The Controversy Over Irvine Rights Ordinance

Re: “4 Lawmakers Fight Irvine Ordinance on Gay Rights” (Jan. 8): Reps. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) and Robert K. Dornan (D-Garden Grove) and Assemblymen Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) and Nolan Frizzelle (R-Huntington Beach) outshine such organizations as the Orange County Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and the Log Cabin Club in providing the public with a dramatic illustration of the need for the very ordinance that they rush to condemn.

Our four fearless leaders are silent on 95% of the ordinance in question. They refrain from trotting out the Right’s usual principled objections to protection from discrimination because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status or physical handicap. In 1989, politicians earn no political brownie point for kicking the handicapped, slurring religion, slamming women or betraying the slightest insensitivity to the elderly or Orange County’s multiracial majority. They focus instead on two words-- sexual orientation --that stand for the aspirations of 250,000 Orange Countians to a life free of violence and ignorant, purposeless discrimination.

What “traditional family values” do these paper crusaders purport to defend? Are Mr. and Mrs. Dornan fighting for public civility and respect for the worth of every individual? Is Dannemeyer, self-appointed apostle of anti-AIDS hysteria, coming out in favor of compassion for the ill and infirm? Are Ferguson and Frizzelle prepared to tout the value of family love and acceptance in a world in which one child in 10 establishes a homosexual orientation in the first 3 years of life?

By sheer force of numbers, the heterosexual majority will continue to dominate the major institutions of our society--churches, schools, commerce, the news media. A few words on a piece of paper can not begin to change that fact. They can accomplish one goal: to proclaim our faith in what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”--the enduring side of the human spirit that turns toward reason, compassion and tolerance and away from fear, bigotry, hate and the “skinhead” philosophy of Dannemeyer, Dornan, Ferguson and Frizzelle.

SCOTT R. DICKERSON

Los Alamitos