Hill County Dems hear LGBT issues during Politics in the Park

The Hill County Democratic Central Committee held their second annual “Politics in the Park” event at Simon Pepin Memorial Park Saturday in Havre, an event that included a barbecue, live music by local band Stevie Nixon and a series of speakers who talked about LGBT rights.

Rick Magnussen of Havre, who is openly gay, said that about three years ago he lost his front teeth when someone in a local bar punched him for being gay. In 1991, he was beat up in Great Falls after having dinner at a restaurant. He said violence against LGBT people is real.

“It happens,” he said. “This stuff is real it happens.”

Magnussen was one of four speakers, all but one of whom was openly gay, who talked about their personal experiences and how public perception had changed on the issue.

Kevin Hamm, president of Big Sky Pride, the group that organizes Montana’s annual gay pride celebration, said discussing his sexuality as openly as he does now was something that once was difficult to imagine.

“I couldn’t see myself being in Helena with these flags, much less Havre,” he said as he stood on the steps of the park’s gazebo, where three rainbow flags hung in the background.

When he graduated from Circle High School in 1991, Hamm said, he moved out of Montana feeling there was no place for him.

“I did the same thing that literally thousands of gays across America do. They run away,” Hamm said. “They run away to the big cities.”

State Rep. Bryce Bennett, D-Missoula, said when he came out, his family and friends were largely supportive. But even in his hometown of Missoula, Bennett said, other people in the LGBT community were sometimes evicted from their homes and ostracized by their family and friends.

When he was elected to the Montana House of Representatives in 2010, Bennett became the first openly gay person elected to the state Legislature.

“That was quite an experience, quite a change of pace,” Bennett said.

He said that in the past, Montana has struggled with LGBT rights. Bennett said that when he went into politics, there was a state law on the books in Montana that made being gay a felony.

“Just the act of loving somebody was a felony,” Bennett said.

Another law made the penalty for rape stronger if the victim was the same gender as the suspect. And Montana, like many states, had an amendment in the state constitution restricting marriage to one man and one woman.

First Lutheran Church Pastor Tanner Howard said he remembers how, when he was growing up, people in his small Iowa town were just coming to grips with “the gay issue.” He said that back then his church did so with a simple phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

“It allowed us to pat ourselves on the back without actually addressing anything or dealing with the complicated, complex issues facing us. It didn’t make us have any of those wonderful, difficult conversations that we really needed to have,” he said.

Howard said that when he was in seminary, righteousness was often discussed. He said that righteousness means a person is who they are supposed to be.

“We should be righteous, we should be who we are created to be, who we are supposed to be in the world,” he said.

“I can’t believe in a God that would reject people because of who they are. Because in their righteousness they are being who they were created to be,” Howard said.

The speakers expressed widespread agreement that the situation has improved for the LGBT community.

Bennett said the Legislature now has three openly gay members, which has given the LGBT community a voice.

“We get to show people our concerns are real, we get to show people there is a face behind the decisions they make when it comes to our community and our values,” Bennett said.

Laws leveling a harsher penalty for same sex rape or that criminalized homosexuality in Montana are no longer state law, and in 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws banning gay marriage as unconstitutional.

“I think it’s exciting to see that, even a couple of years ago, the LGBT community was in a much worse place,” Bennett said.

Hamm said he returned to Montana about the time Bennett was elected. He added that, after being away so long, he felt something had changed.

“I didn’t know what it was, but I felt I could be a part of it,” he said.

In 2014, when the group that organized the annual gay pride celebration folded, it appeared that the annual pride day would be canceled. However, Hamm, who spent 20 years in marketing and hospitality, and a friend worked to keep the annual celebration alive.

Hamm said that each year they have had the celebration, he has noticed an increase in the number of people participating.

“Every year we’ve done it, in each town we’ve done it in, it’s grown by at least 100 percent, “ Hamm said.

All of the speakers said that while they believe strides have been made in how people within the LGBT community are treated, there is still work to be done.

Bennett said a few cities in Montana have nondiscrimination ordinances that prevent discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity, but repeated efforts to get a statewide ban through the Legislature have been unsuccessful.

“To this day, if I go to my office and I put out a picture of the person I love, my employer has the right to fire me,” Bennett said. “We’re not asking for much, we are asking for the same very basic level of equality everyone here experiences.”

He added that LGBT issues could soon again be a topic of discussion. A push is underway to get an initiative on the ballot that would force people to use the public bathroom that corresponds with their birth gender, he said.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us.” Hamm said.