A.G. Gancarski
The expansion of Jacksonville’s Human Rights Ordinance is on the backburner to LGBT people, but the First Coast Tea Party sent Mayor Lenny Curry a recent letter opposing HRO expansion.
“We encourage the City Council to NOT create a new protected class,” says the letter, which notes that “Jacksonville’s business community is thriving/growing.”
The First Coast Tea Party’s Policy Team offered an 8 page paper explaining its position further.
It describes the “movement to promote and normalize the LGBTQI lifestyle” as a “specter haunting America,” a movement which is “utterly cynical and possibly racist,” given its use of the “rhetoric and imagery of the U.S. Civil Rights movement.”
With gay marriage the law of the land, the Tea Party believes HRO expansion would “no longer be an issue,” yet the “political agitators of the LGBTQI movement want to force participation on the public… the forced acceptance and condoning of the LGBTQI lifestyle.”
The policy paper, as Mayor Curry did last year in stating that HRO expansion wouldn’t be “prudent”, noted EEOC workplace protections bar workplace participation based on sexual orientation, and that the EEOC includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in that policy.
The Tea Party document also calls the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division a “solid protector of this community,” barring “sex discrimination.”
HRO expansion would be “undue affirmative action,” the Tea Party asserts.
“‘Gayness’ has not yet been determined to be immutable… Homosexuals want to be designated a ‘class’ so they can game the legal system for the spoils of discrimination lawsuits… Relegating same-sex attraction as immutability distorts reality,” the document continues.
The paper cites a 1989 book, After The Ball, which the FCTP asserts “laid out a six-point plan” to change popular conceptions of homosexuals, including “talk[ing] about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible.”
“We the people will not be herded as sheep to the slaughter by the special interest groups, the Jax Chamber, the Civic Council, the donor class, and the academics.”
