Thousands of mailers, social media posts and television commercials are pushing the city of Arlington to restore its anti-discrimination ordinance and questioning City Council members’ values.
The media campaign, called Arlington Strikes Out, wants council members to keep LGBTQ protections after they overhauled programs and ordinances to protect the city’s $65 million in federal funding.
DeeJay Johannessen, the CEO of HELP Center for LGBTQ Health, said the campaign is a direct response to a lack of action to protect LGBTQ residents.
“The discomfort they are having is that, for the first time in Arlington’s history, the LGBTQ+ community has the resources to have this discussion in the public square,” Johannessen said. “It’s not about getting 250 people to show up at a City Council meeting. It’s about being in tens of thousands of living rooms telling people exactly what’s going on.”
The campaign was paid for by the HELP Center for LGBTQ Health. Johannessen declined to say how much money the organization spent on the ads.
The HELP Center, or Health Education Learning Project, is a Fort Worth-based nonprofit focused on providing preventative resources for HIV, AIDS and STDs. Alongside the organization’s resource work, it also advocates for LGBTQ rights.
Johannessen was one of the initial proponents of an anti-discrimination ordinance in Arlington.
In 2021, then-Mayor Jeff Williams and Arlington City Council unanimously adopted the anti-discrimination ordinance. Ahead of that vote, Johannessen urged council members to adopt the measure.
“This ordinance will not magically make discrimination disappear in Arlington, but what it will do is, for the very first time in our city’s history, put down in writing that in Arlington, Texas, the American Dream City, discrimination is not OK,” Johannessen said at the time.
Williams’ involvement in passing the ordinance was the subject of one mailer that ended up in Arlington mailboxes over the weekend.
The front of the flyer reads: “Former Mayor Jeff Williams championed the inclusion of sexual orientation.”
On the back, Johannessen wrote an open letter thanking Williams and other council members for their votes and leadership.
Williams did not respond Monday to a request for comment.
In the campaign’s initial messaging and advertisements, HELP Center pushed City Council to not remove sexual orientation and gender identity from the ordinance.
Council members initially suspended the anti-discrimination ordinance in September and delayed the vote multiple times.
On Oct. 14, Arlington City Council was slated to vote on removing the two classes from its discrimination ordinance while bringing back the rest of the protections. As the council opened the meeting, Mayor Jim Ross announced the postponement of the vote to November.
Johannessen said the HELP Center had been gearing up the campaign as the council pushed the vote. After the Oct. 14 delay, the organization decided to act.
“The hope prior to that was that we could work with the city, one on one, and let them explain that what they were being told isn’t accurate and give them the documentation they needed to make an informed decision,” Johannessen said.
A campaign of this type and size is not usual for the organization, Johannessen said.
In 2023, the organization had about $26 million in expenses, including salaries and operations of two Arlington-area clinics. During that year, the center spent about $730,000 in advertising and promotion, according to tax filings.
While Johannessen said exact estimates of how much the organization has spent on Arlington Strikes Out are not available, he said that HELP Center mailed about two flyers that reached around 20,000 households with messaging about the upcoming vote.
Alongside the mailers and online advertisements on social media and streaming services like Hulu, the organization launched a website with files that organizers say debunk claims city staff have made about the ordinance. The site also includes a petition and both of the television ads.
One commercial included headshots of all City Council members, asking if they oppose discrimination against the LGBTQ community.
Council member Nikkie Hunter said she wishes the campaign had taken another route.
When the ordinance suspension was voted on in September, she voted against it twice.
“I do understand that everybody has a voice, but to put every single City Council member’s face out there when we haven’t made a decision puts us in a bad light,” Hunter said.
Johannessen said Hunter has been a supporter of the movement against the suspension and that the campaign was not meant to call her stance into question.
“Having everybody on that was not indicating anything about whether we think they would be supportive or against civil rights,” Johannessen said. “It simply showed who all the council people were.”
Hunter declined to say how she plans to vote Tuesday night, but said that she “wants to make sure everybody’s protected.”
“I’m not able to really support anything that doesn’t support every single resident here in the city of Arlington,” Hunter said.
Arlington City Council will vote Nov. 18 on a measure that would bring the ordinance back and insert a clause suspending certain parts of it, should it be required.
The clause suspends any provision of the ordinance deemed to be in conflict with federal grant requirements by the state or federal government.
Johannessen said that he worries the new change would allow the city to suspend protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The clause also says that “a legal opinion” can be used as a justification for suspension, which Johannessen says the city already has.
“It’s their own city attorney’s opinion,” Johannessen said.
Johannessen said he believes that, if the council adopts the resolution, gender identity and sexual orientation will be suspended from the ordinance.
His hope is that council members remove the legal opinion section while keeping the federal law and court order clause.
“This opens up Pandora’s box,” Johannessen said. “It’s poorly crafted. It was designed so they can say they’re restored, but still removed.”
Chris Moss is a reporting fellow for the Arlington Report. Contact him at chris.moss@fortworthreport.org.
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