By Christianne Walker
© Seattle Gay Standard, August 2001

After three special sessions to try to finish the work it didn't complete during the original session, the 2001 Legislature will be remembered mostly because it accomplished very little.

While the passage a major LGBT rights bill would have been extremely unlikely given the 50-50 split in the House and one-seat Democratic majority in the Senate, hearings on a couple of favorable measures and the defeat of hostile bills were in themselves small victories.

State Rep. Ed Murray's "Safe Schools Bill" advanced further than it has in the past four years he has introduced it, yet even a significant compromise on the language could not get it passed.

It would have required school districts to adopt policies against harassment and intimidation, direct the state Superintendent of Public Instruction to develop model policy, and provide funding to train teachers how to recognize and prevent bullying.

The focus of this legislation has been to better protect LGBT youth from harassment and violence suffered at school. This year Murray worked with the attorney general and a coalition of groups to craft broader language and eliminate references to sexual orientation to insulate the bill against anti-gay attacks from the legislature's more conservative members.

In a small step forward, the House bill, HB 1444, received a hearing in the Education Committee for the first time.

The Senate bill championed by Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, SB 5528, passed out of its Education Committee and out of the full Senate by a vote of 36-13. Yet that measure was thwarted back in the House by conservative legislators led by House Education Committee co-chair Rep. Gigi Talcott, who, despite its broad language, continued to view the bill as a front for a pro-gay agenda.

Murray recognizes that watering down a strong civil rights bill as a failed strategy that needs to be reevaluated. "We can try to de-gay an issue," he notes, "but the fact of the matter is that we're not going to address it [harassment of gay and lesbian students] unless we have legislation that says, 'This has to be stopped.'"

Senators were able to eke out a small gain by inserting $500,000 in the state budget plan for anti-bullying training. Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson will convene a panel of education experts to develop a model policy that school districts will be urged to adopt voluntarily.

Another bill championed by Murray - it, too, received a hearing for the first time since it was introduced in 1994 - would have expanded our state's anti-discrimination statute to cover the LGBT community.

This measure, HB 1524 and SB 5771, would have added "sexual orientation" as a protected class under the law prohibiting discrimination in employment, commerce, labor union membership, credit transactions, insurance transactions, access to public places, and real estate transactions.

The bill defined sexual orientation to include actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and gender expression or identity. Although it did not pass, Murray notes the hearing was thoughtful and the testimony was overwhelmingly positive.

As for prospects next year, he notes there's a better chance than in years past, but given that next year is a short session and an election year, "there's still along ways to go."

Conservative legislators blocked another bill that could have secured greater protections for gays and lesbians in custody disputes.

Rep. Carolyn Edmonds sponsored legislation, HB 1054, to ensure that only individuals with a significant bond to a child could seek court-ordered visitation rights. The bill could have a positive effect on unmarried and same-sex partners by ensuring that decisions about visitation rights were made based on the adult's relationship to the child.

But conservatives, this time led by House Judiciary Committee co-chair Rep. Mike Carrell, blocked the bill from a vote in committee because of its potential to protect gay and lesbian parents.

Two other LGBT bills languished with no real legislative action - one to add gender identity and expression to the state's hate crimes law (HB 2032), and another to establish civil unions with all the legal benefits of marriage for same-sex couples (HB 1758 and SB 5769).

Fortunately, anti-LGBT bills never progressed out of committee, including a measure (HB 1760 and SB 5232) to overturn last year's decision by the Public Employees Benefits Board to provide health care benefits to same-sex domestic partners of state employees, making Washington the fifth state to do so.

In fact, Murray notes the full funding of same-sex domestic partner benefits in this year's budget is one of the great, unnoticed accomplishments of the session and that "everyone who worked on that, from the unions on down, needs to get credit."

Other bills that went nowhere include HB 1970, which would have prohibited same-sex domestic partnerships or civil union-type arrangements and any related benefits, and HB 1250, which sought to "protect" the Boy Scouts of America from adverse reactions by public entities due to their anti-gay membership policy.

All of these bills will be in play again next January as the legislature heads into the second session of the legislative biennium. Citizens can easily monitor developments of these and newly introduced bills by visiting www.leg.wa.gov.