“I didn’t mean for anyone to hear that! I don’t wanna talk about it!”
“So disgusting!”
That exclamation escaped the lips of District 9 Councilwoman Elisa Chan on May 21 in her City Hall office, where she was meeting with members of her staff to discuss the city’s proposal to update its nondiscrimination ordinance, adding protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.
In the course of the conversation, Chan expressed her unvarnished views on homosexuality, which range from befuddled to intolerant….
Chan balked at defending any comments in the recording.
“I think that’s in a private setting and I don’t know if that’s — I need to hear that recording to know,” she said. “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about so maybe you can play that back to me. We talk a lot of things in the staff meetings, so I wanted to know also under what context.”
Yes, of course, as if saying that being gay is a choice and gay people shouldn’t be allowed to adopt children would be looked at differently taken into context with anything.
I’ll save the gay adoption debate for another day — for now I’ll just say that I don’t think gay couples should be denied — but can we at least dispense with the notion that being gay is a choice? I’ve heard it put a lot of different ways, but this one example I saw somewhere pretty much sums it up. Dude’s close friend is gay. Dad steadfastly refuses to accept it, stepmother hates him to pieces, tells him all the time that he’s going to hell and raised his five-year-old brother to hate him too. His mother is the only one who loves him and accepts him for who he is.
Why in the hell would anyone choose that? And we haven’t even gotten into the discrimination and ostracism gay people face in society at large. Come to think of it, Elisa Chan is of Asian descent. In other words, she’s a member of a group that has in the past faced the very same discrimination in society that gay people face now. You’d think she would be more empathetic.
Tags: politics
Live from the Alamo City 
August 16, 2013 at 21:15 |
Yeah, pretty much every gay man I know has a similar story to tell. Ask Mark about his exorcism some time, or the way his family treats the cousin who murdered his grandmother for drug money better than they do him, ’cause at least Mike’s not gay.
Buttsex is just that good, apparently.
August 17, 2013 at 19:48 |
Elisa Chan has realized, that like the rodeo clown in Missouri, she has committed a blasphemy against another federally established religion. Some panic is understandable.