If you go over to this anemic AFA offshoot’s site, you’ll understand the level of faux-hysteria that Diane Gramley is trying to stir up over the passage of a measure by the State College Borough Council to add protections for workers and job candidates in the borough based on sexual orientation, familial status and gender identity by unanimous vote.“Christmas time - the perfect time to push this type radical agenda through when everyone is busy with last minute shopping and preparation for the upcoming holidays. It appears the Borough Council is more interested in toeing the line drawn by homosexual and cross dressing activists than it is in taking steps to insure employers can make decisions that are best for their company”
– Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania
It was passed so matter-of-factly that Gramley can only believe that passed during the holidays — with Christmas as a cover to sneak it in, since all those bible-beating shoppers are frantically participating in the secular consumerism of the holy season instead of keeping their eye on the homophobic ball.
Why do these people lie continuously — it’s like breathing to them. So where in any of these anti-discrimination measures does it require anyone to hire someone who is LGBT? The whole point is that these attributes are no hindrance to one’s ability to perform a job and that they must be considered equally or not singled out based on those attributes. And I don’t see Gramley calling for removal of protections based on religion from the list of protected classes, hmmm?Passage of a so-called anti-discrimination ordinance by the State College Borough Council on December 17th will open the door to discrimination against employers with deeply held religious beliefs that homosexual acts are sinful, according to a statewide traditional values group. Additionally, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA) states that the ordinance will require employers to permit men who believe they are women to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms in a workplace setting.
This effort began last year with pressure being applied by the PA Human Relations Commission (PHRC)– specifically open homosexual chairman Stephen Glassman. It is part of his continued agenda to get municipalities to pass these type ordinances.
…“The full ramifications of this bill have not been explained to employers. Men in women’s restrooms do not make for a good and safe work environment and I don’t believe there is a husband in State College who wants his wife or a father in State College who wants his daughter confronted with that type situation in the workplace. Additionally have religious schools been told that if they participate in the reduced lunch program that is considered government appropriations and they would be required to hire homosexuals and cross dressers under this ordinance? What kind of message would this send the children attending those schools?” questioned Gramley.
32 Responses to “Pennsylvania fundie: Homo Agenda using Christmas as cover to pass anti-discrimination measure”
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That’s it, I’m packing my bags and going to New York. First it was ManOnDog Santorum, then the Dover creationism trial, and now, it’s this. I’m going to a more progressive state.
Oh come on Skwee. Let’s give State College the credit it deserves. The town passes the ordinance and we’ve got an outside whackjob complaining about it.
Full points to the town for being progressive and tolerant.
That’s because to them it’s not a lie—to lie, you need to be able to hold your statements up to specific standards of provability or disprovability, which you either adhere to or break. Stuff like this, IMO, isn’t even bullshit: what it is, is an expression of the kind of visceral disgust that claims no justification and needs none. It’s the modern-day version of: “…and then they’ll sit down next to us at lunch counters just as nonchalant as you please and then horrible things will happen.” The stuff about the wives and daughters and the the men in the ladies’ restrooms gives the game away—it’s so deliberate an echo of “would you want your daughter to marry one” that it has to have been modeled on racist rhetoric. (Though it’s pretty funny in the sense that it delineates as Thug Life Rapists men who by definition don’t have a sexual interest in women.)
This kind of thing is scarcely even speech—it’s the human, verbalized equivalent of a dog’s growl. A threat is recognized (though the threat doesn’t need to be a genuine threat, any more than a chance passerby needs to be a potential burglar to warrant an attack from a mean dog). Then the threat is reacted to. And that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing else there. The frustrating thing about verbiage of this kind is that it’s almost impossible to answer back to it, since there’s no real reply to raised hackles and bared teeth.
“So where in any of these anti-discrimination measures does it require anyone to hire someone who is LGBT?”
Sorta like a “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” 180, huh??
“…Men in women’s restrooms do not make for a good and safe work environment…”
Same sort of thinking as this clown, except that he’s concerned about his GRANDSON:
http://bangornews.com/news/t/city.aspx?articleid=157940&zoneid=176
WHAT is it with nutters and their fascination with restrooms?
Women must be too busy with shopping year round, since it’s only their fathers and/or husbands who care if there is a transgendered person in the bathroom with them.
Don’t Coloradan women’s rooms have stalls with doors? The rest of the country does.
And what does it matter if an employer finds an employee *sinful*? As long as the work gets done, we’re all free to worship as we please.
You know, sorta “Golly, that adulterous fornicator is sure good with numbers!” or “Even though she wears poly-cotton blends, she has the highest sales every quarter!”
Unless…has teh Gay gone airborne????
“As long as the work gets done, we’re all free to worship as we please.”
*slaps forehead* D’OH!
Shhh! Don’t give ‘em any ideas!
I am continually amazed at the incredible savvy of the LGBT Community and its efforts to execute their Radical Agenda. It’s pretty obvious to me who got second helpings when we were all standing in line to get our brains.
And the public cover of being a downtrodden group with few or no civil rights - genius!
Good work! Keep it up…
:)
Typical liberals forcing their homosex agenda on bathrooms! Will no one think of the toilets? A toilet of conscience has a deeply held beiief that only man ass or only woman ass shall be seated upon it and void its associated bladder or bowel. This intermingling of man and woman ass is…so gay! The toilet is getting the vapors here. It’s high time the AFA started a new chapter, the American Family Toilet Rights Association. Because all god-fearing families have single-sex toilets, as the Almighty intended. Right? This is in the bible, yes?
Yes, what Caren said–maybe it’s because I have a friend who’s considering transitioning MTF, whom I don’t find threatening at all, but I’m thinking that I’d be more likely to be proud that a transwoman felt safe enough to use a restroom I was using than to feel scared of her or to call her a “man who thinks he’s a woman”. I wonder how many of the women who actually use these restrooms feel the same way. The quoted selection pretty much makes it sound like it’s the menz freaking out that omg something unpure will touch their precious innocent wives & daughters! Which is just dumb.
Waiting in line. You see, their precious wives and daughters would have to wait longer in line. And that’s not fair because they’re Christian. Waiting in line is for all of those sinful heathens.Right. Because if someone is transgendered, and they’re a “man who thinks he’s a woman”, and they go into a woman’s bathroom, just the fact that pwecious little baby daughter is a virgin will make them go crazy with lust and do unspeakable things. Like pee in a toilet in a separate stall, I guess. I dunno. I don’t really think about what the person in the stall next to me is doing, or who they are, or anything like that.
Of course, then their wives and daughters may have to still wait in line, and everyone knows that your chances of catching Sin increase the more you have to wait in line with heathens.
The thing is, is that they wouldn’t be able to turn down an otherwise qualified candidate just because they’re gay. So in that sense, then, they would be “required”. As in, required to hire people based on their qualifications for the job, and not discriminate against job applicants based on their sexual orientation or identity.Because, you know, their kid’s already waiting in line with the heathens and sinners for their lunch, it’s just not fair that they may be exposed to Gay Rays as well while they’re trapped in line.
I appreciate the fact that the anti-harassment video that my company shows all of its new workers includes a vignette where one women is religiously harassing her co-worker — basically, she won’t take no for an answer when the co-worker tells her that she’s not interested in her church.
They do a lot of other crappy things, but at least they do try to be as non-discriminatory as possible.
Some people deeply believe that black people are subhuman. They don’t get to deny them employment either.
I mean, they still do, but at least if they get caught then they’re in trouble.
I, too agree with Caren, but, unlike Nenya, I must admit that my first reaction, upon seeing a guy I don’t know in the restroom would not be pride.
I don’t believe there is a husband in State College who wants his wife or a father in State College who wants his daughter confronted with that type situation in the workplace.
Man, they love to own the wimminz! It doesn’t matter what the women who are actually involved think, it’s what their male owners think.
(Though it’s pretty funny in the sense that it delineates as Thug Life Rapists men who by definition don’t have a sexual interest in women.)
Insert obligatory pointing out that some transwomen are lesbians, not that that’s relevant.
I think this is a clear sign that the supposed christians in the area have fallen away from their beliefs. If they weren’t out preparing to celebrate christmas by running holiday soup kitchens and homeless shelters during the cold winter months, they would have been able to throw all of their energy behind defeating on ordinance encouraging people to be decent to their neighbors.
http://www.noradsanta.org/
Off-topic but in the Christmas spirit, here is what we do every Xmas Eve…
I guess so, Hypatia. Come to think of it, these people might be simply a vocal minority.
If I’m seeing a transperson in a restroom, I assume they are going to be washing their hands or doing their makeup. Ladies’ rooms don’t have urinals, so it’s not like getting flashed. If I get a bad vibe and think she may be faking, I can wait, you know?
Not really that upsetting to a thinking person.
American Family Association of Pennsylvania
so is their acronym pronounced “A-FAP?”
employers with deeply held religious beliefs that homosexual acts are sinful,
So what? My employer can think as ill of my life outside of work as they choose to, that’s still not grounds for termination. I realize that states’ laws regarding wrongful termination vary widely. Georgia, where I live, is a right to work state. An employer needs no reason to fire someone; they can simply do so without warning or justification.
That having been said, if someone performs their tasks well and gets along with their fellows at work, firing them for some extra-professional reason is just plain wrong. Who doesn’t understand that?
“That having been said, if someone performs their tasks well and gets along with their fellows at work, firing them for some extra-professional reason is just plain wrong. Who doesn’t understand that?”
You mean, BESIDES the US Military machine?
As a personal care provider for a disabled woman for a decade and a half, I more often went into women’s than men’s public restrooms, because those are the ones Natasha preferred to go to. I figured both out of courtesy and professionalism I shouldn’t look around unnecessisarily when conveying her to a stall, but one must after all navigate somehow, and I confess freely I always sort of hoped I’d see something I shouldn’t.
But oddly enough, I never saw anything there I couldn’t see outside the restrooms. For that matter, I’ve never really seen much of men’s private parts in men’s restrooms either, despite the openness of urinal stalls. That has to be deliberate not-looking of course.
Worrying about restrooms therefore strikes me as either disingenuous or evidence of wacky obsessions. IRL they are boring places.
As Isaac Asimov once wrote in Murder at the ABA, “they [women] always do come back from the ladies’ room. Its charms are limited, apparently.”
C’mon, these guys worship their own dicks and demand that their women do, too. They’re absolutely terrified that any woman who belongs to them will get a look at another dick and decide she’s a devotee of a lesser god, and want to convert.
Yeah, heaven forbid that people use the “cover” of celebrating the birth of Jesus, who preached about accepting societies outcasts, to pass laws about accepting members of society who are on the fringes into the workplace.
I mean, that runs totally counter to Jesus’ teachings, to accept marginalized members… of… oh, wait, uh… are these people really Christian? That’s what I want to know. ‘Cause if they make that claim, they got a whole lot of studying to do. Maybe afterwards they should sit in the corner for a while to think about what they’ve done.
In other news, these laws are good things to have (in my not so humble as it should be opinion). But they still won’t prevent employers from firing whomever they want to fire. You can always find a reason. It just can’t be “omg he’s GAY’ anymore is all. If that’s the real reason, I’m sure any reasonably creative employer can come up with a convincing smokescreen.
Maybe I shouldn’t have included that last paragraph… they might get ideas.
This reminds me of the time the Onion wrote that article about gay recruitment and all the Christian organizations flipped the fuck out…
Also: my boss already thinks I’m a sinner**, and has occassionally inserted her inappopriate ideas of personal advice into otherwise work situations, but it didn’t make her fire me.
**Young & unmarried but lived with a guy anyway. ONOES.
That’s not as unreasonable as it might at first sound, because the actual position held by organizations like the American Family Association (though they’ll never admit it) is that bathroom fixtures have about as much will, intelligence, and decision-making capacity as most human beings. Women are out of the picture because we’re mysteriously “threatened” by the presence of XY individuals in or near the places we pick out to pee, even though we come into contact with dozens, scores or hundreds of such individuals every day, and men are out of the picture because their sense of protectiveness/ownership is so acute that the mere notion of something like that happening is enough to make them run berserk. IOW: neither sex can be trusted; both sexes have to be ruled—by somebody, somehow.
I know what you mean, and perhaps I ought to have chosen a better way to make my point, but I’m fairly sure we’re fundamentally in agreement insofar as what I was getting at is that this entire idea is Teh Stupid sans alloy.
bekabot:
It just occured to me that this attitude can be expressed as a South Park-ism:
1) Gays in the workplace.
2) ???
3) Chaos!
This worldview relies on a whole string of wacky non-sequiturs and the assumption that no one will ever question them.
You know Ema, most trans*guys preffer to stay out of women’s restrooms so this sort of measure helps to prevent guys from going into the women’s room!
It also helps women, specifically trans*women, from being forced to hold it or face violence in the men’s room.
Toilet fear was a big part of the anti-ERA campaign. They convinced a lot of people that Equal Rights meant men in the women’s room.