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Pastimes : Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (18)	5/27/2008 5:31:38 PM
From: one_less	Respond to of 3816

No I don't wear lace panties but guys wearing lace underwear and dresses now have the right to go into girls bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms here in Colorado. So I suppose you be moving here? ======================= Senate Bill 200 and moral sovereignty This Web-only Speakout has not been edited. Whitney Galbraith Saturday, May 3, 2008 Billed as “an expansion of prohibitions against discrimination,” this bill, now being debated in the Colorado legislature, would indeed expand the existing list of sixteen categories (go count them at www.leg.state.co.us) of personal identity qualifying for protected status by adding “sexual orientation...” or even “...the perception thereof” to over a dozen public and private activities, including private property usage, jury selection and charitable giving! Besides the sheer inanity of such a sweeping collection of “protected classes” how are we to adjudicate “identities” as amorphous as those based on personal choice or behavior? As a matter of law, how do we identify an individual’s “orientation,” whether it be political, artistic, economic, athletic or sexual, other than what the individual simply states? As a matter of law, how do we identify, and punish, an individual’s “perception”? This is approaching government coercion of our thought processes, the theme of George Orwell’s prescient 1949 novel “1984,” which dealt with “Big Brother” governmental thought control and which today is reminiscent of Soviet gulags, where dissidents were shipped off to “psychiatric wards” for not toeing the party line. When government creates an artificial group identity for “protection” purposes, it creates correlating obligations, responsibilities and liabilities on citizens not belonging to that “group.” When government takes it upon itself to codify personal preferences, political and social agendas and impose them on others it is violating our moral sovereignty. It is not government’s job to legally burden each American citizen for the choices that others are free to make in their own lives. It is not government’s job to cleanse our very thought processes from what we as individual citizens care to believe. To do so is a violation of our own freedom of choice, freedom of association and freedom of conscience. It is not government’s job to dictate to employers whom they may or may not hire. It is not government’s job to dictate to property owners what they legitimately may or may not do with their property. It is not being facetious to suggest that we are approaching the point at which each American citizen will have his or her own name on an infinite anti-discrimination statute. I, for one, would love to have my own private statute preventing anyone in America, anywhere or at any time to deny me anything I ever have or ever will want. This bill is an egregious example of “reverse discrimination,” where each of us is sorely discriminated against for not believing what our individual legislators believe. Just as America properly deleted earlier segregation laws and statutes, it is time to delete Senate Bill 200 and many of the other endless, and senseless, anti-discriminatory laws. Whitney Galbraith is a resident of Colorado Springs.