‘It’s shameful.’ Critics say GOP bill in Kansas House could wipe out LGBTQ protections

A bill proposed last week by a Kansas Republican lawmaker mirrors in part two Democratic measures that deal with eliminating unlawful racist language from HOA and other housing documents.

But the bill also contains a section that opponents say would negate ordinances passed in recent years by local governments across the state that prohibit discrimination and retaliation based upon sexual orientation and gender identity.

“I would describe it as disingenuous,” said Michael Poppa, mayor of Roeland Park and executive director of the Mainstream Coalition. “It’s a back door to wipe out protections for a vulnerable community. It’s virtually hidden if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

“It will invalidate any current local non-discrimination ordinance protecting the LGBTQ community and ban any from being enacted.”

About 20 municipalities in Kansas have passed non-discrimination ordinances, Poppa said, including Lawrence, Wichita, the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, and all northeast Johnson County cities. Roeland Park passed an ordinance in 2015, the first city in Johnson County to do so.

A hearing on the proposal, House Bill 2376, is scheduled for 9 a.m. Wednesday in the House Committee on Local Government.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Patrick Penn, R-Wichita, told The Star the measure “does the right thing” when it comes to dealing with discrimination.

The bill puts Kansas in line with federal non-discrimination law and “empowers local government to eradicate the scourge of discrimination against Black people in the form of discriminatory covenants,” he said. “In that same vein, it pulls into alignment and compliance as well, with one uniform standard across Kansas, anti-discrimination language as seen in ... the Kansas act against discrimination.”

But Thomas Alonzo, the chair of Equality Kansas, saw the bill as an effort to “dismantle the freedoms that we’ve” fought for. He said most of Kansas’ big cities have non-discrimination ordinances that extend to gender identity and sexual orientation.

If the bill passes, he said, businesses across the state will once again be free to discriminate against the LGBTQ community.

“I don’t want us to go back to where our people are not really able to participate or pursue life and happiness,” Alonzo said.

One portion of Penn’s bill says that if a homeowners association is no longer active, a city or county can eliminate a racially restrictive covenant by redacting it from the plat description or HOA governing document. Under current law, that language — though unenforceable — can only be removed by a homeowners association, not a city or county.

But another section of the bill says that “no city or county shall adopt or enforce any ordinance, resolution or regulation related to discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, disability, national origin or ancestry that is more restrictive than the provisions of the Kansas act against discrimination…or any other provisions of law related to such discrimination.”

The Kansas act against discrimination does not include sexual orientation or gender identity.

Rep. Emil Bergquist, the chair of the local government committee, said he believed Penn’s bill more uniformly dealt with racial covenant issues across the state.

The section on non-discrimination ordinances, he said, was a “matter for discussion.”

“I think the intent was to make laws uniform across the state,” said Bergquist, R-Park City.

Much of the language regarding restrictive covenants is similar to bills introduced in January by Rep. Rui Xu, D-Westwood, and Sen. Ethan Corson, D-Fairway. Xu’s bill hasn’t had a hearing scheduled, and Corson’s bill was set to have a hearing last week in the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee, but it was canceled.

Sen. Mike Thompson, R-Shawnee and the committee chairman, told The Star that the committee “gets a lot of bills” and “had to adjust our schedule.” He said he didn’t know whether the committee would get back to the bill.

Xu said he first heard of Penn’s measure on Friday.

“I’m really disappointed that we were given what accounts for a legislative layup in removing this discriminatory language (from property records), and we’re complicating it by adding in language that effectively targets our LGBTQ community,” he said. “They’re just injecting divisiveness into it for no reason.

“This is not a game that I have any interest in playing — pitting our Black and Jewish constituents against our gay constituents. This is not a scenario where one gets to win at the expense of the other.”

Xu said his bill isn’t controversial and has received widespread support.

“But now it feels like we have to scratch and claw just to get back to the status quo, which is continuing to have these unenforceable racial covenants on the books,” he said.

Rep. Linda Featherston, D-Overland Park and ranking minority member on the House local government committee, called Penn’s bill “alarming.”

“Rep. Xu’s bill has definitely been co-opted,” she said. “Our cities in Johnson County worked hard to get those NDOs (non-discrimination ordinances) passed. They worked with all of the invested parties, the community was very active, and to have the Legislature try to overrule that is a clear violation of home rule, which we are guaranteed in our Constitution.

“It’s shameful what’s been done here.”

The racially restrictive covenants were routinely recorded in plats and deeds in the first half of the 20th century and placed in many homes association documents not only in the Kansas City area, but nationwide. The language was ruled unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 and later deemed illegal by the Fair Housing Act. But because of the way the documents were recorded, the restrictions were nearly impossible to eliminate.

A 2005 investigation by The Star found that more than 1,200 documents involving thousands of homes in the Kansas City area still contained language banning Black people, Jews and members of other ethnic groups. After The Star’s report, Missouri and Kansas passed laws requiring HOAs to delete the restrictions without having to get approval from the homeowners.

But cities like Roeland Park have faced a challenge in removing the restrictions, officials say, because the city no longer has any active HOAs. That’s why they requested the bills that Xu and Corson introduced.

Jae Moyer, a Kansas LGBTQ activist, said combining the two issues into one bill was a “dirty” tactic.

“As someone who is actually affected by one of these non-discrimination ordinances — living in Overland Park, which has one — but also someone who advocated for those ideas back when those arguments were being had at the local level, I think this is absolute government overreach,” Moyer said. “I think it’s dirty that it would try to almost quid pro quo this in the same bill — as in ‘Well, we can work with your racially restrictive stuff, but we’re going to get rid of your NDOs.’”

At first glance, Poppa said, Penn’s bill “seems very well intentioned — that it would be removing these racially restrictive covenants.”

But in reality, he said, one part of the bill is designed to eliminate discrimination and the other part would allow it.

“Once the committee hears what this bill actually does,” he said, “I really hope that they will kill this bill and deal with Rep. Xu’s bill — a bill that doesn’t pit African Americans’ and Jewish Americans’ equality with equality for the LGBTQ+ community.”