Roeland Park City Council to vote on LGBT anti-discrimination bill this coming Monday
It was all the way back in early March when Roeland Park City Council members Jennifer Gunby and Megan England introduced an ordinance that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the group of classes protected by the Kansas municipality’s anti-discrimination law. Roeland Park’s laws already protect individuals against discrimination on the bases of race, religion, color, age, sex, disability, national origin, ancestry and familial status. Under the new ordinance, LGBT individuals could no longer be discriminated against in employment, housing and business regulations.
In an advanced society, such a proposal would be a slam dunk. Ah, but this is Kansas we’re speaking of. So instead of an acknowledgment from the council that, yes, duh, LGBT people deserve the same rights under the law as every other American, it’s been four months of hemming and hawing and listening to bigots stand up at council meetings and talk about how letting a gay into their church’s Friday-night fish fry would be a violation of their First Amendment rights. Or about how changing the ordinance would be a huge burden to the city financially — even though it hasn’t been a burden at all to any of the hundreds of other municipalities that have made similar amendments. We wrote about all this here.
Anyway, despite being pushed back several times already, it now looks like a date has been set for the council vote. It’ll happen next Monday, July 21.
If you’d like to express your views to the council members ahead of the vote, you can find all their contact information here.
