Indiana lawmaker to colleagues: Listen to LGBT side before deciding

Some of the most instructive time that Sen. Travis Holdman, R-Markle, spent on his failed legislation this year, he said, was in private conversations with transgender people.

“They helped me better understand what they face,” he said, including abuse, harassment and, sometimes, fear for their lives.

This summer a legislative committee will return to the issue of adding protections for gender identity and sexual orientation to the state’s civil rights law. Neither the committee’s members nor the dates have been set.

Holdman said he has no plans to carry another bill addressing the matter, having been burned by intense political heat that he blamed on both the “far right” and “far left.”

But he said he welcomes the study committee and its public hearings, which will likely include an array of people testifying and offering personal stories.

“You have to bring the sides together for them to see that the other has a valid point of view,” he said.

That approach got the socially conservative Holdman, who represents a rural district north of Indianapolis, in trouble earlier this year.

His legislation, filed with the support of Senate President David Long, R-Fort Wayne, was blasted by LGBT activists and religious conservatives.

The former said his measure didn’t go far enough because it contained too many “religious liberty” carve-outs, which the LGBT community saw as a license to discriminate.

The latter said recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights violated their religious beliefs that homosexuality is a sin.

The bill ultimately failed and was pulled from consideration before it could get a vote in the Senate or House, which spared most lawmakers from having to take a stand.

A part of the bill related to ensuring access to public accommodations generated some of the loudest noise.

Holdman’s language, which would have given businesses and schools the authority to decide who could use their locker rooms and bathrooms, brought cries of unfairness from LGBT activists.

It also brought howls of protest from social conservatives, who said it would clear the way for predators to enter women’s bathrooms – an allegation that Holdman rejected based on the experience of other states with similar laws.

Those polarized views have left some legislative leaders questioning whether any viable measure can come out of a study of the issue this summer.

In announcing the hearings, Republican House Speaker Brian Bosma predicted that lawmakers would rather spend the next session debating what he called more critical matters, such as funding for an aging infrastructure.

Senate Democrat Minority Leader Tim Lanane pushed hard for the hearings, but he, too, conceded they may be futile.

“This isn’t an issue that’s going away,” he added.

Twenty Indiana communities have passed ordinances that include some protection for LGBT residents, said Chris Paulsen, head of the LGBT advocacy group Freedom Indiana.

“People’s hearts and minds can be changed on this issue,” he said. “They already have been.”

Some opponents don’t agree.

The Rev. Ron Johnson, head of the Indiana Pastors Alliance, who mobilized conservative churches to stop Holdman’s bill, said the measure would have “criminalized” the decisions of people of faith who refused to employ or serve people based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

It was an argument that he and his allies have made time and again, he said.

“We should be well past the time of study on this issue,” Johnson said. “You’d have to be living in a hole not be aware of the issue and the various positions on it.”

Still, he said lawmakers on both sides of the debate will try to make political hay by claiming credit for studying the issue.

“There’s no political downside for legislators,” he said. “It’s just another way for government to say, ‘We’ve been listening,’ without taking any real action.”