Advocates seek county-level civil rights protections

WASHINGTON — A handful of local advocacy groups are asking the Washington County Board of Supervisors to draft and vote on a resolution declaring the community’s civil rights standards, after state legislators removed the term “gender identity” from Iowa’s list of protected classes earlier this year in a bill titled Senate File 418.

The movement began with a request from Richmond resident JJ Johnson in March. While Johnson’s been permitted a public comment on the matter at one board meeting, it’s otherwise gone largely undiscussed by county supervisors.

Board Chair Richard Young opted not to add an agenda item on the matter at several previous meetings, first citing a shortage of members as one elected official was gone for medical reasons, then saying the county wouldn’t debate SF 418 since it doesn’t take effect until July 1, and most recently saying the proposal would be redundant with federal law.

That’s set to change next week, however. Young told The Union Wednesday morning that he planned to put the item on an agenda for the supervisors’ upcoming June 10 meeting, though he said he was skeptical it would gain much traction there.

“The board is pretty conservative,” Young said, citing the all-Republican makeup of the five-member Washington County Board of Supervisors. “When I’ve talked to them individually … they have no desire to do this.”

Discussion comes after quiet but visible protests

Aside from Johnson’s brief public comments at a meeting earlier this year, the local protests against SF 418 have been largely undisruptive. A handful of advocates have instead begun sitting in the audience of board meetings holding signs. Others have joined public Zoom calls to access the meetings, muting their microphones but setting their profile pictures to signs demanding discussion on the bill.

While a handful of emails obtained by The Union show Johnson’s had a handful of individual conversations with supervisors on the matter, little has reached the public eye.

“I worry about how reticent the board is to have an open discussion about this,” Johnson said. “Where possible, they’ve tried to deflect having any sort of statement on the issue … What I worry is that the board is maybe concerned with how their conservative voter base would react to them appearing to stand up for trans people, because it might lose them some points in the culture war.”

Local advocacy groups have recently gotten involved in the effort as well.

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Washington For Justice, a nonprofit based in the county seat, has started a petition to show support for Johnson’s request. And members of Indivisible Washington County — a subgroup of the statewide and nationwide anti-Trump organizations all using the “Indivisible” name — last week began sitting in on supervisor meetings, where they hold signs and amplify their voices at the end of the Pledge of Allegiance, on the words, “liberty and justice for all.”

Indivisible Washington County Cofounder Lynette Iles said the group was committed to nondisruptive tactics.

“Sometimes, when people are not listening, they need to be faced with silence,” she said. “It’s a parenting technique … it gets everybody out of the anger and rage stance, and it kind of gets people back into a conversation mode when you stop the anger, and the fighting back-and-forth.”

Requested policy seems like a long shot

As Young mentioned, the Washington County Board of Supervisors is composed entirely of Republicans. The county’s conservative slant is also evident in its history of voting for President Donald Trump in presidential primaries, its lack of Democratic contenders for any county office in 2024, and its approval of a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” resolution in 2021, among other things.

Supervisor Jack Seward Jr. candidly told advocates and The Union that he supports SF 418, citing the state Republican Party’s platform which recognizes only “biological sex assigned at birth,” as opposed to the gender expressed by individuals in their everyday lives.

“Because you believe you are transgender, you don’t get special rights … if you want to pretend or believe that you’re something that you’re actually, physiologically not, that’s up to you in your own private life,” he said. “The special rights seem to me to be trying to force the vast majority of society to bend to the will of the transgenders, and I just don’t think that’s right.”

In emails obtained by The Union, other supervisors did not seem to express agreement with Johnson. Supervisor Stan Stoops said he believed federal law addressed Johnson’s concerns, while Supervisor Marcus Fedler at one point told Johnson, “I understand your position,” but did not expand on his own.

In an interview Wednesday morning, Young said he didn’t have strong feelings about SF 418, and didn’t know why state lawmakers passed it, though he added the caveat that he doesn’t understand “why they do a lot of stuff in Des Moines.”

Still, the supervisor chair said he didn’t hear much outcry against the bill from constituents, though he said he received a total of six emails about the matter in recent days.

“Right now, there’s six people that are behind all this,” he said. “There’s 22,000 people in the county, so I don’t see that as a majority of the people in the county wanting this.”

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Despite the partisan leanings of the board, advocates said they hoped to find common ground, pitching the issue as one that went beyond party politics.

“You don’t need to abandon any sort of religious, moral, cultural, whatever understanding of gender that you have, in order to recognize that this bill is simply discrimination,” Johnson said. “This bill makes it effectively legal in the state of Iowa to discriminate in things like housing, employment and accommodations. And to me, that ought not to be a politically divisive issue, regardless of where you stand on the gender issue.”

As Washington For Justice gathers petition signatures, the group’s president, Dan Henderson, said he believed elected officials would either come to recognize the call to action, or be voted out when election season rolls around.

“We are (interested) in finding candidates who would be willing to run for county board in the future, who might be more responsive to these kinds of requests,” Henderson said. “This board has been there for a long time, pretty much unchallenged … and I think they’re used to that. The reality is, there are a lot of people in this town and in this county that are very upset about SF 418.”

Sides disagree over local law’s potential impact

Supervisor Young disputed the need for a civil rights ordinance like one passed in Johnson County, which does explicitly mention “gender identity.” He said he saw no evidence of anti-trans discrimination in the county to begin with.

“I do not see people in Washington County, businesses, discriminating against these people. I have never seen it or heard it,” Young said. “Why’s it going to start now? And I don’t even know how many of those people are in the community. Heck, who knows, I could be dealing with them … but those kinds of things, in my personal life, I don’t look for.”

County officials like Stoops and Young have also argued that federal civil rights laws offer sufficient protections where state codes do not. Young cited Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 Supreme Court Case that effectively established gender identity and sexuality as a protected class at the federal level.

Advocates disagree. Some argue that the current Republican-led administration is unlikely to enforce such protections. In one email, Johnson cited the Pentagon’s recent efforts to remove openly trans troops from service as evidence that federal officials were uninterested in protecting citizens whose gender doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth.

Others point out that Title VII — the federal law at the heart of the Bostock ruling — applies only to employers of 15 or more people, a threshold many local small businesses do not exceed.

“How many Washington businesses have 15 employees? Not very many,” Dan Henderson said. “There’s a gap here that, we’re hoping, the county board will recognize, just like they recognized four years ago they felt they had to make Washington County a safe gun sanctuary … this is much more ambiguous than the Second Amendment is, I hope they’ll see that.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com