Should you choose to support this ordinance, I will direct every future dollar I spend on political and charitible efforts…to see that you are not re-elected.

Your lack of good judgement in this matter is most revealing.

Respectfully,

Phillip

Even though my sexual behavior would not lump me in with this select group of people you wish to grant special rights and protections, I also have been discriminated against. I’ve never met a single person who has NOT been discriminated against at some point. Regardless of how we have sex or dress ourselves, everyone already has the same and equal right to be discriiminated against based on their choice of behavior. Why should we single out one behavior over another?

I find it oppressive and evil for a small group of people desiring to impose their viewpoint on everyone, to use the force of goverment to make it illegal for anyone to use their own good judgment in making a choice, to remove our freedom to observe or make a distinction, or to discriminate good from bad. You are attempting to deny some the right to express their opinions if it differs from yours, to deny and forbid our God-given conscience. This is social INjustice.

I’m afraid that I must break the chorus of support which you have received in the comments to this point. Were this proposal limited to the provision of public services, in which members of the gay/lesbian community have a stake as citizens, it would have been entirely appropriate. As a requirement placed upon private individuals in conducting their businesses and disposing of their property, however, it is tyrannical.

We have anti-discrimination laws to protect individuals against prejudice pertaining to conditions over which they have no control, such as sex and race. These arbitrary factors cannot justly be included in considerations for hiring, sales, or anything else because they indicate a “pre-judgement”; the individual in question is not being evaluated as an individual, but as a member of a group in which they did not seek membership. It is alien to the spirit of these laws to extend them to categories of choice. Every private citizen has the right to do, or not to do, business with other citizens whose actions they find objectionable. What you call discrimination against homosexuals and veterans, I call American freedom of association.

I recognize that there are those who will argue that homosexuality is not a choice. I would respectfully ask them then, why the homosexual community lobbied so hard for the phrase “lifestyle choice”? One thinks of the French poet Paul Verlaine, who, while engaged to marry his long-time fiancee, was convinced by his friend Arthur Rimbaud to leave her and enter into a homosexual relationship with him while travelling Europe. Rimbaud conceived of his sexual orientation as a deliberate protest against the values of “bourgeois” society, and endeavoured to win converts much as one does to a political movement. In the PC terminology, in the lives of men like Verlaine, and in the rhetoric which one hears, particularly from gay men, about “turning” heterosexuals, it becomes perfectly clear that, at least for a very large share of homosexuals, we are confronted from the public policy standpoint with practitioners of a chosen behaviour.

In short, I believe our government has crossed a line when it arrogates to itself the right to determine how citizens are allowed to conduct their private affairs and dispose of their personal property, when they do so solely on the basis of what they think of the actions of others. Please do not drag us across this Rubicon.

In this era of worldwide need for the military, and considering the huge military presence in Anchorage, thank you for including veterans in the ordinance.

Many, many thanks to you and other members of the Anchorage Assembly who are willing to take a stand to see our fine city take its place as a truly Number One American City.

First of all, I congratulate you for taking this issue on to the floor of the Anchorage Assembly.

I am a resident of Alaska. I am gay and 25 years old. I have lived here my whole life. I live in Wasilla currently and a homeowner. I am speaking on behalf my gay-lesbian friends in Anchorage. I read the proposed ordinance bill and I think this should be ALREADY a ordinance and it should be LAW Statewide. The main “change” in the ordinance are adding the two words “sexual-orientation” and “veterans.” The two words “sexual-orientation” and “veterans” would be protected under ANY circumstance in EQUALITY through Anchorage.

For the opponents on adding “veterans” along with an EQUALITY Ordinance, i just say to them, NOW the veterans will be protected also and why wouldn’t they want that protection anyways? I mean I have gay friends that are active in the military also, so that means they would be protected twice, right? or would they be protected at all? tell the opponents that GAY people don’t want ’special rights’ we want ‘equal rights’ and that is it. We are very simple people.

I hope to this day that they were forced to take someone with horrible credit score who is more of a risk than we are. They could have had a couple with an average score of 720 on research grant income…. (That’s pretty steady income for those who aren’t in the know)