Our View - Friday

A HORRIBLE STATE LAW
Anti-discrimination law violates rights

   Focus on the Family hates the new revisions to Colorado's anti-discrimination law. The powerful Christian organization has warned of sexual deviants entering restrooms intended for the opposite sex, relieving themselves near children and possibly doing far worse.

   Focus is right to oppose the revised law, but it has been expressing the wrong objection - up until now.

   The revised law adds "sexual orientation" to a laundry list of attributes one cannot use as a basis for discrimination in places of public accommodation, including restrooms. It gives "sexual orientation" equal status to "disability, race, creed, color, religion, sex, marital status, familial status, national origin, or ancestry."

   Any living human is protected by nearly any category of this law, as all humans have a "sex" identity, or a "sexual orientation," and all are part of a "race," etc.

   With the inclusion of "sexual orientation" and its broad definition in the law, a man who self identifies as a woman will be allowed to use restrooms intended for females. It's this aspect of the law that Focus and Dobson have dwelled upon in their media campaign against it.

   The law is self-defeating, with or without the new revisions, and the addition of "sexual orientation." It aims to end discrimination, but ultimately paves the way for it by forcing relationships some individuals may not want. It would force a homosexual, for example, to have a business or rental relationship with a religious extremist who believes homosexuals should burn in hell - a person such as the Rev. Fred Phelps, a hatemonger who pickets funerals to denounce homosexuals. His entire religion is one of homosexual hatred. Taken literally, this law would force the church hosting a soldier's funeral to welcome funeral picketers Phelps and family to the service, so long as they behave. After all, one can't discriminate on the basis of another person's religious belief, no matter how disgusting it may be.

   The law is flawed, but so are concerns about perverts in restrooms. Felons don't wait for legislative permission to use a gun before shooting up a mall. Likewise, those who would harm children haven't been waiting for state permission to use the ladies' room. The public understands this. Besides, communities with laws similar to the state revision, such as Boulder, haven't seen a surge in lavatory molestation and rape.

   But the law is genuinely dangerous, and Focus is finally showing us why. Focus legal analyst Bruce Hausknecht told WorldNet-Daily that an exemption in the law allows religious groups to continue teaching biblical condemnations of homosexuality and other religious judgments, in "a place that is principally used for religious purposes." As the law states, such places include churches, temples, mosques, synagogues and the like.

   The exemption stands as an affront to freedoms of religion and speech, because it respects the expression of specified beliefs only in the enclosed areas of a building used primarily for religion. Inherent in that acknowledgment is disrespect for those particular views outside the walls of a church. The law, therefore, could be used to challenge the right of a street preacher to distribute pamphlets some might find offensive or his right to verbally denounce same-sex marriage in public. Likewise, it could be used to impede peaceful Klan rallies in the public square, or the right of a homosexual activist to publicly denounce the dominance of heterosexuality from a sidewalk. It could restrict unpopular speech of any kind. This is the danger of trying to engineer thoughts and words through fashionably correct feel-good legislation.

   The permission to express discriminatory beliefs, but only in church, comes in a bill that tries to prohibit the publication of discriminatory messages by owners and managers of places of public accommodation. Section 24-34-701 of the statute forbids publication and distribution of anything "that is intended or calculated to discriminate or actually discriminates against any disability, race, creed" etc., in a manner that advocates deprivation of access to a slate of listed public accommodations, such as housing. This could easily be used to prevent editorial writers or bloggers, who also own rental property, from challenging the law itself. To challenge the law, after all, is to advocate a right of discrimination or discriminatory expressions and doing so is forbidden. It means a landlord who disagrees with the anti-discrimination law can't stand on a street corner and distribute fliers expressing her disgust with it. It could hardly be more un-American.

   "There are those who simply by publishing Christian materials could find themselves charged with a violation of this statute," Hausknecht told WorldNetDaily.

   It could likewise be used against those who publish anti-Christian messages, as Christians are protected from discrimination under the law. And it discriminates against atheists. In what church, after all, is a homophobic atheist supposed to contain his expressions of disapproval that can be made only in a church? Atheists don have churches.

   The First Amendment wasn't written to protect popular expressions or benign religious beliefs that don't offend. It was written to protect those expressions and beliefs the majority may not like - the expressions and beliefs likely to be targets for censorship by the state.

   Most people don't like preachers of hate, such as Phelps or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright - a man who promotes racial hostility forbidden by this law. Protecting the rights of people like them, however, has for 200-plus years maintained a large platform of freedom and tolerance for everyone else. Unpleasant thoughts, words and beliefs don't threaten our freedoms. Censorship does, telling us what we may say and write, and whom we must associate with. Colorado's anti-discrimination law discriminates, while eroding our most basic liberties - for the sake of tolerance.

CORRECTION

The June 10 Our View, "Meet the new evangelicals," identified the wrong magazine when citing an article by author Jon Birger. Birger writes for Fortune. The Gazette regrets the error.