“If this trend continues, no one could discriminate against anyone for any reason.” Del. Kelli Sobonya (R-Cabell). source.
13:34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
13:35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Jesus Christ as quoted in John 13:1-34-35
West Virginia came close to passing an anti-discrimination bill to add the same protections to gays as other groups.
This is a diary about how it came close, but failed.
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God bless gay-bashing, bigoted, Republican Del. Kelli Sononya. Blessings come in many guises as we know from the Book of James. Many people like Sononya are ignorant of the Bible except the portions they can use to “justify” their own bigotry stemming from fear of “others.”
“Where’s the tolerance for those with true, deep-seated convictions based on Bible teachings relating to homosexuality?” Sobonya wondered after the meeting.
Conceivably, under the bill, she said, a cross dresser could demand to put on whatever he pleases while teaching in a public school to express “sexual orientation.”
“Homosexuality is an abomination to God based on the teaching of the Bible,” she said. source
There are four passages in the Bible regarding homosexual acts and more than 3,000 passages about caring for the poor. Do you think Kelli Sononya has ever stood and railed that the state is not doing enough to help poor people? Has she ever railed against the sins of greed? Of course not.
So when Sononya pleads for “tolerance for those with true, deep-seated convictions based on Bible teachings” she ignores the log in her own eye. I can quote passage after passage of Jesus condemning hypocrites, but none where Jesus condemned homosexuality.
My blogmate Wabi-Sabi pointed out this great YouTube clip.
But this is a democracy, not a theocracy despite the desires of Sononya and Del. Mel Kesser, D-Kanawha, who said, “It’s my right. I’m not going to discriminate against gays. I’m not going to line any of them up and shoot them. I’ve said this in church before. I should have the right to exercise my religious beliefs, and my religious beliefs are that the Bible says it’s an abomination.”
The irony of his claiming his rights while seeking to deny a group of people the same rights because of his narrow views was not lost on me.
But it is not just ignorance of the Bible and religious views in support of anti-discrimination measures against gays. Opponents to the bill showed a remarkable lack of knowledge of U.S. history and of scientific research.
Echoing the sentiments of other critics, Delegate John Pino, D-Fayette, said the bill attempts to reward behaviors of choice rather than birth determinations such as gender and race.
“This country was founded on certain principles, and one of them is that I’ve never known that any behavior of any individual deserves special recognition or status or grace that’s to be blessed by the majority of the country,” a somber Pino reflected.
Really? Did Pino choose to be heterosexual?
Is Sexual Orientation a Choice?
No, human beings can not choose to be either gay or straight. Sexual orientation emerges for most people in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. Although we can choose whether to act on our feelings, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed. source
Nor is he historically accurate. From The Historians’ case against gay discrimination:
Even in periods when enforcement increased, it was rare for people to be prosecuted for consensual sexual relations conducted in private, even when the parties were of the same sex. Indeed, records of only about twenty prosecutions and four or five executions have surfaced for the entire colonial period. Even in the New England colonies, whose leaders denounced “sodomy” with far greater regularity and severity than did other colonial leaders and where the offense carried severe sanctions, it was rarely prosecuted. The trial of Nicholas Sension, a married man living in Westhersfield, Connecticut, in 1677, revealed that he had been widely known for soliciting sexual contacts with the town’s men and youth for almost forty years but remained widely liked. Likewise, a Baptist minister in New London, Connecticut, was temporarily suspended from the pulpit in 1757 because of his repeatedly soliciting sex with men, but the congregation voted to restore him to the ministry after he publicly repented. They understood his sexual transgressions to be a form of sinful behavior in which anyone could engage and from which anyone could repent, not as a sin worthy of death or the condition of a particular class of people. See Richard Godbeer, “The Cry of Sodom”: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England, 3.52 WM. & MARY Q. 259, 259-260, 275-278 (1995); Eskridge, 1999 U. ILL. L. REV. at 645; JOHN D’EMILIO & ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN, INTIMATE MATTERS: A HISTORY OF SEXUALITY IN AMERICA 30 (2d ed. 1997).
The relative indifference of the public and the authorities to the crime of sodomy continued in the first century of independence.
So why do they support bigotry and intolerance? Fear and hatred. The two are often combined.
You see, they might not know anyone who is gay. It is hard to discriminate if you learn your favorite niece or nephew comes out of the closet and is gay. It is hard to hate those you know in your family or in your circle of friends, no matter how much you have been told that “homosexuality is an abomination.”
Here is a diary I wrote on Daily Kos on Nov. 14, 2004.
God bless gay-bashing Rev. Fred Phelps. Why? Because his hatred and bigotry against gays has united a very conservative church and community in Oklahoma to rally around a 17-year-old gay man, Michael Shackelford.
The story here at the Washington Post should give us all hope that American progressive values of tolerance and “Love thy neighbor,” shared by Christians and atheists alike, are alive and well even in the red-state heartland.
The Washington Post did a story on the young man growing up gay in a red state in a community that openly despised him.After Phelps read about the young man, Phelps brought his oxymoronic “God hates fags” campaign to the young man’s community. (Oxymoronic because if you believe God made everything and God doesn’t make mistake then God’s not going to hate anything he made.)
What happened next shows that real life is much more than blue or red and black or white.
“There is darkness and there is light and we are in the middle of the light,” Eubanks said, to more thunderous applause. “Say it: God loves us all. All of us!”
After the service, several people came up to hug Janice. One woman held her in an embrace that lasted two minutes, whispering to Janice the whole time.
A burly man with a crew cut gave Michael a thumbs-up. “Man, you be who you are,” Shannon Watie said, holding his Bible. “We got your back.”
Watie later said that he respected Michael for having the courage to come out. “I have the sin of pride, the sin of lying sometimes,” said the 37-year-old father of two. “The reason why Jesus was on the cross was because we all do.”
Watie voted for Oklahoma’s ban on same-sex marriage. Civil unions? He might have considered those. Homosexuality? “That’s between the person and God,” Watie said.I’m a happily married heterosexual who has had a vasectomy. One could say I don’t have a stake in either the fight for gay rights or reproductive rights.
But I do. Because I’m an American and a Democrat. And Americans are supposed to look out for each other like the people in this community did for one of their own.
I saw this story as hopeful. Sure things look dark right now with George Bush’s election (stolen or otherwise), the defeat of all the gay marriage amendments, and the control of Congress in the hands of the worst group of politicians since the pre-Civil War era.
This community rallied around a gay man when outsiders challenged him. It may have helped him that the outsiders came from Kansas and they’re from Oklahoma, but they embraced him as one of their own.
The America of the individual cowboy or lone gunfighter embraced by George Bush and his capitalist cronies is a myth. The strength of America is in being united, not divided. It wasn’t an individual* that held the line at Bunker Hill, stormed Normandy beach or died at the Alamo. Martin Luther King didn’t march alone. John Glenn may have orbited the earth alone, but rose on the efforts of many. And Neil Armstrong may have took the first step on the Moon, but our hearts were there with him.
Let’s remember Michael and Sand Springs, Oklahoma when we talk about the differences between red states and blue states. So even if the Phelps family is a hopeless cause, God bless them for reminding the people in Sand Springs and elsewhere that the rest of us do share many of the same values.
This fight is not over and in West Virginia gays are not alone. As I reported before, Fred Phelps said West Virginia was `by far the worst‘ in countering his bigotry.
There are people who in their ignorance want to divide us instead of unite us. We need to love those who oppose us and lead them into the light. They can’t claim to follow the Lord’s word and then hate people and they can’t discriminate and love at the same time.
SB 600 made it farther than in the past. We should remember those who opposed progress and those who tried to advance it, such as the West Virginia State Senate for passing SB 600 out unanimously, particularly Senators Kessler and McCabe. There were also 13 members of the House Judiciary who voted in favor of sending SB 600 to the floor for a vote, Delegates Clif Moore and Fleishauer tried to reason with the unreasonable as did Del. Carrie Webster, who stood up against the worst hyperbole and slurs.
It doesn’t always come easy and it doesn’t come at the pace we’d like, but they cannot hold back progress with their hate. The Bible also tells us love is the greatest of all.
