Which is very handy if you are a Department of Motor Vehicles desk clerk who hates Teh Gay. Or a Senator.
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\nThomas Demartini does or did work for the California DMV in San Francisco. A while back he refused to process a change of gender on the license paperwork for a transgender person. That apparently caused a bit of a stir but he kept his job and, apparently, was never retrained. Or maybe he was.<\/p>\n
Anyway, when Amber Yust, recently transgendered herself, applied for the male to female change in status with the DMV, and she ended up with the same anti-gay desk clerk, things got weird.<\/p>\n
Demartini used his access to her file to get her address and send her a letter condemning her to hell. A fundy church in the area sent her a DVD about eternal damnation and stuff, apparently provided with her address by Demartini (who mentions the church in his letter to her).<\/p>\n
The California DMV is handling this poorly, as one might expect. They won’t say if they’ve fired Demartini.<\/p>\n
The point I’d like to make about this is the following: In the more extreme ends of our social landscape there are people like Thomas Demartini who probably understand and generally follow the laws and regulations that they live with, like those restricting what you can and can not do as a government employee with access to people’s records, but who do not follow those rules when the guiding hand of their particular god tells them they don’t have to bother.<\/p>\n
And, elsewhere on this social landscape we have people doing essentially the same thing … ignoring the laws of our land and our constitution, when convenient, such as the Republican and Blue Dog Democrat Senators who would not vote for cloture on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which is clearly a human rights violation.<\/p>\n
For some reason, gayosity raises those who oppose it above the law of the land at several levels, civil servant and elected official alike. When is this going to stop?<\/p>\n