I will be there in spirit with you, and you may feel free to tell anyone that you want to that there's a lot of people in Houston that recognize the difference between gay rights and the exposure of children to homosexual predators.
I'm more or less indifferent to the former, but combatively opposed to the latter.
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speaker slips will be available at the council session
WARNING!! WARNING!! WARNING!!
These guys FIGHT DIRTY! Be prepared! (no pun intended!)
Your statement about the City Council signup sheets really rang a big fat bell with me! If you're not careful, NONE of the speakers on your side will get a chance to air their views.
We had a big City Council meeting like this here in Ft. Collins a couple of years back. And the people like me who were pleading with them to NOT pass a Gay Special Rights ordinance had outnumbered the pro-Special Rights group maybe 2 to 1 in a previous meeting on this same topic that was held by a special task force appointed by the Council to study the issue.
So it was natural to assume that at the full City Council meeting, the same ratio would prevail. But NOOOOOO!
One or two of the first 5 speakers were anti-Ordinance. But then EVERY SINGLE ONE of the next 30-40 speakers were pro-Ordinance. And with a previously set time limit in place, this meant that only a very few of us anti-ordinance speakers got a word in at the very end.
THIS IS WHY! - Friends of mine who had gotten there early told me that long before the meeting started, the speaker signup sheet mysteriously disappeared for about 15 or 20 minutes. People were looking all around for it. Nowhere!
Then it suddenly reappeared with 40 or so names, virtually all of them (after the first handful) in the same handwriting. Duh! Imagine that!
Also, during the session, every once in awhile the CC moderator would call out the next speaker's name, only to be told by someone calling out from the back of the room that so-and-so person could not make it tonight, but that they had expressed the desire to let someone else take their place, and could this other person now speak instead? The answer was always yes.
It became obvious to us that they had organized themselves earlier, putting together a list of people who committed to showing up that night to speak. That list got copied onto the stolen signup sheet all at once. A handful of those turned out to be no-shows. But obviously a few others who were on their same side of the issue but not on the list had shown up late or at the last minute, and were instantly recruited to pinch hit for the no-shows.
There were enough complaints raised one-on-one with the CC members after that meeting that they agreed to level the playing field for the next meeting ..... Instead of a signup sheet that could be tilted heavily toward the Left by this form of cheating, they required people to line up behind the 2 microphones and speak in the order they had lined up.
But it was TOO LATE for that first meeting!
And don't think this won't occur in YOUR city! These guys share all their cheating tactics, all their illegal or barely legal disruptions, on well-read Leftie websites. I've seen these types of sites for at least 5 years now. Like one radical homosexual group that detailed their Tried And True tactics to defeat Conservative petition drives through high levels of harrassment that were just short of causing their own arrest, but were more than sufficient to cause the failure of the drive. It was sickening to read their gleeful gloating as they told the story of their success in sinking a petition drive somewhere in the northwest.
So once more .... BE PREPARED!
(PS: In case you're wondering what eventually happened.... the CC ended up unanimously passing this hateful ordinance, and in the very next election we succeeded in getting it overturned by over 60% of the city's voters. Hurrah!)
I can only be there in spirit with you wonderful people, but I will be rooting for and praying for the success of your Freep-God speed to you all.
If this brings out the media, be prepared with "sound bite quality statements." TV news crews shoot lots of footage, but only air bits and pieces.
Gays yes. Gays no. That's just a "rallying" point.
I DO NOT support a "free ride" for the Boy Scouts. I do not and will not support a "lease" extension. When you're talking in terms like $1 and 99 years, which is what I recall from the debates last year, forbidding competition for the lease of city property--well, that smells. Badly.
It's time to wean the Boy Scouts of America from the nipple of our tax dollars. This is as crooked as the taxpayer-paid-for-losing sweetheart scheme the Charger's got.
From my personal observances, the "virtue" of Scouting is more myth than substance. They should be forced to compete for public leases just like any other charity or corporate entity. No more free-rides in San Diego.