Advance Indiana does an excellent job of narrating the action from last night’s city county council meeting, so I won’t duplicate the effort here.
If you want to see it for yourself, the committee meeting will be broadcast several times on Channel 16, so haul out your TIVO.
I was asked to speak at the council meeting, and I was too freaked out by the idea to do so. I won’t make that mistake again. I’ll be speaking about my experiences at the next Committee meeting on Tuesday, December 13th. I’ll need all the moral support I can get, so if you could make it, I’d appreciate it.
Several things that struck me as really interesting: the obviously miserable “ex-gay” couple (notice how they always marry each other so they don’t have to make excuses for why they don’t want to have sex) who testified were strange and heartbreaking. The man, who flamed more than any other gay man I know, actually said that “I can’t guarantee that I won’t slip and fall back into the lifestyle. But I’m here to testify that it can be done.” Um, if there’s a greater indicator that this law is needed than that, it was this:
19 people, most of them ministers and religious people, stood up and testified against the HRO, and every one of them spewed hatred and malice against gay people, and then had the audacity to claim that there’s no real discrimination against gay people and that the laws aren’t needed. It’s was as ironic as if we held a civil rights hearing, and the KKK showed up in their cloaks and testified that black people are 2/3rds of a person, then tried to claim that there’s no discrimination against blacks so civil rights laws are not really needed anyway.
And every single person against Prop 622 invoked the Christian God. So those of you who aren’t Christian — if you’re Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, agnostic or atheist, be aware that your beliefs aren’t important to the city-county council.