Reality Check 101

Over a year ago, Holland City Council began experiencing the lobbying efforts of a group of homosexual rights activists. Activists haven’t been very successful at the national or state level and therefore have begun the tactic of submission by a thousand blows – hitting municipalities one at a time. As one person put it, speaking of Holland as a bastion of traditional values, “If that is the perception, it’s perhaps even more important that we do this” (Sentinel 10/20/11).

In ancient times, rather than conquer the center of power first, conquest was through one city at a time. The resolution presented to Holland City Council on June 8^th represents such a campaign. It’s an effort to win Holland for homosexuality by gaining submissions of business and housing.

The Human Relation’s Commission’s (HRC) resolution of June 8^th makes note in several sections that sexual orientation and sexual preference have no standing in either federal or state civil rights law. The resolution’s “recitals” instead attempt to justify its recommendations by citing the conquest of 18 other communities.

It could be claimed that the civil rights movement was born one city at a time. It wasn’t. Its eventual victories had nothing to do with its protected victims’ behavior. Indeed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rested on four constitutional amendments which were institutionalized between 1865 and 1920.

Why not ride the wave of incremental protections for certain sexual lifestyles? The answer is provided by the HRC resolution itself. Its sixth recital cites reviews of existing ordinances, a statewide housing study, communications from citizens and the validity of elevating homosexuality to a protected class. It ignored the fundamental principles for valid civil rights classes; immutability, economic disadvantage and historical longstanding discrimination.

Recital seven re-enforces the commission’s negligence is re-enforced by passing off human sexuality, the very reason for the resolution, to “churches and scientists”. This is a rather duplicitous position. The proposed protections cannot be demanded by the commission as naturally necessary if the class they protect is not an ethically, historically and scientifically validated class within civil rights standards. Homosexuality is changeable according to best-practices science. Homosexuals do not endure widespread persecution and are not denied civil rights and do not suffer economic disadvantage.

The resolution’s claim of no “infringe[ment] on the rights of others” is a fairy tale. The proposed exemptions for religious entities and programs is a geographic exemption. It does not guard religious liberty, free speech, equal protection, conscience or property rights of individual citizens in the public square. Those protections are at the core of Americans’ personal freedoms.

HRC’s study and its resolution are failures not worthy of its own claims, let alone the imposition of a new protected class in Holland. Even though there will be anecdotal claims to the contrary, there have been no substantiated cases of discrimination in accommodations or employment in our area.

Statistics presented by HRC are an attempt to put Holland’s character in a pool with other municipalities, therefore creating guilt by association. Testimonials are an appeal to emotion instead of verified realities, an attempt at guilt by presumption.

The campaign for protection of a specific set sexual behaviors is really an effort to pull Holland into a complete ethical and worldview shift. It asks us to, by force of government, embrace a morality, a political standard and a local culture based on claims of reality and truth as moving targets – even to the utter disregard of objective standards of science, ethics and sound reasoning. We are being asked to manipulate reality in order to fit sexual lifestyle perceptions. We are being asked to protect against what does not exist in order to prevent what might be.