The decades-long struggle for LGBTQ equality in Michigan achieved a landmark victory Thursday.
Michigan’s anti-discrimination law will now explicitly protect Michiganders on the basis of sex and gender identity, after legislation amending the Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act was signed into law.
Sen. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, the bill’s sponsor, called back to more than 50 years of activism and invoked the names of countless activists “who devoted their lives to this movement and did not live to see this day.”
“People have not been able to keep jobs. They’ve not been able to keep housing. They’ve been put out of places and this seeks justice for the people suffering now, but it definitely is a signal to those people that their lives were not lived in vain. So many people lived in the shadows, so many people were beaten and bruised just because of their identity,” Moss, Michigan’s first openly gay senator, said after the signing. “I feel like today is an attempt to write those wrongs and to recognize their importance to the state of Michigan.”
The signing was heralded as a historic advancement in civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Michiganders by activists and policymakers. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer thanked the Democratic legislative majorities even as she worked to maintain her composure in a venue that was filled with emotion.
“Their tears of happiness are coming down, I’m trying to hold it together — can’t look at them too much,” she joked.
The move is the latest in a cascade of policy decisions that have made LGBTQ Americans, who continue to suffer stigmatization, discrimination and violence, a class of citizens legally protected from discrimination.
Since last July, LGBTQ residents have been fully covered under the preexisting law, which barred discrimination on the basis of sex alone. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that term encompassed sexuality in a 5-2 decision, after a lower court had previously ruled it also included gender identity.
Related: Michigan Supreme Court rules sexual orientation protected by civil rights law
Those decisions followed a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June 2020 which extended the same interpretation to sex-based protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The rulings in both high courts had Republican-nominated justices among the majorities.
Related: U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of LGBT workers on job discrimination protections
But those legal advancements have come amid a nationwide climate of increasing hostility toward members of the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender children, who have found themselves, and policies that would restrict opportunities for them, at the center of school board meetings and political campaigns.
Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Michigan’s first openly gay statewide elected official, told the largely LGBTQ crowd “we will never stop fighting for your futures.”
“There are those who continue to scapegoat this community. It seems like their sole mission is to destroy us,” Nessel said. “But we will say this: we will not relent, we will not submit, we will not ever stop striving for equal opportunity under the law for all Michiganders.”
This legislation, she said, ensure those protections cannot be rolled back if judicial interpretations of the laws change along with either courts’ ideological composition. But Nessel and others also emphasized the symbolic weight the law’s amendment has, noting, “until now, at this very moment, never has Michigan passed any law to enshrine legal rights and protections for the LGBTQ community into law.”
They mean for the law to also be a statement about Michigan.
“Instead of being a hateful state, we are a state that shows love, and not only acceptance, but support of a beautiful and diverse community of folks who now know Michigan is a great place for not wanting to live, but thrive as who they are,” S’Niayh Tate, a Black trans activist, said.
Whitmer has coined the slogan, “bigotry is bad for business” and is striving to brand Michigan as a state with an expansive view of civil rights.
“We’ve proved it over and over again these last few months, whether its your freedom to make your own decisions about your body, your freedom to go to school or work without worrying about a mass shooting, your freedom to be who you are, love who you love,” Whitmer said.
There was also a political reality behind the bill’s signing: that the bill, which had been introduced by Moss and former Rep. Jon Hoadley in session after session of the legislature, is only being written into law now because Democrats have full control of state government.
Erin Knott, the president of Equality Michigan, praised the Human Rights Campaign “for helping to prove here in Michigan the value of electoral investments and LGBT groups, voters and supporters.”
The law passed the Michigan legislature largely along partisan lies, as some Republicans decried the change as an infringement on religious liberties or an overreach of “woke” culture. Still, in both chambers the civil rights legislation won support from moderate Republicans, often in swing districts, a mark of just how far public opinion has shifted in recent decades.
At least one opponent of the legislation has asserted the expansion was outside the intention of the original law. Former state Rep. Mel Larsen, a white Republican, attended the signing and offered clarity about the 1976 law he co-authored with Daisy Elliott, a Black Democrat who died in 2015.
“The original intent, and the intent still is, that every citizen of Michigan has the right to be protected,” Larsen said to applause.
He received a standing ovation for his groundwork on civil rights.
“The best thing I can say to you is we’re on this Earth to move the pendulum and a little bit in our lifetime,” Larsen said. “And if we do all right by that, we’ve done something.”
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