Constructing the Moral Landscape Through Antidiscrimination Law

This research examines the geographical manifestations of the debates in 2002 over adding sexual orientation antidiscrimination protections within three Florida communities: Miami-Dade County, the City of Orlando, and Collier County. These debates are analyzed within the context of a spatialization of social rights as they take place through community dialogue of the local 'moral landscape'. The overall theoretical dimensions implicated within the spatial diffusion of civil rights protections for sexual minorities are: the spaces of citizenship, community designs on the local political economy, and how the 'culture wars' and local politics coalesce and converge around embodied identity and geographies of inclusion or exclusion. These theoretical designs are approached from two basic scalar aspects: phenomena internal to the individual, and how their particular belief system shapes their geographical imaginations of their community; and culture as a structure of social relations that are writ large through local institutions and regimes. Culture war issues such as gay and lesbian civil rights constitute a distinctive arena of local governance, apart from urban politics as usual. In addition, organizations and individuals that serve as gatekeepers for 'community values' become a key resource in comprehending how morality politics and identity are embedded within notions of the politics of place. While keeping this framework in mind, the debate on anti-discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation was arguably the same for all three places: explosive and divisive. But in other ways, the geographical contingencies of each place exhibit some important and unique differences which greatly impacted the nature of the community debate, as well as the ultimate outcome in passing or rejecting these ordinances.