Olympia City Council Candidate Karen Veldheer and Equal Benefits for LGBT’s
A recent post on Emmett O’Connell’s blog prompted me to email Karen Veldheer and ask for clarification on the assumptions I was forming based on Veldheer’s church’s (Orthodox Presbyterian) beliefs regarding LGBT persons, mainly that the lifestyle is a sin. The following are my questions and her response, unedited.
Rob Richards:
1. How do you feel about the city’s equal benefits policy?
2. Do you support full civil rights for minorities, including
GLBT?
Karen Veldheer:
I believe in the separation of Church and State, and that city ordinances must be supported by elected leaders. I support the City of Olympia’s equal benefits policy. Regarding civil rights for minorities, including GLBT, the State of Washington has over 200 specific rights including many of the rights most important to GLBT which I support as well.
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I did ask a couple of clarifying follow up questions which I will post when I receive a response.
My reaction to this so far?
In her answer above, the second sentence, as written, says that she supports the EBO. The first sentence makes me wonder what she means by that. My take on this response is that Veldheer believes that elected officials should uphold the law, the EBO is the law, and so she supports it. The problem I have with that answer is that it doesn’t speak to her personal values around the issue, for instance, would she support repealing it if a campaign were launched to do so? What are her personal experiences around this? I’m left wondering many things.
She also doesn’t put any kind of emotional emphasis into this response, it ends up feeling a bit canned, like a lawyer wrote it, and she doesn’t convince me that she has thought much about gay rights.
Now, as rough as that may sound, I really do hope that this can be an honest and open dialog where we clear up misconceptions and fix bad assumptions, where we can learn about and from one another. These local elections are too important to ignore, and we have to be informed about who is on the ballot. Too much is happening, and too much growth is about to happen in Olympia for us to go blindly into the ballot box.
