The Bethlehem City Council this week unanimously approved a bill that prohibits discrimination on a number of factors, including sexual orientation and gender identity, making it the 21st municipality in the Keystone State to offer an LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination law.
Mayor John Callahan, who introduced the bill to Council in the fall, will sign it into law, but a date has not yet been set.
Council adopted the measure Tuesday night after a nearly four-hour public meeting.
Adrian Shanker, vice president of Pennsylvania Diversity Network and the lead organizer of the effort to pass the measure, said Wednesday that the excitement of the previous night’s vote had yet to wear off.
“It’s such an incredible, amazing feeling that a very large city like Bethlehem took this step and passed a law that will protect everyone in this city,” Shanker said. “After the vote, one person came up to me and disclosed their identity as a trans person and said, ‘Thank you, I feel safer in Bethlehem now.’ And that was a great feeling.”
Prior to this week’s vote, Bethlehem had been the largest municipality in the state without an LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination law.
In addition to sexual orientation and gender identity, the measure also prohibits discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, ancestry, national origin, handicap and the need for a guide animal. It also created a human-relations commission to investigate and adjudicate complaints.
Support for the measure was vast, Shanker said, as more than 100 businesses, faith communities, civil-rights organizations and other groups joined a coalition to press for the adoption of the bill.
However, passage was never guaranteed, which Shanker said made the victory even more satisfying.
“I’ve worked on a number of pieces of legislation but this had a different feeling. Unlike in Easton or Allentown with the domestic-partner benefits laws, where we pretty much knew from the beginning how it was going to go, we really weren’t sure for much of the way on this one,” he said. “This was introduced without a sponsor, and we had to build relationships with every member of council after the ordinance was introduced, which is not the way this usually happens. So to go from not having an initial sponsor to having unanimous passage is a pretty big deal.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].