A new website has made available all of the names and addresses of those who signed petitions calling for the repeal of a new Houston nondiscrimination measure.

WASHINGTON — Since the Houston City Council passed an ordinance banning discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, opponents have been gathering signatures to reverse the measure.

Now, a new, anonymous campaign is publishing the names and addresses of those opponents, posting the petitions online that were submitted to the city earlier this month asking City Council to repeal the ban, which was passed in May and is called the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

If the opponents, No Unequal Rights, have gathered enough signatures, the City Council has the option of either repealing the ordinance — which it is not expected to do — or placing it on the ballot for a referendum vote. The Houston city attorney is still reviewing the signatures to see if the petition met the required number of signatures, with a final ruling expected in the coming week.

The online posting of the petition has set off a new debate, beyond the one over the ordinance itself, about just who is behind the online effort and with what motives. Although the website, HEROpetition.com, states that the aim of making the petition easily available to all is "to allow for independent verification of its validity," one of the first people to note the site's existence after a Gay Star News report was South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman, who wrote that a person had told him that he hadn't signed the petition because he "feared what would happen to him if his name and contact information were released."

One of the people who has strongly supported the HERO measure, Houston GLBT Political Caucus treasurer Noel Freeman, told BuzzFeed that he was the person who made a public records request for the petitions — and that he did so on the day they were submitted.

"If somebody feels that they're being publicly shamed by these petitions being online, I think that says more about them than it does about the people who are putting the petitions online," Freeman said on Wednesday. "If you're embarrassed that your political views are on public display, then maybe you should rethink your political views."

Although Freeman said he isn't behind the website, he said that he knows who is behind the site and noted that he "shared them [the petitions] with a number of people. They got into the public domain pretty quickly."