PLYMOUTH, MI – For years, a battle has raged in Michigan over the question of civil rights for gay and transgender citizens. Now, there’s a new campaign that just might change everything.
Until now, that division has mostly fallen along party lines.
Democrats tend to favor extending the full protection of the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act and prohibiting discrimination in any way based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Republicans — with a few exceptions – have been opposed. Two years ago, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission declared it held that the law protected gay and transgender individuals, and would investigate claims of discrimination against them.
But then-Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette rejected that interpretation and claimed such persons weren’t protected.
However, he was defeated for governor that year by Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, who vowed to press for new legislation amending the Elliott-Larsen law to protect everyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. But that got nowhere in the Republican-dominated legislature last year.
Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield, a fundamentalist Christian from a rural district in northern Michigan, said any such bill protecting transgender rights “is a reverse discrimination against those who have religious beliefs.” That was pretty much echoed by Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican from a district near Jackson.
But now a surprising coalition led by some of the state’s top business leaders has come forward to attempt to get legislation on the ballot to outlaw against any transgender or gay people.
Calling themselves Fair and Equal Michigan, the group aimed to collect enough valid petition signatures — 340,047 are needed – to get a statewide proposal on the Nov. 3 ballot.
They have some formidable names on their roster, including the CEOs of Michigan’s major utilities – DTE Energy and Consumers Energy – and have won the backing of Tim Cook, the head of California-based Apple Inc., the computer firm.
Some names may surprise some, including Jim Fitterling, the head of Dow Chemical Co., headquartered in conservative Midland.
However, support for transgender and gay rights has been growing among businesses for some time. According to one recent survey, 91 percent of Fortune 500 companies prohibit orientation in their firms based on sexual identity.
Almost as many — 83 percent — forbid discrimination based on orientation. Discrimination, they believe, is bad for business.
Fair and Equal Michigan also is bound to have the strong support of the usual liberal activist groups. Organizers have said they believe they will need to spend $3 million to get on the ballot.
That means paying for signatures. With heavy business backing, raising that money may not be that difficult.
Their problems are more likely to be logistical. Realistically, since some signatures always turn out to be invalid, they will need to collect at least 400,000. They may be at a disadvantage, since it is harder to find large groups of people congregating together in Michigan’s often harsh winter and early spring months.
But assuming they do – what are the chances it will pass? Organizers note that polls have shown that the number of Americans willing to fully accept gay and transgender Americans has risen dramatically, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that same-sex marriage was a Constitutional right.
Seventeen states and Washington D.C. do have laws outlawing discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. But in an indication of the divisions in America, every one of them voted for Hillary Clinton.
Jaime Powell Horowitz is an attorney and a special prosecutor of hate crimes, often against gay and transgender persons, for Wayne County, and has long been a supporter of their rights.
“I think we are going to do it!” she said last week, excited by the news. “People are coming out of the woodwork to volunteer.”
This is something badly needed, Horowitz said. “Michigan has no (statewide) hate crime statute. Bills are introduced, but they don’t get out of committee.”
There are some who worry about an electoral backlash, that the proposal, if it gets on the ballot, will drive hordes of religious right voters to go to the polls to vote against it – something that might hurt other liberal candidates as well. Horowitz, however, isn’t worried.
“This is one of the reasons we are partnering with the business community,” she added. “These are people who are more likely to vote Republican, and this in a sense validates” the proposal.
Twenty years ago, however, an ideological backlash from the opposite spectrum occurred when a proposal was put on the ballot that would have established a voucher system for education funding.
Huge numbers of public school employees went to the polls, voted it down, and defeated Michigan’s last Republican U.S. Senator in the bargain. But every election is different.
Alanna Maguire, president of the Fair Michigan Foundation, a separate group established to support LGBTQ rights, also has no doubt this is a good idea, one that can be sold on both human rights and economic grounds. “Michigan business leaders understand that, in order for our state to recruit and maintain top talent … we can and must be a state free from discrimination.
“Everyone deserves an equal chance to succeed,” she said. Maguire’s opinions are noteworthy, and perhaps even more so because they are fully shared by her wife –Dana Nessel, who two years ago was elected the state of Michigan’s attorney general.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
