Sex and the city (government)

COEUR d'ALENE - It's the baby of the bunch - the newest big ticket item on the Coeur d'Alene campaign trail.

Unlike McEuen Park, the fate of urban renewal and the state of city salaries, which have been talking points for years, this one's only been around a few months.

It's the anti-discrimination ordinance, a law the city adopted June 5 aimed at protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

While it may be the youngest of the hot topics, opinions about it run as passionately as they do on any other city issue.

The Press asked the three mayoral candidates how they feel about the City Council's decision, and which way they would have voted.

Steve Widmyer said he would have supported it.

He was the only candidate to offer that response.

"I've always supported human rights," Widmyer said. "If you go back in the history of the United States, it talks about 'all men being created equal.' I believe in that."

The City Council passed the ordinance 5 to 1. Roughly 400 people attended the meeting and an overwhelming majority of those who testified spoke out against it.

The ordinance aims at protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (LGBT) in areas of employment and public accommodations, such as restaurants and housing, by preventing people from discriminating against them based on "sexual orientation, gender identity and expression."

So under the new ordinance, an employer can't fire someone just because of the person's sexuality, or refuse them service in a restaurant for the same reason.

Federal laws prohibit employers from doing that for race or religion, so the local ordinance attempted to extend the same protection to the LGBT community.

"I understand those people's emotions that were against it. I understand they feel passionately against that," Widmyer said. But "it's not just the people that come to the council meetings (who had an opinion on the ordinance) ... You have to take a pulse of a whole community."

Opponents say the rule will do the opposite of what it's supposed to do. It will discriminate against those with religious beliefs, especially in the business world, by forcing them to go against their conscience for the benefit of a select few.

Mayoral candidate Joe Kunka agreed with that.

He said anti-discrimination offered special protection, which is discrimination by its very nature.

"You're alienating everyone else," he said. "For the council to vote against the overwhelming majority of its people, that wasn't very smart."

Or, he said, he would have put it to a vote because it received such high interest.

"You can't protect everybody," he said, adding: "I think the only people now who don't have some sort of protection are white guys between the ages of 18 and 90."

Coeur d'Alene became the fifth Idaho city to adopt the ordinance. It made national headlines during the time.

Candidate Mary Souza said the volume of opinion on the issue should have prompted the City Council to table the decision during its regular meeting and schedule workshops on the topic so the council could have received more feedback.

It also should have scheduled a special meeting for the topic at a bigger venue than the library.

"They went ahead and pushed it through and they left a lot of people in that room feeling left out - that their opinions or their views or their concerns were not worthy of consideration," she said.

Souza said as mayor, she would vote whichever way the public favored on highly charged topics when the opinion is stacked on one side, regardless of how she feels personally.

She said it seemed the City Council had its mind made up before the meeting began, and didn't let testimony change it. She didn't answer which way she would have voted on the ordinance if public opinion was split.

"I don't want to go there," Souza said. "I really think, as an administrator, what the process is, is important. If you have a true and open process that's responsible to all sides of the issue, then you're doing it right.

"Don't you think that our responsibility is to represent the people of our community?"

Coming Friday:

- The mayoral candidates will discuss the issue of city employees' salaries and how the city's salary structure, staffing and responsibilities could possibly be changed.