Yesterday Fayetteville citizens repealed the city’s controversial “nondiscrimination” ordinance by a vote of 52% to 48%, according to KFSM News.
The Fayetteville City Council passed the ordinance last summer in spite of widespread opposition to the measure. Local residents launched a campaign to repeal the ordinance following its passage. Last night, those efforts proved successful.
Duncan Campbell, who helped lead the effort to repeal the ordinance, told reporters,
“We wanted to repeal the ordinance because we didn’t believe it made Fayetteville a fairer city or a freer city. It did just the opposite. It was called the Civil Rights Ordinance, but it was misnamed. It was an ordinance that actually took away civil rights and freedom from people. It criminalized civil behavior. It didn’t accomplish the stated purpose of the ordinance and it was crafted by an outside group, it wasn’t something Fayetteville residents put together.”
The Washington, D.C., based Human Rights Campaign contributed more than $160,000 to keep the ordinance on the books.
Opponents of the Fayetteville ordinance included the local Chamber of Commerce; local ministers and churches; Fayetteville businesses; the editorial staff at Northwest Arkansas Media; area lawmakers; and–clearly–thousands of Fayetteville voters.
We have written repeatedly about the unintended consequences of the ordinance, and I applaud Fayetteville voters for choosing to repeal it.
If you would like to read some of the unintended consequences we found in the ordinance, click here.
Photo Credit: “Old Main from the northwest, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas (autumn)” by Brandonrush – Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Carey Hodshire