I don't think that we realize how lucky we are. Cook County and Chicago are some of the best places in the country for gays and lesbians to live and work and play. Certainly better than anywhere else in Illinois. We've got great nondiscrimination laws that protect our rights, we've got domestic-partner benefits for city and county employees, we've got protection under the state hate-crimes law, there's no problem with adopting kids, and we've got supportive elected officials. All in all not a bad place.
And even though gender-variant people are not included in human-rights laws, or hate-crimes laws, what the heck? We can still have fun. ( Hah! )
Why am I going on singing the praises of our town? Maybe just to show you what the rest of the state doesn't have. The contrast between Cook County and the rest of Illinois is absolutely incredible. With few exceptions, you have no rights outside of Cook County.
During the last week of July, I went out to DeKalb. For those of you who may be a little short on geography outside of Lakeview or Andersonville, DeKalb is a pleasant farming community and college town about 60 miles west of the city. An hour and a half drive. Not so very far away.
DeKalb is fairly progressive. In fact, at the end of 1998, their city council passed an amendment to their human-rights ordinance that includes gay rights. I was invited there because the local gay organization ( CMAD, Community Members Against Discrimination ) are now considering an additional amendment to include transgender and gender-variant people.
What I did not know at the time is that other elements in the community are conspiring to weaken the law that CMAD fought so hard to put into place.
It seems that the city officials do not want the human-rights law to apply to them. They feel that it's all right to have a law preventing businesses and restaurants from discriminating, but when people are allowed to file a suit against an official governmental body… now that's carrying democracy too far. They want to be free to discriminate.
Where did this all come from? Seems that their police had been accused of doing some racial profiling, and that one of the victims had filed a discrimination complaint with the Human Relations Commission naming the DeKalb police as the ones doing the discrimination.
The city responded by saying, no, no, no … we'll take care of our own. We'll just set up our own complaint board to handle these types of cases. Seems fair, don't it? Yeah, about as fair as having the fox oversee the safety of the inhabitants of the chicken coop. ( I thought an agrarian analogy might be appropriate. )
The proposed exemption of city government has been introduced and is awaiting vote by the council. If it passes, any unit of city government would be exempt from the human-rights ordinance. Imagine if that happened here in Chicago or Cook County. If you were discriminated against in a library, you would not be able to lodge a complaint against the librarian. If you were hassled by the park guards, you would not be able to sue them. If you were fired from your job in the city clerk's office, well you would be just out of luck.
The people representing the city of DeKalb have stated that the local ordinance is redundant in view of the state human-rights statute, and provisions in the Federal code. What they have failed to realize is that those laws may cover most of the classes under the DeKalb ordinance, by they do not include sexual orientation ( or matriculation ) . The way I read this is that it is a deliberate attempt on the part of DeKalb to allow them the ability to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Pretty despicable, isn't it?
We have gotten as far as we have because we have supportive elected officials. Unless you take it as your personal obligation to elect supportive officials each time, we might wind up with a situation as bad as the one DeKalb is facing. You have to participate in the process.
MirandaSt1@aol.com
