I've never been in an oppressed minority. So one could argue I have very little to say about Fayetteville Alderman Matthew Petty's proposed ordinance against gender and orientation bias.
Therefore, I'll quote Frederick Douglass. This former slave's credentials as both an oppressed person and a champion of the oppressed are beyond question. His ghost could give the Fayetteville City Council the same speech on Tuesday night that his living body gave in 1857.
Here's the gist: Somebody who needs this ordinance should step up. I'll quote much more after giving some context.
Petty's proposal would go beyond declaring it illegal to discriminate in housing or other businesses. It would have the city appoint an advocate for those whom, as yet, haven't openly complained.
I don't doubt people are discriminated against for their orientation here. We had the famous case in 1996 of William Wagner, beaten up just for being gay. His nose was broken and a kidney bruised. His family tried to assert his rights before that beating. They should have been listened to. His case made changes others benefit from today.
The question to answer Tuesday is whether we, as a city, can prevent wrongs that are less violent, less clear, or both. And there's the no-small matter of deciding what's wrong. One person's discrimination is another's religion.
Laws get worse the farther they get from real cases. Lawmakers should never skip a reality check. We need a live case of someone who would benefit from this.
Petty bristled when told his plan looked like a solution in search of a problem. "And this idea that I'm going to A) either disclose someone who has lodged a complaint and expose them to public scrutiny or B) expose a business or another association that has had an alleged complaint to public scrutiny is a farce. I would not do that."
Petty's lack of an answer's both evasive and petulant. As Douglass said, quoted from www.blackpast.org:
"The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.
"For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone ....
"It is not within the power of unaided human nature to persevere in pitying a people who are insensible to their own wrongs and indifferent to the attainment of their own rights. The poet was as true to common sense as to poetry when he said, 'Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.'
"... Your humble speaker has been branded as an ingrate, because he has ventured to stand up on his own and to plead our common cause as a colored man. ... I hold it to be no part of gratitude to allow our white friends to do all the work, while we merely hold their coats.
"... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
"... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others."
Again, I do not doubt that there's discrimination in Fayetteville. I merely contend that it's beyond the city's power to give anonymous victims their justice as a gift.
DOUG THOMPSON IS A POLITICAL REPORTER AND COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.
Commentary on 08/17/2014