Nashville News Blog

Eric Crafton: Still full of revolutionary ideas.

​Last week, Eric Crafton was one of eight white men Council members to vote against Metro's new anti-discrimination bill. The long overdue bill simply tacks on the words "sexual orientation and gender identity" to the current law which already protects for things like age, sex and race. In short, it's exactly the kind of bill that God-fearing old white dudes might have a problem with.

But they can't just come out and say "Gay people don't deserve the same rights as everyone else." Instead they have to tie themselves into rhetorical knots when explaining their opposition, using lame excuses like the fact that the 1964 Civil Rights Act already has us covered on a Federal level or, in Crafton's case, claiming they don't know how "sexual orientation" will be defined by the ordinance.

So fine. Despite the fact that semantic somersaults are one of Crafton's bread-and-butter evasive maneuvers, we took him at his word and tried to get him to elaborate on his reasoning. Sure enough, he made exactly as much sense as you'd expect..

First, Crafton tried to play the "but what about everyone else?" card:

The way (the bill) is shaping up now, we're going to be excluding a lot of people who might like some protection. What if I'm overweight? What if I'm short? What if I'm a Democrat and my boss is a Republican?

When we helpfully pointed out that people choose their political affiliation and have some manner of control over whether or not they're fat, Crafton tiptoed around the old "they're gay because they want to be gay" routine:

Well, there's some debate whether other things are under your control or not. There's a lot of scientific debate. But that's not really the issue.

Oh, but you just made it the issue! Ya hear that gays? Mr. Crafton is still not convinced that you aren't choosing to be discriminated against. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't not being able to marry the person you love, not being able to visit them in the hospital when they're sick and not being able to adopt kids just fabulous? No. Well good, because again, that's not really the issue.

Finally, in case you thought Crafton was just some stick-in-the-mud who likes to come up with inane reasons for not endorsing reasonable legislation, we'd like to point out that the man does have his own ideas:

I really don't care whether somebody's gay or not. And I don't think we should discriminate against people. In fact, I'm looking at introducing a bill that says we can't discriminate against anybody for anything at any time.

No word on whether this Forever Walking on Eggshells bill would cover patent idiocy. If so, we're liable to think Crafton's introducing it just to cover his own ass.