Legal Weed, Airbnb and a ‘Bathroom Bill’: Races to Watch This Week
With all the attention being lavished on an election that’s still more than a year away, it’s easy to forget that voters around the country will be heading to the polls this Tuesday. Here are three races to keep your eyes on.
Houston’s anti-discrimination ordinance (aka the “bathroom bill”)
What: Proposition 1, a referendum on the anti-discrimination ordinance passed by the Houston City Council in May 2014.
Endorsed by: Mayor Annise Parker, the Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU of Texas, the NAACP of Houston, the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and a number of local businesses.
Opposed by: A group of Houston-area pastors, the U.S. Pastor Council and Mike Huckabee.
Why it matters: Until last year, Houston was the only city in Texas – and the only major city in the country – that lacked an equal rights ordinance. Even Houston Mayor Annise Parker, the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city, wasn’t aware of that fact until two years ago (more than a decade and a half into her career as a public official).
In May of last year, Parker introduced a measure known as the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO, to the Houston City Council that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial status, marital status, military status, religion, disability, genetic information and pregnancy status. The city council approved it, 11 to 6.
A group of local pastors seized on one aspect of the ordinance — language ultimately stricken from the legislation — that would allow Houstonians to use the bathroom that best suits the gender they identify with. (As such, many people have come to refer to the legislation as Houston’s “bathroom bill.”) Arguing the bill would give sexual predators unfettered access to women’s bathrooms, the group of pastors petitioned the city to put the measure to a public vote.
A skirmish ensued when the pastors failed to meet the minimum requirements for such a vote, and the city, in turn, refused to add the referendum to the ballot. The pastors sued the city, and during the resulting lawsuit, were ordered to turn over all communication they had on the bill, including any sermons they’d given. That’s when things went haywire. “They called in national FOX News,” Parker tells Rolling Stone. “Implied was that we had subpoenaed sermons from every pastor in the city of Houston on everything they had ever said about homosexuality, which was just bunk.”
The move by the city’s attorneys gave the pastors the opening they needed to argue a relatively standard and innocuous piece of legislation designed to protect all Houstonians from discrimination was actually infringing on their right to free speech. “I will give full credit to the pastors and the anti-gay organizers here in Houston: They played it masterfully,” Parker says.
Legal weed in Ohio
What: Issue 3, a ballot measure that would legalize recreational marijuana in the state, but would limit the number of farms allowed to grow and sell the plant to just ten.
Endorsed by: 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey, ex-NBA player Oscar Robertson, ex-NFL player Frostee Rucker, fashion designer Nanette Lepore, two descendants of President William Howard Taft and a handful of real estate developers and businessmen who are also bankrolling the initiative.
Opposed by: Gov. John Kasich, state Attorney General Mike DeWine, the Libertarian Party of Ohio, the Green Party of Ohio and every editorial board that has taken a stand on the issue.
Why it matters: Issue 3 would finally accomplish a goal legalization activists in Ohio have been working toward for years, but the ballot measure would also create an oligopoly that would enrich a handful of prominent Ohioans and shut out anyone else from the emerging weed business.
The ballot measure provides for the creation of a maximum of ten pot farms on specific parcels of land already owned by the proposal’s financial backers. Only those farms would be allowed to stock the shelves of the 1,100 dispensaries allowed by the amendment.