Monday, October 20, 2008

Legal Equality Infringes On What?

I see that Peter LaBarbera thinks that legal equality for GLBT people infringes upon religious freedom.

“Including ‘homosexual orientation’ among the considerations on the basis of which it is illegal to discriminate,” Ratzinger wrote, “can easily lead to regarding homosexuality as a positive source of human rights…(and)…to the legislative protection and promotion of homosexuality.”

The American Family Association of Michigan strongly agrees. However, the practical effects of such legislation extend beyond medical or religious concerns.

Proving to have exactly the opposite effect of their supposed intent, so-called “sexual orientation” ordinances have a track record of being used to discriminate against individuals and organizations who don’t support homosexual activists’ political agenda.

Detective Richard Stern, a fifteen-year veteran and president of the Ann Arbor police officers union, was fired after the chairman of the city’s “rights commission” formally accused him of violating that city’s “sexual orientation” ordinance. Stern’s offense? On behalf of his union, in a public forum for police chief candidates, he “was accused of saying that one of the candidates had a gay-rights agenda,” according to Between the Lines, a Detroit homosexual advocacy newsmagazine.


So, if I understand Mr. LaBarbera correctly, his right to marginalize others based on his personal religious beliefs supercedes the rights of those same people to live a peaceful, law-abiding life.

I'm no genius here - but this just isn't adding up for me. What gives him the right to demand that somebody else live by LaBarbera's personal moral code - or whatever moral code Josef Ratzinger thinks we should live by for that matter?

While LaBarbera will protest that he's only "acting in the public good", he's conveniently missing the point. People don't beat the tar out of smokers - but an amazing number of people seem to think that kicking the crap out of a gay is grand sport, and don't even start me on what happens to transsexuals on all too frequent a basis.

Violence against people simply because of their identity is the ugly child of the morally upstanding protestations of LaBarbera - as they so often give others the idea that they are doing "the right thing" when they beat the crap out of someone they think is GLBT.

Inevitably, in order to step aside from the indefensible projection of his "biblical views" on others, LaBarbera pulls the following little logical turd up:

For example, a compassionate society that rationally discourages smoking because of the clearly identified health consequences should not irrationally enact laws giving special protection to homosexual behavior that has been scientifically associated with a dramatically higher incidence of domestic violence, mental illness, substance abuse, eating disorders, life-threatening disease — AIDS, cancer, and hepatitis — and premature death by up to 20 years.


Ever so typical, he repeats a blatant lie and distortion from the utterly discredited Paul Cameron, or ignores the findings of Evelyn Hooker on mental health in gays.

People like LaBarbera don't seem to understand that they are in fact the best argument for the the laws they protest so loudly - since they so blindly ignore evidence and manufacture "facts" to make their unreasonable stance sound reasoned instead of blindly dogmatic.

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