Irvine Group Warns Gays: Don’t Flaunt Your Ways

Homosexuals are welcome in Irvine as long as they don’t flaunt their sexual orientation, leaders of the Irvine Values Coalition, which organized a successful drive to delete civil rights protections for gays from a city ordinance, said Monday.

“Homosexuals, like any other citizen, are welcome in the city of Irvine. We just don’t want homosexuality promoted in Irvine,” Scott Peotter, president of the coalition, said in a news conference held outside Irvine City Hall.

But Peotter and Michael Shea, another group leader, denied that their newly victorious forces will appoint themselves the city’s unofficial “sex police” as their opponents have predicted since the passage Nov. 7 of Measure N, which repealed protection for gays under the city’s human rights ordinance.

When the coalition formed in 1988, Peotter said he hoped to also monitor sex education in schools, pornography in video rental stores and help homosexuals change their lives through therapy.

Instead, he said, the Irvine Values Coalition now will turn its attention to supporting--and perhaps fielding--”pro-family” candidates for the City Council election next June. Homosexuality is not on their agenda of “pro-family” issues, which could be as diverse as traffic, taxes and day care, Peotter and Shea said.

Despite their statements of welcome, however, the climate in the city already is perceived to be chillier for the city’s estimated 10,000 homosexuals and other minorities, said opponents of Measure N.

“If that’s their welcome, God knows what their rejection amounts to,” said Jim Boone, the gay representative of Irvine Citizens United Against Measure N. “All one can say is clearly they wanted, desired and claimed the right to discriminate on moral grounds. One can only assume they have every intention of doing so.”

In the wake of Measure N’s passage, Irvine City Atty. Roger Grable said homosexuals with discrimination complaints will be referred to mediation services as before. However, if they are not satisfied with the results, they will have to rely on state instead of city law to enforce their rights. But Grable said test cases have yet to prove whether gays are covered by statewide legislation banning discrimination against them.

Measure N, which passed last week by a six-point margin, succeeded because “the majority of people in Irvine feel homosexuality isn’t right,” Peotter said. But the initiative’s success does not mean “open season on homosexuals,” he added. “It means we go back to a level playing field.”

Since Election Day, he said the group had received calls from Riverside and San Diego and from as far away as Massachusetts and Alaska from people wanting to know how they can overturn an existing or proposed ordinance protecting gay rights. “The tide is changing,” he said.

The victorious anti-gay forces also made it clear that the publicity garnered by the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon and the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition since the vote last week should have gone to their group that they said did the real work.