Rahm Emanuel's totalitarian assault on the First Amendment

I recently posted two items about my home town, Chicago.

The first noted the odd spectacle of Mayor Emanuel appealing to the "values" of local street hoodlums in an attempt to get them not to kill children.

The second was a tirade against the current Republican penchant for slamming Chicago in an attempt to get at President Obama.

Well, it seems that Chicago's !@#%&!! mayor has invoked those same "values" in a way that invites even more Chicago-bashing.

Chick-fil-A, a national chain of chicken sandwich stores, is operated by Dan Cathy, who has made his opposition to the casual abandonment of thousands of years of Western legal and moral tradition by redefining marriage so as to include couples of the same sex quite widely known. According to Mayor Emanuel, however, he has no right to advocate that position:

Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values. They’re not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members. And if you’re gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values.

What the CEO has said as it relates to gay marriage and gay couples is not what I believe, but more importantly, it’s not what the people of Chicago believe. We just passed legislation as it relates to civil union and my goal and my hope … is that we now move on recognizing gay marriage. I do not believe that the CEO’s comments... reflects who we are as a city.”

And so he opposes allowing Chick-fil-A to open any more restaurants in Chicago. Currently it only has one- near the Loyola University campus- but wants to open a second one, in the Logan Square neighborhood.

Dude, Mr. Cathy's position is what the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches, and has always taught. And it reflects the values of every Chicagoan who continues to adhere to what that tradition teaches. It's also what the religions of the overwhelming majority of Chicago's people teach. You have the right to disagree. But you do not have the right to impose your beliefs on them.

And the experts agree, Mr. Mayor, that you are legally in the wrong. The rights of Chicagoans- and of Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy- both to believe and to publicly espouse what their religions teach about homosexuality and gay "marriage" are specifically guaranteed by the First Amendment. Every heard of it, Mr. Mayor?

Now, Chicago's First Ward is probably the most notorious of all the political cesspools of my native city's history. Traditionally, it has been pretty much owned and operated by the Mob. Hopefully that, at least, is no longer true today. But Mayor Emanuel's totalitarian determination to prevent anyone who disagrees with him about gay marriage from doing business in the city of Chicago is shared by the current alderman of the First Ward, Joe Moreno:

Same sex marriage, same-sex couples — that’s the civil rights fight of our time. To have those discriminatory policies from the top down is just not something that we’re open to.

No it's not. It's not a civil rights issue at all. In no juristiction anywhere in the world where either civil unions or "marriage" have been legally available to same-sex couples has any appreciable percentage of such couples taken advantage of it. Some "civil rights issue!" And discrimination? How is it discrimination to simply adhere to the very definition of marriage to which Western society as a whole has adhered for two millenia?

The gay community has been commendably forthright about the rarity of sexual exclusivity even among "committed" male gay couples. And concerning the instability of homosexual marriages in Europe, Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review Online has written:

Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too. According to UCLA’s Williams Institute, two-thirds of legally recognized same-sex couples in the United States are lesbian. (Solely on the “marriage” front, in Massachusetts’s first four years, this statistic was 62 percent.) While data in the United States are clearly limited, Scandinavian countries have been at this a little longer. Denmark was the first country to introduce recognition of same-sex partnerships, coining the term “registered partnership” in 1989. Norway followed suit in 1993, and then Sweden in 1995. Again, Stockholm University’s study seems to confirm the American trend. In Norway, male same-sex marriages are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual marriages, and female same-sex marriages are an astonishing 167 percent more likely to be dissolved. In Sweden, the divorce risk for male-male partnerships is 50 percent higher than for heterosexual marriages, and the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men. This should not be surprising: In the United States, women request approximately two-thirds of divorces in all forms of relationships — and have done so since the start of the 19th century — so it reasonably follows that relationships in which both partners are women are more likely to include someone who wishes to exit.

The debate over marriage does not necessarily hinge on its popularity among the eligible, and advocates of gay unions would no doubt assert that “equality” is not a numerical proposition as quickly as their opponents would aver that the very idea is a hopeless category mistake. But it is nonetheless worth noting that there is no particular groundswell — even in states and cities that have both legal gay marriage and significant numbers of homosexuals — and that, when gay couples do decide to get married, they are more likely than their straight equivalents to change their minds later.

A case can perhaps be made for civil unions for gays. But the oft-repeated premise that extending the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples would not adversely affect traditional marriage is simply contrary to the facts. And no, it is simply not the case that there are no reliable statistics on the divorce rate among same-sex couples worldwide. To legalize same-sex "marriage" is to strike a blow against marriage as an institution at a time when it is already under serious challenge. And to squelch the debate by totalitarian tactics such as Mayor Emanuel, Alderman Moreno, and other liberal fascists in the city governments of Boston, Philadelphia and other major American cities is reprehensible and un-American.

The First Amendment certainly is a civil rights issue.

Ald. Moreno continues:

“If he (Cathy) is in the business of selling chicken in Chicago, he should be in the business of having equal rights for everyone. Period …. If it looks like a chicken, talks like a chicken, walks like a chicken, it’s a chicken. If you’re saying you don’t respect the values and rights of same-sex couples, that trickles down through the organization. … That’s paramount to the way the company behaves.

Wrong, Ald. Moreno. The issue is that you and the Mayor do not respect the values and rights of people who disagree with you- and who are faithful to the teachings of their religions. And you have neither the legal nor the moral right to discriminate against them in your official capacities on the basis of their beliefs.

Yes, as I recently noted, the critics of the president need to stop using Chicago as a punching bag. But when Mayor Emanuel suggests that denying people who disagree with him their freedom of speech and freedom of religion are somehow reflective of "Chicago values," that is an assault on the cit I love even more vicious than anything any Republican has said in an attempt to discredit Mr. Obama.

Unless, perhaps, Mayor Emanuel is referring to those same "values" he appealed to in Chicago's gang-bangers. At least judging from his behavior in this instance, those values Mayor Emanuel seems to share.

But I would defend the city of my birth from the slander that they represent it. Chicago's detractors- and its mayor- to the contrary, Chicago's values are not the values of the bully and the storm trooper.

Or of the mob.

HT: Drudge