City of Arlington Votes to Delay Erasing LGBTQ Protections from its Anti-Discrimination Ordinance

In a move that has sent shockwaves through queer communities across North Texas, the Arlington City Council voted Tuesday to delay a decision on whether to remove LGBTQ protections from its anti-discrimination ordinance.

The proposal quietly slipped into public view under the guise of “federal compliance” would erase “sexual orientation” and “gender identity and expression” from the city’s ordinance, effectively stripping LGBTQ residents of their local protections in housing, employment and public accommodations.

Mayor Jim Ross said the council needs “more time to seek legal counsel,” promising to revisit the issue Nov. 18. But for queer residents, delaying the vote doesn’t dull the knife; it only prolongs the pain of its threatening plunge.

“This is not about legal necessity. This is about political cowardice,” said DeeJay Johannessen, CEO of the HELP Center for LGBT Health and Wellness . “There is no legal reason, none, to make these changes. The staff report recommending these changes misinterprets the law.”

City officials claim the change is tied to former President Donald Trump’s stated intention to withhold federal funding from cities with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs—a political threat rather than an active, enforceable policy. Officials warned Arlington could lose up to $65 million federal funds.

Legal experts and community advocates, however, sharply rejected that rationale, calling it a bad-faith reading of federal guidance. “There’s a big difference between anti-discrimination ordinances and DEI programming. Johannessen told the council.

More than 40 community members showed up to oppose the proposed rollback. Many spoke through tears, others through rage, all naming what’s at stake, their right to exist and be treated with dignity in the city they call home.

If approved next month, Arlington would become one of the first U.S. cities to repeal, not just fail to enact, but actively repeal, protections for LGBTQ people. That distinction matters as it signals not neutrality, but retreat. This is not confusion, rather it is capitulation.

Across the country, more than 20 states and nearly 400 cities protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, according to the Movement Advance project. In Texas, roughly 14% of LGBTQ residents live in cities with such protections. Arlington only joined their ranks in 2021. To rip those protections away in 2025 is more than a bureaucratic edit; it is a warning flare in a larger, coordinated rollback of queer rights.

Dallas, Fort Worth and Plano continue to stand firm in their ordinances. Yet Arlington, a major city in one of the fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the nation, is entertaining the possibility of becoming a cautionary tale.

This is not happening in a vacuum. Across the county, conservative leaders are wielding legal ambiguity as a weapon to undo decades of hard-won protections. They couch cruelty in the language of compliance, as if civil rights were a line item on a federal balance sheet.

This is not just an “ordinance update.” This is a script we’ve seen before, the slow erosion of marginalized protections under the banner of “neutrality” and “law.” It’s how discrimination is laundered into respectability.

Stripping legal protections from LGBTQ residents doesn’t make Arlington safer. It makes it smaller, meaner, and complicit.

Ross said the city must comply with federal directives while ensuring “every single member of our community feels welcome, protected, respected, and is treated with dignity.”

But dignity isn’t something that can be balanced on a political scale. It’s not a bargaining chip, it’s a right—a right that, if taken away sends a message loud and clear, some of us are welcome, and some of us are note.

Delaying the vote doesn’t erase that message. It only underscores how easily it can be written.

Queer people in this country have learned to read between the lines of political doublespeak. We know that “delay” too often means “decay.” That “seeking legal counsel” is often code for “finding cover.” And that, time and again, our lives are made to hang in the balance of someone else’s caution.

But history remembers who stood firm and who flinched.

Arlington has a choice. It can uphold its 2021 promise to protect all its residents, or it can join the ranks of those who folded under imaginary legal pressure and very real prejudice.

There’s nothing neutral about erasing queer protections. There’s nothing courageous about hiding behind legalese while real people stand in harm’s way. If city leaders believe their moral compass must bow to the ghost of a Trump-era threat, then what they’re practicing isn’t leadership, it’s surrender.

The LGBTQ community deserves better than backroom legal whispers and postponed justice. They deserve safety that isn’t conditional and protection that isn’t negotiable.

Arlington has one more month to decide which side of history it will stand on. But make no mistake, the world is watching. And so are we.