How low can they go? These anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors apparently have no limits when it comes to denying Houston, TX folks their equal rights. In fact, they’ll stop at nothing to block their city from protecting LGBT citizens, visitors, and workers from various forms of discrimination. They’ll even — as reported by Craig Malisow from The Houston Press — challenge Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance (ERO) with protests, a petition drive to repeal the law, a frivolous lawsuit, and lies, lies, and more lies.
Houston’s City Council passed the ERO in May, 2014 with broad support from the public and the city’s lesbian mayor, Annise Parker. But five anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors from the Houston Area Pastor Council immediately began circulating a petition to overturn the law. And from the very beginning, the ERO’s opponents have spread lies and employed obstructive tactics to deny equal rights to their LGBT neighbors.
Houston’s anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors claimed they had 50,000 petition signatures and ostentatiously had them wheeled into Houston’s City Hall. Photo: ABC 13
1. Anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors wheels in 50,000 — oops, 15K — petition signatures.
Houston’s anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors had boxes and boxes of what they claimed were 50,000 petition signatures to repeal ERO ostentatiously wheeled into City Hall in July, but the City upheld the ERO and declared the petition invalid, as reported by ABC 13 in August. For starters, they didn’t have enough signatures:
[A] successful petition must contain at least 10 percent of the total number of votes cast during the last mayoral election. For this specific petition, a total of 17,269 signatures were needed. Feldman says the number of valid signatures submitted came to only 15,247.
Cristan Williams from The TransAdvocate snarkily commented that all those boxes must have been mostly empty… or perhaps it was merely the signature forms themselves that were half to three-quarters empty, as Williams shows in the scans below.
Many of the petition signature pages turned in by the ant-LGBT “Christian” pastors barely had any signatures. Image: Screen grab/Trans Advocate.
2. Anti-LGBT rights supporters sue their own city.
Instead of saying to themselves, “Gee, if we’re having such a hard time getting valid signatures to repeal the ERO, maybe we simply don’t have enough support and should give up and call it a day,” Houston’s LGBT rights opponents slapped the City with a lawsuit. As The Houston Press explains, the City had issues with the paperwork and wasn’t accusing the anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors and their supporters of outright dishonesty, at least not at first…
So far, most of the City’s challenges to the petitions’ validity has centered around technical — and pretty boring — matters like whether a page included a blank space for a circulators’ signature.
3. Anti-gay “Christian” pastors whine about their rights.
After suing their own city, Houston’s anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors then raised an unholy racket when the City sent out subpoenas for related documents — a routine legal procedure in cases like this — and whined to Fox News and other news outlets that Houston was cracking down on their supposed First Amendment right to deliver vile, hateful, and often flat-out dangerous sermons against LGBT people. Alas, these proponents of so-called “freedom” are really quick to complain when anyone challenges what they see as their “freedom” to incite bullying, drive teenagers to suicide, and treat other people like crap.
But Snopes deftly debunks these lies and claps a stopper on their capers:
City Attorney Feldman later maintained that the city’s intent was not to challenge the churches’ tax-exempt status for engaging in political activities, but rather to prove that pastors involved in the repeal referendum “knew the city’s rigorous charter rules but failed to follow them.”
4. BUSTED!
Then, after further review, the city discovered that many of the signatures appear to be fraudulent: Either the folks collecting signatures for their anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors were forging signatures, or these right-wing evangelicals are so devoid of individuality that they even have the same exact handwriting. Here’s one example of the alleged forgery from The Houston Press.
Copy of fraudulent petition signatures in same handwriting from the anti-LGBT groups seeking to overturn ERO, via The Houston Press.
Furthermore, the City discovered that Jared Woodfill, a GOP operative involved with the anti-LGBT petition — “is no stranger” to fraudulent petitions.
In motions filed last November, attorneys for the City cited a suit where Woodfill — then the chairman of the Harris County Republican Party — accepted “facially valid” election petitions that “turned out to involve ‘forgery, fraud, or other non-accidental defects discoverable only by independent investigation.”
The Trans Advocate also found other irregularities with the petition, and found other signatures in identical handwriting and a couple where people curiously signed their names as “Houston, TX.” And this is just on one page!
More irregularities with the anti-LGBT petition seeking to overgurn Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance. Image: Trans Advocate.
Why do these anti-LGBT “Christians” even bother?
Why do these right-wing, anti-LGBT “Christians” even bother with opposing LGBT rights? Because Houston’s broadly-supported 2014 Equal Rights Ordinance (ERO) prevents those freedom-loving anti-LGBT “Christian” pastors from exercising their God-given right to discriminate against their fellow human beings. Thanks to civil rights activists, it’s getting harder and harder for conservatives to find people they can freely discriminate against. If we have to start treating LGBTs, people of color, and non-Christians equally, then women, children, and farm animals might start demanding their rights, too! And then — God Forbid! — people might have the nerve to get together and start demanding other rights, like the right to a living wage, health care, food, water, housing, and an education.
H/T: Think Progress | Featured image: Composite with anti-LGBT, anti-Houston ERO protest photo by Marie D. DeJesus Houston Chronicle (background) and copy of fraudulent petition signatures in same handwriting via The Houston Press (foreground).
