And Corduroy Skirts Will Be Outlawed!
Hopefully I'll be able to blog regularly again with the respite from teaching...
I have little patience with sociopathic liars. I think that’s the biggest reason why I’ve become increasingly concerned lately with the success of gay rights legislation—because the people on C Street in D.C. lobbying against them are such dishonest bastards. And anything that politically marginalizes sociopathic, dishonest lying bastards is probably healthy for the Republic in the long-term.
A few years ago, I got a chain e-mail describing the horrors that would be inflicted upon our nation if Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Aside from God’s furious wrath, the e-mail breathlessly promised that the law would make it a federal crime to read certain anti-homosexuality passages of the Bible. It invoked images of pastors being led away in handcuffs for preaching the Gospel.
So, being the good lawyer that I am, I read the bill. It of course said nothing of the sort. It said nothing that could even be remotely construed as doing anything sort of like that. The only logical conclusion, then, was that the authors of the e-mail consciously and deliberately lied to their readers in order to marshal opposition to the bill.
That bill eventually passed. It is now the law of the land. And yet there have been zero instances of preachers being hauled off in squad cars—because that’s completely unrelated to the actual law. The conservative apparatus that pushed that lie has been proven, by actual events, to be completely and demonstrably wrong.
What the bill does, by the way, is enforce the Equal Protection Clause by allowing U.S. attorneys to prosecute crimes (murder, assault, rape, arson, etc.) if evidence suggests those crimes were motivated by prejudice against the victim’s sexual orientation. Federal prosecutors have long had that prerogative in cases of crimes motivated by racial, sexual, religious or ethnic prejudice. This ensures that local authorities cannot subvert one of the bedrock principles of law and order: that no matter who you are, if people physically assault you, the state will prosecute them to the full extent of the law.
If you truly know what the law does, then in order to be against it, you basically have to argue that people who physically assault homosexuals should be able to get away with it, or at least get off lightly. Most people find that idea repulsive. Hence, people who oppose the law on its merits went to great lengths to confuse people about the law’s real purpose.
Americans also tend to be overwhelmingly against job discrimination. Even people who don’t disagree with homosexuality as a lifestyle frequently believe that no one should be fired from their job because of their personal life. There happens to also be a bill in Congress that would make it illegal “to fire, refuse to hire, or fail to promote employees simply based on sexual orientation.” Again, this is a protection already extended to every American in regards to their race, ethnicity, gender and religion. And once people understand that that’s all this bill would do, the majority tends to support it.
So anti-gay-rights lobbyists are engaged in the same strategies of deception about this bill. The Family Research Council sent out a letter to its members warning against such nonsense as the law leading to an “employer telling you to remove the Bible from your desk because it is offensive to the homosexual or cross-dresser he was forced to hire.” They also claim that religious organizations would be forced to hire non-discriminatorily, even though those are explicitly exempted from the bill. Think Progress has the story. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/01/frc-impose-homosexuality/
To reiterate: They are lying. There may be more polite words for it, but not more descriptive words.
I hope the bill passes, and not just because I oppose job discrimination. If the bill becomes law, employees will be protected, but none of this hooey about the government cleaning up Bibles from desks will ever come to pass, and these organizations will once again be shown, in real time, to be flatly wrong. I’d like to think that if they’re proven totally wrong enough times, people will start to notice their dubious credibility.
I have little patience with sociopathic liars. I think that’s the biggest reason why I’ve become increasingly concerned lately with the success of gay rights legislation—because the people on C Street in D.C. lobbying against them are such dishonest bastards. And anything that politically marginalizes sociopathic, dishonest lying bastards is probably healthy for the Republic in the long-term.
A few years ago, I got a chain e-mail describing the horrors that would be inflicted upon our nation if Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Aside from God’s furious wrath, the e-mail breathlessly promised that the law would make it a federal crime to read certain anti-homosexuality passages of the Bible. It invoked images of pastors being led away in handcuffs for preaching the Gospel.
So, being the good lawyer that I am, I read the bill. It of course said nothing of the sort. It said nothing that could even be remotely construed as doing anything sort of like that. The only logical conclusion, then, was that the authors of the e-mail consciously and deliberately lied to their readers in order to marshal opposition to the bill.
That bill eventually passed. It is now the law of the land. And yet there have been zero instances of preachers being hauled off in squad cars—because that’s completely unrelated to the actual law. The conservative apparatus that pushed that lie has been proven, by actual events, to be completely and demonstrably wrong.
What the bill does, by the way, is enforce the Equal Protection Clause by allowing U.S. attorneys to prosecute crimes (murder, assault, rape, arson, etc.) if evidence suggests those crimes were motivated by prejudice against the victim’s sexual orientation. Federal prosecutors have long had that prerogative in cases of crimes motivated by racial, sexual, religious or ethnic prejudice. This ensures that local authorities cannot subvert one of the bedrock principles of law and order: that no matter who you are, if people physically assault you, the state will prosecute them to the full extent of the law.
If you truly know what the law does, then in order to be against it, you basically have to argue that people who physically assault homosexuals should be able to get away with it, or at least get off lightly. Most people find that idea repulsive. Hence, people who oppose the law on its merits went to great lengths to confuse people about the law’s real purpose.
Americans also tend to be overwhelmingly against job discrimination. Even people who don’t disagree with homosexuality as a lifestyle frequently believe that no one should be fired from their job because of their personal life. There happens to also be a bill in Congress that would make it illegal “to fire, refuse to hire, or fail to promote employees simply based on sexual orientation.” Again, this is a protection already extended to every American in regards to their race, ethnicity, gender and religion. And once people understand that that’s all this bill would do, the majority tends to support it.
So anti-gay-rights lobbyists are engaged in the same strategies of deception about this bill. The Family Research Council sent out a letter to its members warning against such nonsense as the law leading to an “employer telling you to remove the Bible from your desk because it is offensive to the homosexual or cross-dresser he was forced to hire.” They also claim that religious organizations would be forced to hire non-discriminatorily, even though those are explicitly exempted from the bill. Think Progress has the story. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/01/frc-impose-homosexuality/
To reiterate: They are lying. There may be more polite words for it, but not more descriptive words.
I hope the bill passes, and not just because I oppose job discrimination. If the bill becomes law, employees will be protected, but none of this hooey about the government cleaning up Bibles from desks will ever come to pass, and these organizations will once again be shown, in real time, to be flatly wrong. I’d like to think that if they’re proven totally wrong enough times, people will start to notice their dubious credibility.
posted by Ithakid | 2:53 PM
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