This week, the governor of Tennessee signed into law a bill barring municipalities from passing local nondiscrimination measures that supercede state law.
The bill sailed through both chambers of the state legislature and, less than a week later, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed it.
The measure was introduced after Nashville passed an antidiscrimination law that barred the city from doing business with companies that discriminated based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Nashville Mayor Karl Dean signed the extended protections into law on April 8.
In response, Republicans introduced and passed with a two-thirds margin the Equal Access to Intrastate Commerce Act, effectively overturning the local ordinance.
The state bill originally had the backing of the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, which reversed its support mere moments before Haslam signed it.
After gay-rights activists began to decry the bill and target the members of the chamber — many of whom are large corporations who already offer protections for LGBT individuals — the chamber reversed its position and came out in opposition to the bill, too late to effectively lobby for a veto.
For its part, the chamber stated it supports “a standard regulatory environment at the state level as opposed to potentially conflicting local regulations covering employment practices.”
Which translates to, we don’t want to have to deal with differing laws and regulations in different cities, townships and counties.
As Haslam put it, the new law will cut down on paperwork for businesses by making antidiscrimination policies uniform across the state.
“We just don’t think local governments should set HR policies for businesses,” he said.
Really?
Local governments, for many years now, have enacted laws that provide additional protections and/or rights than what the state or federal government provides for individuals, including setting higher minimum wages, extending protections based on marital status or sexual orientation in employment, housing and accommodations and enacting tougher safety laws.
While this is, at some level, a dispute over local rights vs. state rights, it’s rather transparent that this state law was targeted to the LGBT community.
Which drives home the need for federal-level protections for sexual orientation and gender identity in employment — and housing and accommodations. With a patchwork of laws at the local, state and federal level, sexual and gender minorities don’t have uniform protections.
If states decide municipalities don’t have the right to determine their own business practices and protect their own citizens as they see fit, it will seriously undermine local efforts to pass nondiscrimination laws — a strategy activists in Pennsylvania are using to create a groundswell of support to prove the viability of a statewide nondiscrimination law that includes sexual orientation and gender identity.