The Williams Institute

While, in 1998, New Orleans became one of the earliest cities in the United States to pass a local ordinance protecting LGBT people from discrimination, repeated attempts to pass state legislation that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression have all failed. For example, in 2008, the most recent attempt to protect LGBT rights in the employment context failed to make it out of its first committee in the state House of Representatives and the effort to pass the legislation was subsequently abandoned. In 2008, a bill was also introduced that would have just protected state employees from sexual orientation discrimination. That bill too failed to make it out of its first committee.