Chad Griffin is the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights organization.
Over the years, the ballot box has been a battleground for LGBTQ equality and our most fundamental rights. For decades, anti-LGBTQ forces have worked to repeal non-discrimination ordinances that provide protections for our community at the local level. In dozens of states, these groups worked to ban same-sex marriage at the ballot box, sometimes even succeeding in enshrining these bans in state constitutions. More recently, our opponents have run smear campaigns designed to scare voters into taking away protections from transgender Americans.
But today, change is taking hold across this country. Americans are using their vote as a voice for equality. Last week, Anchorage voters showed us just how far we’ve come.
On Friday, Anchorage certified election results that cemented the defeat of Proposition 1, a vicious measure, pushed by anti-LGBTQ extremists, aimed at rescinding municipal protections for transgender people in Alaska’s most populous city. In defeating this despicable measure, voters sent a clear message to the rest of the country that discrimination has no home in Anchorage, in Alaska, or anywhere in America.
This is a victory for fairness and equality that gives us hope, and a path forward. Working in coalition, Human Rights Campaign joined with Fair Anchorage, local and national advocacy organizations, and transgender leaders in Anchorage to fight back against this discriminatory proposition. And we won.
Over the last 18 months, we've seen how these attacks fail when informed voters see through the smears. Anti-trans attacks didn’t work in North Carolina — just ask Pat McCrory, the first North Carolina governor to lose re-election in more than 150 years. They didn’t work in Virginia — ask Bob Marshall, who lost his seat to trailblazing transgender state legislator Danica Roem last November. And now, these attacks have failed in Anchorage, too.