Springfield is the third largest city in Missouri, but it may win the title as the most homophobic. By a narrow margin, voters in the southwestern town voted Tuesday to repeal an ordinance that prohibited discriminating against the LGBT citizens in housing or the workplace. The ordinance was passed by the city council just last October.
Opponents of the ordinance insisted that conservative Christians are the real victims. “Christian businessmen all over the country are being sued for not participating in gay weddings,” wrote Calvin Morrow, head of Christians United for Political Action,, the group behind the repeal. “To serve those types of celebrations violates their consciences … Do we suspend free speech for Christians and use police powers to force compliance?”
How this translates into the right to throw people out of work and out of their homes is unclear. Morrow did not provide the Biblical verse that supports that argument.
The campaign against the ordinance depended heavily on fear, and in particular fear of transgender people. The specter of having to share a bathroom with a transgender person apparently left a majority of voters with their Depends in a knot.
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“It gives anyone claiming to be transgender the right to choose which public locker room, dressing room, bathroom, or other previously gender specific area they wish to use,” proponents of the measure argued. The anti-ordinance people insisted that they were referring to heterosexual predators pretending to be transgender, and we all know how common a phenomenon that is.
The only positive sign was that the measure passed with such a slim margin: just 51% of the vote. It’s a sign of how much the times have changed that an anti-gay measure in a city where the ultra-conservative (and predictably anti-gay) Assemblies of God is headquartered. That the religious right can’t turn out a landslide there is a sign of how weak their side has become in the culture war they want to keep fighting.
Rick Wallace
good morning rick
Giancarlo85
A nondiscrimination ordinance has nothing to do with so called discrimination against Christians. These same right wing Christians discriminated and persecuted others for years… They even supported laws that harmed other citizens. They are such hypocrites.
Kathy Dobbs
i work at albertsons supermarkets in albuquerque, nm. i am a victim of coworker bullying because i am lesbian. i reported this to my boss, then corporate headquarters and 3 lawyers. all to no avail. i am not the only lesbian and gay employee at albertsons suffering. i knew one lesbian coworker who committed suicide because of other coworker bullying.
Nikki Hatch
Is this anywhere near Fergueson? People in Missouri seem really backwards.
tardis
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
jheryn
I live in a bedroom town/community about five miles outside of Springfield, MO. Obviously I didn’t get a vote on the matter because it was a city resident law.
It was a very slim margin, but even so the majority won.
By the way, the majority are idiots.
jwtraveler
@tardis: Rod Serling was a very astute man.
jwtraveler
Right-wing Christian fundamentalists seem to have some kind of paranoid obsession with what goes on in bathrooms.
And just a reminder, which I’m sure Kathy Dobbs would agree with:
“In 29 states LGBT people still have no housing or employment rights. Gay rights is not all about gay marriage.”
TampaBayTed
The next time an F-5 tornado sweeps through their holy ass town, don’t count on me to contribute to the relief fund again.
TampaBayTed
The restroom panic is a tactic used by the old crone Phylis Schafly of the Eagle Forum way back when she was fighting the Equal Right Amendment.
gjg64
Springfield is also the home to John Ashcroft, the Senator who lost his seat to a Democrat who died in a plane crash before the election. He was then our illustrious Attorney General under Baby Bush and covered up the nude statues in the Justice Dept.
Transiteer
Isn’t it sad to see so many completely stupid scared people, hiding under the cover of religion (Christianity). When they can brutalize others, it’s their religious freedom, when they’re barred from such action, they’re being victimized. And the don’t see it?? They’re religious because they’re stupid obviously.
VampDC
I don’t get gender neutral bathrooms? Is it just a single person bathroom? or is anyone literally allowed to just walk in on others in their bathroom?
Dakotahgeo
Conservative knuckle-draggers in Missouri and Kansas ARE backwards. This is what inbreeding does to a generation of low IQ people!
I Support Same Sex Marriage in Missouri
Missouri is going back into the way it was. We are really hurting here in Springfield. It’s no longer a safe place again for the LGBT community!
jwtraveler
@VampDC: In most cases it is a single-person bathroom. Here in NYC, the LGBT Center has All Gender bathrooms, which even have urinals. I’ve never seen or heard of anything inappropriate going on in them, much less any sexual assaults, but then maybe LGBT people are more civilized than the general population.
aliengod
This is exactly why the LGB community needs to distance itself from the trans movement. They are two completely different issues. Who the hell wants to have “gender neutral” bathrooms? LOL How ridiculous!
Jacob23
Another loss thanks to “LGBT” and our fanatical, suicidal devotion to transgender bathroom issues. We can add Springfield, Missouri to:
the state of Michigan
Anchorage, Alaska
Hutchinson, Kansas
Salina, Kansas
Fayetteville, Arkansas
We would have job protections in all of these places if not for the ideology of LGBT, which tells us that everything and everyone has to be subordinated to heterosexual transsexual bathroom selection issues.
jwtraveler
@aliengod: @Jacob23: It is now 45 years since the Stonewall riots, which were started by transgender people. They were out front because their identities and appearance made it impossible to hide, unlike all the closeted gays. Their courage and strength led the way to an international movement that has brought equal rights to tens of millions of us and has improved our lives immeasurably. Now that “we have ours”, some of us want to throw transgender people under a bus because associating with them makes us look bad.
Screw that.
On one point I agree; as a gay, white man, I don’t feel that I have much in common with transgender people. Nor do I have much in common with black lesbians or Mexican immigrants or Appalachian coal miners. Except of course that we are all human beings who have faced discrimination and injustice, and deserve to be treated with decency and respect and to have equal rights. And the best way to achieve that is for us to unite and fight injustice together, not fight amongst ourselves, which is what those in power want.
If you need a visual, dramatized example, I recommend an excellent film called “Pride.” It’s probably available from Netflix or on-line.
Dakotahgeo
@jwtraveler: THANK YOU! How soon we forget our past history!
hex0
@aliengod:
Agree 100%, trans are actively harming us! It’s LGB
jwtraveler
@hex0: Wrong! We’re hurting ourselves by fighting with each other instead of fighting with our common enemy. That’s EXACTLY what they want.
Giancarlo85
Only a brainless moron would say “LGB community”. First off, trans people have been there since Stonewall and have been part of the movement. Some of you brainless historical revisionists want to remove from the movement, but you are not in any position to do so.
Alienidiot and the fat “fake masculine” dumbfuck Jacob are back at it spewing their hatred towards trans people. Funny how these two idiots use the same kind of hatred that gets thrown at gay people. The hypocrisy is apparent!
Dakotahgeo
@Giancarlo85: THANK YOU! alienspigot and what’s his face Jacob are definitely in the gross minority!
Dragon Mama
@Nikki Hatch: No, it’s not near there, Springfield is in the southwest portion of the state, and Ferguson is near Saint Louis in the northeastern area.
Dragon Mama
@hex0: Did you know that the entirety of the gay rights movement, the very first protest, the first in the series of the Stonewall riots, was started by a transwoman throwing either a brick or a high heel? And the first gay rights protests were ALL headed up by transwomen, standing at the front lines and organizing things? That’s right, if it weren’t for the trans* community, it would still be legal to murder you in the streets.
For decades, the trans* community has stood to the back of the bus and cheered on their GLB brothers and sisters, fighting alongside as unsung heroes and getting little recognition and absolutely no benefit from their efforts. All the while, the majority of the politically active GLB community, including the Human Rights Campaign, were actively ripping out any mention of Trans*persons from any proposed legislation, and even going as far as to promote transphobia in the GLB community.
Study your history, and learn to not only respect your Trans* GLBT family members, but to also give thanks for them, support them and fight for their rights the same as they have always done for yours!
Divided we fall, I stand united with my Trans* family, and any others who would be denied basic human rights!
Dragon Mama
I am from Springfield, and I drove all over town picking up people and driving them to their polling places so that we could vote no to the repeal.
I have to say how sad and misguided it is that the religious wrong argued their case based primarily on the idea that churches would have to suddenly start hiring GLBT persons onto their staff (not true), and that if they allowed the non-discrimination wording to stay, that trans*persons would be forced to use the toilet of their assigned sex at birth (also false).
Before the wording was added, after it was added, and even now that it has been taken away, it is perfectly and completely legal for me, assigned female at birth, to go into the men’s restroom wearing a dress, heels, and makeup! There is not, and never has been a law banning it.
There has also never been a law mandating that people hire someone regardless of their gender identity or sexual attraction. It did for a while say that an establishment couldn’t fire them if they were hired, but it didn’t say ya had to hire them in the first place, ever!
The sheep will be sheep, sad to say, and being the international headquarters of the Assemblies of God, with a church on every corner who is willing to bus people to the polls to have them vote as they are told, is a lot of why they were able to get the protections repealed.