Damien Christopher Warsavage, founder of Upper Darby Pride, a local LGBTQ advocacy group, said one of the group’s board members first shed light on the ordinance. After its discovery, community members reached out to Upper Darby’s elected leaders and demanded action.
“I made it very, very explicitly clear: It doesn’t matter if you guys weren’t the actual edition of the council that passed this egregious ordinance — it’s the fact that it’s your situation to handle now,” Warsavage said.
Before the pandemic uprooted everything, Upper Darby Pride was planning its first festival. And even though that ordinance flew well under the radar, it could have been a threat to members of the LGBTQ community, Warsavage said.
“If someone wanted to cause trouble, lawfully, whether I liked it or not, they would have had a very good leg to stand,” Warsavage said.
This isn’t the first time a bigoted town ordinance has been discovered in municipal codes. Virginia’s Commission to Examine Racial Inequity found almost 100 such laws in the books across the state that said things like, “No child shall be required to attend integrated schools.”
But on finding one in their own code, members of the Upper Darby Council acted rather quickly. According to Council President Laura Wentz, the ordinance was brought to their attention on Feb. 21. The council reached out to the solicitors to get it repealed.
“The language is not representative of Upper Darby Township, it’s offensive to the LGBTQIA+ community, and it’s just generally offensive. So I did not hesitate to find a way to repeal the ordinance in total,” Richardson said.
On March 17, the council repealed the ordinance unanimously. But the investigation into the law led to another discovery: It was actually a duplication of a provision in the state’s criminal code. Pennsylvania currently has an identical anti-LGBTQ law on the books.