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Advocates Hope LGBTQ Protections Will Pass With New Leadership

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The Virginia Values Act, introduced Friday in the General Assembly by Senator Adam Ebbin, would offer extensive (and much needed) non-discrimination protections to Virginia’s LGBTQ citizens.

Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, introduced Friday SB 868, called the “Virginia Values Act,” which would amend existing nondiscrimination laws to extend protections for the state’s LGBTQ residents. While protection from discimination against race, religion, age, and disability, among other demographics, already exist under Virginia law, the proposed bill seeks to include the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”

Less than half of U.S. states prohibit discrimination for LGBTQ individuals, according to Freedom for All Americans, a nationwide campaign that seeks to provide nondiscrimination protection for LGBTQ individuals. Virginia is among the majority, with no laws protecting the community from wrongful firing or evictions based on discrimination.

Tracey Swinarsky is a transgender advocacy speaker with Equality Virginia, an organization that seeks equality for all LGBTQ individuals. She said she has experienced discrimination from two employers, including one that fired her because of customer complaints because she is transgender.

“If there was a legal thing that says legally you can’t do this, I would’ve taken action,” Swinarsky said.

“The new law will bring Virginia into the 21st century, and into alignment with Virginia voters, by modernizing and expanding existing human rights law,” the Virginia Values Coalition stated in a press release. The coalition formed in October, following the 2019 General Assembly session in which over 20 bills supported by Equality Virginia failed to advance.

SB 868 was referred to the Committee on General Laws and Technology, chaired by Sen. George Barker, D-Fairfax. 

Sen. Adam Ebbin, patron of the bill to prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ. (courtesy of generalassembly.gov)

The proposed protections will directly target discrimination from public and private employers, housing, credit applications and public acommodations. The Virginia Fair Housing Law would include prohibiting eviction or denial of residence on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. 

Employers with more than five employees will also be prohibited from firing or refusing to hire an individual on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. It will also be unlawful for employment agencies to refuse to refer an individual for a job on that basis. 

Under the proposed changes, no individual could be legally denied service due to their gender identity or sexual orientation, including in restaurants, stores and public facilities, such as gyms and libraries. This section would not apply to any private club or facility owned by a religious corporation that is not open to the public. 

The bill also proposes including discrimination against sexual orientation or gender identity as qualifying reasons for grievance hearings, which are meetings that address employee allegations of discrimination. 

“It would give us a lot more feeling of safety and security if that happens,” Swinarsky said. “We’re a part of the world and they’re gonna have to deal with that and take care of us and handle us like anybody else out there — no matter what.”

Gov. Ralph Northam included the objectives of this legislation as a priority during his State of the Commonwealth address on Wednesday. 

“Then, we will pass comprehensive protections in employment, housing, and public accommodations for LGBTQ people,” Northam said in his address. “These are important steps toward building a more equal, just, and inclusive state.”

The Virginia Values Coalition worked alongside Ebbin and other partners including Equality Virginia, the Human Rights Campaign, Freedom for All Americans, the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and the National Center for Transgender Equality to create the legislation. 

Legislators announce support of LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections in 2020 General Assembly. (courtesy of hrc.org)

Virginia is home to over 257,000 LGBTQ adults and over 50,000 LGBTQ youth according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. The institute reported that 81 percent of Virginia residents think LGBTQ individuals experience discrimination in the state. It also shows that 74 percent of LGBTQ student respondents have experienced discrimination at school. 

“So we know that discrimination is happening with frequency in Virginia,” said Vee Lamneck, executive director of Equality Virginia, which also conducted its own surveys and reported that about half of its participants experienced discrimination. 

Lamneck stepped into this position just last week after being with the organization for over six years and deputy director for three years. The position was previously held by James Parrish, current director of the VVC. 

“An overwhelming majority of Americans, including Virginians, believe that LGBT people should be protected from discrimination,” Parrish said. “But also a majority of people believe those protections already exist, and they don’t.”

Sen. Ebbin patroned SB 998 last session, which also aimed to prohibit employers from discriminating on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. It passed the Senate 28-12 but didn’t make it past the first reading in the House. 

“Conservative leadership in the House of Delegates continuously stood in the way,” Parrish said. “The Republican-led Senate passed both the employment bill and the housing bill with a super majority of votes in the past several sessions but they were always dead-on-arrival in the House.”

Equality Virginia and the VVC said they are excited to see new leadership this session that seeks to protect the LGBTQ community.

House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn and Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, already pledged to support legislation that protects the LGBTQ community. 

“Passing comprehensive protections for LGBTQ Virginians will be a top priority for Virginia’s Senate in the upcoming General Assembly Session,” Saslaw stated in a tweet. “It’s long past time to end anti-LGBTQ discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces.”

A CNS reporter reached out to a third of the Republican senators who voted against the 2019 bill to gauge their thoughts on SB 868, but none responded. Equality Virginia recently reported that 2018 and 2019 surveys found a majority of Virginia Republicans support passing protective legislation. In 2019, 63 percent said they would support protection from discrimination in employment, while 53 percent — a slight decrease from 55 percent in 2018 — said they would support protection in housing.

When Parrish was asked what he would say to opposing legislators, he advised to listen to the facts: a multitude of polls show that the majority of Virginians support protecting LGBTQ individuals from discrimination. 

“LGBTQ people live in every district in this state, so elected leaders should be looking out for all citizens,” Parrish said.

Written by Emma Gauthier, Capital News Service. Top Photo: A rainbow flag was raised on Sept. 23 along with a trans flag and the Philly Pride Flag for Richmond Pride. (Photos from City of Richmond Flickr account)

Evictions, a Focus of Concern, Fall 14% in Virginia

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Virginia has some of the harshest eviction laws in the country, but the attention generated by a high-profile 2018 study has led to increased focus on finding ways to alleviate the problem, some of which are having a positive effect.

Martin Wegbreit has known for a long time that Richmond has a problem with evictions, but a 2018 New York Times article brought national attention to the issue. It said the city’s eviction rate was more than 11 percent — three to four times the national average.

“The only thing that really surprises me about evictions in Richmond is how surprised everybody else is,” said Wegbreit, the director of litigation at the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society.

Since the article came out, city and state officials started allocating more resources to the problem, and those strategies appear to be working: Through September of this year, the number of evictions has dropped about 19 percent in Richmond and 14 percent across Virginia, according to an analysis of court data.

From Jan. 1 through Sept. 30, about 10,600 eviction cases were filed in General District Court in Richmond. That compares with more than 13,000 cases during the corresponding period of 2018.

Eviction by the numbers

Statewide, about 155,000 evictions were filed in 2018. About 125,000 of those cases were filed during the first nine months of the year. During the first nine months of 2019, about 108,000 evictions were filed statewide.

Richmond’s evictions accounted for about 10 percent of the statewide total — more than any other city or county. Through September, Newport News had about 9,500 evictions; Norfolk, approximately 8,800; and Virginia Beach, more than 8,400.

Much of the concern about evictions in Richmond has focused on the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which provides public housing for low-income families including housing complexes like Creighton, Fairfield, Gilpin, Hillside, Mosby, and Whitcomb courts.

During 2018, the RRHA accounted for almost 2,200 evictions. Through September of this year, the RRHA had filed about 1,500 evictions — 15 percent fewer than the agency took to court during the same period of 2018.

In November, RRHA implemented an agency-wide freeze on lease enforcement for nonpayment of rent. As a result, “no public housing family will be removed from their home for debt owed to RRHA.”

The eviction process

Tough eviction laws in Virginia contribute to the state’s high eviction rate, according to tenant advocates. For example, if tenants miss a rent payment in Virginia, they can be told to provide the money within five days. In other states, notices can be up to 30 days.

Wegbreit said he believes Virginia’s eviction laws are too harsh. “To be honest, I think they are less favorable [and] less friendly to tenants,” he said.

Wegbreit says part of the problem is the archaic legal terminology surrounding evictions. Many tenants receive eviction notices they struggle to understand. For example, “unlawful detainer” is the official legal term for eviction in the state.

“When you have an unlawful detainer, that is when the court finds you guilty of not paying your rent, and that’s when the official eviction ends up on the record,” said Amelie Rives, a graduate student who works with the RVA Eviction Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Rives said tenants are given a five-day notice to “pay or quit” after the payment grace period.

“Most people actually pay within the five to 10 days once they get the ‘pay or quit,’” Rives said. “And the reason why it’s so hard to track the numbers for eviction is a lot of this happens outside of the court system.”

After the five-day notice, the landlord can file a formal eviction against the tenant. A court date is set, and the tenant must attend even if the rent owed has been paid.

At the court date, a writ of possession is issued if the tenant is found guilty of “unlawful detainer,” or not paying rent. This writ is what allows the sheriff to evict a tenant. The tenants have 10 to 15 days to leave, or the sheriff will come remove them.

Sheriff evictions account for 30 percent of involuntary moves. Rives said this is the only number that can easily be tracked, despite the fact that it’s less than a third of total evictions.

Since evictions stay on a tenant’s record for about seven years, tenants are left with fewer housing options after an eviction.

“It really ties people to their location in a way that can and cannot be helpful depending on what life circumstances they’re in,” Rives said.

Challenges in finding resources

Rives says it’s difficult for people going through eviction to find assistance.

“There’s a mix of not having enough bandwidth and that scarcity of ability to think about anything else. If you’re going through eviction, there is probably a lot more going on, but you’ve got to focus on that one thing,” Rives said.

Moreover, she said, “There’s not necessarily a streamlined place that someone could go and qualify for assistance, especially if that person is not extremely low-income or they don’t have children.”

Poverty is a cause of eviction in Richmond. The city’s poverty rate is 22 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 American Community Survey.

Arlington and Fairfax counties have programs called “coordinated or centralized access” to assist tenants facing evictions. These programs provide one-stop shopping for helpful resources. Both counties’ poverty rates are lower than Richmond’s.

Although Richmond does have resources such as the Evictions Diversion Pilot Program, most tenants aren’t aware of where they can go for help, tenant advocates say. As a result, and because they may feel helpless during the eviction process, many tenants do not show up for their court dates, Rives said.

A task force to address the issue

Wegbreit is a co-facilitator of the Evictions Task Force, which Richmond created to address the eviction crisis.

The idea came after two law students from Yale and Stanford University conducted research about evictions in Richmond for seven months. They wrote a report of recommendations on how to address the problem.

The Evictions Task Force is a group of stakeholders that includes public housing residents, tenant advocates, nonprofit executives, civil rights lawyers, homelessness specialists and academics.

“I’m one of those people who believes you can’t really see results unless you have a nice mix of diversity and opinion,” Rives said of the task force. “So when you have that nice diversity of opinion in such a public way, I think that you can see results.”

The task force will focus on six primary areas: prevention, landlord and tenant education, individuals who are at or below 30 percent of area median income, tenant support, centralized supportive services, and affordable housing.

“I think the goal for this task force is to prioritize what are the things that we can do sooner rather than later,” Mayor Levar Stoney said at the Evictions Task Force meeting on Dec. 2. “Let us, let the politicians, worry about the cost. You guys find the solutions, and then if you guys find great solutions, the politicians will find the will to find the dollars.”

Virginia’s Capitol building. Photo By Varmin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

Legislation to combat eviction

At least three bills concerning housing practices will be considered by the Virginia General Assembly in their 2020 session. The legislation includes:

HB 3 — Virginia Fair Housing Law; unlawful discriminatory housing practices, sexual orientation and gender, etc. This bill would add discrimination because of an individual’s sexual orientation or gender as an unlawful housing practice.

HB 6 — Virginia Fair Housing Law; unlawful discriminatory housing practices. This proposal would add discrimination on the basis of a person’s source of income to the list of unlawful discriminatory housing practices. Source of income is defined as “any source of income that lawfully provides funds to or on behalf of a renter or buyer of housing, including any assistance, benefit, or subsidy program, whether such program is administered by a governmental or nongovernmental entity.”

HB 7 — Virginia Fair Housing Law; unlawful discriminatory housing practices. This measure would prohibit discrimination in local land use ordinance of housing developments because the housing development is “expected to contain affordable housing units occupied or intended for occupancy by families or individuals with incomes at or below 80 percent of the median income of the area where the housing development is located or is proposed to be located.”

About the data in this report

For this story, multimedia journalists Patricia Cason and Jaclyn Barton analyzed data on evictions cases filed in General District Court throughout Virginia.

The data had been scraped from the state’s court system by Ben Schoenfeld, a software engineer in Hampton Roads, and posted on an open website.

Evictions cases, officially called “unlawful detainers,” are civil filings. So the reporters downloaded records on all civil cases filed in General District Court statewide in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 (through September).

From the 2.8 million records, the reporters extracted the eviction cases — more than 620,000. They used Microsoft Access and Excel to look at the number of evictions by year and by locality. The reporters also examined the number of cases filed by the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

Written by Jaclyn Barton and Patricia Cason, Capital News Service. Top Photo by Chris Gerber on Unsplash.

Virginia LGBTQ Advocates Hoping For Big Gains in General Assembly This Year

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For the first time in over a generation, Democrats control both houses of the General Assembly, and advocates are working to ensure that this has positive results for Virginia’s LGBTQ community.

It hasn’t been all that many years since the dawn of a new General Assembly session meant just as many proposed bills designed to diminish LGBTQ rights and further discrimination against us as bills designed to improve the lives of LGBTQ Virginians. That’s changed in recent years, notably with the ending of Bob Marshall’s term in the House Of Delegates, but continued Republican control of both houses of the General Assembly meant that the many pro-LGBTQ bills that were proposed never made it out of committee.

This week, everything changes. The Democrats are in control not only of the Governor’s Office but both houses of the General Assembly. This is the first time that’s been true since 1993, before many of our readers were born, and it has the potential to make a lot of improvements in the civil rights and legal status of LGBTQ Virginians.

State Senator Jennifer McClellan agrees, and called the Democratic electoral victory a “huge deal” in a recent conversation with Virginia Mercury. McClellan has sponsored SB 66, which would amend the Virginia Fair Housing Deal make it illegal for landlords to refuse to rent to someone on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“I think that is an area where we would have been able to make some progress had it not been for Republicans in the House who wouldn’t even hear legislation,” McClellan told Virginia Mercury.

Indeed, many of these measures passed in the state Senate in previous sessions, even when it was under Republican control. However, Republican leadership in the House Of Delegates often refused to even hear discussion of pro-LGBTQ bills, either in committees or full sessions of the House. Now, with Democrats in the driver’s seat, LGBTQ advocates see hope on the horizon.

James Parrish. Photo courtesy Equality Virginia.

“There is an opportunity to pass legislation that supports Virginia’s LGBTQ community more broadly than just nondiscrimination protection,” James Parrish told the Virginia Mercury. Parrish, until recently the executive director of Equality Virginia, stepped down on January 1 in order to lead the Virginia Values Coalition, a newly formed pro-LGBTQ advocacy organization bringing together groups like Virginia’s ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, and the National Center for Transgender Equality under a single banner.

Indeed, many issues are on the table for this upcoming session. Currently, only employees for the government and state contractors are protected from firing based on sexual orientation or gender identity — and those employees are only protected in a temporary fashion. One of Ralph Northam’s first acts as governor was to sign an executive order replicating one previously signed by Terry McAuliffe during his gubernatorial administration, protecting LGBTQ state employees from firing. However, if a less LGBTQ-friendly governor were elected in 2021 and decided not to sign a similar executive order, that protection would disappear.

The new Democratic leadership of the General Assembly are certainly in a position to create a more permanent law protecting public employees against discrimination; indeed, SB 159, introduced by Senator Jennifer Boysko, does exactly that. But advocates see an opportunity to protect more than public employees; Parrish told the Virginia Mercury that advocates are hoping for the passage of a bill that protects all LGBTQ employees, public and private. “We anticipate getting a lot of corporate support for it,” Parrish told the Mercury.

SB 23, introduced by Senator Adam Ebbin, would enact exactly this sort of employment protection. Ebbin, one of five LGBTQ members of the General Assembly, says that a positive change like this has been a long time coming.

“It’s a big deal to know that you can’t just be swept aside as a second-class citizen,” he told the Virginia Mercury. “And it’ll matter. There’s a lot of people older than me who thought this kind of environment would never come.”

Senator Adam Ebbin. Photo By EbbinForVirginia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia

Another big push from advocates is to ban conversion therapy in Virginia. While the Virginia Board of Psychology and multiple other state agencies within the Department of Health Professions have released guidance stating that conversion therapy is considered a violation of standard practice, it is still technically legal within the state. Both Richmond and Virginia Beach’s City Councils have passed resolutions asking the General Assembly to ban the practice, and Senator Scott Surovell, who has been attempting to pass a ban for multiple previous sessions, has introduced SB 245 in hopes of doing exactly that. A similar bill in the House Of Delegates, HB 386, has been proposed by Delegate Patrick Hope.

There are other issues on the table as well; bills in both the House and Senate would require the Department of Education to create a statewide policy determining how Virginia’s schools would interact with transgender students. Both bills mandate “a safe and supportive learning environment free from discrimination and harassment for all students.” Bills introduced in the House and Senate also add sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as disability, to the list of classes protected by hate crime legislation.

Multiple bills and resolutions in the Senate attempt to remove the Marshall-Newman Amendment, the 2006 amendment to Virginia’s Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman, from the constitution. While this may seem strictly symbolic now, the Supreme Court’s more conservative shift in recent years, with the addition of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, leave some concerned that federal protections for marriage equality, currently protected only by Supreme Court precedent, may be challenged in the near future.

If the Supreme Court overruled its previous decision in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case, Virginia’s Constitution might once again become the top legal authority on marriage within the Commonwealth. If the Marshall-Newman Amendment remained on the books in such an event, all same-sex marriages within Virginia would immediately lose government recognition. This isn’t an outcome anyone wants, and therefore the passage of bills like Senator John Edwards’ SB 39, which repeals the Marshall-Newman Amendment, are more important than some might think at first.

While not all of the pro-LGBTQ bills currently facing the General Assembly will necessarily pass, it seems likely that the overall legal picture for LGBTQ Virginians will be considerably brighter by the end of the 2020 General Assembly session. And that’s a wonderful thing.

“We’ve come forward. We’re not going back,” Ebbin told the Virginia Mercury. “And I think there’s momentum to bring us to where we should and need to be.”

Top Photo By Varmin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia