GOP Congressman To Gays: Lie At Work That You’re Straight Unless You Want To Be Fired

GOP Congressman Steve King, a notoriously anti-gay, small government hypocrite, told a reporter that gays should lie about their sexuality unless they want to risk being fired for being gay, and that government has no business telling business they cannot fire someone just because they’re gay.

“In the first place, I would think that unless someone makes their sexuality public, it’s not anybody’s business, so neither is it our business to tell an employer who to hire. He won’t know who to discriminate against in the first place,” Rep. King told Think Progress’s Scott Keyes in an exclusive interview.

“To Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the problem is not that it’s legal for employers to fire an employee for being gay. It’s that the employee made his sexual orientation publicly known in the first place,” Keyes writes, and reports:

We asked if this meant that he opposed the idea of forbidding businesses from firing an employee because of her sexual orientation. “How do you know someone’s sexual orientation?” he countered, before proposing an idea similar to the recently repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military. “I would think that unless someone makes their sexuality public, it’s not anybody’s business, so neither is it our business to tell an employer who to hire.”
KEYES: Would that encompass, for instance, the government being able to tell businesses who they can hire and fire?
KING: Yeah, they shouldn’t be able to do that [to] a private business.
KEYES: Even if those were to be regulations say on a matter of sexual orientation or gender or other stuff like that?
KING: How do you know someone’s sexual orientation? I don’t know how you discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation. That’s their business.
KEYES: I guess if it became public knowledge that an employee were lesbian or gay.
KING: You have private sector businesses here and they need to have freedom to operate. In the first place, I would think that unless someone makes their sexuality public, it’s not anybody’s business, so neither is it our business to tell an employer who to hire. He won’t know who to discriminate against in the first place.

Hypocritically, and ironically, Rep. King, who vehemently opposes same-sex marriage and abortion, and “Obamacare,” but supports government intrusion in a woman’s right to get an abortion — supporting transvaginal ultrasounds – and anything belonging in the 21st century, last week attended a Tea Party rally against Obamacare and stood in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, shouting, “Keep you law off my body!”