Despite last-minute GOP push, all anti-LGBTQ+ bills fail in Iowa legislature

In state after state, GOP-dominated state legislatures are adjourning without passing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Now, Iowa has become the latest state to fail to pass any of the numerous bills introduced this session.

It joins Kentucky, Georgia, and West Virginia in the cohort of states failing to pass a single bill. Florida passed only one.

Related:

Anti-LGBTQ+ bills keep failing. Could the tide be turning?

Advocates are cautiously optimistic as state legislative sessions come to a close without passing any hateful laws.

Iowa Republicans saw bill after bill fall this session despite prioritizing them. A last-minute effort to push one through as an amendment to another bill also collapsed.

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More than 20 bills were introduced during this session. Some were introduced by the governor herself.

One bill tried to remove trans people from the state’s civil rights laws and declare them “disabled” instead. Another would have redefined the word “equal” in state law to specifically exclude trans people from the standard definition of “same” or “identical.”

A third bill would have banned transgender from bathrooms that match their gender identity. One of the worst, known as the “pink triangle law,” would have required special markers on trans people’s birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

The proposed change to Iowa’s civil rights law was so drastic and loathsome that even Republicans refused to entertain the idea.

A crowd of hundreds erupted into cheers when the members of a subcommittee who had heard an hour of testimony against the bill announced they would not advance it any further. The committee was composed of two Republicans and a single Democrat. The vote was unanimous.

In Kentucky, all ten bills that targeted LGBTQ+ residents failed. Republicans overwhelmingly dominate the legislature.

Some of Kentucky’s most atrocious bills would have weakened local nondiscrimination ordinances, restricted drag performances, and allowed doctors to deny care to LGBTQ+ individuals by citing a “moral objection.”