Yay! Two Idaho Cities Pass LGBT Anti-Discrimination Ordinances

It’s hard to believe that certain anti-discriminatory LGBT laws are just being passed now — oh, just your basic human rights tenets and stuff like that — but good news nevertheless: the town of Pocatello, Idaho, just voted 4-2 to pass an ordinance that will protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals from discrimination when it comes to housing, employment and public accommodations, reports the Idaho State News Journal. Another Idaho city, Coeur d’Alene followed suit shortly after.

They are now the sixth and seventh cities in the Idaho to do so, even as Republican state officials stall on expanding the Human Rights Act to protect the LGBT community.

While an almost-identical ordinance failed to pass in Pocatello back in April, this one was accepted after an internal debate that ran late into the night, taking into account the following changes from the April version:

Language added to the ordinance that would have called for gender identification based on state driver’s licenses or official IDs in restrooms and locker rooms and an exemption for all employers with five or fewer employes were pulled before the bill passed.

Gotta crawl before you can walk, I guess. A tipster emailed to inform us that this achievement is largely thanks to the work of Monica Hopkins, executive director of the ACLU. Woo!