Fringe Right LIES To Thwart Houston NDO

It appears as though the far-right is moving to try and stop Houston’s Non-Discrimination Ordinance from passing Council.  Here’s an email received today from Steven Hotze, President of the Conservative Republicans of Texas.  In an effort to enrage their supporters, they’ve renamed the planned NDO the ‘Sexual Predator Protection Act’
Dear Fellow Conservative,
Mayor Annise Parker is introducing a city ordinance on Wednesday, April 30th, at 1:00 pm at City Hall which would create a new minority class for individuals based solely upon their practice of sodomy and other homosexual and lesbian activities. This is outrageous!
This would make those who engage in deviant sexual acts a new minority class equal to African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and other legitimate minorities. This is a slap in the face of true minorities. It is absurd to base a person’s minority status upon a choice of sexual activities or any other activity, for that matter, in which a person is involved. It’s outrageous!
Mayor Anise Parker’s proposed ordinance should be entitled the “Sexual Predator Protection Act.” It would allow men to put on women’s clothing and go into a female bathroom or locker room in both public and in private business locations open to the public. If challenged all he has to say in his defense is that he thinks that he is a woman. Parker and her supporters call this “transgendered.” Most would consider this deviant and perverted behavior. Do you want your mother, wife, girlfriend, daughters or granddaughters to be exposed to this danger? To allow this would be outrageous!
Parker wants to coerce the public, by force of law, to accept her lesbian relationship as morally equivalent to marriage. This violates not only the Texas Constitution Marriage Amendment, but also our Sovereign God’s law for marriage. “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5)
While we are all sinners in need of the atoning blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us of our sins, it would be outrageous to allow any group who organizes politically, based upon their sexual activities, to elevate themselves to minority status.
Please call the members of the Houston City Council today and tell them that you are outraged about Parker’s Sexual Predator Protection Act. Tell them the following:
  1. Parker and her supporters’ sexual behavior does not give them a right to a minority status like legitimate racial minorities, and
  2. You do not want girls and women to be exposed to sexual predators in restrooms or showers.
The City Council names and contact information are listed below.
Also, go to City Hall this Wednesday, April 30, for the 1:00 pm city council committee hearing on Parker’s ordinance. It is important for the council members to know that their actions are being watched.
Parker’s “Sexual Predator Protection Act” will be voted on by the Houston City Council on Wednesday, May 7th.
It is critical that you start calling the city council members today and tell them that you are outraged about Parker’s Sexual Predator Protection Act.
Please forward this email letter to your family members, friends, neighbors and business associates.
Committed to advancing Biblical principles, I remain, as always,
Sincerely yours for Constitutional liberty,
Steven F. Hotze, M.D.
Just because Houston’s pro-equality movement has made some significant progress in recent weeks doesn’t mean that we’ve won the fight yet.  As you can see, Hotze and his organization are not above spreading as many lies as possible to get what they want.  If this ordinance is to pass, it’s going to take an overwhelming show of support from those that know the truth.So we are clear, here’s some myth-busting from the American Psychological Association

1.) Sexual orientation is NOT a choice.

2) LGBT people are NOT child molesters or sexual deviants
3)  Being LGBT is NOT a disease of any kind.  We all have a sexual orientation and a gender identity.  It is something that you are born with!!
And many more from years of extensive research from the APA.  Remember the meeting at City Hall is tomorrow 2pm, with a rally for equality starting at 1pm.  If you can attend, please do so and help create a better Houston for us all.  There’s also still time to call and email your City Council representatives.  This is for real folks!!
CRT1

A Southern Strategy for LGBT Equality

If we could travel back in time just 5 years, it would seem impossible to imagine the pace at which marriage equality is occurring today.  To think that even less than 2 years ago, no popular vote granting same-sex marriage rights had been won in any state.  That didn’t occur until the November 2012 elections.

But since those first wins at the ballot box in Washington state, Maine and Maryland in 2012, large parts of the United have seen nothing short of a transfiguration on LGBT marriage rights.  Sometimes it seems like magic to sit and watch this play out from a southern state like Texas or Arkansas… it feels as though time is moving forward in other areas, yet we’re still stuck squarely in the past.  But this swift movement towards equality was anything but magic.  It was earned through the blood, sweat, voices, votes and tears of millions of people working to advance these rights.  For the past several years, marriage equality has been the central orb around which the country’s largest and most powerful Civil Rights organizations have revolved.  You throw all of your time and money into a cause, and hopefully you yield some results.

But a new report from The New York Times reveals that this singular focus on marriage equality is about to change.  The movement itself is now turning to those that have stood patiently on the sidelines…

The country’s leading gay rights groups and donors, after a decade focused on legalizing same-sex marriage, are embarking on a major drive to win more basic civil rights and workplace protections in Southern and Western states where the rapid progress of the movement has largely eluded millions of gay men and lesbians.

The effort will shift tens of millions of dollars in the next few years to what advocates described as the final frontier for gay rights: states like Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and Texas, where Republicans dominate elected office and traditional cultural views on homosexuality still prevail.

The new strategy reflects the growing worry within the movement that recent legal and political successes have formed two quickly diverging worlds for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender Americans: one centered on the coasts and major cities, and another stretching across the South and up through the Rocky Mountains, in states where gays enjoy virtually no legal protections against discrimination.

“We can’t allow two distinct gay Americas to exist,” said Tim Gill, a Colorado philanthropist whose foundation is putting about $25 million into a handful of mostly conservative-leaning states over the next five years. “Everybody should have the same rights and protections regardless of where they were born and where they live.”

The push is likely to encounter resistance. Gay rights groups will be engaging in communities where churches and other religious institutions are tightly woven into daily life, and where efforts to expand civil rights protections to gays are sometimes viewed as an attack on people of faith…

In some states, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union and groups Mr. Gill helps fund plan to lobby for nondiscrimination ordinances in housing and employment and for legislation allowing gay parents to adopt. In other states, they are building new grass-roots organizations and pushing for the election of openly gay and lesbian officials where there are none.

Those involved in the planning described it as the biggest realignment of gay rights activism in a decade, one that will shift the movement’s focus into territory where there is almost no unified network of support and where gay people are more likely to hide who they are, making them more difficult to reach.

Just the American Civil Rights movement two generations ago, today’s fight for equality has always been about much more than marriage.  In my opinion this shift in focus is welcome, and long overdue.  When they do get to the south, they will be able to build on the great work of groups like the Campaign for Southern Equality.  This fight is already being waged, but with the help of larger resources, it can be won decisively.

For this shift, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign are in capable hands.  The group’s President, Chad Griffin, knows much of the territory to which he is taking this next great push.  He is a native Arkansan, and grew up in the small, bucolic college town of Arkadelphia, Arkansas (full disclosure, I went to college in the very same town).  Knowing the struggles that some of our most vulnerable LGBT Americans face, Griffin’s voice is sure to be an even greater attribute in this “new” frontier.

Arkansas Pride

(photo credit:  cogvv.com)