Utah cities and counties, pondering whether they should follow Salt Lake City’s lead on protecting gay and transgender residents from discrimination, could get a green light from an unexpected source: Sen. Chris Buttars.
Buttars, a West Jordan Republican and fiery opponent of gay rights, said Wednesday he “very well might” sponsor legislation in 2010 that would allow local governments to adopt such anti-discrimination measures for housing and employment — but forbid them from going any further on gay rights.
Buttars is an asshat, but you have to admit making the Eagle lay an egg is amusing. Just this is a trojan horse intended to limit civil rights advances, not further them. He’s trying to bail water from the canoe, not get to shore.
Apparently the Mormon church set an official spokesperson to a public hearing on a non-discrimination ordinance that would protect LGBT people from housing and job discrimination. In a nutshell,
The Church supports this ordinance because it is fair and reasonable and does not do violence to the institution of marriage. It is also entirely consistent with the Church’s prior position on these matters. The Church remains unequivocally committed to defending the bedrock foundation of marriage between a man and a woman.(Deseret News
Oh, gee, thanks. In other words, we’ll let the gays live and work as long as their presence doesn’t threaten our “standards.” We still oppose society officially recognizing their relationships, we can still call them sick and mentally disturbed any time we feel like it and we can still kick them out of BYU if the mood takes us, so it doesn’t matter. Oh, and (bonus!) we have just upped the ante on our victim role because: See how nice we really are?
Oh, and Michael Otterson? The Managing Director of the LDS Church’s Public Affairs? In other words a hired PR gun. Where was Monson? Packer? Anyone from the Twelve? Well, except Oaks. I’ll bet you won’t see him in the public spotlight again any time soon. Hell, even someone from the warm and fuzzy arm of the church, The General Relief Society Presidency, would have been better than Otterson. By sending Otterson the Church was making another statement. “This is just policy. This doesn’t carry the weight of doctrine, so you can ignore it if you want.” What do you bet most True Believing Mormons do exactly that?
Case in point: This isn’t anything they haven’t said before. The Mormon church said essentially the same thing during the Prop8 stupidity as well, but when it came time to actually pass legislation on the Hill in Utah, did Utah Legislators take statements of PR arm of the church as evidence that passing non-discrimination and equal protection laws was the right thing to do? Nope. Did the Mormon church send an spokesperson to the Hill to give legislators permission encourage legislators to enact said laws? Nope.
I’ve not followed the impending LGBT march on Washington much, strikes me as an exercise in futility, if not political masturbation, since Obama will be out of town as will, likely, be much of Congress. But I do admire the spirit going into some of the preparations.
A friend forwarded me the following from a contestant in the contest to address the march. An impressive kid.
The conversation we ought to be having in response to the July 16 incident and its heated aftermath isn’t about race, it’s about police arrest powers, and the right to criticize armed agents of the government.
By any account of what happened—Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between—Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest.
He won’t be, of course. And that’s ultimately the scandal that will endure long after the political furor dies down. The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abused. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights.
The President’s oath of office obligates him to fully respect the Constitution of the United States (or at least make a believable show of doing so, which most Presidents treat as the same thing). Disrespecting that oath represents a fundamental and often criminal failure by the President to carry out his duties.
George Bush left the next administration with a clever Sophie’s Choice in that the only way to stop pissing all over the U.S. Constitution is to upset the mother of all apple carts. Necessary steps would include, at a minimum, releasing the prisoners whom we can’t prosecute because we tortured them and then prosecuting the torturers.
Obama doesn’t like upsetting apple carts.
That nail the problem with Obama’s approach on a lot of things. He doesn’t like upsetting apple carts. But sometimes doing the right thing is disruptive.
“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”
While disappointing to civil rights advocates, the California Supreme Court ruling upholding Proposition 8 is not unexpected. The revision vs. amendment line was always considered a long shot.
Gibbs gets yet another question on the Obama administrations lack of attention to civil rights issues:
Good on Cox. I’m reminded of the story of FDR who counselled advocates that it’s good they agreed with him, but the responsibility was theirs to make him follow through. Obama has made many committments toward gay civil rights, restoring rule of law in Washington, etc. The administration’s feet needs to be held to the fire to make things turn into reality.
