In 2006, Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern declared that when it came to Homosexuality, 

“I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.”

She made the comments to a Republican club meeting defending herself later by claiming,

“I said nothing that was not true, I said nothing out of hate and I don’t believe my colleagues will censure me.”

they didn’t.

She also declared at a gathering at the state capitol that,

“Gays are a cancer and like cancer must be removed.”

That line is being applied to other groups these days.

When she had taught civics with an extremely conservative bent a few doors down from my classroom, she knew I was advocating for Gay student inclusion in school district policies. There was some backlash to her comments especially the Islam part considering the bigoted reaction aimed at the Muslim and Arabic Community 10 years before with the Murrah Building bombing they got blamed for when it had been a White, conservative, Christian who did it, and counted me among the activists of whom she explained,

 “I was speaking about the homosexual activists who are aggressively funding pro-homosexual candidates against conservative Republicans. In 2006, they targeted conservatives across the nation, mostly at the state and local levels. They took out 50 of them.”

No Christian militarism there when electing someone else is taking out who she prefers.

Subsequently, an estimated crowd of 1,500 people cheered for her at a gathering where she whined about Gay Rights groups and others “persecuting” her for calling homosexuality the biggest threat facing this country and went on to justify the bigotry by saying 

 “I told the people when I was running for this office that I was a Christian candidate and that I believed we were in a cultural war for the very existence of our Judeo-Christian value.” 

Claiming he Gays’ objecting to her negative misrepresentations “proves that I was right. We are in a cultural war; this is for real,”

She later softened a bit about its being all the Homosexuals to just the problem being

“the strategy of gay rights supporters to defeat conservative candidates. 

Get rid of them and they who support them and more victories for her side.

At the time, the strategies we employed included logic, reason, science, information, facts, and the truth.

For her it was all 

“about the church having the right to speak out about the redeeming love of Jesus Christ who died to set us all free from our sins.”

For those who don’t realize the hard work of the past and the effectiveness of the now old people, Kern also admitted,

“Here’s the problem. The gay people are motivated. Whether you’re Christian or not, if you’re just a good conservative, if we were as motivated as the gay people were, the contest would be over. That’s just all there is to it. It would be over. But we aren’t motivated.”

She was aware of the student advocacy going on at the time, and she chose to misrepresent the attempt to have inclusive school policies to push her Christian agenda. 

 “What’s happening now is they’re going after in schools, 2-year-olds. You know why they’re trying to get early childhood education? They want to get our young children into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them. I taught school for close to 20 years and we’re not teaching facts and knowledge anymore, folks. We’re teaching indoctrination. We’re turning out a citizenry who are learners but not thinkers. By that I mean they take whatever’s thrown at them. They don’t question it. They’re going after our young children, as young as 2 years of age to try to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is an acceptable lifestyle.” 

She was never close to her own children, so she may not have been aware that topics like gender and sexuality are lost on kids who have short attention spans and limited vocabulary.

New to her office as state rep in 2005, she introduced House Resolution 1039, which urged library officials to restrict children’s access to books with homosexual themes. The resolution passed, 81-3.

House members passed the resolution after Kern claimed an Oklahoma County couple in her district were surprised to learn that a book checked out by their child was about homosexual marriage. It made two major statements: 

The development of children 

“requires certain guidance and protection by adults to ensure that their maturation is timely and results in a greater degree of personal responsibility and respect for their role in society.”

and

A child’s development 

“should be at the discretion of a child’s parents free from interference from the distribution of inappropriate publicly cataloged materials”. 

However, it does not acknowledge that parents like those who dropped their children off at the library unaccompanied only to be surprised and angered that this resulted in the children choosing a book the parents could have prevented them from checking out, have a responsibility to monitor their own children and not those of others.

It did not become law.

Not happy with this, in 2006 Representative Kern introduced House Bill 2158, which would have required the state Board of Libraries to withhold state funding if a public library did not separate books with homosexual or sexually explicit material from the children’s section. The House passed the measure, 60-33. It died in the Senate.

Her defense of censorship was to claim it wasn’t censorship even as in explaining what it wasn’t, she described censorship.

“There are a lot of books that children shouldn’t be reading (according to her). This isn’t censorship, because I’m not asking that they be thrown away, be burned. I’m asking that they just be put in with adult collections and then if a parent wants their child to see a book like that they can check it out.”

She isn’t destroying them, she is locking them away so they can’t be read.

According to the bill, to be put in a separate section, books would have had to contain specific and graphic sexual references, not just a mention of sex (unless it was Gay sex). Books with homosexual themes must clearly be recruiting and advocating same gender sexual relationships (stories about dating) before separation is required by the legislation.

Supporters of the bill said parents should decide whether their children can have access to these books apparently, unknown to them, like those two parents had the right to do with their own kids not someone else’s.

And then, just as now, the hang up is an obsession with other people’s private lives and the inability to accept that we are not all like the book banners.

Then, just as now, their religious reason, being applied to all of us, is, 

“Libraries and librarians should not be usurping the role of parents. You can’t sell toothpaste without sex. Our society is obsessed with sex. And I will tell you this, the American Library Association is out to sexualize our children.”

The obsession with sex and genitalia is not new. It has been a problem looking for therapy and we, he non-Christians,  have been chosen  for that purpose..

An unforeseen problem would have arisen from compliance as the description of the books was very broad, overly so, and that would influence the number of books to be housed separately and how big the house.

 The end result of this banning and the discussion around which books, how many, and where, was a “parenting collection” shelf of age appropriate books on high shelves within the children’s area at libraries if a consensus could be reached for deciding which books will be moved to that area.

The unintended consequence of th nois “parenting collection” was the elimination of accidentally coming upon a “forbidden” book while browsing if you did at all, replacing it with an easily recognized and visible book shelf whose height you will eventually reach and have access to the books you will not have to go looking for when you are an older child.

In the old days they thought separating the porn magazines from the sports and news ones would make it hard for us kids to find them. You just kept walking to the end of the shelves in the magazine store.

It also resulted in members of the Community donating books to public and school libraries to make sure the books were available for the youth who needed them for as long as it took the banners to get them all out.

When held to specifics, they did not have them.

Besides fighting the book banners and working to keep books in the library, there should be a constant flow of books being given to the libraries. It will get messy for a while but when the dust and confusion settle, there will be books and no bans.

Although she never had to nor voluntarily chose to apologize for her comments about Gay people in general or in particular such as the time during one public meeting pointing me out to the audience saying I might be a good teacher but my lifestyle was an abomination unto the lord, she did get called in another instance when she went off on women and Blacks, of course in Jesus’s name.

The House of Representatives publicly reprimanded her for disparaging comments she made against Blacks and women during a debate on affirmative action saying that minorities and women earn less than men because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative. 

She also said, “I taught school for 20 years, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t want to work as hard.”

Some of those were my students too. That hit close to home

As for women, 

,“Women usually don’t want to work as hard as a man. Women tend to think a little bit more about their family, wanting to be at home more time, wanting to have a little more leisure time.

 . I’m not saying women don’t work hard Women like … to have a moderate work life with plenty of time for spouse and children and other things like that. They work very hard, but sometimes they aren’t willing to commit their whole life.”

A continuing mindset of those who then and now want to ban books and replace the Constitution with the Bible

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It is the holiday season so there will be limitless warnings from friends about what evils I should not commit based only on the season, not any previous actions or expressed plans of mine. 

Many of these will be sent by those who just discovered what is already common knowledge and are rather more insulting than the intended friendly advice being offered as it implies that their friends on their social media contact lists are assumed to be heartless reprobates.

I have to assume that either they assume all their friends, me among them, have major flaws in common, or they assume their faults are universally shared by all they know.

Either way, after the slew of how not to kill pets and children on Thanksgiving, we have the switch in the season, and I have been warned in two days not to:

• Abandon puppies at Christmas and in anticipation of my doing so later, abandoning chicks at Easter instead of eating them later accompanied often with the vehemently expressed suggestion I go Vegan
• Leave dogs outside in winter.
• Choke sea life with balloons.
• Gawk at the afflicted.
• Assume everyone on everything fits some “normal”.
• Take any land from anyone.
• Prefer a homeless person over a Vet and vice versa.

Things are tough all over and people need their friends. They do not need to know through Christmas memes how low an opinion of them a friend has been concealing.

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By their fruits you will know them, and the fruits we were looking for were the application of the Beatitudes given by Jesus to those who claim they follow him. Instead, we get a lot of militaristic talk.

We have Christian soldier marching as to war, priests blessing instruments of war, people praying for God to pick their side, and images off an angry Christ looking hell bent on the destruction of humanity after he created all the problems by not being more specific about that apple thing with Adam and Eve in the Garden.

The Prince of Peace has a lot of historical blood on His hands.

And then there are the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons.

Hospital Sisters Health System, a Catholic health-care system operating hospitals in Wisconsin and Illinois, is removing crucifixes from their facilities to prevent attacks on staff.

It might appear that many staff have been attacked by patients wielding both wooden and metal crucifixes and they are seeking less lethal forms of a bloody Jesus with great abs hanging on a cross with nails, but there have actually been no attacks. However, it has been seen that the potential is there, so Sisters is looking for “safer replacements”. Perhaps there is money to be made in making crucifixes out of rubber or styrofoam.

I have a hard time imagining a sick, bedridden patient somehow having the time and energy to rip one of those church size crucifixes hanging on a wall, usually high up over a door, or even one of the small ones we see over each hospital bed in old movies, and overpowering a staff member who is in good health.

Would the patients unite and remove an easy to overlook small crucifix from the bed in the far corner and pass it around like a prison shiv waiting for the right moment to use it?

But now the Christian militants have realized that their constantly telling followers to become more militant and use religion as a weapon might be used against them in the form of Jesus Himself.

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(Because of a Netflix Bio, Bayard Rustin is back in the public conscious and I have to admit, albeit with a degree of reluctance, that one of the most conservative places in the country at the time, Oklahoma City, was way ahead of the rest of us in this regard as Bayard Rustin played a role in addressing the attempted book banning twenty years go. I present this tale of presenting school libraries with two books on Gay History when “Homosexual Themed Books” were facing censorship.)

State Representative Sally Kern’s attempt to ban what she broadly described as “Homosexual Themed” books brought people‘s attention to the fact that with all the books in Oklahoma City’s high school libraries on diversity in America, there weren‘t any that included Gay people unless as footnotes, or as characters that did not end their stories well.

I had found a few books in my high school library that dealt with the topic of Homosexuality. Among these were a book on debate topics with essays on the pros and cons of various controversial topics including Homosexuality authored by a prominent celebrity pastor; a book on AIDS where all the heterosexual couples were in normal relationships with some minor varying details while the sole Gay teen had decided on a life of promiscuity involving a lot of older men; and one where a conservative televangelist treated the topic of teen sex with cautions about those abominations that might lead them astray with, of course, Homosexuality topping the list. But as far as any history, biography, or work of fiction not related in any way to sex, unlike such books involving heterosexuality, there was nothing.

Money was raised from individuals and organizations within the city’s Gay Community so that one copy each of the books Stonewall, by David Carter and Forgotten Profit: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D‘Emilio could be bought for each high school in Oklahoma City and presented to the School Board in the summer of 2005 as a gift to cover this void. With two shopping bags filled with books bound in pairs by rainbow ribbon, one set for each high school, members of the community presented the books to the Board at one of its public meetings.

The books had been chosen because of their historical value, and because there was nothing in either that could be even remotely objectionable, with the target audience being high school students so as to avoid any possibility that someone could accuse the books of being recruitment tools from which children would need protection. Indirectly the actions of the state representative regarding the books in the public libraries also guided the choice of the books and the audience as we followed her proposed requirements for age appropriate Homosexually themed books placed appropriately. The books would be only for high school students, and, being histories, were relevant to the curriculum.

They were not sensational.

We decided on a public presentation as opposed going to the individual schools as a way to make sure the books were not just silently put in a closet somewhere with no central person or department to keep after to get the books on the shelves if it ever came to that.

At the meeting, various members of the Gay Community spoke to the Board about the importance of such books, and how information may not only have helped the speakers, themselves, make better decisions in their youth, but might help the students avoid some of the pitfalls involved in figuring out on your own what it meant to be Gay and where they fit into the big picture. Both books contained flawed individuals whose errors were not glossed over, so it was not a question of presenting a false, rosy picture, but one that was realistic and at times embarrassing.

     I had been to many Board meetings and the procedure for Community Comments had always been first come, first served. However, that night the acting chair grouped people according to topics, listing the book donation last even though I had been the first person to sign up to speak.

Usually at Board meetings when any one group and its members spoke and finished their business, those people left. To have artificially placed us last ignoring the Board‘s own procedure guaranteed that when we got up to present the books the audience would not be there and we would be addressing ourselves and those Board members who had not left or taken a bathroom break. This would deny us both the drama of the moment, and witnesses beyond ourselves and the Board.

As it was, due to some confusion experienced by a group called before us, we were moved ahead of a union issue only to have the acting chair announce that there were four speakers, naming only three, and then absenting himself so that after the third speaker was finished there was a very awkward pause that almost brought our presentation to an ignorable standstill since by procedure the chair announces the next speaker. Since I was the fourth intended speaker whose name had not been called, I went to the podium anyway, made my remarks, and presented my set of books along with the other three speakers who came forward from their seats with theirs.

The irony was that the acting chair who gave many people beyond us the impression he was trying to interfere or at least minimize the book donation was a Black man who benefited from the Civil Rights work of Bayard Rustin, a Black man, or he may not have been sitting on the Board. Yet, obviously being ignorant of who Bayard Rustin was, he tried mightily to censor us and the presentation. This was demonstrable ignorance of Black History, and oddly enough fit well into Strom Thurmond‘s attempting to control Black History as he did in 1963, and showed that even supposedly informed people were woefully uninformed about their own history. I was embarrassed for him and his lack of knowledge about someone like Bayard Rustin and his obvious assumption that Rustin was a bad thing.

We did not ask for special, but for equal treatment, and did not expect these two books to be treated any differently than any other books, nor would we accept that they were treated less than any other book. Before even presenting the idea of a book donation I had checked on the school district policy about such donations and found there was none.

The televised media covered our presentation in a positive way, showing the two books presented, and asking those responsible their motivation for donating the books and their hopes for the books‘ impact on students.

The books were passed on to the administrator in charge of district school libraries. Convinced that someone would come forward to make some impossibly unfounded and bizarre claim that the “homosexual agenda” was being promoted in the schools, and that the “Homosexual Lifestyle” was being taught as an acceptable alternative to Heterosexuality, the director of libraries wanted to have a few people read the books to see if there was anything to which anyone might choose to object. Her intention was to anticipate any objections that might arise by coming up with answers to them before they were voiced.

The District‘s initial inability to let the book donors know where the books had ended up when asked a few weeks after their presentation gave the impression that there may have been some reluctance in accepting the books, and they had been conveniently lost in the labyrinth of school headquarters. It would have been a good way to dodge having to deal with them or any backlash toward the donation.

When the books were located, they were just where they were supposed to be, in the office of a person who wanted the books in the libraries but who also found herself facing a possibly awkward and unsought position. The District‘s procedure for addressing complaints from parents or students about any book in any school library was applied in anticipation, and when all was said and done, and all arguments that could be were anticipated, the books went into the libraries after a six month process.

Upon checking after the date given as the day of delivery of the books to the high school libraries, I found most high school librarians contacted had received the books with some already having placed them on the shelves. One newly built high school had the two books as some of the first to be placed on the new school library‘s shelves.

As with the Gay History Month displays and other materials that had found less support in the past, these books did not bring down any storms of fire and brimstone, and if they were responsible for the loss of souls or any other demonic mayhem, no one has yet mentioned it.

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