Musings from the playground in my mind.
The City of Green Bay was
bragging about its recent 100% score on the
Municipal Equality Index.
This measurement is a phony indicator of the open and welcoming
nature of a community.
Back in 2017, I was serving on the city council in the City of De Pere, a small town just south of Green Bay. We had an agenda item to change our municipal code regarding nondiscrimination in housing, public accommodation, and employment.
The issue came up for a vote at our November 7, 2017 meeting. As we often did, we suspended regular order to allow folks from the public to speak on the issue. 42 such people had their time to speak in front of the council; it took over two hours. As you can imagine, we had opinions from all angles on this. Here are two of those opinions, interestingly, each from one of our two high schools:
A high school student described how things are at her school. She spoke of other kids who sometimes sit alone in the cafeteria and how she and her friends will invite them to sit with them. She spoke of how she and her friends keep an eye out for classmates who seem a bit disconnected and they make efforts to include them.
A high school teacher spoke about an issue that had recently come up at commencement, where it's been tradition for girls to wear orange gowns while boys wear black gowns. But a student recently struggled to decide which color gown to wear. After discussing the issue, the school decided to end that rule and have all students wear the same color gowns.
We even had people from outside the city, like a UWGB professor, share their thoughts. During my eight years on the council, I put very little value on the opinions of people from outside our city, telling us what to do. Can you imagine if I told my constituents that I ignored their wishes and feedback and voted a certain way on an issue because someone who doesn't live or work here wants it that way? Should people from outside your city determine how you run your city? But I digress.
After a couple of hours listening to all of the stories and opinions, it was obvious that we just didn't need to make any changes to our ordinance. We didn't have a problem. Just re-read those comments from our two high schools. Not only did one school address the issue and change their rules accordingly, students in the other school addressed the issue where it matters, assuring that their classmates don't feel left out; they didn't even need their school leaders to step in and enforce a rule, they just did the right thing and solved the problem. And when young people are doing good things, that tells you something about how they're being raised and what your city will look like in 10 or 20 years. In other words, we already have good people and good organizations in our community, with no need to change our ordinance. Even the two largest employers in the city, St. Norbert College and Humana, told us that they already have company policies to prevent such discrimination and they've had them for years. They don't need an ordinance. These stories were not only heartwarming, they made me a proud resident of De Pere.
The proposal was a solution looking for a problem. So, back to the Municipal Equality Index; according to their webiste, "the Municipal Equality Index examines how inclusive municipal laws, policies, and services are for LGBTQ+ people who live and work there." It doesn't look at actual behaviors in your city, its organizations, and more importantly, its people. It's not a measure of how good your people are. It doesn't measure how welcoming or how fair your companies are. It doesn't even look at those companies to see how well or how quickly they resolve such issues as they arise.
The organization just looks at your municipal code with no history or knowledge of who the people are or how they treat their neighbors, and they issue their score.
But what if you live in a community that doesn't need such rules? What if your neighbors are by-and-large really good and welcoming people? And what if those neighbors are the ones running the companies and the schools?
Here's another way to look at it. You're choosing a new city to call home. City A has such an ordinance and uses it to ensure equality among its people. Nearby, City B has no such ordinance and has never even had a situation where such an ordinance was needed. The people who run the companies see to it that such situations are not tolerated; the students in the schools take matters into their own hands, making classmates feel welcome and maintaining an environment where school leaders don't even need to be involved.
De Pere is a good community with incredible people. We don't need an 'index' to tell us how to treat each other.
