Can Jacksonville’s City Council be bought?

Can Jacksonville’s City Council be bought? When it comes to the Human Rights Ordinance, at least one out-of-state outfit thinks so.

As first reported by WJXT, a Dallas outfit called Newstarter.com posits a provocative proposition:

“Millionaires buy politicians. Now the PEOPLE can too! Buy City Council votes to pass the Human Rights Ordinance in Jacksonville,” says the site, which already has over $2,000 committed to its goal of $100,000.

That $100,000, according to the WJXT dispatch, is to be split 10 ways among the 10 Council members who would vote for an expanded HRO.

With $2,000 plus raised, so far they’ve bought (theoretically) the femur or perhaps the torso of a yes vote.

The group’s spokesman, a David Olshansky, told WJXT, “The group would be willing to crowdfund for the other side also, if there was a desire to vote down the HRO, which first failed in 2012, but he said he hasn’t seen a want to.”

“We didn’t get called in. I saw a desire from several groups in the Jacksonville area and also groups that were working in Houston where their human rights ordinance just failed to add LGBT protections,” Olshansky told THE Local Station.

The salient question is one of why a grandstanding group like this is grabbing media coverage on this issue.

Going back to 2012, there was no leadership from the executive branch on this issue, ironic given that expanding an anti-discrimination ordinance would seem to be in the wheelhouse of a Democratic mayor who came to the office with establishment bona fides. The narratives, of course, abound on Alvin Brown and his position on it. Some charitably say that he was simply obtuse or oblivious on the issue. Others have ascribed less charitable motivations.

Whatever the case, he’s out of office now. And his inability to take a position on the very real issue of housing and employment discrimination against the LGBT community is seen by many as a reason why.

He didn’t take a position in the debate in 2012 or 2015, even as former Councilman Johnny Gaffney claimed, during the campaign, that he was pressured into the No vote that surprised City Hall reporters at the time.

And here’s the thing: It’s easy to pillory Brown for a lack of courage on this issue. But he’s not the only one.

In the current discussion of the issue, leaving aside the amorphous promises of the campaign trail, two people on council have gotten out in front of the issue and said, unambiguously, that the time is now to expand the HRO: Democrat Tommy Hazouri and Republican Aaron Bowman.

The others? They hem and haw, and fret and fume, about the “language in the bill” (which doesn’t exist yet, because no one has written it). Or they’re handwringing about “religious exceptions.” Or they won’t make a concrete comment either way.

This is the same outfit that can spend months talking about the rights and wrongs of backing cars into driveways, and years talking about how close food trucks can be to restaurants. You know, the big issues of the day.

But when it comes to the kind of anti-discrimination ordinance that most real cities have passed as a matter of course, as a good faith protection of rights? They wait for guidance. From someone else.

So they get crowdsourcing campaigns to buy votes. And they get the buffoonish distribution of Klan flyers. And they get itinerant preachers, who show up to City Council meetings without a flock, who threaten to show up at a Democratic Party gala in drag and use the women’s bathroom, presumably to make a point about how this bill’s primary motivation is to ensure that men can use women’s bathrooms.

How stupid do people think Jacksonville’s city government is?

The extremists of the right are able to find traction on this issue precisely because the politicians of the center right are scared of offending them, because … well, why?

Are they worried that the religious yahoos will mobilize against them in re-election bids?

Here’s a protip: vote for the stadium renovations and Build Something That Lasts. Shad Khan’s backing will take you way farther than that of the church set, in terms of mailers and ability to get a positive message out.

(And of course, those stadium renovations will pass 18 to 1, if the council committees are any indication.)

The question raised by the HRO is simple: do all people in Jacksonville have equal rights or not? Should people be able to be fired or evicted because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression?

It’s an issue of moral clarity: either you want to protect people from said discrimination, or not.

But when moral clarity is called for, these politicians, who messaged so hard to get into office, are by and large soft and opaque.

Stand up and be counted. Because right now, extremists and outsiders are hijacking Duval County’s democratic process.

And right now, we are seeing yahoos like Raymond Johnson and the Rev. Gene Youngblood given global press in The New York Times, as examples of Jacksonville’s “conservative” wing.

Is this good for business? Is this going to help on Chamber business junkets? Can we stop pretending that it’s 1983 and finally relegate these relics to the dustbin of history?

Those are the open questions.