Maryland's House has approved discrimination protections for lesbians and gays, while a state Senator is in hot water for his unethical campaign to stop the rights bill from succeeding. Maryland's House of Delegates by an 80 - 56 vote on March 24 approved a bill to extend civil rights protections against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, to add sexual orientation to the current protected categories of race, age and gender. In eight years and six attempts, this is the farthest that any such bill has advanced there. While the vote was a sweet moment for activists who had made the bill a focal point of Maryland's "Equality Begins At Home" activities this week, celebration was restrained by the knowledge that the bill could well go no further. Its companion measure is currently before the state Senate's most conservative committee, Judicial Proceedings, which is expected to vote on it next week, and should that fail, the House ! version would have to face the same committee. Meanwhile, one first-year state Senator's campaign against the bill may have been taken a step too far, in the view of the non-partisan Common Cause/Maryland and even some of the bill's opponents.
The proposed law would empower the Maryland Commission on Human Relations to investigate complaints of sexual orientation discrimination, and to punish those it finds have illegally discriminated by means including fines and payments to victims. Only ten states have enacted similar laws (plus Maine, which enacted a measure which never took effect before it was repealed by referendum). Before the House Judiciary Committee approved the bill on March 19, it removed explicit reference to transgendered and transsexual people, even though Committee members were clearly more moved by the testimony of a pre-operative transsexual than any other. Some Committee members believe these groups will nonetheless be protected if the law is enacted. Some lawmakers believe this deletion will make the bill more acceptable to the more conservative state Senate.
The House vote is generally credited to the extraordinary lobbying effort of Maryland's Democratic Governor Parris Glendening, who made his first personal testimony before a legislative committee in its support. He had also threatened to hold back state funds from some legislators' favored projects unless there was action on the civil rights measure and three of his other top priorities. He has a profound personal motivation in the story of his late brother, a gay man who spent 19 years in the military in fear of losing his job, and ultimately died of AIDS-related illness. In a statement following the vote, Glendening wrote, "Today's vote by the House sends a strong message that Maryland is a fair, just and inclusive state and that discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated here." He wrote, "It's a big step forward in making Maryland a more fair and just society. It's a major statement. It took a lot of courage." Delegates arguing in support of the bill empha! sized it is a matter of fairness and justice.
Opponents argued that lesbigay people are not suffering from discrimination, and even that as individuals they are already protected from wrongful dismissal, despite many examples to the contrary. As is usually the case, there were arguments it provides "special rights" based on "what they do behind closed doors." Opponents also said the bill would be bad for businesses.
But freshman state Senator Alexander Mooney (R-Frederick), who campaigned on a "family values" platform, is perhaps the most dismayed of all. He calls the measure radical and very extreme, and fears it will lead to teachers wearing drag in the classroom and the legitimization of deviant behavior. So concerned was he to "expose" "the truth" about the bill, that he hired a public relations firm to place editorials in newspapers serving the districts of as-yet uncommitted Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee members -- intending to pay the firm with as much as $1,000 of the budget he's provided by the taxpayers. Not only was there no open bidding process involved, but the firm in question had contributed to Mooney's campaign. The General Assembly's Joint Ethics Committee will be reviewing this situation, one they have never been faced with before, and that committee's co-Chair Sen. Michael Collins (D-Baltimore) is confident that Mooney will pay with his own money if the! committee decides he should. Mooney believes it's possible the firm may even agree to do the job without payment, but is loudly insisting that all complaints about his unprecedented lobbying tactic are merely an effort to distract from his message, a maneuver he describes as typical of the "militant homosexual and transgender lobby".
Mooney has also given several different answers as to what portion of the op-ed pieces being distributed was written by him rather than the firm, including saying it didn't matter as long as his name appeared on it. (He'd better hope it says nothing about Tinky Winky.)
Another Frederick resident, open gay David Koontz, a Democrat who failed in a bid for a Delegate seat last year, told the "Montgomery Journal" that, "I'm horribly concerned that he hates gays and lesbians so much that he's willing to compromise his credibility and effectiveness with his colleagues by unethically using state money to go after his colleagues."