I received a most interesting call a couple of evenings ago from the "Vote No on March 1" campaign.
For those of you who have no idea on what the whole "Vote No on March 1" campaign is about, it is an attempt to prevent from passing a referendum on the primary ballot here in Topeka. This referendum would prevent the city from establishing sexual orientation as a protected class in employment practices. A current ordinance, forced through the City Council after a long and bitter debate, prevents the city from discriminating on the basis of those criteria. My thoughts on the ordinance may follow in a later post, when I have time. For now, I will focus my comment on the implications of this unsolicited call.
What surprises me is that the "Vote No" group hired a telemarketing firm in Florida to start calling Topekans and urging them to vote against the ordinance. This tells me that the opponents of this referendum are very scared that they will lose this vote. After all, this is a primary, in which the majority of voters stay at home anyway. Those who do go are usually not ambivalent and undecided. Rather they, like me, have already made up their minds on where they stand on the issue. So to go to the cost and effort to hire a telemarketing firm suggests to me some desperation on the part of the "Vote No" coalition. I think that this coalition feels that they will lose the vote on the ordinance.
Fascinating. That's all I'm going to say about it.
2 comments:
Hey Paco,
Thought you might like to know that it was the group backed by Fred Phelps that hired the Floridians to call you. It wasn't the Vote No On March 1 campaign. It's kind of a moot point now, since the wise people of Topeka thought it wise not to legalize bigotry in their city. Thank goodness not everybody agrees with the hatemongering of Fred Phelps. . .
I'm curious where you heard that it was Phelps who hired the company from Florida to call? Because that doesn't make any sense to me. I can assure you as someone who has some contacts with people related to the Vote Yes campaign (a group, incidentally, that is not tied to Mr. Phelps in any way) that Vote Yes was neither organized well enough nor funded well enough to pull off such an action. So it couldn't have been the Vote Yes group.
And don't you think that it's counter-intuitive for Phelps to hire somebody to call and urge people to vote no? After all, what would they gain by calling a bunch of already-confused citizens and urging them to vote no when they wanted them to vote yes? No thinking person would take such a strange action.
Besides, the caller clearly identified herself as from the "Vote No on March 1 Campaign".
As far as the "wise people of Topeka not legalizing bigotry", I want to explore the idea a second with two questions:
1. Do you think discriminating against someone based upon their sexual behavior (which I will contend is not something inherent but rather chosen) is wrong? Please explain.
2. On what are you basing your system of right and wrong? Where does the idea of fair and unfair come from?
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