Wait A Sec ..... THIS Is Tennessee, Too

Brian Moran, a Knoxville, Tennessee police officer wasn't working last Tuesday, so he decided to attend a City council meeting, where there was going to be a debate over adding ethnic origin, disability, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity in hiring city employees.

And Moran came armed with passages from Leviticus.

Oh, no, not Those passages. Moran, who was brought up in the Baptist Church, says, “I’m here for human rights. I’ve been doing my research. And if somebody’d brought up Leviticus, I was going to hit them with these.”

He flashed a list of Bible verses enumerating human acts that are sanctioned—burning a bull on an outdoor altar as a sacrifice, selling a daughter into slavery, owning slaves as long as they’re not from neighboring states.

“But I didn’t need to do it,” he said.

And he didn't need to do it, because the Knoxville City Council voted unanimously, and without discussion, to approve that ordinance to prohibit discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin, disability, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity in hiring.

This means, and i quote from the article, "that the legislative body of this scruffy little burg on the reddest end of the state the punditocracy has dubbed 'Talibanessee' is halfway to adopting an anti-discrimination ordinance."

All that's left is for it to pass on second reading tomorrow.

And, as often happens, Paul Berney, one of the most active supporters of the non-discrimination ordinance is a first cousin to state Senator Stacey "Don't Say Gay" Campfield, who is notorious for his gay-bashing proposals, and his inane ramblings on the origin of AIDS: "[S]ome guy screwing a monkey."

Cousins. One smart, one Stacey Campfield.

Berney isn't sure if Campfield knows how hard he's worked for this new anti-discrimination policy and, frankly, doesn't care much: "I don’t know [what he’ll say]. My family’s Catholic, and like Stacey I have a lot of love and respect for the church … What I was taught was that the church looks at sex not between a husband and a wife as a sin. Masturbation is a sin; sex outside marriage is a sin. If we’re going to deny people privileges and rights based on homosexuality, maybe we ought to look at all that other stuff, if we’re going to legislate morality. Bottom line, I don’t think it’s for the government to decide. As a taxpayer, I want the most qualified person doing the job, period. I don’t care what they do on their own time.”

Wow. Maybe Stacey Campfield ought to spend a little more time with his relatives, and little less time worried about The Gays. He might actually learn something useful.

Way to go, Knoxville. Way to tell the rest of Tennessee that you won't play that game.

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