Michigan Democratic state Senator Jeremy Moss is criticizing his Republican colleagues, and one in particular, for throwing up roadblocks instead of adopting a simple LGBTQ Pride Month non-binding resolution. He says Republicans’ this year want “to make you fear the gay agenda,” as he defined what his “gay agenda” is.
Moss, at 35, is one of the youngest state elected officials, but that did not stop him from going after the Senate Republican Majority Leader, Mike Shirkey, for wating to “strip out some references to the LGBTQ community,” the Detroit Free Press reports.
Leader Shirkey is facing a lot more problems than Senator Moss. Last week two nonprofits tied to Shirkey were accused “of improperly raising millions of dollars for Unlock Michigan,” MLive reported, “to limit the executive branch’s powers during health emergencies.”
But in the LGBTQ Pride Month resolution, Shirkey wanted “language saying not all Michiganders support the LGBTQ ‘lifestyle’ but that all people are ‘created in God’s image,'” despite it being the exact same one that was approved last year.
“I thought we were over this,” Moss said on the Senate floor Tuesday (video below). “But this month, the Senate majority has sent the LGBTQ Pride Month resolution to committee just so that they can not adopt it.”
“It is a nonbinding resolution,” Moss says in his speech. “It requires nothing of you, doesn’t change any law – although we should – and it doesn’t cost you anything. When it was finally adopted last year, no one’s marriage dissolved because of it. No business shuttered. No church lost its religious freedom. But this year, curiously, this year, the Republican leadership regresses and again, throws pride month back into the trash heap.”
“I guess the cruelty is the point,” Moss added, noting that Republicans are “in the majority now and have not solved any of our problems.”
“Their agenda is to make you fear the gay agenda, but I am not the cause of your problems. My community is not the cause of your problems. I will tell you what the gay agenda is. I am a Senator who is gay. And leading the fight against price gouging of rising everyday costs that all Michigan families are worried about that [Republicans] have not addressed.”
“I am a Senator who is gay working with my Senate Democratic colleagues desperate to pass common sense gun reform to keep all communities safe from gun violence that they are blocking. I am a Senator who is gay that despite our political differences and working with them on bipartisan proposals on affordable housing, economic development and police reform, there are LGBTQ people like me in all sectors of Michigan’s economy who only wish to contribute be good neighbors, and not have the government interfere with their freedom to live their lives. We are a community of good people. We don’t need a piece of paper to tell us that. But the fact that you won’t adopt it says a lot more about you than it does about us.”
Watch: