It's Time to Move Forward

Somewhere in my many papers, I have the clipping from the Tallahassee Democrat in the early 1990s with a man standing before the Leon County Commission holding a closed Tupperware container. In it, he claimed, was human excrement. He said his plastic tub of poo was the equivalent of what the County was allowing to be dumped on our community... because the County Library was going to be the locale of a Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. A lovely image which, as you can tell, made a lasting impression on me!
The Commissioners allowed the Festival to go on.
The Festival's producer was Jeff Peters, an attorney, who had also led the group FREE (Floridians Respect Everyone's Equality) that had gone head-to-head to stop the American Family Association from writing discrimination against gay people into the state's constitution. It was one of the last truly bright moments for the statewide LGBT community that I have witnessed here in Florida in a long time.
Now Peters, and several others, are going back before the Leon County Commission on Tuesday in hopes of giving us another burst of hope. The Commission is scheduled to take up an addition to the county's Human Rights Ordinance to extend protections to LGBT citizens in employment, and to expand the current protections against housing discrimination to cover the transgendered community (they had been left out before). There is an article on the proposal in the Tallahassee Democrat.
For me, one of the most telling comments in the piece had little to do with the merits of the proposal, but more about the perception of life in our community.

Last year, a “Soul of the Community” survey conducted by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found that only 12 percent of the community at-large felt strongly that Tallahassee is a welcoming place for gays and lesbians. That was down from an already low 17 percent the previous year, said Katherine Loflin, lead consultant on the survey. Gallup interviewed about 400 randomly selected adults.
“The community needs to work on being more open — that is clearly coming from this data,” Loflin said. “Gays and lesbians are now perceived to be the least welcomed group of all the categories we surveyed for.”

The "least welcomed group of all". And this in a Gallup survey which, among those in the business of conducting polls, is the one that tries to pose the questions in a neutral fashion.
Tallahassee and Leon County can do better than that! This community can rise above the low set by the man with his Tupperware container. Can't it?
There are some in the County government who appear to be waffling. They'd prefer to study this matter of non-discrimination in employment and housing. Maybe have a focus group or two. Conduct some more surveys of the community. And delay. And delay. And delay. Others complain that it will burden the county administrator's office. It will cost too much to process these complaints.
I ask, "What is the cost of inaction and delay of justice?" Besides the obvious, that most of our college-educated queers can't wait to get out of here, and that most major industries are moving in the direction of equality for all their employees; hence won't locate to a community where LGBT people are "the least welcomed group of all"?
And if the County is worried about cost and how much time this is going to take for the county staff, doesn't that mean that they fear that there really is a lot of this type of discrimination going on? And if that's the case, what does that say about them if they'd rather look the other way?
The truth is this won't raise costs, won't create any more burdens, and these are the types of red herrings that politicians and others with power use to justify delaying doing what is right.
It is time to move forward. It is time for this county to overcome its sins of the past, and welcome the queers in their midst.
Let's hope the commissioners agree.