}

Total Pageviews

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

JUDGMENT FREE ZONE? Michigan State Representative Gary Glenn Says Planet Fitness' Non-Discrimination Policy "Anti-Woman, Anti-Reality"

State Rep. Glenn (official photo)
An old friend of Glistening, Quivering Underbelly,  Michigan State Rep. Gary Glenn (R-Larkin Township), says the corporate nondiscrimination policy Planet Fitness established to protect its transgender members is an “in-your-face policy” that threatens the safety of its female customers. 

While no legislation has been proposed, Glenn threatened the chain with loss of customers looking for a “family-friendly” environment. Of course, he couldn’t come up with a single example of how trans people have threatened the safety of women in bathrooms or locker rooms...anywhere or ever!

“My wife has been a member at the Planet Fitness in Midland,” Glenn stated in local news reports. “As she characterized the situation, Planet Fitness has made clear it does not offer a family friendly environment, and she said she will not be going back, and I imagine they’ll lose other customers as well.”

Michigan does not protect citizens based on sexual orientation or gender identity, although 35 cities in the state do have some local protections. 

Glenn was first featured on this blog in January 2014 when Miss Fortune broke the story of then-candidate Glenn's radio commercial featuring a beyond-the-grave endorsement by the late actor Charlton Heston.     

While the spot was edited to sound like a ringing endorsement of Glenn, the campaign's website carefully explained in 2014 that the commercial featured "the late Charlton Heston's comments about the individual freedom principle behind Michigan's new Freedom to Work law and about Freedom to Work leader Gary Glenn, now a conservative Republican candidate for state representative in Bay and Midland counties." 

Jeffrey C. Briggs, Heston's longtime attorney, confirmed in an email to Miss Fortune that the Glenn campaign had sought and received permission from the Heston estate to use the late actor's image and voice in the audio commercial.

The campaign explained that Heston and Glenn, shown together above in a 1987 photo, met during the successful effort to pass a Right to Work law in Idaho in the 1980's. Glenn and Charlton Heston -- who grew up in St. Helen, Michigan -- were named co-recipients of the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives' 1987 "Freedom Fighter of the Year" award. 

The free market think tank, located at the College of Idaho, was led at the time by former Northwood University professor Larry Reed, who later returned to Midland, founded the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and recruited Glenn to follow him in 1998 to help promote the center's Universal Tuition Tax Credit.

In 2011, Glenn was a founding board member of the Michigan Freedom to Work coalition, which launched the successful effort to pass Michigan's new Freedom to Work law--known outside the hyper-Calvinist areas of western Michigan as the "right to starve" law.
 

Still creepy, though. 

Unlike the woman whose membership was revoked, Yvette Cormier, who at least claimed to have “no issue with the LGBT community and fully understands the issue surrounding gender identity,” Rep. Glenn is a well-known opponent of LGBT rights, and currently serves as the president of the American Family Association of Michigan.

He has championed bills that would allow states to criminalize homosexuality and has called anti-bullying legislation the “Trojan horse” of “homosexual activists.” 


In 2012, Glenn railed against the American Academy of Pediatrics for backing adoptions by same-sex couples:

“The scientific fact is that children's health is endangered if they are adopted into households in which the adults -- as a direct consequence of their homosexual behavior -- experience dramatically higher risks of domestic violence, mental illness, life-threatening disease, substance abuse, and premature death by up to 20 years.


In 2011, Glenn disputed assertions that gays are not inferior employees, and he turned the issue on its head:

“What ridiculous folly to suggest that only those individuals who engage in homosexual behavior, given all of its severe medical consequences, constitute the best and the brightest.”


And in 2010, just try to guess what Glenn’s beef was with this state House candidate, based upon a robo-call he placed in her district:

“Liberal Democratic lawyer and openly homosexual state House candidate Toni Sessoms doesn't share our values. Michiganliberal.com boasts that Sessoms is 'independently wealthy, and if elected would become the first openly lesbian state representative.' Sessoms is endorsed by the homosexual newspaper in Detroit, by Detroit's homosexual equality Michigan PAC and by the Michigan Democratic Party homosexual and transgender caucus. Sessom's campaign manager is the openly homosexual Central Michigan University faculty member who lost (this) state House race two years ago. Her deputy campaign manager was co-president of CMU's homosexual student group -- an openly homosexual candidate with a campaign run by homosexual activists.”

In 2013 Glenn posted this on his American Family Association Facebook page in defense of professional loose screw (and member of the Republican National Committee) Dave Agema:

“(Is Glenn a bigot?) Of course not, and neither is Dave Agema. Such terms are deployed any time someone dares publicize medical and social science findings that homosexual activists and their media allies wish to suppress for fear of damaging their politically-motivated agenda to persuade us and our children that homosexual behavior is normal, natural, and healthy. It's none of the three.”

In 2014, Glenn placed robo-calls in Bay County denouncing an anti-discrimination ordinance that would protect the LGBT community:

“(The ordinance) threatens religious freedom and women’s privacy rights by giving special protections to individuals involved in homosexual behavior or cross-dressing.” 


Though the ordinance would only apply to county government, not the private sector, Glenn said it “would require a Christian bookstore to “hire a man who comes to work wearing a dress.” 

Calling Dr. Freud!

No comments:

Post a Comment