By Grant Pick
Ronnie Greer came to God while a marine in 1976. He’d been court-martialed for assaulting a credit union officer and was serving an 18-month sentence in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was 20, an angry and committed Black Muslim from Milwaukee, when a Christian crusade showed up at the stockade. “A young white man preached at me,” Greer recalls. “He was nervous and sweating, and I talked to him so I wouldn’t have to go back to my cell. A week or so later I was lazing away on my bunk when suddenly I framed a major prayer to God. If you’re real, I prayed, change my head. I fell asleep on my bunk and woke up with a deep sense of commitment to the Lord.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Greer believes a good Christian must be God’s vessel. “I am to give a picture of God,” he says, “as if God were working in and through me to make my character like His.” He’d lived a wild life before turning fervently Christian–dealing drugs, procuring women for other men–but now he condemns such behavior. He calls homosexuality sinful, citing Leviticus as his authority, and calls not just the act but even the inclination reprehensible. “Gays should repent their gayness and commit to living according to the moral laws of God,” says Greer, “the same way that an adulterer or a pedophile or a gossip should.”
Amesqua, who took office in February 1996, and other city officials maintained that distributing the pamphlet on fire department property violated workplace rules forbidding harassment based on sexual orientation. That March, when Greer called in sick yet attended an antigay speech the same night, his superiors asked him for a doctor’s note. Greer told a reporter Kinney was “a phony” with a “vendetta” against him.
Madison, a city of 200,000, has had a gay rights ordinance on the books since the mid-1970s. A fair number of Madison’s elected officials, including Mike Verveer, are open about their homosexuality. And at one time Madison had the Washington, an old railroad hotel that was converted by two developer brothers into a gay gathering place. It housed a 24-hour cafe, a leather bar, a live-music club, and a combination hair salon and ersatz speakeasy entered through a secret door. “This was Madison’s unofficial gay-and-lesbian community center,” says Verveer. “It was where folks like myself–who are out of the closet, or maybe not–could go and be with people like themselves.”
After four months of hearings, in June 1997 the police and fire board suspended Greer for two months for showing “disregard, disrespect, and disdain” for his bosses. By then he had other charges hanging over his head. In April he’d faxed out a “news release” that accused Amesqua of too lightly disciplining her training chief for the alleged abuse of a cadet. The reason, Greer suggested, was that both women are lesbians. (Like Amesqua, the training chief has never discussed her sexuality publicly.) Their relationship, Greer wrote, “goes back a ways, namely through their affiliation with an organization called ‘Women in Fire,’ an organization seen by most firefighters in this area as a predominantly homosexual organization. Is it possible that some favoritism has been shown here?” In response, Amesqua told Greer, “Your public distribution of the scurrilous document entitled ‘news release’ is the equivalent of spitting in the department’s face.” She charged him with harassment and with showing disrespect for a senior officer.
Greer has been suspended for a year with pay from his $45,000-a-year job as the five-member police and fire board weighs the outcome of his news-release case. “It’s pretty hard to ignore that gauntlet,” says Rick Petri. “If he’d have gotten away with that press release, there’s nothing a municipal employee can’t get away with. It may be old-fashioned, but you have to show some respect for your boss.” Greer’s lawyer, Michael Dean, says that even though Amesqua couldn’t point to anyone who’d been harmed by the document, he and Greer assume that the board will rule against him; in that event, Greer promises to take his case to federal court. He can’t find a new job, he says, because he’s notorious. He’s running for Congress as a Republican in a city where passersby either tell him they’ve seen him on TV or insult him.
