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After saving us from wilderness while he served in the U.S. Senate, Bill Armstrong now wants to protect us from gay-rights ordinances. He supports a ballot initiative which prohibits home-rule cities from adopting such laws.
Last week, Armstrong issued a four-page letter which was mass-mailed by Colorado for Family Values -- the same folks who list Bill McCartney (position unmentioned now, but here's a hint: his job involves using public money to import drunken drivers, brawlers and rapists into our fair state) as a prominent supporter, and an organization which looks to California for guidance.
Now that we know how Colorado
they are, what
about their family values?
Robert Frost once wrote that Home is the place where,
when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
The Family Values folks don't see things that way. In their
view, if you're different, then nobody has to take you in
-- not to an apartment or a job, anyway.
It is a family value to accept people, ranging from loutish in-laws to peculiar shirt-tail cousins. Armstrong and McCartney profess to be Christians; they might examine the teachings of Jesus to determine who qualifies for such acceptance. There they would find the Parable of the Good Samaritan -- and note that the Samaritans were a minority despised by the right-thinking citizens of Palestine.
Nor is Armstrong content to ignore only religious teachings. The Republican party holds that local governments, such as cities, function best with minimal restrictions from higher governments, such as states. Yet Armstrong wants the state to restrict the powers of cities.
It is hard to imagine a principled Colorado Republican supporting such heavy-handed state intrusion into the traditional powers of local governments, although it is also sometimes hard to imagine a principled Republican.
I'm no particular fan of gay-rights ordinances. They don't go far enough. There are millions of us whose sexual impulses are as straight as sunbeams, but who still suffer because we don't fit in the mainstream -- we have the wrong friends, priorities, hobbies, clothes, etc.
But if a city I don't live in wants to pass one, why is it my business or Armstrong's business? Well, he fears that schools may thereby be forced to employ homosexuals as teachers, and they might trifle with impressionable youth.
Has he checked the statistics? For every case of a gay teacher molesting a student, there must be ten of a male teacher abusing his position of trust with a female student, or of a female teacher seducing a male student. As the father of two daughters, I sometimes worry about this, but the only solution I see is a girls' school staffed only by urnings, and a boys' school staffed by lesbians.
If Armstrong really wants to protect our children, he
should support that. Otherwise, he's about as sincere as
anything else in Colorado for Family Values.
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