that pertains to city employees.
What’s good about it is that in most cities that have citywide nondiscrimination, like Dallas, that ordinance was preceded by one like this that pertained only to city employees. It’s a great step and a first for Oklahoma.
And to Puzzled, yes, I could write about Texas OR Oklahoma, but the point of the post was that in a week that a Dallas agency is rescinding rights, an Oklahoma city is beginning to offer them. The piece is a follow up to a series of stories about DART and a previous piece about the Tulsa ordinance. But it’s about ironic comparison, not really about Texas or Oklahoma. Sorry if I didn’t make my point.
You made your point, David. At least to those of us who can read and understand English…
Not sure if Oklahoma is outshining Texas, but we are all just trying to change things for the better here in Oklahoma. I assume that is true also in Texas, at least from what I have seen and heard from amongst Texas PFLAG chapters (met them this weekend at the PFLAG Regional Conference held in Norman, Oklahoma). I live in Enid, a city of 50,000+ (at least that is the estimate from the US Census Bureau, we’ll see the actual numbers after 2010) and we held our first Pride event last year and are doing so again this year, and this year we opened up the first LGBTQA Community Center. Big steps for us. But it isn’t all good. While OKC and Tulsa and now Enid all have Pride, the cities of Ada and McAlester have stopped having Pride…at least for now since all of us in Oklahoma hope they are able to reorganize and get back out there helping to work towards equality in Oklahoma…and maybe some other Oklahoma cities will join us as well. Still, there are some ways in which Texas is ahead of us here in Oklahoma, so don’t sell yourselves short. We live in a tough part of the nation to fight for equality, and yet we all have the courage to be bold enough to do so. And that’s what really matters!
If there IS a competition over which state is most progressive on the gay human rights front, we wish one of the 50 would hurry up and win.