Cities and local governments would be banned from adopting broader civil rights protections than the ones stated in Iowa Code under a bill advanced by a House subcommittee Monday.
The bill (HSB 664) was proposed by the governor nearly one year after Iowa became the first state in the nation to remove existing civil rights protections for gender-identity, according to Lambda Legal. The law removed gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, which protects against discrimination in housing, education, employment, wages, public accommodations and credit practices.
Transgender rights advocates decried the proposal on Monday, saying it would further erode protections for transgender Iowans and interfere with the ability of local governments to respond to needs in their communities.
“The Civil Rights Act was a floor for communities to build off of a minimum set of requirements that municipalities could then expand upon to respond to the issues within their individual communities,” said Keenan Crowe, the director of policy and advocacy at One Iowa, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. “We have now turned it into a ceiling to limit communities to a maximum of what the state says they can do.”
Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison, and Rep. Skyler Wheeler, R-Hull, advanced the bill. Holt said the bill would promote consistency across state and local laws, pointing to state laws barring transgender women and girls from female sports and barring transgender students from using school bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
“I think having a patchwork of different ordinances really creates a lot of confusion for businesses. It creates a lot of confusion for schools,” Holt said. “We did what we did last year to ensure equal rights for everyone, and that is what we're doing here today.”
In the year since the state repealed gender identity-based civil rights protections, Iowa City and Coralville have passed resolutions affirming civil rights protections for members of the LGBTQ community.
Under the House proposal, cities and local governments would be banned from adopting civil rights protections that are broader or set out different categories of discriminatory practices than those outlined in the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
According to the nonprofit Movement Advancement Project, 13 cities currently have ordinances prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity in private employment, housing and public accommodations.
Coralville City Council member Katie Freeman called the bill a form of overreach on local decision-making.
“If you are unwilling to recognize the value of protecting gender identity at a state level, let the communities, cities, towns that understand that value do so on their own,” said Freeman, who identifies as transgender.
Danny Carroll, a lobbyist with the conservative group The Family Leader, was one of two people at a public comment meeting to speak in support of the bill. Carroll said civil rights protections should be left up to the state, not local jurisdictions.
“With 99 different counties and over 900 different towns and communities, it does make sense that certain issues would have broad and consistent application across the state and not vary from one community to the next or from one county to the next,” Carroll said.
Other speakers, like Teresa Baustian of Des Moines, disagreed.
“Much of my legal career was devoted to enforcing the Iowa Civil Rights Act, the provision in this bill, in this law that you're seeking to strike, has been on the books for 60 years, and it has not caused any problem between state and municipalities having inconsistent provisions,” Baustian said.
Baustian said municipalities responded to problems with landlords accepting Section 8 vouchers by updating their civil rights codes to prohibit denying housing to a person based on the source of their income. She said the local ordinances presented “no problem” for the state.
“Localities know their particular issues, and they know how to respond to them, and the businesses in those communities know how to seek out their own permitting, their occupancy, their zoning requirements,” Baustian said. “They’re not confused about where the law is.”
The bill will next be considered by the House Judiciary Committee.
