A message from:

Georg Ketelhohn
Political Committee Co-Chair
SAVE Dade

I am proud today of SAVE Dade and of the City of Miami commissioners for standing up for fair treatment of all city employees regardless of what kind of family they have.  The commission voted five to zero this morning in favor of the proposed Domestic Partner Ordinance.  SAVE Dade received assistance from ACLU of Florida in crafting the language for the ordinance, and from Equality Florida, ACLU of Florida and the Florida GLBT Democratic Caucus in turning out speakers for the public hearing this morning. 
 
A City of Miami firefighter spoke about how even as she puts her life on the line at her job, and does so gladly in service to the city, she and her partner and their child have struggled to find and pay for private insurance to cover health emergencies, when her fellow employees have such health insurance secured for them by the city.  Speaker after speaker spoke in favor of the ordinance.
 
Then, after all the speakers I knew had spoken, one older man, a Cuban exile, got up to speak.  At first I wondered if he was there to speak against the ordinance, but instead, in broken English he talked about how when he fought during the Cuban revolution, some of the guys who fought along side with him were gay, and they fought "like real men" while some of the "macho" heterosexual guys fled like cowards, and he asked the commission to treat everyone equally based on merit, and to pass the ordinance.  Not one person got up to speak against the ordinance today.
 
In contrast to the contested battle at the public hearing last year on a similar ordinance at the county level, and to the circus that ensued when Miami-Dade County prohibited discrimination in employment and housing back in 1998, a clear line of progress can be traced in the way LGBT issues are received in Miami-Dade, as with many other parts of the country.  We have much work to do in Florida, with a hostile legislature and Amendment 2 freshly added to our Constitution.  But we are making progress, albeit one bit at a time. 
 
Georg Ketelhohn
Political Committee Co-Chair
SAVE Dade
Miami, Florida