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Chicago Fur Ban Fails In City Council After Black Caucus Backlash – Block Club Chicago
May
Block Club Chicago
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CITY HALL — A proposed ban on the sale of new fur products within Chicago city limits was voted down by the City Council.
Introduced by Southwest Side Ald. Ray Lopez (15th), the ordinance had garnered both fierce support and opposition among City Council members and members of the public, some of whom spoke out on the issue before Wednesday’s full City Council meeting.
The ordinance passed through the council’s license committee last week, and with 23 co-sponsors appeared to have a good chance of winning final approval. But in recent days the council’s Black Caucus was joined by numerous other aldermen in opposing the measure, including some who had initially backed it.
The fur ban ultimately failed to win approval by a 19-26 vote.
Proponents of the ordinance said that it would fight animal cruelty, citing inhumane tactics like electrocution used to extract fur for coats and other products.
“There is no humane way to produce a fur product. From birth to death, it is a painful experience for these beautiful wild animals,” Jodie Wiederkehr, executive director of the Chicago Alliance for Animals, told Block Club this week.
RELATED: Should Chicago Ban Fur? Proposal Puts Animal Rights Activists And Small Businesses At Odds
If passed, the measure would have made it illegal to “sell, offer for sale, trade or otherwise distribute for monetary or non-monetary consideration a fur product in the city.” Exemptions were included for used fur products or furs used for religious reasons or cultural and spiritual purposes by Native American tribes.
But critics characterized the law as government overreach, and said it would cause the six furriers that are currently open in Chicago to likely close. That includes Gerard Brown, who owns Island Furs at 1827 W. 103rd St. in Beverly — one of only a handful of Black-owned fur shops in the entire country.
“This would put me out of business, and that’s wrong. This is my livelihood,” Brown told Block Club.
The ban would have made Chicago the 17th U.S. city to enact a prohibition on fur and the first in Illinois, according to the Fur Free Alliance. Many of the 16 municipalities with such a law are located in California, which also passed the ban at the state level.
Far Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th), whose ward includes Island Furs as well as Andriana Furs, 2201 W. 95th St. in Beverly, emerged as one of the most vocal Council critics of the fur ban.
He was one of three aldermen to vote against the proposal at last week’s committee hearing, and joined Brown, Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th) and others at a press conference Wednesday to oppose the ordinance.
“Are we going to ban leather next? Are we going to ban beef? Are we going to put Ronald McDonald out of a job?” O’Shea said. “This is about personal choice. As elected officials, our job is to do whatever we can to protect our citizens, to improve our schools, to attract business. It’s not to tell people ‘you should be able to buy this and you shouldn’t be able to buy that.’”
O’Shea later sang a few words from the famous Andriana Furs theme song on the Council floor while giving an impassioned speech against the ban.
Also rising to speak in opposition to the measure, Coleman said any anti-fur efforts should be legislated on a state level, not in Chicago where there are no licensed fur farms. The proposed ban also ignores the cultural significance of fur products in the Black community, she said.
“For Black women, furs are about embracing elegance in the world that has not been kind to us,” said Coleman, who is the current chair of the council’s Black Caucus. “It is about our pride and strength and ability to access a luxury item.”
Near the end of the brief formal debate on the ordinance, Lopez said the goal of his proposed ban, which would not go into effect until a year after its passage, was a way to “help a business that is on the decline prepare for the 21st century.”
“The facts state quite clearly that natural fur is on the decline,” Lopez said, citing data showing fur production has gone down steadily in recent years.
“Change is hard, but we also need to show…our children, to Chicagoans, that this body can also stand for having compassion and empathy in how we deal with all things alive, moving forward” he added.
No other alderpeople spoke in favor of the ban, but numerous Chicagoans did show up at City Hall to support it on Wednesday.
That included Pilsen resident Samuel Mosley, who was handing out flyers about the cruelty of the fur trade on LaSalle Street before the meeting. He said the city can “walk and chew gum at the same time” by combatting pressing issues like public safety while also moving to ban new fur products.
“Fur is some of the most grotesque, awful animal cruelty that exists,” Mosley said. “The footage from repeated undercover investigations show that there is no humane fur, and the best way to combat it here, where there are no fur farms in the city, is…to ban retailers from selling new fur.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson was neutral on the issue, staffers said on Wednesday.
Tim Moran contributed.
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