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The longest, bitterest argument in Anchorage's social and political experience returns to center stage Tuesday before the municipal Assembly.
For the third time in little more than 30 years, a proposal to ban discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals is up for public hearing and action. It arrives at the request of Acting Mayor Matt Claman, who said he was happy to sponsor it when asked to do so by members of an organization called Equality Works. The change would add "sexual orientation" to a list of characteristics -- race, color, religion, age, marital status and so on -- for which it is illegal to discriminate in employment, property sales or rental, education, financing and public accommodations. Equality Works is organized by gays and lesbians, but it also has support from community organizations including the League of Women Voters, the Anchorage Education Association, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, the Anchorage Urban League, Immanuel Presbyterian Church and others. Well-known Alaskans such as former state Sen. Arliss Sturgulewski, a one-time Republican nominee for governor, and former state Rep. Cynthia Toohey have endorsed the proposed ordinance in newspaper opinion pieces. But it is vehemently opposed by some conservative religious leaders, including the Rev. Jerry Prevo, who has fought equal rights protections for gays and lesbians from the pulpit of the Anchorage Baptist Temple since the early days of 1976, shortly after a unanimous Assembly voted to include them under the protections of the new municipality's first equal rights law. Mayor George Sullivan vetoed the new law then and, three weeks later, the once-unanimous Assembly failed to muster eight votes to override the veto. A revised version passed again a few months later. It too was vetoed, and stayed vetoed. That first war over rights for gays drove a harsh wedge through the community and produced lasting political wounds. For example, Prevo and others targeted the chairman of that first Assembly, Dave Rose, during Rose's unsuccessful 1978 mayoral campaign because he had supported drawing gays and lesbians under the city's anti-discrimination shield. But others, including leaders of more than a dozen churches, defended Rose. divisive battle "People really got hurt in that," said Jackie Buckley, one of the organizers of Equality Works and the person who asked Claman to sponsor the legislation now. Buckley had her own brush with the backlash in 1993, when the Assembly took up the issue again. After hours of testimony over five separate meetings, the Assembly in January of that year passed a watered-down version of the law that trimmed protections based on sexual orientation from everyone in town to only city employees and people who worked for big contractors doing business with the city. Even that weakened measure was repealed after a city election changed the balance of power on the Assembly later that year. But in the meantime, two gay men were assaulted by teens wielding baseball bats in the parking lot of a Midtown restaurant. They had been seen holding hands. Buckley said she was followed home after testifying at one of the 1993 hearings, and the same car was parked outside her house periodically for quite a while. "Having someone sit outside your home and watching you is very weird behavior," she said in a recent interview. "I asked the police to come cruise by, and they did, but it went on for weeks." Buckley said she and her partner of 25 years worried about their kids. "We walked them to school for weeks," she said. Others, among them people who weren't gay but stood up for the equal rights protections, also had problems, she said. "That's scary, and it makes you really think twice about whether you're going to do this again," Buckley said. More recently, "we thought about it and talked about it in the gay and lesbian community. ... I guess we just got ready again to take this on." CRUX OF THE CONTROVERSY Prevo said he too has been targeted during the struggle over gay rights. He said his car has been keyed. Sometimes he gets unpleasant messages from people who claim to have tainted a restaurant meal for him, he said. At one point in the late 1970s, someone fired a shot into his church. Prevo has argued that the city's latest attempt to enact anti-discrimination legislation protecting gays goes even further than the proposals he's opposed in the past. It would restrict his ability to decide who drives church buses or does cleaning at the Baptist Temple, he contends. Language in the new law defining "sexual orientation," in his view, could cause legal blurs that would allow men dressed as women to claim places on a business sales team or in an elementary classroom. He said he's been told of a male cross-dresser who regularly enters the women's restroom at a DeBarr Road grocery store and of a "gender-confused man" trying on ladies' fashions in a downtown department store. "It goes to provide protection for what I believe is that aspect of the homosexual movement that probably even the normal homosexuals are not proud of," he said in an interview several days ago. "Perverted heterosexual" men might take advantage and start dressing as women to wander into restrooms for the opposite sex too, he said. Claman called such fears unfounded and over the top. On Friday, the acting mayor unveiled a revamped version of the proposed ordinance intended to address and mollify some of the more extreme concerns voiced by Prevo and other conservative religious leaders, and to underscore exemptions for churches. The ordinance defines sexual orientation as "actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or gender expression and identity." The last four words, Prevo argues, would protect people like the cross-dresser in the restroom or a teacher who chose to dress as a member of the opposite sex in the classroom. At an Assembly work session Friday, city attorney James Reeves said the proposed equal rights ordinance could never have that effect. Federal and state courts, including the Alaska Supreme Court, have upheld laws forbidding it, and violators can be charged with criminal trespass, sexual harassment and other crimes, he said. "An employer doesn't have to give a man access to a women's restroom based on sexual orientation," he said. "That's just ... the law." To underscore that point, the revised version of the ordinance adds a section explicitly saying it does not apply "in matters such as access to restrooms, nor does it change the rights of employers and operators of public accommodations to impose reasonable dress codes" or other workplace restrictions. Reeves likened that addition to having "suspenders with our belt." Prevo isn't convinced. "I still think it's a bad ordinance," he said Friday, arguing that sections exempting churches and other religious organizations as well as those dealing with dress codes and bathroom use would still be up to interpretation by judges. "The language they've put in there to try to deal with the issues I've raised, my fear is they will not hold up in court," he said. "I'm opposed to the term 'sexual orientation' being included in the ordinance, period." "The original ordinance shows the intent of the homosexual agenda," he said. "These concessions are on paper only, and that will be the crack, the crack in the door to get them what they originally wanted, and do not provide any real protection." FIGHT NOT OVER More than 100 communities and more than a dozen states have passed laws protecting the rights of gays and lesbians, Claman said, without producing the kinds of catastrophic problems Prevo predicts. Complaints have been comparatively few too, he said. Reeves, the city attorney, told Assembly members that Louisville, Ky., averages about nine complaints a year after passing a similar law. Philadelphia, with a population of more than 1 million, registered 28 complaints last year, he said. "This is about jobs," Buckley said. "This is about housing. It's about public accommodations. Education. These are the basics of living your life." The outcome Tuesday isn't clear. With Claman serving as acting mayor, only 10 Assembly members can vote on the measure; six votes are needed to pass it. Prevo said he thinks that might happen. If it does, he said, he will lead a petition drive to put a referendum on the city election ballot in 2010 to repeal the law. "I would think we would be successful in that," he said. "I think that people that voted (statewide in 1998) that they wanted a marriage to be between a man and a woman and not gay marriage, I think that will carry over and carry through this ordinance, because I think that we could frame this ordinance as just a step toward that, which it is." Buckley said the history of civil rights shows the ballot box doesn't work where minorities' rights are involved. "It's not appropriate for the majority to decide," she said. "It would be like all the whites in America deciding that the 12 percent of blacks in America shouldn't have the same opportunity ... It's just wrong."