sexual orientation

Back in September, Mike Heath of the Maine Family Policy Council suddenly announced that he was leaving the organization, right in the middle of the fight over marriage equality in the state.

Heath had been finding himself being pushed aside in the Religious Right's activism and mobilization efforts, presumably because of the rabidly anti-gay insanity he'd been spreading, as the Yes on 1 side worked to portray itself as tolerant and mainstream.

Heath then all but disappeared from the scene ... but now that Yes on 1 has been victorious in Maine, Tip-Q points out that he has popped up on Peter LaBarbera's Americans for Truth website declaring that gays are sick and calling for reinstatement of Maine's anti-sodomy laws:

Homosexuality has absolutely nothing to do with marriage. Homosexuality is a sickness. It’s a sin.

We need to stop putting up with it. There is nothing civil about hiding the truth from those we love. And the truth about sex outside of marriage is that it hurts, it’s bad for us. We need to avoid it.

We need to choose life over sex. Sex is for life … it creates life. Sex and life must be connected in our thinking. We come together sexually in the context of marriage to celebrate creation, the creation of a unique individual human life. It is perilous to disconnect sex from creation. It is even more perilous to pretend that pleasurable sex should be associated with acts unspeakable.

In the interest of protecting and affirming all of Maine’s people, especially our children and grandchildren, we must repeal domestic partnership laws that provide benefits on the basis of homosexuality, we must de-fund the so-called “civil rights teams” [pro-homosexual student groups] and remove “sexual orientation and gender identity” from the Maine Human Rights Act and the Maine Civil Rights Act. It would also be prudent to reinstate Maine’s anti-sodomy law that was quietly removed from our criminal code in the late 1970s.

For months now, I've been trying to understand the reasoning behind the Republican and right-wing opposition to adding hate crimes protections for sexual orientation, noting that while they regularly complain that certain groups of people shouldn't be getting "special rights" or receiving extra protection, they are perfectly content to allow the existing hate crimes protections for religion to remain on the books.

As it turns out, the reason I couldn't understand their reasoning is that it is apparently rooted in a belief that sexual orientation is a choice, while religion is not: 

Last week, House Republican Leader John Boehner objected to House passage of a bill that would expand hate crime laws and make it a federal crime to assault people on the basis of their sexual orientation.

"All violent crimes should be prosecuted vigorously, no matter what the circumstance," he said. "The Democrats' 'thought crimes' legislation, however, places a higher value on some lives than others. Republicans believe that all lives are created equal, and should be defended with equal vigilance."

Based on that statement, CBSNews.com contacted Boehner's office to find out if the minority leader opposes all hate crimes legislation. The law as it now stands offers protections based on race, color, religion and national origin.

In an email, Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith said Boehner "supports existing federal protections (based on race, religion, gender, etc) based on immutable characteristics."

It should be noted that the current law does not include gender, though the expanded legislation would cover gender as well as sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

"He does not support adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes," Smith continued.

Boehner's position, then, appears to be grounded in the notion that immutable characteristics should be protected under hate crimes laws. And while religion is an immutable characteristic, his office suggests, sexual orientation is not.

Over the last several months, we've been chronicling episodes in which Religious Right legal groups have stepped in to represent former lesbians who have decided that their former partners ought to have no access to the children they had raised together. Liberty Counsel has been active in several cases, as has the Alliance Defense Fund.

Today, the Montana Supreme Court decided another case in which the ADF was involved, regarding another custody battle involving two women who could not get married, as Montana does not grant marriage equality, and were unable to adopt children together, as state law apparently does not allow that either. One of the women, Barbara Maniaci, adopted two children and the two women raised them together for ten years until they split and Maniaci married a man and then decided that her former partner should not have access to the children.

The state Supreme Court diagreed:

The Montana Supreme Court Tuesday upheld parental rights for a Missoula woman who'd been part of a same-sex couple that cared for two adopted children, saying she's entitled to joint custody of the kids.

Supporters of the 6-1 decision hailed it as a victory for all parents, regardless of their marital status or sexual orientation.

"This is a victory for families in all shapes, sizes and colors," said Betsy Griffing, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana.

Justice James Nelson also issued a special concurrence, in which he wrote a blistering denunciation of discrimination against homosexuals.

"Naming it for the evil it is, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is an expression of bigotry," he wrote. "Lesbian and gay Montanans must not be forced to fight to marry, to raise their children and to live with the same dignity that is accorded heterosexuals."

And, predictably, professional anti-gay activists are outraged:

Jeff Laszloffy, president of the Montana Family Foundation, called the court's decision "egregious."

"Basically, what the court did in this decision is said that no longer does a parent have to be declared unfit for a third party non-parent to be able to abridge the natural parents' rights and authorities over that child," Laszloffy told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN). "Now you just have to prove that that child has a psychological connection to you. And you can apply for, fight for, sue for parental rights and it's a crapshoot, you might get them, you might not."

While Laszloffy said he believed the issue of homosexual "rights" was not the original impetus behind the case, he noted, "I'm sure that the Montana Supreme Court is always looking for cases to push the homosexual agenda."

Attorney Matt McReynolds with the Pacific Justice Institute, which filed an amicus brief in the case, agreed.

"It actually seems like the plaintiff was favored in this case just because she was a lesbian," Reynolds told LSN. "It's fairly shocking how the Court wouldn't allow this person who had left the lesbian lifestyle to be freed from it - her and her children.

"It's very disturbing that someone who wants to get out of this lifestyle can still be trapped in it for years to come ... by someone who has no legal or adoptive relationship with the children."

Yesterday, I wrote a post about Utah state Senator Chris Buttars' refusal to believe that gays suffer discrimination and his threat to introduce legislation that would override any effort by Salt Lake City to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance.

The Deseret News has followed-up on Buttars' claim and just check out his utterly ridiculous explanation:

Sen. Chris Buttars has his eyes on Salt Lake City's proposed anti-discrimination law and the state lawmaker says he would likely take action to quash the ordinance should the City Council approve it.

"I don't think anybody should be discriminated against," said Buttars, R-West Jordan. "But in America, we have never given special privilege or protection to little groups. We give them to the entire nation."

Salt Lake Mayor Ralph Becker said he was "committed to eradicating discrimination in our city" last month as he unveiled the ordinance aimed at providing fair housing and employment protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.

Buttars, however, said the LGBT community doesn't fall under the same protective umbrella as race, age and religion, which "affect everybody."

"We've never done what they're asking," he said, "nor have I seen any evidence that it needs to be done."

The Human Rights Commission of Salt Lake City released a report last month detailing incidences of discrimination in the city, many of which involved LGBT residents, but Buttars questioned the validity of some of those claims.

"I have never seen any facts to back it up," he said. "They want to say they're being hurt more than someone else, I guess. If anybody had a right to special protection it would be Mormons; they've been persecuted but not as bad as the American Indian. But they're not pounding on the newspaper's door. Or the Jewish people; the Jewish people have lots of people hate them. I love them. But you know that's true."

So apparently, things like race, religion, and age "affect everybody" so laws banning discrimination on those grounds are okay but "sexual orientation" only applies to a "little group" so any such law is unfair. and unneeded

Here's a newsflash: "sexual orientation" affects everyone too since everyone, even Chris Buttars, has a "sexual orientation," just as everyone has an age and a race.

It was just last week that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in the Senate, so the Religious Right campaign of screaming their heads off is just getting off the ground. 

But Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries gives us a nice preview of the sort of hyperbolic nonsense we can expect to see:

On Aug. 5, the GOP's Maine kleptocrats, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, joined Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and longtime sponsor Ted Kennedy in reintroducing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which we'll call the "gay quota bill" for short. ENDA is profoundly dangerous. It turns private sin into a public right and brings the force of government against morality itself. Any such law is a violation of our unalienable rights as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. To put it more simply, a statute that directly contradicts God's moral law is illegitimate. Laws embody and reflect morality, or they are not laws. They are tyranny. That's why so-called same-sex "marriage" laws are absurd and treacherous. Forcing citizens to accept a counterfeit as the real thing is an act of despotism.

ENDA adds not only "sexual orientation" but "gender identity" to federal workplace anti-discrimination law. Thus, it takes an ax to the idea that sexual behavior has a natural normalcy or any relation to morality. It falsely equates a changeable condition (sexual desire) with race and ethnicity. Worse, it turns traditional values into a form of bigotry punishable under the law.

First of all, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act already has a short-hand name: ENDA.  So we don't need your suggestion that it should be called the "gay quota bill" because a) that's false and b) it's longer than the one we already have.

And secondly, it looks like efforts to pass this legislation are going to run into the same sort of Religious Right lies that plagued the hate crimes legislation, with right-wing activists claiming that it will grant "special rights" to those in the LGBT community. 

Of course, that will raise the exact same problems as their efforts to make that claim about hate crimes legislation, considering that there are already a number of federal laws on the books that outlaw employment discrimination based on things like race, religion, gender, and disability: 

• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

• the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which protects men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination;

• the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), which protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older;

• Title I and Title V of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), which prohibit employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in the private sector, and in state and local governments;

• Sections 501 and 505 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities who work in the federal government

So, once again the Right will have to explain why gays shouldn't receive similar protections as say, Christians. 

And once again, they'll fail to do that because they have no reason other than claims that God hates gays and therefore it should be okay to discriminate against them, leading to pieces like Knight's where the Right is reduced to bellowing that any "statute that directly contradicts God's moral law is illegitimate."

• Box Turtle Bulletin: The American Psychological Association, meeting at their annual conference in Toronto, adopted a resolution today calling on mental health professionals to stop telling clients that they can change their sexual orientation through therapy or other treatments. And in a direct challenge to NARTH and Exodus International, the resolution further calls on patients, guardians, families and other clients to avoid conversion therapy programs which portray homosexuality as a mental illness or developmental disorder.
• Steve Benen says it's impossible to deal with the Right because, no matter what you say or how your phrase it, "it's hard to anticipate just how paranoid some people will choose to be" and how they will distort it.
• Kevin Drum says "every movement has its loons" but while Democrats never validate the ones on the left, Republicans make their right-wing ones the centerpiece of their movement.
• There is just something funny about the Right trying to stoke anger and shut down Democratic town hall events while the RNC is refusing to take calls from "a bunch of angry liberals" about it.
• And there is something even funnier about Frank Luntz complaining that Democrats would use "poll driven language" to "mislead the American people" on health care reform.
• Salon's handy-dandy guide to refuting the Birthers.

One of the points I have tried to drive home regarding the Religious Right's purported opposition to the current hates crimes legislation is that they don't actually oppose hate crimes in general, they just oppose offering protection to gays. 

They claim that hate crimes laws give certain groups "special rights" and are therefore discriminatory.  If that is indeed what they believe, then the logical position for them to take would be to call for the complete repeal of all existing hate crimes laws, such as the federal law that provides protections for things like race and religion. 

But they haven't offered to forgo the "special rights" they receive as Christians or even bothered to acknowledge this basic fact, choosing instead to harp on the addition of "sexual orientation" to the existing law as somehow a threat to their religious liberty.

Well, Dan Gilgoff has written a piece taking a look at the Right's scare-tactics about this legislation and points out that they are all completely unfounded:

Legal experts note that under the hate crimes bill, a person's religious beliefs about homosexuality become relevant only once he or she is accused of a violent crime against someone from the LGBT community. The bill prohibits a defendant's religious expressions and associations from being introduced as substantive evidence at trial, though the information can be used to help determine whether the defendant was motivated by bias. "Your penalty is being enhanced because of your religious beliefs," says Prof. Douglas Laycock of the University of Michigan Law School. "But you're being prosecuted for the crime."

Proponents of an expanded hate crimes law say religious beliefs should be subject to scrutiny if they lead to violence. "Even the strongest proponents of religious freedom do not claim that religious liberty means the right to beat people up," says Prof. Andrew Koppelman of the Northwestern University School of Law.

Conservative religious activists, meanwhile, point to recent developments in Australia, Canada, and Sweden, where religious conservatives have been penalized for so-called hate speech, even where such speech did not lead to violence. But legal scholars note that those countries lack the robust free speech protections of the First Amendment. And even opponents of expanding the hate crimes law acknowledge that statutes widely adopted by individual states have not resulted in litigation over religious liberty or free speech violations—though many cover the LGBT community. "If somebody had been prosecuted simply for speech, we would have heard about it by now," says Laycock.

So why has the Right been so vehemently opposed to this legislation?  Mainly because, as Tony Perkins admitted last month, their real fear is that if protection for gays are added, it would make gays "equivalent to other categories of protection" and, if that happens, the Religious Right's anti-gays views will be seen as "equivalent to racial bigotry."

And Erik Stanley of the Alliance Defense Fund basically admitted it to Gilgoff as well: 

As religious conservatives mount a last-ditch effort to derail the bill, however, legal experts say the legislation narrowly focuses on violent acts and that pastors' speech remains protected by the First Amendment. And some religious activists acknowledge that they're less concerned about the immediate effects of expanding hate crimes protections than about the broader message it sends. "This is the first time you would have written into law a government disapproval of a religious belief held by the majority of Americans—that homosexuality is sinful," says Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. "It's more of a slippery slope argument than about the law itself."

They are afraid that as society progresses and being gay become increasingly acceptable, their right-wing views are going to become less acceptable.

In short: the more mainstream gays become, the less mainstream the Religious Right becomes ... and that is what they fear more than anything.

One point I have tried to make in my various posts about the Religious Right's opposition to expanding hate crimes protection to cover "sexual orientation" is the fundamental disconnect between their claims and the basic facts.

As I've said before the Religious Right has two basic options in explaining it opposition to adding sexual orientation: 1) explain why something like religion receives and deserves protection while sexual orientation does not, even though there are nearly 2.5 times as many violent hate crimes targeting individuals because of their sexual orientation as there are violent crimes targeting individuals because of religion or 2) advocate doing away with hate crimes laws completely while explaining why the existing enhanced penalties for a racist who burns a cross on someone's lawn or a neo-Nazi who burns down a synagogue are "extraneous and obsolete."

But instead of doing either of these things, Religious Right groups tend to try and muddy the waters by conflating all of the issues.  Case in point is the written testimony [PDF] the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the legislation in which he claims to oppose hate crimes laws in general but then admits that what he really opposes is expanding existing law to cover sexual orientation:

The Family Research Council strongly opposes the enactment of a Federal hate crimes law (H.R. 1913).

Hate crime laws force the court to guess the thoughts and beliefs which lie behind a crime, instead of looking at the crime itself, in order to prosecute and convict someone of a hate crime. Violent crimes are already punishable by law. “Hate crime” laws put the perpetrator’s thoughts and beliefs on trial. Hate crime laws are tantamount to federally prosecuting “thought crimes.” The Family Research Council believes that all crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and that every violent crime has some form of hate behind it. All around the country, crimes are being prosecuted in the state justice systems. American justice is being done. There is simply no need for a federal hate crimes law ... A federal hate crime law is unnecessary and violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

This claims is immediately followed by Perkins' assertion that "expanding the Federal hate crime law would not only be unnecessary, it would be ineffective."

Note the he is not calling for a repeal of the existing Federal hate crime law that currently covers things like race and religion, even though he asserts that such laws are fundamentally unconstitutional, but is instead opposing efforts to "expand" it to cover "sexual orientation."

And to explain why, Perkins then trots out all of the standard right-wing lies:

Family Research Council has a particular concern regarding such laws, however, when they include "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" (a reference to cross-dressing and sex-change operations) among the categories of protection. This sends the false message that deviant sexual behaviors are somehow equivalent to other categories of protection such as race or sex. In fact, the very term "hate crime" is offensive in this context, in that it implies that mere disapproval of sexually extreme behavior constitutes a form of "hate"equivalent to racial bigotry.

Sexual orientation and gender identity are not defined in the bill. As such, it is not clear from this lack of definition what the bill authors intend for sexual orientation and gender identity to mean or how these terms should be construed in law. Since these terms are not defined by the bill itself, it is possible that someone could claim protection for their “sexual orientation” based on participation in one of the 30 paraphilias listed in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which include pedophilia and bestiality.

Note again how Perkins' main concern is not with existing hate crimes protections but rather that expanding those protection to cover gays would make them "equivalent to other categories of protection." But what he and his allies are really concerned about is the fear that, if this legislation passes, their anti-gays views will be seen as "equivalent to racial bigotry."

And that, in essence, is really what the Right's opposition is all about.

Charles Colson, who knows his way around a jail cell, told Southern Baptist pastors that they would be headed behind bars, too, if the current Hate Crimes bill becomes law.

In an address to the Southern Baptist Convention Pastor's Conference, Colson chose to attack everything from the Hate Crimes bill to Islam:

"Sponsors of congressional hate crimes legislation insist it won't restrict speech, but Colson warned that ministers will face the threat of prosecution within the next two years.

He also said medical professionals are losing their conscience right to refuse to perform abortions, and faith-based ministries could soon have to hire non-believers.

Colson also predicted a continuing threat from Islamic terrorists and dismissed the Qu'ran as an "irrational invention of Muhammad rather than divinely inspired scripture."

It seems Colson is reverting back to the Right's tired (and false) argument: If we protect LGBT people from violent crimes targeted specifically at them because of their sexual orientation, then any conservative, anti-homosexual priest who speaks out against homosexuality will be jailed.

Maybe Colson is still shaken up, and paranoid, by his own 7-month prison sentence due to his involvement in Watergate.