social contracts

It is still early in the 21st century.

Last night, the Indianapolis City-County Council overwhelmingly rejected an ordinance to extend fair housing and employment protections to gay folk. According to the Star, the Mayor lobbied for it. Only one Republican voted for it, the fellow who introduced the ordinance. Four of the Democrats voted against it.

A friend sent me an email from one of the Republican Councilors who was adament against the city-county ordinance. She wrote that she did not support addictions, and homosexuality was an addiction that could be cured. She referred to an organization that is notorious for not changing people's sexual orientation but that puts up a good front, and then she listed other untruths about gay people that border on the kinds of filth used by anti-semites in Europe in the first part of the 20th century and by certain terrorists groups now about Jewish people.

Meanwhile, the Indiana Assembly has passed the first round towards an amendment to the State Constitution that would not only ban same sex marriages, but would deny any other protections/rights to same sex couples. Many gay folk create legal partnerships and agreements to offer some protections for their families and these may be invalid once the amendment is finally passed. And if in some enlightened period, the state of Indiana chose to offer civil union benefits for gay families, that would be unconstitutional, too.

Indiana, the state that was ruled by the Klan in the 1920s, stumbles resolutely towards insitutionalizing second-class treatment for an entire group of people. As a state, we cannot decide to join the rest of the country with a standardized time, but we are quite good at defending ourselves from the onslaught of gay people living among us, working, raising families, paying taxes.