Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 05:15:45 -0500 From: jwalsh@wilkes1.wilkes.edu (jeff walsh) Subject: Wilkes-Barre gay rights update Here's the story (belated) I promised about Boris and the Wilkes-Barre Pa., gay rights amendment. Boris votes for gay-rights amendment [ The councilman did, however, call for a cost analysis of the amendment's implementation By P. DOUGLAS FILAROSKI Times Leader Staff Writer WILKES-BARRE O The City Council gave preliminary approval to gay-rights legislation Thursday, voting unanimously in favor of action that would outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation. Council member Al Boris O who touched off a firestorm in December when he said gays should be ``shot'' O voted for the bill, but declined to elaborate following the meeting at City Hall. ``You saw my vote. I have no further comment,'' Boris said. The proposed amendment to the city's Human Relations ordinance now goes to the city attorney's office for review, before coming back to the council for a second and final vote. The council also approved Boris' resolution calling for a cost analysis of implementing the altered law. Some gay community members criticized the action. ``There's no way you can put a price on civil rights,'' said Fred Holmes, who is forming a local chapter of Gay and Lesbian Americans, a national organization. Council's approval was met with cautious optimism from proponents. ``I think the vote tonight was a vote in favor of research and further consideration,'' said Steve Hemker, a gay man who has been advocating expansion of the city's human-rights laws. The change would prohibit employers, landlords, lenders and those who offer public accommodations from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. It also adds an offense under the ordinance for so-called ``hate crimes.'' Meanwhile, the council approved a resolution supporting state legislation amending a hate-crime statute to include sexual orientation. Thursday's council vote came six weeks after Boris' remarks about shooting gay people O for which he later apologized O and that gays who contract AIDS are ``getting what they deserve.'' Initially, gay community members called for Boris' resignation via a petition drive and ads in a local newspaper. Since then, efforts have shifted to a push for gay-rights legislation, which exists in only about a half dozen communities statewide. They include large urban areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as well as smaller cities such as Lancaster, York, Harrisburg and State College. ``You're in for quite a bumpy ride in the next few weeks,'' said Lancaster City Clerk Janet Spleen, recalling the uproar the proposal created in that community in 1990. The discord included a demonstration by the Ku Klux Klan. Last month, about 150 people filled Wilkes-Barre City Hall to respond to Boris' remarks about gays. The meeting had to be adjourned abruptly O after Boris made additional derogatory comments O as council members were escorted from the building by police. Local gays and lesbians called the proposal an important first step toward ensuring human rights for all. If the council approves final passage of the measure, the law's enforcement would lie in the hands of a Human Relations Commission, which has lain dormant since its members' terms expired in 1983. On Wednesday, Mayor Lee Namey pledged to resurrect the 11-member board by appointing members with the help of a new, proactive social-service agency he is planning to create. The passage of the original ordinance in 1967 created the board and granted it the power to hear grievances and make rulings. It also gave the city attorney the right to prosecute offenders, who could face fines up to $600. The board fizzled out through lack of interest. In his six years on the board, former chairman Charles Petrillo said it never managed to attract a quorum to vote on issues. It referred most of the grievances to the state Human Relations Commission. However, the state has no anti-discrimination laws pertaining to sexual orientation. -------------------------------------- This is the editorial written by our homophobic editorial writer, who can barely look at and keep smiling anymore. Some sentences are incomplete, because I wasn't there the day this ran, and only found this version which was VERY close to the final version on the backup wire. Oh, his name is Tom Dennis, and you can address the idiot at: The Times Leader, 15 N. Main St., Wilkes-Barre, PA 18711. He'd be much worse if he had writing talent. Pride, Boris' downfall, subverts gay activists, too You'd have to go back a ways to find a political blunder as big as the one Al Boris made in December, when he spoke without thinking against gay rights. You'd have to go back O well, at least until Thursday, when Wilkes-Barre's fledgling gay-rights movement may have made a similar whopper of its own. Notice that word, ``may.'' No crystal ball is transparently clear, especially not on an issue as storm-clouded as gay rights. But by pushing gay-rights legislation to a City Council vote on Thursday, there's a chance that the gay-rights movement may have disturbed a sleeping tiger. And if they have, gay activists in the future may look back on this seemingly Medieval time in the Wyoming Valley as the good old days. Remember this word: ``galvanize.'' It's the key. Mr. Boris, as is now clear, set back his own cause by his stream-of-consciousness diatribe in December. That was when he said (among many other things) at a City Council meeting that homosexuals with AIDS got what they deserved. The words galvanized the opposition. They so clearly violated the 1990's norms of public discourse that they took a movement with zero political power O the gay rights movement in Wilkes-Barre O and turned it overnight into a force to be reckoned with. Even worse (from Boris' standpoint), the words pushed away those groups that might have rallied to his support. Boris found himself standing almost alone, without the backing of the churches or other groups that most Americans look to for guidance on mor The City Council's unanimous vote giving preliminary approval to a gay-rights amendment showed the size of Mr. Boris' miscalculation. Would the amendment have passed at all, let alone unanimously, had Mr. Boris never opened his mouth? Probably not, given But the fact that the council approved the amendment to the city's Human Rights ordinance does not mean that the public approves. A majority almost certainly does not approve. And it's this majority that the gay-rights activists may be sorry they ever wakened. How can we be so sure of the feelings of the majority? Because as far as we know, when this issue was put to a vote last year, every city in the United States that considered it voted it down. In Cincinnati, Ohio; Lewiston, Maine; Portsmouth, N.H.; and Oregon City and Kelzer, Ore., gay-rights protections wer And those votes came on the heels of the more famous one in Colorado, where in 1992 voters passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting anti-discrimination laws for gays and lesbians. Six votes in two years, including one that encompassed an entire state. Six defeats for gay-rights activists. It's safe to speculate on the feelings of the majority in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Gay-rights activists here may have been lulled by the absence of an organized opposition. After all, Al Boris standing alone isn't a very formidable foe. But just as Boris' comments gave the activists their moment in the sun, the new amendment may be just the nudge needed for conservative religious groups to organize. It could galvanize the formation of an anti-gay-rights coalition; it has else And as gay-rights activists in Cincinnati, Lewiston, Portsmouth and elsewhere learned, groups such as the Colorado-based Focus on the Family pack a ferocious wallop at the polls. Now, whether such organization will happen before or after the City Council takes its final vote is open to question. (And that's assuming the organization happens at all.) But one thing's for sure, as the Wyoming Valley begins tackling one of the most explosive and divisive issues of any on the American agenda: We will live in interesting times. _