Anti-Bias Ordinance Repealed in Springfield, Missouri

Wonder how Hitler came to power?  We got a sampling last week when the non-discrimination ordinance passed by the Springfield, Missouri, city council was overturned by a referendum.  Leading the charge for repeal were the Christofascists who continue to demand special rights for themselves and continue to have psychotic need to be able to tell themselves how superior they are to others.  It's the same psychosis Hitler played upon to turn everyday Germans into monsters who closed their eyes to horrors and later claimed ignorance to what many say was only too well known.  It is exactly the type of religious extremist cancer the Founding Fathers did not want infecting America's civil laws.  The New York Times looks at the frightening about turn.  Here are excerpts:

On Tuesday, after a nearly five-month campaign by Christian conservatives, voters in this southwest Missouri city narrowly approved a measure to repeal the [non-discrimination] ordinance.

“We were quite elated to win this,” said Calvin Morrow, the executive director of Christians Uniting for Political Action, a group that led the repeal effort. The push succeeded, 51 percent to 49 percent, in a vote that officials said drew the largest turnout here since 2001.

The campaign pitted national gay rights groups against leaders of many of this city’s large churches. Human Rights Campaign, based in Washington, spent more than $27,260 on the “One Springfield” effort against the repeal measure. Its financial support was assisted by a $10,000 check from the Gill Action Fund to finance advertisements and organizational efforts.

But the outside money defending the ordinance motivated local and, to an extent, national efforts to support repeal. More than $37,600 was contributed late in the push by the National Black Robe Regiment, a group that describes itself as a network that helps pastors “to engage in their biblical and historical role to stand boldly for righteousness and transform society through spiritual and cultural engagement.”

Mr. Morrow, who lives in Mansfield, east of here, said that measures intended to protect gays from discrimination create unfair burdens on religious business owners that could lead to costly litigation.

Before Tuesday night, Springfield was one of 15 Missouri cities — including St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia, a college town — that had such ordinances. In December, voters in Fayetteville, Ark., a college town about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Springfield, also overturned a nondiscrimination ordinance, 52 percent to 48 percent.

Mr. Morrow said that Christians thought they “are being targeted and being asked to do some things they would never do.” He said his group would fight any efforts to pass a new nondiscrimination ordinance, saying, “There is no middle ground.”

I suspect Mr. Morrow would have been one of the members of the crowd cheering Hitler and the Nazis as they swept into Austria.  Hate is hate no matter how one tries to dress it up in the cloak of religious belief.  Look at the world today and some of the ongoing wars and atrocities are being driven by the same old curse: religion.