(1) FIGHT CRIME. (2) Fight fires. (3) Deliver water. (4) haul away wastes, through trucks and pipes. And build, operate, and maintain (5) roads, (6) parks, and (7) libraries. Every other job is mission creep. This includes housing, after-school programs, and -- through cutouts -- building sports stadia and toy trains.
Which brings us to the so-called equal rights ordinance. Mission creep. Little more than a new program to hire social justice warriors to harass Houston businesses about . . .
. . . thought crimes and pretty much everything that comes into the cadre's fertile minds, including -- notably and undeniably -- who pees in which bathroom.
The Big Seven Jobs bore progressives to no end. To progressives, these old-school municipal projects exist solely to fuel the two-cycle municipal political machine -- borrowing vast sums on the credit of the public to pay contractors, architects, engineers, lawyers, bond salesmen and other campaign contributors and putting unionized workers on a pension gravy train that requires of them for its maintenance, political fealty.
Meanwhile, potholes? Leaky pipes? Insolvent pension systems? Who cares?
These things (and more) are monuments to generations of mission creep and political payoffs.
The equal-rights ordinance, so called, is dead, but the progressive project never ends.
One mayoral candidate celebrated making the runoff by promising to do something about income inequality. Think about that. We have potholes that turn people's wheels into modern art. His job, if he's elected, is to do something about them. Instead, visions of utopia dance in his head. As he spoke, he positively glowed. The same social justice warriors who are now cut off from banging on Houston businesses about how their employee mix contains an insufficient number of progressive clients (for example) can now bang on the businesses about their salary practices.
The equal-rights amendment, so called, was a textbook case of how progressives rule. Like Obamacare, the Houston plan never had majority popular support. Like Obamacare, it was railroaded through a compliant legislative body -- a Democrat-majority Congress in one case, the weak Houston city council in the other.
That's how the system works, more or less, so both victories, however out of step under any reasonable definition of "consent of the governed," still count.
Then, when Houston rebelled and called for a referendum to repeal the ordinance, Mayor Parker answered with the vile and extreme illiberal tactics that marks modern progressives. Saul Alinsky would have been proud.
First she tried to cheat the petition-gatherers out of a vote by throwing out valid ballots. No can do, said the Texas Supreme Court.
Then she tried to word the referendum language to trick the bozos -- that would be you, that would be me -- into voting for an ordinance we thought we were voting against. Ditto, said the Texas Supreme Court.
And all this was after using the power of the Houston city attorney's office -- every man, woman, and child of them living off taxpayer money -- to subpoena sermons, pastors' emails, and other church records. It was an astonishing, and largely successful, attempt to run up legal fees for Christians who oppose the ordinance. She finally backed down, but slowly, slowly, slowly, and only after her point had been made.
These adventures in violating the law, principles of free speech, and the constitutional protection of religion were not one-off example of overreach. The demonstrate the overreach baked into the whole equal-rights, so-called, program. It was a template for how social justice warriors would treat political and cultural adversaries under the ordinance. A dry run.
Finally, when adversaries hit upon a campaign strategy that worked -- opposing the ordinance because it would permit anatomically complete males with identity issues to do their business in the women's room.
Supporters of the ordinance repeatedly and hysterically accused opponents of lying. But pay attention: They never denied the complaint. Not one time.
Instead, they played a game of misdirection and denied other things. Existing law already forbids men from coming into women's bathrooms to hurt people, they said.
True enough, but that's not the issue. The issue is whether men can come into the women's bathroom to answer nature's call. And under the equal-rights ordinance, so called, the answer would have been yes. And for anyone to say that would never give cover to bad guys who do want to hurt people -- well, that's wishful thinking.
Likewise, said proponents, existing law already prevents men from going into the "wrong" bathroom. That's true. The question, however, is what does "wrong" mean. And one purpose of the ordinance was to redefine the word to mean that it is not "wrong" for some men to use women's toilets. There's something unctuous, self-righteous, and sticky about trying to confuse voters about the meaning of "right" and "wrong."
Both arguments were designed to mislead people, to fool people, not to elevate or educate or improve them.
As for the handwringing about how the political campaign against one class of progressive clients had the effect of depriving more than a dozen other classes of actual and potential progressive clients from their God-given -- if progressives believed in God -- right to raise hell with businesses guilty of thought crimes, my answer is this:
The ordinance had nothing to do with the Big Seven.
Therefore, no.
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