Anti-gay Just Newer Guise of Old-fashioned Bigotry

A recent column by Bryan Fischer in the Idaho Statesman requires response. Fischer a minister of the Deep Religious Right maintained that a bill promoted by the Idaho Commission on Human Rights (ICHC) to extend human rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity “is a danger to civil liberties (and) violates freedoms of business owners”.

I decided the best commentary on the Rev. Fischer’s anti-gay rights column would be to run it as it might have been written about 40 years ago when President Lyndon Johnson brought the first civil rights legislation before Congress. Whenever any group of people is singled-out to be excluded from basic human rights, civil liberties are at stake.

So, here it is, as it would have been written in 1963 with the changes italicized:

“Leslie Goddard of the Idaho Commission on Human Rights recently promoted S1323, a bill focused on “interracial marriage” and “racial identity” on the pages of the Statesman (It’s time for plain talk about fairness, Feb. 5).

“She says in her column that is matter calls for an open, respectful discussion.” I agree, and happily join the dialogue here. It’s exceedingly odd to see an organization with “Human Rights” it its title push a bill which represents such a clear and present danger to the civil liberties of good-hearted Idahoans. For Ms. Goddard’s bill would punish Idaho employers and landlords who take race into account in business decisions.

“The bill would violate freedom of conscience by forcing businessmen and landlords to compromise their own moral convictions or face potentially crippling lawsuits. It would violate an employer’s constitutional right to freedom of association, his basic right to select a work force that represents the values he wants his business to reflect, by giving government the power to drag him into court for making politically incorrect employment decisions.

“It also would violate the first freedom guaranteed to Americans in the Constitution, the free exercise of religion. Any Christian, Jewish or Muslim business owner who holds time-honored views of marriage and race would become immediately vulnerable to paralyzing legal action.

“This is not a hypothetical threat. In New Mexico, a Christian photographer, (Fischer named the photographer here, but I have left it out), just last month was hauled before the New Mexico Human Rights Division, the state’s counterpart to the ICHR, where she was forced to spend two days being grilled by the thought police in the Land of Enchantment.

“Her crime? She had respectfully declined to photograph an interracial marriage. She did so for the simple reason that her conscience restrained her from participating in a ceremony that would send a signal contrary to her own deeply held religious beliefs. It mattered not that New Mexico does not recognize interracial marriage or civil unions, meaning this ceremony was purely symbolic in the first place. And it mattered not that the photographer is not the only photographer for hire in the state of New Mexico. No, she had transgressed New Mexico’s human rights law, which provides special rights for those with non-normative sexual relations and had to be punished.

“Since New Mexico also awards attorney’s fees to prevailing plaintiffs in civil rights cases, if the photographer’s case goes through an appeals process her legal bills could easily mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, jeopardizing the survival of her business. {A pernicious companion bill S1283 would add an attorney’s fees provision to Idaho code – but only for a successful plaintiff in a civil rights case, not a successful defendant.}

“Further, S1323 does not define “sexual orientation” anywhere. But the American Psychiatric Association does, listing no less than 30 different sexual orientations in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). Included are such things as bestiality, pedophilia and prostitution. A bill with no definition opens Pandora’s Box to litigation that could result in the granting of special protections to various sexual perversions.

“Far-fetched you say? Hardly. One plaintiff in Canada already has tried the tactic of claiming in court that sex with children happens to be his particular “sexual orientation”, that he was born that way, and that he deserves special protection under Canada’s discrimination statute.

“At this point, it mercifully appears that this dangerous bill will gain no traction in the Idaho Legislature this year. Nor should it. Idaho is too great for laws that trample on freedom of conscience and fundamental constitutional liberties.

“Bryan Fischer is the executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance.”

If you don’t believe that minister’s calling themselves Christians preached and wrote this kind of racist invective in the 1960s and long before, then you probably are not old enough to have been reading the papers and watching the television news in those days. Interracial marriage was illegal in many states, not all of them in the deep south. More to the point, whites having sex with African-Americans was considered a “perversion” in the same sense that Fischer uses it in his final paragraphs by not a few psychologists and psychiatrists. Black Americans discovered trying to “pass” as whites were often lynched.
Lynching, by the way, was and is “legal” in the United States. The only time anyone could be prosecuted was when they could be singled out from the mob as the only ones actually hanging the victim.   Bills introduced in Congress to outlaw lynching in the 1930s died because President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed them, according to William Allen White, the famous Emporia, Kansas newspaper editor and last of the progressive Republicans, once led by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The deep south belonged to the Democrats in those days, just as it belongs to the Republicans and the Rev. Fischer’s cohorts today, and FDR wasn’t taking any chances.
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And I know some African Americans might resent having their situation compared to that of gay Americans. Well, I do sympathize.  Being African American in the USA must be downright difficult, dangerous, and, at times, emotionally scarring and disheartening. Yet, others also suffer in our country, and their pain should not be ignored.