We have more than one plea to the Indiana General Assembly this year. None are larger than this: Don’t get distracted by legislation regarding human sexuality and how everyone is supposed to feel about it.
Views in such matters are intensely personal, emotional and can’t be legislated effectively. Going down that road, as we did last year, is a no-win situation, which should have been the lesson learned. The state cannot effectively force people, by matters of faith or by matters of nature, who believe homosexuality is wrong to act as if homosexuality is ok. Conversely, folks who are gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual should be able to legally act on those self-perceptions among consenting adults without anyone disrupting their lives – least of all the state.
Of course, in the normal course of events there will be conflicts of conscious for Muslims, Christians, Jews and other people of faith or even without faith that find such activity wrong and something they cannot in any way affirm. That should be ok too.
As in other places, in Indiana there will likely be calls for shared bathrooms by men and women because there seems to be a growing number of people who view gender not as a scientific fact determined by chromosomes but a matter of personal choice that can be made as early as the toddler years. So, we are supposed to let 12-year-old girls share the public potty with 40-year-old men who say they are women. No. That that won’t work or win the day.
We think reality will win this out, it always does in the long run. Unfortunately the long run can seem terribly long. But very personal choices and desires of people are best worked out by people among themselves without a politician’s help. If the courts are needed to settle civil disputes, then that route will certainly be needed, taken and endured.
The is not a subject to endlessly pursue this short General Assembly session when pressing needs such as educational testing reform, rebuilding roads and streets in the state, producing more transparency from state and local governments, along with the pseudo-government nonprofit organizations in the business of economic development, are all demanding General Assembly action.
Defining if religious freedom must move from toleration to affirmation and, if so, where that point comes in the shared public marketplace is a discussion to be worked out within society itself, probably over a decade, maybe two. In the meantime, let’s figure out how to get our education system back on track and how we can make the state more attractive to prosperity.