The saga over a Houston city law that protects LGBT people from discrimination just took a sudden turn. The Texas Supreme Court intervened in the court fight over the effort to repeal the initiative, ordering that the Houston City Council must either repeal HERO on its own or allow it to be challenged at the ballot in the next election. Either way, the city can no longer enforce it.
The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) was a sweeping piece of legislation, because prior to its passage, Houston had no municipal nondiscrimination protections for any class. Opponents of the bill objected primarily to its inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity, and collected signatures to challenge it at the ballot. Whether enough signatures were valid to qualify the referendum became the subject of heated back-and-forth court fights, but the Texas Supreme Court ignored almost all of it.
According to the Court, all that mattered is that the City Secretary initially certified the referendum. It doesn’t matter what was discovered later about the validity of those signatures, or even the fact that the Secretary later acknowledged the flaws that were found. “The Charter requires the City Secretary to ‘certify’ her findings, and the only findings she expressly certified were her own,” the Court explained. It’s as simple as “no takesie-backsies.”
It’s unclear if there is any remedy for LGBT advocates, particularly given the ample evidence that there actually were not sufficient signatures. This included video evidence that the petitioners were well aware of the rules they broke that should have invalidated the signatures they collected, evidence of possibly forged signatures, and a jury’s ruling that the valid signatures just did not add up.
Brad Pritchett, who runs the HOUequality site that has defended HERO throughout this process, told ThinkProgress, “The certification has been boiled down to ink on the page. If someone turned in 20,000 forged signatures, this ruling says that as long as there are 20,000 on that page, it counts. No other certification necessary.”
The city is still reviewing its options, but will likely allow the ballot initiative to advance rather than repeal it. Pritchett is optimistic that, particularly given all that it has endured so far, “If HERO is on the ballot this November, there is no doubt that Houstonians will do the right thing and reaffirm the need for HERO once again.”