Bigotry, equality, and the city I love

It was an odd moment, standing next to my wife in the natural foods section of Fred Meyer, almost running into a gentleman as he flung around the corner. My initial reaction, as he stared angrily, was that he was simply in a hurry and wanted me out of his way. That's as commonplace as tourists wandering around looking for the liquor aisle in the summer. Thus, I apologized. When he continued to stare, I quickly grew more uncomfortable, as I started to recognize both the face and the expression. Eventually, he grunted and walked past me, shaking his head.

That's been happening a lot lately.

A schism has opened up, running right down the center of the Anchorage community. It is the result of the threat of change, in the wake of the summer-long effort to pass an ordinance that would have granted equal protection under the law to our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. While Mayor Dan Sullivan may have believed that a quick veto might suppress the struggle for equality for another 30 years, reality is begging to differ, and resulting in a duality that cannot run without consequence for too long.

Emerson once wrote, "We change, whether we like it or not." Unfortunately, Emerson did not occupy the crucial eighth seat on the Assembly.

We now have a tumultuous dynamic that has migrated from within the confines of the Z.J. Loussac Public Library, where, from June through August, hundreds of people offered testimony in support of or opposition to the ordinance. Now, the reaction, reality, and resentment has expanded to street corners, shopping malls, and grocery stores. One side is left unprotected, unacknowledged, and without any course of redress. The other is reaffirmed in their self-righteous indignation of the human condition, unable or unwilling to accept change. In the case of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, which very vocally lead the charge against the ordinance, the congregants offered Reverend Jerry Prevo a standing ovation for defeating an ordinance that, according to ABT Pastor Glen Clary, would have "made homosexuality an acceptable alternative lifestyle."

Rev. Prevo, on many occasions, and close to weekly during the public hearings, referred to homosexuality as an abomination, a perversion, and a form of sexual deviance. He preached its inevitable connection to the end of days and the difference between what types of climate we might prefer in the afterlife.

This was the language that permeated the assembly chambers over the summer, causing the freshly-elected Mayor Sullivan to squirm in his seat, desperately seeking an end to having to deal with it. But the veto has done nothing such, instead advancing it into our daily lives, allowing the wound to fester. It is hateful speech, but moreover, it's hurtful speech. And, for Alaskans, it is hurting our family.

Anytime the topic is broached in the local media, the comments pages quickly devolve into online dictionaries of offensive slurs. Some of the worst epithets of bigotry have been attached to Julia O'Malley's opinion column in the Anchorage Daily News. Myself, and other bloggers and activists in the community, have become targeted. My e-mail inbox has become very colorful, but not in the spirit of diversity that I was hoping for. My wife and I have been forced to unlist our phone number; all because a small group of people have been mislead to believe that Leviticus, Revelations, and Deuteronomy outweigh Community.

In her decision to vote against the ordinance, Assembly Chairwoman Debbie Ossiander offered that the legislation didn't touch on the real issue, which in her opinion was "people just being darn right cruel to each other and mean and verbally abusive to each other and hurtful."

She felt that the heart of the problem was civility.

Locking eyes with the gentleman in Fred Meyer reminded me of this fact, as did having Eddie Burke shove a microphone in my face, demanding to know why I wanted "special rights." I remember the horror I felt when I recognized a man in a downtown parking lot who had testified before the Assembly, comparing homosexuality to the experiments in Nuremberg. That disgust increased tenfold when I realized that he was probably equally appalled by the notion that I disagreed with that logic. The sentiment makes you want to crawl up into a ball and withdraw from society. In fact, I have no hesitations that this is by design. It's worked before.