From: leecr@microsoft.com (Lee Crocker)
Subject: Maybe CO-2 isn't so evil after all.
Date: 23 Nov 92 06:17:55 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corporation

Ed Arnold provides a lot of good information and makes some good points
about Colorado's Amendment 2, but I would like to risk serious flamage
here by what I consider sincere and reasoned argument.

First let me point out that while I suffered a Mississippi Southern Baptist
upbringing, I have fought against such bigotry and narrow-mindedness all
my life.  Even in elementary school, when I befriended the first black child
our school was legally forced to accept, some of my former friends refused
to speak to me because their parents didn't want them playing with the
"nigger lover."  While my own earring is on the left, my girlfriend is very
bisexual and I love her dearly.  I have had close friendships with gay men,
Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, Mormons, and many others.  I
take a very dim view of those who use a 2000-year-old book as a brain
substitute, though I practice Zen occaisionally.

Mr. Arnold supposes that Colorado Amendment 2 passed because of publicity
by CFV and other religious organizations and because of voter confusion.  I
would like to argue the point that maybe it passed because more voters have
come to realize that using force (i.e. laws) to change people's attitudes
doesn't work, and that the best way to combat private discrimination is with
private action, not with government force.

To this day, over 20 years of civil rights laws have done nothing to
change the minds of some of my family's worst bigots, and indeed only
steeled their resolve and forced them to move their bigotry underground.
I'm afraid I have to sympathise with some of them that many civil rights
laws do not eliminate intolerance, they just move it from one group to
another.  How can I as an individual honestly say that my idea of right
and wrong is any more deserving of government support than theirs?  Do
the bigots not pay the same taxes I do?  I must conclude that using the
government force to make an individual do something he honestly believes
is morally wrong with his own private property (such as renting a room
to a homosexual couple) is not justifiable.

It is time for enlightened minds to fight the real enemy--coercive force--
not bigoted attitudes.  In the private sector, those who practive discrimi-
nation openly without fear of government action can be boycotted more easily,
and opposing groups can form their own private countermeasures (your basic
United Negro College Fund approach).  This moves the battleground of ideas
out of the hands of government guns and into the hands of free trade.  Our
ideas are not so radical that they need to be backed by guns; we are on the
right side, and enlightenment will win.

Let us spread the idea of tolerance by practicing it ourselves, even toward
bigots.  We should reserve our strongest condemnations for when the bigots
try to use direct government force against us, as in the Oregon Prop 9 case
wherein they would mandate public schools teaching homosexuality as a
"perversion".  But we should fight it on the basis that it is wrong for the
government to tell free people how they must think; we must not try to use
government to force them to think our way.

Let them take Colorado Springs--we will move elsewhere and compete against
their narrow minds in the free market, and arise victorious by right, not
by force.  Narrow minds will fail of their own accord, we do not need to
give them ammunition by trying to fight their intolerance on their terms.

---
Lee Daniel Crocker    |  Hate is not a family value.  But neither
leecr@microsoft.com   |  is government-mandated compassion.

Newsgroups: soc.bi