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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