On Tuesday, Houston voters demonstrated that they are not fully insane by rejecting an ordinance pushed by Mayor Annise Parker, the city’s first lesbian mayor, to allow transgenders to use any bathroom they please. The voters rejected the so-called Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) by a two-thirds margin.
Actually, the ordinance did far more than that. The ordinance would have added transgenderism as a protected class under anti-discrimination law, meaning that businesses would have had no recourse if their employees decided to pretend to be members of the opposite sex. The law would have fined all businesses, public and private, $5,000 for any such “discrimination.” The only institutions exempted would be religious ones, but religious businessowners would be subject to the regime. The leftist City Council passed the ordinance last May, but voters rejected the referendum after a court said the ordinance was illegally passed.
Parker has a long history of anti-religious extremism on behalf of the leftist-approved delusion of transgenderism: in fighting for her ordinance, she tried to force local religious leaders to turn over their speeches to her so she could use the mechanism of government to target any pastor opposing her agenda.
But Parker isn’t an extremist on the left. She’s fully within the mainstream. White House spokesman Jeff Tiller endorsed HERO just days ago:
While the Administration generally does not take a formal position on specific proposals or initiatives, the President and Vice President have been strong supporters of state and local efforts to protect Americans from being discriminated against based on who they are and who they love. We’re confident that the citizens of Houston will vote in favor of fairness and equality.
After the vote, Hillary Clinton endorsed HERO as well:
Everyone deserves full and equal protection under the law. This is a reminder of the work still left to do. https://t.co/r68QAHxxPT
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 4, 2015
Under Barack Obama, non-religious rationality and religion — both of which see the difference between men and women — are now a crime. Hillary would extend that forward.
Hilariously, the left insists that they don’t want to destroy the notion of protecting women with such ordinances. They say that conservatives have skewed the argument by pointing to restrooms – even as week the federal government declared this week that a Chicago school violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, designed to protect women, by forcing girls to undress next to a boy who thinks he is a girl, and to view that boy’s penis. BuzzFeed, a major media backer of the ordinance, ran an entire hit piece against conservatives, stating, “Of the roughly two dozen voters BuzzFeed News interviewed in Houston, about half believed the ordinance applied solely to granting men and transgender people access to public bathrooms. Roughly a quarter knew of the law’s wider scope banning discrimination.”
Now that’s a scientific poll!
BuzzFeed added:
The vote comes at an especially critical moment for the LGBT movement. After winning marriage at the Supreme Court in June, leaders of top organizations vowed to use the wind at their backs to pass laws prohibiting discrimination in cities, states, and eventually the whole country. A bill in Congress, the Equality Act, was introduced in July but has stagnated without a single Republican co-sponsor.
The left wants the Houston/Chicago experience to go national. But they’ll never tell you the truth about that.
In 1977, conservative warrior Phyllis Schlafly began STOP – “Stop Taking Our Privileges” – in order to fight the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been ratified by 28 states. She claimed, rightly, that the ERA would lead to unisex bathrooms. Her opponents said that she was lying – it would never come to that. They were lying. As always.
That’s because the left lies routinely about its actual agenda. With regard to homosexuality, the left once said they simply wanted the government to stop prosecuting homosexual sex acts, but would never suggest legal privileges attach to such acts; the right acquiesced. The left then said they wanted civil unions for homosexuals, but would never want same-sex marriage; the right acquiesced. The left explained that they wanted same-sex marriage, but such marriages would never impact your life; the right is acquiescing. Now the left says they want to force religious businessowners to take part in same-sex weddings, and want to prevent you from taking your child to therapy if your child expresses angst over possible homosexual attraction. They lied.
The left’s quest for utopia never ends. They’ll destroy the basic notion of male and female, the basic notion of privacy, the basic notion of protection of childhood innocence, and the basic freedoms of association and religion in order to achieve their leveling. Any leftist who tells you otherwise is either ignorant of the final agenda or lying about it.