INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – Hundreds of people calling for Indiana to add protections for gays and lesbians to the state’s civil-rights laws marched through downtown Indianapolis Saturday, attracting the attention basketball fans attending the Final Four tournament, some of whom offered the protesters cheers of support.
The march came two days after Indiana lawmakers responded to an uproar over a new religious objections law and tweaked the law to address concerns that it would allow discrimination against gays and lesbians.
March organizer Dominic Dorsey II told the crowd as it gathered on the steps of the city’s Monument Circle that the Legislature’s move was only a beginning. He said lawmakers now need to add legal protections to state law to prohibit workplace discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
“This new language that they’ve added is like stabbing somebody in the back and then pulling it out three inches and saying, ‘You’re all right, right? We’re good now, right?” he told crowd, which shouted back “no!”
Dorsey then led the gathering in chanting “Hoosiers don’t discriminate! – No more Band-Aids masking hate!” as they began a march that carried them several blocks past the city’s business district, bars and restaurants to the Lucas Oil Stadium, home of this year’s men’s Final Four.
Dozens of the marchers carried rainbow flags, American flags and Indiana state flags as well as signs reading “No hate in our state,” ”Equal rights for all” and other messages. Some pushed baby strollers with their children, others had dogs on leashes and many wore blue T-shirts reading “Indy Welcomes All.”
Police officers who blocked intersections so the protesters could march along downtown streets without incident estimated that between 500 and 600 people took part in the march. There were no arrests and the protest was “very peaceful,” said Indianapolis police spokesman Lt. Richard Riddle.
As the crowd approached Lucas Oil Stadium chanting, college basketball fans watched the passing spectacle under cool, sunny skies. Their response to the march was generally positive, with some appearing amused, others cheering the crowd on and many using their smartphone to record the moment.
There were no signs during the march of supporters of Indiana’s religious objections law.
When the marchers began chanting “No hate in our state!” Wisconsin Badgers fan Tammy Holtan Arnol clapped and cheered and then shouted back at the passing procession “No hate in your state!”
The 46-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, who was in town for Saturday’s semifinal between Wisconsin and Kentucky with her husband and their 7-year-old son, said she believes Indiana’s law was “hateful.”
She said the changes Indiana lawmakers made to the law in response to sharp criticism from around the nation and concerns raised by major corporations was just an effort to obscure the law’s real intentions.
“It was a shallow move to make it seem like it wasn’t to discriminate, but it really was,” she said.
Her 57-year-old husband, Tom Arnol, noted that Wisconsin, like Indiana’s doesn’t have protections for the LGBT community, even though he said many Wisconsin residents want such protections in place.
Outside the Lucas Oil Stadium, openly gay U.S. Army Major Steve Snyder-Hill told the crowd that he’s not from Indiana, but from Ohio. He said he’d thought about that when the crowd was chanting “No hate in our state.”
“I thought, ‘Well this isn’t my state, but then I remembered that I’m in the Army fighting for everybody’s freedom, for everybody’s rights,” he said to cheers. “So it isn’t just our state, it’s all our states that we’re fighting for together.”
Jason Collins, the first openly gay NBA player, said on Saturday that the NBA should avoid putting future Final Four championships in states that do not protect the rights of gays and lesbians.
Meanwhile, LGBT rights advocates are hoping to parlay the momentum from their legislative victories in Indiana and Arkansas this week into further expanding legal protections for gays and lesbians in those states and others.
Facing widespread pressure, including from big businesses such as Apple and Wal-Mart, lawmakers in Indiana and Arkansas rolled back their states’ new religious objections laws, which critics said could be used to discriminate against gays. Amid the uproar, the Republican governors of Michigan and North Dakota urged their own legislatures to extend anti-discrimination protections to gays.
Twenty-nine states currently don’t include protections for gays and lesbians in their non-discrimination laws, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. But the Indiana and Arkansas laws, along with court rulings or legislatures legalizing same-sex marriage in 37 states and an expected U.S. Supreme Court decision on gay marriage this year, are fueling efforts to change that as the 2016 elections approach.
“We’re not going to let any of these people off the hot seat,” said Kathy Sarris, co-founder of the gay-rights group Indiana Equality Action. “This ultimately is going to happen in Indiana.”
Hundreds of people calling for Indiana to add protections for gays and lesbians to state civil rights laws marched through downtown Indianapolis on Saturday, drawing the attention of fans attending the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament.
They chanted “No more Band-Aids masking hate,” before they walked several blocks to Lucas Oil Stadium, site of the NCAA men’s basketball championship semi-final and final games.
Most of the states without sexual orientation protections are in the South or the Plains, which tend to be more conservative. As public opinion has become more supportive of same-sex marriage and other gay rights in recent years, many businesses say such protections factor into their decisions about expansions and help them attract top employees.
Arkansas state Rep. Warwick Sabin, a Democrat from Little Rock, said the issue isn’t going away.
“Other states are moving ahead of us and Arkansas is being left in the dust. We need to make an affirmative statement about our values as a state, and I know that the vast majority of Arkansans believe in fairness and opportunity for all of its citizens,” he said.
Indiana’s Republican-controlled Legislature took a first step by adding language to its new religious objections law stating that service providers can’t use the law as a legal defense for refusing to provide goods, services, facilities or accommodations based on sexual orientation, gender identity and other factors. It is now the first Indiana state law that explicitly mentions sexual orientation and gender identity.
The governors of New York and Connecticut, who had imposed bans on state officials traveling to Indiana as a symbol of their opposition to the religious objections law, lifted those bans on Saturday in response to the changes in the law.
Arkansas’ amended law only addresses actions by the government, not by businesses or individuals. The law’s supporters say the changes would prevent businesses from using it to deny services to individuals, even though it doesn’t include specific anti-discrimination language similar to Indiana’s law.
Gay rights proponents want Arkansas to go further, though, and are trying to build support for adding sexual orientation to the protected statuses covered by the state’s civil rights laws. The state’s attorney general, Leslie Rutledge, last week approved the wording of a proposed ballot measure that would add such protections, clearing the way for supporters to begin gathering the signatures needed to get it on the November 2016 ballot.
“Today, LGBT Arkansans are still unequal, and today’s battle points toward a broader struggle ahead – a fight where full and complete equality for all Arkansans that cannot be undermined is the only acceptable outcome,” Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT rights group, said in a statement after Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed that state’s law.
Hutchinson, meanwhile, has left open the possibility of issuing an executive order that would prohibit workplace discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people at state agencies.
Similar debates are going on elsewhere. In North Dakota on Thursday the Republican-controlled Legislature voted down a measure that would have prohibited discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation in the areas of housing and employment. Gov. Jack Dalrymple rebuked lawmakers, saying such discrimination wasn’t acceptable.
In Michigan, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder warned legislators that he would veto a religious objections bill unless they also sent him a measure that would extend anti-discrimination protections to gays. He cited the Indiana outcry in making his warning.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and fellow Republicans maintained that the state’s religious objections law never sanctioned discrimination against anyone. They said considering changes to the state’s civil rights law was too major of a policy change to take up with less than a month left in the legislative session.
Eric Miller, the executive director of an Indiana group, Advance America, called the national outcry over the state’s law an “orchestrated effort of misinformation” led by those pushing for “government recognition, government approval, adding to our civil-rights laws protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.”
A crowdfunding campaign for the owners of an Indiana pizzeria who expressed support for the Indiana religious objections law has raised more than $840,000 as of Saturday morning. Memories Pizza in Walkerton is closed indefinitely and its operators say they’ve gone into hiding after their comment that they would not serve pizza to a gay wedding prompted an avalanche of criticism on social media.
