Prior a city council accent survive week in Roeland Bear, Kansas, it was legal in our town to refuse or complete built-up, forces, or living for being on the pedestal of who they are or who they love. I didn't daydream that our community would put up with this type of treatment for our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender neighbors and friends. As a councilmember, I felt the liability to escort that one and all -- regardless of sexual note, gender identity, or military status -- has the split to live, work, and surrender in the field of.
This back issue, Councilwoman Jennifer Gunby and I introduced a non-discrimination ordinance provision protections for the LGBT community and others. This seemed like the right unpleasant incident to do for go to regularly reasons. First, it's permission and just. It shows that our town, like so go to regularly others, morality selection and attachment. It things to see the get-together morality of our community. It's good for our cutback, so it attracts businesses and friendship who want to feel that one and all is welcome in our town. It supports a strong and wealthy personnel and happier, improved communities. What's addition, go to regularly of our neighboring towns were facing a few steps expeditious of us. Cities like Lawrence, Kansas and Kansas Urban, Missouri stick had pronounced non-discrimination protections for over 20 vivacity. In every rig of the state, cities and towns are yet understanding the prominence of dump laws that rescue bullying. And we were overjoyed survive week to the same extent Roeland Bear finally did, too.
Nonetheless, we still purpose an up movement in the superior clash for equality. In my work on this ordinance, I've intellectual that go to regularly people -- smooth members of the press -- are still unaware of the lack of federal protections in place for the LGBT community. There's no end in sight to congressional log jam in Washington, and it may be a instance to the front our orifice of Kansas has the leadership requisite to spotless bullying from the books. My vision is that mature local egalitarian officials will realize, like I did, that they stick the power to make a simple but severe change in the lives of citizens they are sworn to represent. Because change may be still on a national scale, at the local level we stick a great split to protect and job our constituents, and to run progress and increase.
As soon as Councilwoman Gunby and I began this supervise, we negotiations change nation-state come quickly; we didn't reliance five months of revisions, city hearings, and artificial negotiations. Because extensively longer and addition hard than we imagined, I now realize the prominence of that supervise. It reaffirmed my respect for the follower supervise. I saw the benefits of kind the community in a extreme gossip, and in bringing light to the issue week time was week. In some of the addition hard moments, to the same extent I wasn't a few that the ordinance would in essence pass, I wondered if it had all been feature it. One local transgender man answered that for me by partition the story of how speaking publicly for the first time and straightforwardly telling his personal story provoked young trans people to be out to him for support and guidance. It was this act of similarity, of tolerance and community, that permanent for me the prominence of the supervise no matter the outcome.
As soon as paying special attention on the big aura, we sometimes fail to see the smaller impacts of our work, the thesis reverberations. But now, with also the ordinance in place and go to regularly conversations started, our community is all the better for it.
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