It was an odd moment.

It was the mid-nineties and I had been in Oklahoma about a year and my involvement in Gay Rights activism had gotten me to become a volunteer for and be sworn in by the City bCouncil president as a member of a subcommittee to review and revise the city’s Human Rights Ordinance.

Obviously, adding “Sexual Orientation” to cover the Gay citizens was a goal.

This was the Buckle of the Bible Belt at the time and this would not be easy.

The members of the subcommittee itself were in favor of the addition, except for the one or two members who had volunteered for the work in order to prevent something like this, and, after much discussion and revision, the sub-committee produced a document for the Council’s approval.

Usually those in attendance at the live streaming of the i council meetings was very low, usually made up of people there for a specific agenda item and then would leave when it was addressed, but for the meeting where the ordinance was to be reviewed, discussed, and, hopefully, passed, the room was full.

Like a wedding in church, the two sids, those for the addition and those against, gathered on opposite sides of the chamber with a cadre of Baptist pastors taking up most of the front benches on their side and those on the other gathered in a similar sized group, but a little toward the back and middle of the chamber.

Cable cameras captured the gathered pastors whose placement had them on camera in far shots and close ups of the dais. Members of the Gay Community, many of whom could lose their jobs, homes, and social standing if they were seen, sat outside of camera range with only the speakers representing the Community up front and visible. 

Yes, little details like that were considerations in the past and may be again.

The person presenting the proposed revisions went through any addition or subtraction, explaining the reasons for it, and summarized the sub-committee’s discussions to show there had actually been some and this was not an automatic move.

When the time for public comments came, those wanting to add the words “Sexual Orientation” presented facts and figures based on statistics and studies to show such protections are good, not only for those directly affected, but the community at large.

The pastors, however, had a different approach. 

They wanted to talk about sex.

Pornograhy was basically illegal in Oklahoma at the time and none could be bought or sold in the state unless it followed certain guidelines. There were to be no direct shots of the main event, only the scenes leading up to it with the only parts allowed shown being the two bodies in motion, but never together at the point of co-mingling with certain camera angles forbidden as they would clearly imply what was going on downtown as you are forced to look at the foliage in a outlying neighborhood.

To get the good stuff you would have to drive across the Red River into Texas where there was a Porno Palace just across state lines, approachable by a service road from which you could not reenter the highway and head back to Oklahoma without first driving up to the on-ramp further up by the Welcome Center so whether you had reentered after visiting the center or the Porn Palace could not be determined by Texas law enforcement, and you would be in general traffic coming from Texas into Oklahoma. 

There is another such porno place a few more miles into Texas, but for the pastors’ purposes, the one across the state line was adventure enough.

Standing in the council chamber while being streamed live into the homes of the people, a pastor confessed to the crime of having crossed state lines to purchase illegal material and then transporting it across state lines to a state in which it was clearly illegal. To emphasize his various attempted points as he spoke, the pastor began to wave one of the Porn magazines he had bought to prove the perversion of the Gays, having chosen magazines that contained some of the more out there sexual activity dealing with fetishes, BDSM, scat, and most other activities of a limitted interest nature and practiced with equal relish by heteroseulas in porn productions, claiming it represented the regular behavior of all Gay people. 

He was on live cable only able to wave one magazine around and hold it up for view because he had handed the other magazines he had purchased to the pastors to his left and right who, after leafing through them passed their copy on down the line to the next pastors who also peruse before passing.

He was apparently attempting to explain that you can learn all about Gay sex if you go to a porn store, I guess, just as anyone could learn all about being Heterosexual and a good life companion by getting information solely from porn.

My parents had three sons which would mean they were having Heterosexual sex on occasion. I never saw a whip or ball gag among their things. How Heterosexual were they, really  if they weren’t doing all those things you see Straight couples doing in magazines and videos?

The magazines did eventually reach the dais. 

One side presented statistics and studies, one having been conducted by the first Bush administration that reveal the horrifying number of teen suicides annually and how the treatment of Gay youth drove many to it.

On the other side, a pastor who had broken the law was confessing to it as he passed the evidence around the chamber, condemned Gay people for leading children to sin as he stood in the Council Chamber  waving around the visual evidence of his crime, committing a further one by displaying the porn in public while reciting in detail some activities pictured in the porn.

There had been no warning to viewers, especially those with children in the room, of the impending sexual content, nor was the broadcast on any time delay. 

The pastor’s actions, his constant reference to and presentation of pictures of men in flagrante delicto, and his detailed descriptions of sex acts, heavy on the fetishes.

One side exercised decorum, respect for space, presentation of facts and personal anecdotes, and attention to the audience.

The other side, the pastors, got up in turn and described sex acts, the most fringe they could find while displaying illegal pornography in public.

While one side read reports and statistics, the other, like that old priest with Jaws I wrote of in an earlier blog who did not read the book but spent his time underlining the curse words in the novel, these pastors prepared to object to the addition of “sexual orientation” to the Human Rights Ordinance by going to a porno palace with the intention of violating the state’s pornography laws and spending time looking at all the magazines to see all the ways people have sex to find the ones that best fit their purpose. This meant they had to look at, pick up, examine, evaluate, and compare a lot of pornographic material and objects to choose the ones that might be most effective at a live streamed public meeting of the City Council in it’s chamber.

In the end the pastors, who were never pursued for their confessed crime, won..

The City Council members accepted the testimony of the pastors and decided that, although it had actually been made clear that Sexual Orientation should be included and they had no firm ground upon which to reject the revision to the civil rights ordinance, if there was no ordinance there would be nothing to revise. 

To avoid adding the words they admitted should be added, the City Council voted to rescind the existing ordinance without replacement and to disband the city’s Human Rights Commission.

In the capitol city of the state of Oklahoma it was decided that in order to keep Gay people from having Civil Rights, no citizen should have them.

If your rights were violated, there was no longer a way to address it through the city.

Book Bans?

Did that in Oklahoma 20 years ago.

Dick picks in a government chamber viewable by anyone with a television?

Stand aside Marjorie Taylor Greene. That was almost 30 years ago in Oklahoma.

Taking away the rights of the majority to deny rights to a minority as the Supreme Court is bent on doing?

Again, been there, done that.

The problem was that when these things were happening, rather than seeing the canary in the coal mine, the rest of the country just walked away from the mine because it did not have a big enough name.

The arguments are the same and the counter information stronger as it has been tested and proven.

As far as Hunter Biden?

Moe Shaft got his dick pic televised long before this.

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