Ohio Representative Nickie Antonio, a Democrat, has spent the past six years trying to pass a law that would protect the civil rights of gay and lesbian employees. Right now if you live in Ohio, it’s legal for an employer to refuse to hire you if you are gay.
At the moment, if you happen to live in Ohio, you can lose your job because of the gender of your dates.
Nickie Antonio has been trying to fix that. She has repeatedly introduced legislation that would extend civil rights protections to the LGBT community.
She hasn’t gotten anywhere, though. You see, in Ohio the state legislature is dominated by Republicans. They have repeatedly refused to support the bill because they say they there are already enough protected classes of people in the state.
Antonio spoke to The Trace, a website that reports on the gun lobby and gun legislation. She said:
“Every time I introduced legislation, I was told we don’t need to add to the list of protected classes.”
She went on to say that her bills are given at best a cursory review and then they go to die in committee.
You can understand why Representative Antonio was outraged to learn that the Ohio legislature is about to pass a bill that will protect the work rights of gun owners in the state.
The bill will make it illegal for employers to fire workers who insist on storing their guns in their cars on company property.
Can you imagine? If you are a store owner in the state of Ohio, you can’t prevent your workers from keeping loaded guns in their cars. In cars that they park right on your property. They are a protected group; they have the right to own and store those guns wherever they want to.
Now imagine that you’re the same store owner. You find out that one of your workers is attracted to people of the same gender. For reasons that defy logic, you are outraged.
You can fire that employee on the spot.
This is unethical and insane in any world you want to inhabit. Representative Nickie Antonio agrees.
Watch the following video to see how Rep. Antonio has worked to put a few logical gun laws in place in Ohio.
Featured image by Always Shooting via Flickr. Available through CC BY 2.0
