(a) In the State of Rhode Island, hereinafter referred to as the state, many people are
denied equal opportunity in obtaining housing accommodations and are forced to live
in circumscribed areas because of discriminatory housing practices based upon race,
color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status,
lawful source of income, military status as a veteran with an honorable discharge
or an honorable or general administrative discharge, servicemember in the armed forces,
country of ancestral origin, disability, age, familial status, or on the basis that
a tenant or applicant or a member of the household is, or has been, or is threatened
with being the victim of domestic abuse, or that the tenant or applicant has obtained,
or sought, or is seeking, relief from any court in the form of a restraining order
for protection from domestic abuse. These practices tend unjustly to condemn large
groups of inhabitants to dwell in segregated districts or under depressed living conditions
in crowded, unsanitary, substandard, and unhealthful accommodations. These conditions
breed intergroup tension as well as vice, disease, juvenile delinquency, and crime;
increase the fire hazard; endanger the public health; jeopardize the public safety,
general welfare, and good order of the entire state; and impose substantial burdens
on the public revenues for the abatement and relief of conditions so created. These
discriminatory and segregative housing practices are inimical to and subvert the basic
principles upon which the colony of Rhode Island was founded and upon which the state
and the United States were later established. Discrimination and segregation in housing
tend to result in segregation in our public schools and other public facilities, which