KMTV reports on Nebraska Heritage Coalition news­paper ad, fight with Heartland Clergy for Inclusion over pending LGBT protection measure

Update: a reader tipped us that a nationally infamous death-to-gays preacher is on the Nebraska Heritage Coalition's roster. We checked. It's true.

On Sunday, the born-yesterday Nebraska Heritage Coalition ran a full-page black-and-white ad in the Omaha World-Herald (reputed to have cost about $10,000) which was probably a shot across the bow of an even larger church organization in favor of LGBT rights, Heartland Clergy for Inclusion.
     Charitably, the "Heritage" side said that ALL people (not just homos!) are "broken" and invited them to their churches (Don't forget your checkbooks, you broken — but we hope not broke — sad queers yearning to be free!)
     Sinners were firmly reminded that “We do not have the right to change God’s moral law to fit our sexual preferences."
     Then all the ad signers went out to celebrate at Red Lobster and ignored the part of Leviticus forbidding the consumption of shellfish because that passage can't be used to hammer homos. OK, AKSARBENT made that up.
     The totally credible ministers told KMTV that it was just a coincidence that their ad appeared two days before Ben Gray introduced Equal Employment 2.0 because, you know, if it weren't just a coincidence, then someone might raise a stink about the rules governing tax exemption organizations engaging in political activities.
     So it was a coincidence, capiche?

Omaha LGBT employment protection to be reintroduced by Ben Gray in today's council meeting

Equality in the Workplace in Omaha from Lindsay Trapnell on Vimeo.

Ben Gray's proposed revision to Omaha's municipal code to protect LGBT workers is the 93rd item on the City Council's agenda today. The council will meet at 2 pm. Following today's introduction, there will be a public hearing (March 6th) and a final vote by the seven-member council on March 13th.
From the Omaha City Clerk's office:

93. Ord. to amend 13-82, 13-84, 13-85, 13-89, 13-90, 13-91, 13-92, 13-93, 13-94, 13-95, 13-97 and 10-192 of the Omaha Municipal Code to add prohibitions for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and gender identity within the City of Omaha and in City of Omaha contracts; and to provide the effective date hereof – see attached.

Following the release of University of Nebraska Medical Center research findings that 1/3 of gay Omahans surveyed were subject to employment discrimination because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, the Voice of Omaha has published a long post full of first hand narratives of antigay Omaha workplace bias which give the lie to those heterosexual supremacists who say the issue is too insignificant to be addressed by the long arm of the law.

Added protection including LGBT Omahans has been endorsed by the Omaha World Herald, more than 100 Omaha businesses, and 257 clergy members.

The Omaha City Council LGBT rights refuseniks:
(clockwise starting at upper left)
Garry Gernandt, Jean Strothert and Tom Mulligan)

Only three city council members stand in the way of equal protection for LGBT Omahans and of Omaha joining the 160 prominent US cities which treat their LGBT citizens equally. These three already voted down LGBT equality once, in 2010.

Those three are (left to right); Jean Strothert (District 5), Tom Mulligan (District 7) and Garry Gernandt (District 4).

Please email your City Council Member (if you don't know your district, look here) and send a copy to the Committee for Equal Protection addressed to CFEPJEFF@me.com. Be sure to tell them which district you are in as well.

Here are email addresses for all Omaha City Council members:  Congratulate Festersen, Gray and Jerram for their green ones for their positive votes and ask them to vote that way again.

Ask Stothert, Thompson, Mulligan and Gernandt why they're holding back Omaha's image as a progressive city, why they've ignored the need for recourse as demonstrated by a recent UNMC study on LGBT discrimination in Omaha, and why they think that the gay-friendly corporations Nebraska is trying to attract won't instead choose Iowa if Nebraska government officials continue to stiff-arm their LGBT citizens.

Red = a vote against equal protection for LGBT Omahans in 2010.
Green = for.
Yellow means the council member wouldn't take a position and didn't vote.


Pete Festersen — pete.festersen@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 1
Ben Gray — ben.gray@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 2
Chris Jerram — chris.jerram@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 3
Garry Gernandt — ggernandt@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 4
Jean Stothert — jean.stothert@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 5
Franklin Thompson — fthompson@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 6
Tom Mulligan — tom.mulligan@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 7 

214 churches and pastors buy full page antigay Omaha World-Herald ad on eve of reintroduction of Equal Employment legislation covering LGBT workers

Click picture to enlarge and read (at full resolution the image is quite sharp.)
The website is nebraskaheritagecoalition.org

Councilman Ben Gray, trying a second time
to pass LGBT protection in Omaha.
(Photo: KETV)

Update: A beautifully-made new video has just been released by EqualOmaha. See it in this post.
Writing in a 2/26/12 Sunday Omaha World-Herald ad "We do not have the right to change God's moral law to fit our sexual preferences," an organization of (mostly tiny) antigay churches and pastors has fired a shot across the bow of Omaha churches who have organized to support Councilman Ben Gray's reintroduction this week of his antidiscrimination ordinance, which failed in 2010 on a 3-3 council vote. (Ben Gray, Pete Festersen and Chris Jerram voted in favor; "Mean" Jean Stothert, Garry Gernandt and Thomas Mulligan were opposed.) Councilman Franklin Thompson called for a referendum and refused to vote.
    (Last summer the Human Rights Campaign released a poll during its bus tour (which included stops in Lincoln and Omaha)  revealing that a majority of Omahans favored passing an ordinance that would prohibit firing people because of their sexual orientation.)

Knee-jerk homophobe Perkins, of
Omaha's Pilgrim Baptist Church, who
opposed a gay rights law in Omaha
by saying "I find it offensive that we
would equate this with civil rights.
Those rights were based upon a
person's color of their skin,
which they could not change."

     The measure was shot down with the help of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce's executive committee, antigay churches, especially Pilgrim Baptist Church, home of heterosexual supremacist Cedric Perkins, and right-wing Christian policy organizations.
     When the Omaha Chamber of Commerce opposed the antidiscrimination ordinance in 2010, it said the law would impose "ambiguous and unclear" regulations and would be "difficult" for businesses to implement, saying such concerns were best approved at the state or federal level. The World-Herald said the Chamber would not elaborate on those arguments this week, citing the lack of final language for the latest proposal.
     LB912, an attempt to nullify any LGBT ordinance in Omaha by banning municipal protected classes not enumerated by the state appears to have stalled in the Unicameral's Judiciary Committee after a hearing last Wednesday during which Byron Babione of the Alliance Defense Fund, which appears to have written LB 912 for state Sen. Beau McCoy, testified on behalf of the legislation. The Alliance Defense Fund "helped" write a similar law in Tennessee which passed and nullified Nashville's LGBT protection ordinance.

Below: Alliance Defense Fund urging passage last Wednesday in Lincoln, Nebraska of LB912.

Where in Nebraska are gay people protected from arbitrary discrimination?

The apparently-failed attack on LGBT Nebraskans by Sen. Beau McCoy via LB912 has focused attention on existing legal recourse by gay Nebraskans against arbitrary discrimination. Those remedies are sparse.

Dan Holtmeyer, in a recent Daily Nebraskan article, did a great job of surveying the landscape of LGBT protection.

Few areas of Nebraska have added LGBT protection on their own, and opponents to the extension often cite freedom of religion in their firings of those they consider abnormal or sinful. The city of Lincoln includes sexual orientation as a protected class in its contract with city employees, but Omaha and Grand Island don't. All four University of Nebraska campuses, Nebraska Wesleyan University and Southeast Community College include the provision, but Peru, Wayne and Chadron State Colleges do not.

     McCoy's bill wouldn't affect those that include sexual orientation in dealings with employees, such as UNL or Lincoln, because the university and city act as businesses in that context, not local governments. Otherwise, a town or county ordinance would be nullified if it stretched beyond the state's list of protected classes.

Nebraska bill, LB912, to ban municipal LGBT laws: Sen. Beau McCoy and radical right wing ally, Alliance Defense Fund vs. Shelley Kiel of CFEP, Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska and others

In part one of AKSARBENT's video coverage of the LB912 hearing, Sen. McCoy tried to pull a fast one on the committee and observers by cherry-picking a quote from last Sunday's Omaha World-Herald editorial which made it seem like the Herald supported his approach, when it actually called LB912 wrong. Also in the video is Sen. Amanda McGill telling an LB912 proponent that comparing gay people to drug addicts was offensive and Omaha City Councilman Ben Gray defending his LGBT protection revision to Omaha's city ordinance. See that video here. 

In Tennessee, the Alliance Defense Fund "helped" former Tennessee state Senator David Fowler draft HB600, a state law which passed and killed Nashville's LGBT protection ordinance. Apparently the organization is waist-deep in a similar effort in Nebraska, where the designated puppet appears to be Beau McCoy, District 39, Elkhorn/West Omaha, who is being challenged in the forthcoming election by moderate Judy Domina. In 2008, McCoy's biggest contributor was TD AmeriTrade scion Peter Ricketts.
     Wanna bet on what organization wrote the the verbiage of LB 912 for McCoy, who is a roofing/home improvement contractor, not a lawyer?

     McCoy's buddies at the ADF have a history of lying about policy issues: watch the video (starting at 1:30) to see their sickeningly dishonest attack on the ACLU's "Don't filter me" initiative.

     A senior counsel for the ADF, Byron Babione, was the first person to testify on of LB 912 at the Unicameral Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday after sponsor Beau McCoy explained the legislation, took questions, and then quickly left the room for the presumably more hospitable confines of the Natural Resources Committee. Heaven only knows what mischief McCoy is up on that committee.
     Below is Babione representing the ADF and failing to convince the properly suspicious Brad Ashford, Brenda Council and Amanda McGill to vote for LB912. (Brad Ashford told the Omaha World-Herald that it is unlikely that the Judiciary Committee will vote to advance LB912.)



     The ADF's stated raison d'être is the defense of religious liberty, but in his testimony, Babione didn't give a single reason why "religious liberty" cries out for the passage of LB 912. His spiel, all business, was about as spiritual as a cost/benefit analysis of corporate homophobia, which is really the specialty of David Brown, the president of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce, who rides roughshod over the more progressive views of younger Chamber members.
     Particularly affecting was the testimony of veteran Shane Strong who felt compelled to speak out at the hearing on behalf of his two gay siblings and who revealed that when he was in the military he was warned that the OSI had Omaha's gay bars under surveillance (Your tax dollars at work!):

I don't see why the state is interested in trying to take away rights that the city wishes to give its people.

     Jane Kleeb, the head of Bold Nebraska and wife of Scott Kleeb:

"I'm here really in solidarity with the LGBT community as well. On a very personal level, my little girls' godfathers are both gay and as a single mom when I lived in D.C., I'm not sure what I would have done without them, so I know that there's lots of other families like that in Nebraska that are deeply affected by discriminatory practices."

LB912, law banning gay rights ordinances in Nebraska, likely dead in the water, even after trickery at yesterday's hearing by its sponsor, Beau McCoy

At yesterday's LB 912 Judiciary Committee hearing in Lincoln, the bill's introducer, Beau McCoy, tried to con senators, observers and the television cameras into believing that Nebraska's largest newspaper agreed in an editorial Sunday with his bill killing all LGBT municipal ordinances in Nebraska; actually the Omaha World-Herald called his bill wrong.

State Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha, the Unicameral's Judiciary Committee chairman, said at a committee hearing Wednesday he does not expect the panel will act on a bill aimed at blocking the ordinance.

Byron Babione, of the Alliance
Defense Fund, testifying FOR
LB 912, a bill which would
nullify any LGBT municipal
ordinances in Nebraska

KETV's report is here.

AKSARBENT obtained video of yesterday's hearing; below are excerpts including a spectacularly inept performance by a proponent of LB 912 which must be seen to be believed. It starts at the 6 minute mark.

The first person to testify in favor of the LB 912 was Byron Babione, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which seems to have written the bill for McCoy, who is a roofing/home improvement contractor, not a lawyer.

AKSARBENT will post more video from the hearing soon.

Omaha World-Herald endorses Ben Gray's LGBT Equal Employment Ordinance AND slams LB912! Paper reminds readers that it's 2012

Not-from-Omaha twins Saul and Nathan demonstrate for gay
marriage elsewhere; quite a discussion about these two here.

Even the right-wing, business-minded Omaha World-Herald knows that Big Red Homophobia is dragging the city down, even as it seeks more convention business to pay off the bonds on the $250,000,000 Century Link Center.
     Twelve years ago, the Herald threw its statewide influence against Initiative 416, which amended Nebraska's constitution to ban gay marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships and anything else that even smelled queer.
     The state's voters overwhelmingly supported 416 anyway, convinced in large part by hundreds of thousands of carpetbagger Mormon dollars.
     As we write this, state senators in Lincoln are putting final touches on boutique legislation to attract a $1.2 billion data center, perhaps to be built by Apple but more likely by Facebook. Iowa is also vying for the facility, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the gay employees of either firm would doubtless prefer to work in LGBT-friendly Iowa than heterosexual supremacist Nebraska.
      Anyway, in an editorial published Sunday, the World-Herald made it clear that it wasn't fooled by Jean Stothert's transparent attempt to head off Ben Gray's February 28th reintroduction of his amendment to include LGBT folk in Omaha's list of protected classes.
     Stothert's meaningless stunt, introduced by her and the other two council members (Garry Gernandt and Thomas Mulligan) who voted against LGBT rights in Omaha last year, was a nonbinding resolution that didn't even mention LGBT people by name. It said, in part: “All people possess an innate human dignity that must be acknowledged and respected,” and went on to claim that the council would pledge to work with business and community leaders to promote workplaces that “promote respect and eliminate any workplace discrimination.”
     Gray's response was: “If you have people who are hellbent on discriminating, what's a ‘voluntary approach' going to solve?” The Herald, which is running a poll on the issue here, politely dismissed Stothert's calculated distraction as a:

precursor to the introduction of council member Ben Gray's proposed amendments to make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
      It's now 2012. The hope would be that businesses, landlords and others would have moved past the stereotypes and scorn that have too often greeted the gay and lesbian community.
      Most have. Many businesses have adopted non-discrimination policies regarding the gay and lesbian community and operate that way.
      These are real signs of positive progress.
      But the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community is seeking equality. Real equality. The kind that is accompanied by a law making it illegal to discriminate against a certain group...
      In the absence of state and federal laws, the Omaha City Council should adopt Gray's proposal...
      Nationwide, about 140 cities have enacted such anti-discrimination laws. If local elected officials choose to do so, they should have that authority. A bill currently before the Nebraska Legislature, LB 912, would wrongly prohibit local communities from taking such action.

David Brown, of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce, which lobbied against Ben Gray's amendment last year, seems to be on board with the Stothert deception. He sent a shameless letter to the Council in support of it, which read, in part:

“Omaha is certainly a welcoming and inclusive place, but we do need to constantly reinforce that — from government leadership to individual employers and associations.”

Please email your City Council Member (if you don't know your district, look here) and send a copy to the Committee for Equal Protection addressed to CFEPJEFF@me.com. Be sure to tell them which district you are in as well.

Here are email addresses for all Omaha City Council members:

Pete Festersen — pete.festersen@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 1
Ben Gray — ben.gray@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 2
Chris Jerram — chris.jerram@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 3
Garry Gernandt — ggernandt@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 4
Jean Stothert — jean.stothert@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 5
Franklin Thompson — fthompson@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 6
Tom Mulligan — tom.mulligan@ci.omaha.ne.us — District 7