Municipal Equality Index — How did your city do?

Every year, the Human Rights Campaign releases their Municipal Equality Index. It is a survey of municipalities in each state, and scores each one on various criteria. From their web site:

The MEI examines how inclusive municipal laws, policies, and services are of LGBTQ people who live and work there. Cities are rated based on non-discrimination laws, the municipality as an employer, municipal services, law enforcement and the city leadership’s public position on equality.

The MEI uses a pretty straightforward form for recording and calculating each city’s scores. Each category has subcategories worth a certain number of points, with 100 points being a perfect score. But, in addition, there are addition Flex subcategories where cities can get bonus points. So, a city could score, say, 95 on the regular categories, but get 5 flex points for a final score of 100.

There is also a document explaining the criteria for getting credit in each category. If, after reading this story, you want to know why your city scored as it did, you can compare your city’s scorecard with the criteria document.

How did Kentucky cities do?

The good news is that a number of Kentucky cities did very well in terms of the equality in their city. The bad news is that some others did really, really badly.

Here’s a table of the cities that were rated, along with a breakdown of their points by category:

[supsystic-tables id=10]

Obviously, there are some cities in this index that need to take a good, long look at how their city treats LGBTQ people, including laws preventing discrimination.

But, congrats to Covington! Most people expect Louisville and Lexington to do well on the MEI, since large urban cities often do. But Covington has risen from a score of 66 four years ago to this year’s score. They show that it is possible for a city to take LGBTQ equality seriously.

Individual city scorecards

Here are the scorecards for each city, in PDF format.

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