With cartoons used to fight Kern’s destructive bills

Because Oklahoma has term limits for its House and Senate members, Republican Representative Sally Kern’s time as a legislator comes to an end when this legislative session ends.

Although I am no longer a resident of that state, my time there involved a connection with the representative.

Having taught a few doors down from her, and having had to deal with her bigoted and damaging statements during the time I was advocating for GLBT students, I thought I would share the story of my time with Sally Kern.

When I first transferred from the middle school across the street to the high school and was already involved in advocating for GLBT students, I was hoping to find an ally at my new school, and thought I had found one in Sally Kern because my first impression of her was, not unlike that of many, that she had to be a Lesbian, albeit a stereotypical one, as she was sporting khaki pants, a blue polo shirt, comfortable shoes, had her hair done in a style favored at the time by dip-stick Lesbians and old Portuguese women, and was leaning very non-femininely on a golf club.

Ashamed of my profiling her, I chose to hold off on any introduction until I got to know her better, and this turned out to have been a safe move.

She insists that she has made few, if any decisions in her life, so she bears no responsibility for things she has done because every major move in her life was undertaken because she was directed by God.

She had decided to remain a virgin and preach the Gospel as a missionary, and this very well could have been the last decision she was ever to make because God took over immediately afterward.

According to her own telling of her life story, God subsequently told her she was to get married, and made things easier for her by telling her who the husband was to be. This was before He handed that duty over to that Christian Mingle web site.

She was then told to have children and raise them while her husband preached, and this gave way to God then telling her that since her children were of an age that they could fend for themselves she was to become a teacher and bring Jesus into the classroom and restore God to public schools.

This would explain why her classes in Government took on the attributes of spreading the Gospel and showing how nothing happened in the United States that was not directed by God.

This allowed her to speak against certain people because, well, God told her He did not like them, even the ones that were sitting in her classroom.

She might have liked them, she has said she does not hate Gay people, but it seems God told her not to.

When she hadn’t been as successful in God’s school directive as one would think she would have been since an all-powerful deity had given her the assignment, and certainly would have helped her out, He told her to run for the State House of Representatives and bring God back state-wide.

But she has a dangerous obsession.

She hates Gay people with a passion that also envelopes Gay youth.

She pushed the perverted idea that being Gay is all about sex, as if she needs to make that assertion so she can think and talk about sex because God no longer wanted her to have any.

She tells children that they are going to grow up to be perverts and are no better than animals, and that God hates them.

She did it while she was a teacher.

During adolescence when students are looking for answers to what are to them major questions, her default  answer was to tell them that they will burn forever in hell and will be rejected by God and their families if they allow themselves to be who they are.

While Gay people want to love other Gay people, Sally Kern likes to dwell on the fantasy that, no, they want to love animals.

Gay people haven’t told her that. It is what she wants to believe.

And every year in her time as a state Rep, she has attempted to use her position to promote her perverse way of thinking, and has relished the chance to speak out loud  her own fantasies about who Gay people are.

She may not want to speak like an audio-porno magazine, but she has to in order to do God’s work. He makes her speak pornographically.

I taught down the hall from her. I never told her a thing about my personal life. Yet, she publicly told people that, while I might be a good teacher, my life-style was repulsive.

My life style, at the time, consisted of getting up in the morning, throwing on some clothes, walking the dog, arriving home to grab a cup of coffee, getting dressed, and going to work.

At the end of the school day I went to teacher staff development meetings, band practice, Union meetings, and school district educational committee, or community betterment meetings on different days.

By the time I got home, I would walk my dog, prepare supper for the both of us, correct papers and write lesson plans, and, perhaps, do some artwork. Sometimes I cleaned the house and did laundry.

I ended my day going to bed at a decent hour so I could get up the next day and do it all again.

My apologies for exposing readers to the repulsive details of my lifestyle, but I thought it necessary.

Once in a while I would date someone the old fashioned way, and on weekends I might go out for a night on the town with friends.

But according to Sally, in her mind anyway, it was perverted sex whenever I wasn’t doing all that other stuff.

Who could have found the time?

My relationship on campus was a professional one, and, in spite of our political differences, and her distaste for my assumed lifestyle, we were as friendly any the average co-worker, until she began her public library crusade.

It seems that after she was in the legislature she needed to come out of the clichéd gate running, and found her motivation.

Oddly, as it happened this way in every place in America where the book was condemned, locally two parents picked up their very young children, whom they had left at the library unattended, and on the way home asked what books they had gotten. One of the children began to read from a book, King and King, the story of a prince whose mother, while attempting to marry him off to a princess, found he was actually in love with another prince and had no problem with it. After almost hitting a tree and potentially killing their own children in their horror, the parents called the new representative who then demanded that as the public library was tax funded this book be removed from all libraries, or those offending libraries which refused to do this would be denied funding from the state.

The bad parenting skills of the parents who simply dropped their children off unsupervised in a day and age when children were being abducted, or could be, was obvious. They had not supervised their children, nor helped them pick books out of the library that they intended to read at home, and, upon seeing their own failing, attempted to blind others to it by distraction.

Their obvious failure was somehow lost to the expediency of the moment.

Attracting some very disturbingly conservative people as allies, Sally went to a Metro Library Commission meeting in Oklahoma City demanding any book with a “Homosexual Theme”, or which might have spoken of Homosexuality as anything other than an abomination, be removed from the system. Her assumption, apparently, was that as a legislator she would speak, they would listen, and there would be no question.

I do not think she was aware that people would object to her attempted misuse of power, or that her wishes would not be so automatically obeyed.

A group of people, including legal people from the ACLU, local Gay organizations, library workers, and concerned citizens, myself included, went to the same meeting to argue that parents, after instilling in their children their own family values, should view what their children intend to read before they checked out a book at any library, rather than demand that, if they found something objectionable, no one should be allowed to read it.

I felt a little naked at that first of many meetings when, in attempting to prove her action was not based on bigotry, but a concern for children, Representative Kern tried that old chestnut that she only objected to certain things of a “Homosexual nature”, but she herself loved Gay people and knew many, and even worked with some very fine teachers who happened to be Gay. While making that last statement she swept her left arm in an all inclusive arcing motion declaring as she did so that I was a wonderful teacher with whom she had no problem, and mentioning me by name when he finger found me in the crowd. Although she knew I was open at school, she took the liberty, or acted on the assumption that there would be no harm in using me in so public a manner, and “outing” me to the public in the process.

The commission decided to take things under advisement, or avoidance if you will, and hold a few more meetings in libraries all around the city before any decision was made.

At one of these subsequent meetings, while again attempting to show her actions were based on genuine concern for children dropped off unattended by their parents at libraries and not GLBT animus, she told those in attendance that she knew Gay people, and even taught with them in her days as a teacher. She again pointed me out by name to those in attendance as a wonderful teacher, but expressed her objections to my constantly and obnoxiously pushing my “lifestyle” into people’s faces to show how militant Gay people were about their agenda and desire to recruit.

Depending on her need from that meeting on, I was either just a good teacher, or a good teacher who as obnoxiously Gay.

The media was mixed in their reaction to her move, but most often questioned it, and although the media tried mightily to report in a balanced, neutral way, some of her statements, which bordered on fanaticism, came across as quite bizarre.

As the meetings progressed and the foolishness of her demand became more and more apparent, she modified her demand from removing the books totally from libraries to placing them in a restricted area for books that were controversial in nature without actually describing who would do this, or on what the decision on what was controversial would be based.

The commission, for its part, knowing that as libraries are funded by all tax payers, was reluctant to choose and place books apart solely on the opinions and desires of any one group. Even the Bible had its unsavory parts, and fairy tales were rife with negative references to step-mothers that would certainly offend those families that had one. It was conceivable that quite a few originally unintended books with anything anyone might find objectionable would be put in a totally separate place apart from the other books. There just wasn‘t enough space in any library to accommodate all the books that might need to be moved.

Wherever Sally Kern went with her message, people from the other side of the argument were there too with the unified message that if any parent did not want his or her child to read something it was up to them to establish limits within their family and be with the child at the library. It was wrong for someone to force their own personal family values on others by deciding what other people‘s children should be able to read.

There were rallies in front of libraries, interviews in the various media, and a presence at all Library Commission meetings.

As we had not been unfriendly when we taught a few doors from each other, the legislator and I would have friendly conversations before the meetings where I filled her in on what was going on at school and any news about anyone with whom she had worked, only to retire to our sides to argue our points when the match began.

The final compromise of the Library Commission to the legislator‘s demand was far from a total seclusion of these books in a separate room. They would be placed on an easily findable shelf, but separated from other books. Instead of the desired effect of making them hard to find, these so called controversial books were made more easy to find because they were on a separate shelf in a section of the main library, and not mixed with other books where they would have blended in, like the enticing bawdy magazines are separated from sports and news magazines in a newspaper store, and are, therefore, made easier to find.

Her greatest threat of withholding public funds from non-cooperating libraries was shot down in the state legislature, and the matter died.

After a period of not hearing much from Sally Kern, just prior to the Gay Prom and a few weeks before graduation Kern wrote a letter to her constituents which stated she had been divinely placed in the legislature to return much needed reality to the state, and that Gay people were the biggest problem.

 “I ask for your prayers that God’s will be done. We, the Christian community, have set idly by for too long and let this perversion get out of hand. The homosexuals are wanting us to accept their behavior has normal and natural. It is not. It is sin and unless Believers stand up and be heard it will continue to spread like a cancer and destroy our society. I believe that with all my heart. I am not a particularly valiant person but God has put me in the position of State Representative for such a time as this.”

It was at her return to her public crusade that she warned her constituents at a meeting that Homosexuals were more of a treat to America than terrorists or Islam.

If this claim of divine anointing, and her attitude toward Homosexuals as stated above were brought into her Government classes, especially during the time she was a candidate for office what, other than the wording of school policy, could have protected Gay Students from her negative attitude toward them and Homosexuals in general?

So, recognizing it as nothing more than a form of name dropping, while either through total ignorance or willful self-service, especially as the principal at the time was a compliant Lesbian more concerned about her standing with the higher ups and the prospects of a higher paying, more prestigious position in the school district, I was disturbed when Sally Kern was invited to attend the graduation of the school in her legislative district at which she had taught in spite of her very public statements about GLBT people. Although I could see that as she was a former teacher it was nice to have invited her to attend the graduation of some of her former students, even the ones she held in extremely low esteem as they were Gay, or perhaps not Christian, I questioned why she sat up on the stage with administrators and honored students. I saw this as a little insensitive toward the Gay students who fell into her perversion category, and who may have been harmed by her words in class and in the legislature.

Again, without regard for our Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender students and family members, some sitting among the graduation class, and others either as siblings or parents in the audience, and ignoring the demeaning and dismissive attitude expressed in her email and comments made while she attempted to ban Gay books, and the damage done to our past and present students by the actions she had taken and the expressed reasons for them, she was given political advantage. Someone thought it would be a feather in the cap of the school if a Representative was an honored guest.

Her hurtful comments did not apply to majority of them while they were meekly accepted by at least one for expedience.

I was responsible for some segment of the education of those graduating, and I attempted to give them the best education I could, sometimes in spite of odd realities. To have me publicly described by the Representative as a pedophile, a lower form of creature, a sexual predator, a recruiter of youth into a condemned “life-style, pornographic by my very nature, a danger to the welfare of youth, and a cancer on society where such statements could be heard by my students, only to have her presented as a good and totally acceptable and honored role-model was extremely insensitive toward those to whom her ignorance was directed, again, some of whom were members of the honored graduates.

Having lost the Library crusade, it became Sally Ken’s modus operandi to introduce any number of anti-GLBT bills at the beginning of each legislative session while continuing her appearances at conferences and churches to spread lies about the GLBT Community, often presenting her cause as a defense of Christianity against the onslaught of Gay attacks.

While attempting to victimize others, she attempted to play the role of the victim when her attacks were rebuffed and her lies exposed.

She wrote a book, The Stoning of Sally Kern, that explained her victimhood.

Among her attacks she came up with a bill to allow unregulated conversion therapy, which is a bit of debunked quackery that attempts to make Gay kids straight by promoting a relationship with Jesus, her version of him anyway, and relies heavily on induced guilt and self-loathing. Regardless what is best for the kids, they could have been sent to conversion therapy for any reason a parent might choose even if it was only because of the embarrassment having a Gay child could cause a family, or because the preacher man saying being Gay is the devil’s work.

Perhaps the kid liked art more than God’s chosen sport, football.

She wanted kids to be the victims of the political or religious beliefs of the uninformed.

Her bill would have made it illegal for those who are trained and work impartially with children, like Child Welfare, the Oklahoma Commission on Youth, the Department of Mental Health, and the Health Department, to voice any objection.

The system of referrals and delivery of services would have been totally unregulated.

There would have been no oversight of services defined as Conversion Therapy, and without inspection and oversight, including the ability to investigate a complaint, children sent to conversion therapists could have been exposed to quackery, snake oil salesmen, religious charlatans, and even child abuse and molestation conveniently passed off as therapeutic techniques.

Thankfully there were enough intelligent people at the state house to kill that bill.

But she wasn’t done.

She wanted to make legitimate therapy more difficult to obtain

“No counselor, therapist, social worker, administrator, teacher
or other individual who provides counseling, guidance or
instructional services for a public school, public school district
or technology center school district may refer a student under the
age of eighteen (18) years to, nor provide the contact information,
business card, brochure or other informational materials of an
individual, organization or entity not employed by or under the
direct control of the school district in which that student is
enrolled if the referral or information provided pertains to human
sexuality without notifying the parents or legal guardians of the
student either by email, personal phone call or text message
at least twenty-four (24) hours prior to making the referral or
providing the information”.

This would have harmed more than GLBT kids, and considering that a very broad definition of “Human Sexuality” can be applied, and will be, if history and experience count for anything,  it could have applied to any positive GLBT information and the advertising of GLBT student friendly things like PFLAG, Community events, sources of information, or anything to do with safe spaces. It could be used to deny GLBT students necessary information not denied equally to religion, even though religion deals with human sexuality in many ways.

Students would have been forced into harmful silence as they may have feared having whomever they talked to call their parents and outing them, or, worse, avoid asking important questions as they might feel they would have been putting whoever the school related adult is in a terrible position and could have been responsible for any adverse action taken against that person by school administration.
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Sally was asking to be able to legally abuse students mentally and emotionally. She wanted to scar them for life and be excused for doing it.

This would have violated both Oklahoma City School policies on Bullying, Harassment, and Nondiscrimination, and those of any town in OK with similar policies, and even the Equal Access Act as Gay/Straight Alliances would have been deemed as dealing with human sexuality.

The assumption that GSAs are all about sex exists.

This woman would not be happy until she had gained control over the lives of children, and had forced her beliefs on people who otherwise would not accept them.

What she could not accomplish by preaching her interpretation of the Gospel, that would be bringing people closer to the God of her making, she attempted to do by legislation.

She wanted to ruin children’s lives and adversely affect their future all in the name of her god, using the state legislature to do it.

She wanted to legalize child abuse.

But time was not on her side as she now has to leave the legislature because of term limits.

However, she now has time to pursue her crusade, and it is beyond a doubt that she will.

Although I am no longer a member of the GLBT Community in Oklahoma, I was contacted by people dealing with Sally Kern’s ongoing aggression, and ask to do a series of cartoons for them. I was more than happy to do so, and did.

I am glad for the part I played to slow, if not stop, her crusade when I was a resident of her state, but I feel for those who may be spending more time than a person should dealing with the damage this person may decide to keep on attempting.

On Tuesday, May 24th, Freedom Oklahoma, an Oklahoma GLBT advocacy group will be sending Sally Kern off in style as they celebrate the end of her term in Oklahoma State House.

Oklahoma could have gone down the path of North Carolina and Mississippi, but Freedom Oklahoma, after the onslaught of 27 anti-GLBT bills faced in January, managed to defeat everyone of them.

Now, we have the opportunity to take the next step in securing protections for our community. We are saying goodbye to over 20 members of the Oklahoma legislature this term – including Rep. Sally Kern, and we need to find allies to replace them.

“We picked her for very obvious reasons,” Freedom Oklahoma Executive Director Troy Stevenson said. “She said some pretty atrocious things about the LGBT community. I don’t know that any legislator in this country has said worse.”

“I can tell you all LGBTQ Oklahomans look forward to Rep. Sally Kern’s last day in public office,” said Toby Jenkins, executive director of Oklahomans for Equality in Tulsa. “She has given 12 years of constant attack against gay, lesbian and transgender Oklahomans. She believes what she believes, and she is not even open to the idea that she might possibly be wrong.”

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The 43rd anniversary of the moment when Anita Bryant was pied in the face by Gay rights activist Tom Higgins during her interview for her crusade against homosexuals was just a few days ago.

While most people knew her as an American singer who had four Top 40 hits in the late 50s and early 60s, the former Miss Oklahoma1958 who made it to Second Runner-Up in the 1959 Miss America Pageant, and then the face of the Florida Citrus Commission, smilingly reminding us that a day without orange juice was like a day without sunshine, for some, and a sizable some, there was the side, the nasty, demeaning side hidden behind the orange juice smile that the general population didn’t see because it didn’t touch them directly.

She was also an outspoken opponent of Gay rights running the Save Our Children” campaign to repeal the local ordinance in Dade County, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, using the false Christian belief that Homosexuals were after children for recruitment to some “lifestyle” they insist exists, and molestation as her weapon.

She said such things as,

  “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children”;

“If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters”

And,

“All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God’s continued help we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation,”

all while referring to Gay people as “human garbage”.

Not content with her activities in Florida, which, although successful at the time, brought about a national boycott of Florida orange juice with Gay bars not serving any drinks with orange juice and the idea spreading to ally bars, politicians, and social justice advocates, an action that would bear results, she went national most notably with her anti-Homosexual campaign inspiring the Briggs Amendment in California which would have made pro-gay statements regarding homosexual people or homosexuality by any public school employee cause for dismissal in effect, besides preventing GLBT students access to, at times, lifesaving information while making verbal harassment and bullying on school campuses directed toward GLBT students unstoppable, Gay teachers could be purged throughout the state.

It failed. 

When I taught in Los Angeles I worked with and knew many fine teachers who would not have been there had Anita Bryant been successful, nor would I have even been hired as I would not be allowed to teach.

Times were changing, and Gay people, in becoming more open and visible, revealed that we were as normal as Straight people, and reality began to push aside religious based false fantasies.

Her activism began to be seen as the fanaticism it was, and there was fallout from it.

The Singer Corporation rescinded an offer to sponsor a possible weekly variety show, and the Florida Citrus Commission allowed her contract to lapse after her divorce, a divorce that killed off her Christian fundamentalist audience with invitations to appear at their events drying up which meant the loss of a major source of income.

Although divorce went against her firmly held religious beliefs, since it affected her directly, she eventually came to the belief that,

“The church needs to wake up and find some way to cope with divorce and women’s problems.”

A series of failed businesses in which she was involved with her second husband ended in bankruptcies, a series of unpaid employees and creditors, and unpaid state and federal taxes.

In explaining their divorce, Bryant’s first husband blamed the Gays by playing the victim, claiming those who reject being victimized by him and the Missus were in the wrong for not accepting it, saying,

“Blame gay people? I do. Their stated goal was to put her out of business and destroy her career. And that’s what they did. It’s unfair.”

It would appear that the people who rallied others to victimize people based on lies so they could lose their jobs and homes is what was unfair, not those people refusing to be further victimized. 

The woman who had worn her religion on her sleeve and worked to have her religion the basis of civil laws applicable to all citizens, when asked just a few years ago her views on Gays, she said, in my opinion patronizingly, dismissively, and hypocritically,

“I’m more inclined to say live and let live, just don’t flaunt it or try to legalize it”.

She had caused such damage to Gay people and threatened to do more.

So that is why the pie was thrown.

During Bryant’s fading years, I was living in Oklahoma when Brad Henry was elected governor. He was young, a Democrat, and a creature unique in that state at that time, a Liberal politician. I was on the Board of a political committee in the GLBT Community of Oklahoma City who backed him during his campaign as he spoke strongly for the rights of GLBT people. We helped on his campaign with time and money, and this resulted in our getting an invitation to his inaugural ball after his election.

Henry was popular and this led to having three settings at the ball. On one floor there was a child-oriented room with games, child friendly eats, and adult supervision. The governor had children. Another floor had the Blue Room for those who had donated money and/or given of their time up to a certain level. The third floor had the Gold Room for the high-end donors. Most such events would have just had the one Gold Room for the moneyed and influential, but, because of the guy he was, Brad Henry extended the invites beyond the “elites” while still keeping them feeling special.

 The Board I was on met the requirement for the Gold Room, and, as with other organizations being appropriately identified, our table had a sign sticking out of the centerpiece with our organization’s name on it. 

We had opted to abandon the totally irrelevant boy/girl seating pattern for the more relevant boy/boy/, girl/girl or whomever you came with pattern, and at dessert were chattering like children planning to do something naughty about going to the dance as the true couples we were, rather than dancing like Heterosexuals.

It may not seem so now, but this was in the Buckle of the Bible Belt that was Oklahoma in 2003, quite close to what 1958 had been in other states when it really had been 1958, at a state wide function of the state’s movers and shakers where there was a lot of press, and where such an action would not go unnoticed, perhaps the very opposite with unknown reactions, so this was one of those little moments that was actually a pretty big deal.

It was a time in that place when anything done by a GLBT person openly as themselves with no shame or fear was most likely the first time it was done out of the closet making it “A First”.

While we were whispering, the MC for the evening had introduced the local, well known dance band whose leader then introduced its guest performer for the first set as the woman who used to sing with them way back before she became famous, and the dancing began. We hadn’t heard the singer’s name over our and the tables’ around us talking.

We walked into the middle of the dance floor and added a little Gay club spirit to it, dancing men with men and women with women, cutting in and mixing up couples, ending up most of the time right below the singer and getting a lot of thumbs up from the other dancers who I thought were signaling that they supported what we were doing.

That would have been enough to show we were among allies.

However, as it turned out, it wasn’t just that we were unabashedly dancing as the Gay people who had earned our invite just as the other people on or near the dance floor that they thought was great, but more that we had been dancing right below Anita Bryant, herself, as she sang her set just above our heads.

Those of us dancing had no idea of this until the set ended and we were approached by a lot of happy people as we left the dance floor who could not believe we had not only taken the bold step of dancing as Gay couples so freely and proudly, but we had taken the further step of doing it blatantly under the gaze of Miss Anita.

It was a big thing, the memory of which makes me proud to have known, been with, befriended, and worked with the people who sat at the table and danced for the Community.

This was that moment in time.

Those at the table who took that step on to the dance floor that night, at least the ones I can remember after the intervening 17 years, were Edward Kromer and his spouse, Paul Bashline, Anthea Maton, a wonderful artist, Margaret Cox, a power house in the fight for women’s rights in general and Lesbians’ in particular, Tom Mac Donald who, perhaps just doing instead of considering possibilities, came up from the Blue Room to the Gold Room with his date because, well, there was live dance music, and me.

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In the opening years of the 21st Century, the volunteer organizers of the Oklahoma City Gay Pride parade and festival, realizing that the permit to use a city park for the annual one day community festival that preceded the Sunday evening parade actually covered the whole weekend from Friday evening to Sunday evening, decided to take advantage of what was available, but up to then not used.

The plan was to have some form of musical event on Friday night followed by two days of the usual festival activities of information booths, vendors, food, and entertainment, culminating in the annual parade, and letting the greater community know that everyone was invited.

In spite of its being the Buckle of the Bible Belt, the Pride parade was the biggest parade in the city, and the festival one of the most attended, and eventually even the state tourist board would recognize this and include it in its tourist guide.

But back then there was a need to advertise the expansion of the festival, tout its importance to the whole city community, and, perhaps, attract a bigger crowd. It would still be geared to the GLBT community and the celebration of its pride, but it would also become welcoming to all people so they could see how diverse, and, as was also necessary, how normal GLBT people were to counter the cartoonish representations presented by churches and extremely conservative politicians.

Nothing would be compromised or “toned down” as there was no reason for that.

The national theme chosen by whoever chooses them was not relevant to Oklahoma City as it was geared toward those cities whose GLBT Communities had made much more progress than we had, and so we would have been celebrating what we had yet to be celebrating.

We chose to celebrate the strength and hard work of the community in the fight for its rights in spite of the odds, and used the graphic of a powerful locomotive and Dolly Parton’s version of Peace Train for advertising. We constructed a model steam engine with two box cars on a flat bed trailer, strung it with lights, and made it adaptable for any parades we could get into to advertise the festival and parade that year.

It was rather surprising how many local Christmas parades accepted our application for inclusion, and that made it necessary to add piles of white puffy material to have the train plowing through snow with Christmas gifts in the box cars.

There were banners on both sides stating who we were and what we represented, and along with the Rainbow Flags flying from the 4 corners of our float, it was not a closeted thing.

We originally intended to walk along beside the float wearing rented animal costumes, but because the cost of renting both the bodies and heads made the cost of this prohibitive, we marched as animal bodies with human heads.

Peace Train played on a continuous loop as we tossed candy and strings of beads into the crowds, and the response from the spectators was positive, unlike the negative responses we had anticipated, and we saw that the people did not fall in line with the religious leaders and politicians who, while pushing their animus toward GLBT people, were obviously out of touch with the general population.

It was after our participation in the Norman, Oklahoma Mardi Gras Parade that we received an invitation that was historic.

For many years, GLBT communities throughout the country had been suing St. Patrick Day Parade organizers in their communities to be allowed to march in their communities’ parades. Because of the continuous denials, their suits and the news stories about them had become as annual as the parades.

The invitation we received was to be part of the Oklahoma City St Patrick’s Day Parade.

On the morning of the parade as we “Irished up” the train float with plenty of green and pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, the person who was in charge of the flags was a no-show. This meant we had to go to a local flea market we had passed when bringing the float to the staging area where we had seen a rainbow flag flying along with MIA-POW, Harley- Davidson, and Confederate Flags on poles above a flag vendor booth. The Hells Angels, ZZ Top looking guys who manned the booth were surprised when we told them why we needed to purchase four Rainbow flags, and got a good laugh at their unknowingly flying the Gay Flag along with those others. As an aside, they continued to fly that flag with the others for many years after.

A problem in the wider GLBT community is that its own media pays a lot of attention to the large city communities while very little is paid to smaller communities and none, if any, to rural places. The GLBT Community was making great strides in GLBT rights, but major victories in Oklahoma were ignored in favor of covering even the most minor win in the big name cities. And it is not because they are not aware of these victories in the “second tier”, flyover places.

While the bigger news story should have been that without any law suits, the GLBT community in Oklahoma City had been invited to participate in the parade, the story the GLBT media covered was that Chicago had finally won its suit while Boston and NYC, as well as other big name cities, had, once again, failed to win theirs.

The OKC parade stepped off one half hour before the one in Chicago which means that the GLBT contingent in OKC was already marching when the Chicago parade began. As a result, not only was the OKC GLBT community the only community invited to be in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade, bypassing the need for lawsuits, but it was also the first to actually march in such a parade.

The big news in the GLBT media that day was Chicago. The bigger news was Oklahoma City.

It has been 16 years since history was made, but during those years which major city has won or lost its law suit, which major city GLBT community will or won’t be allowed to march continues to be the coverage of St. Patrick’s Day parades.

Not once in those years has what happened in Oklahoma City been mentioned.

So I am trying to get the information out by going around the selective media.

Not only was the Oklahoma City GLBT Community invited to be part of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but it was also the first GLBT contingent to march in one.

The more you know.

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 When Trump took office after claiming to have been the Best Friend the Gays Ever Had  and then began to remove hard won rights of the Gay Community while tolerance and patience were requested, this blog explained how patient the Gay Community had been and continues to be, although with more activism and less patience.

  Stop telling me to relax and give Donald Trump a chance, especially if you are not in any of those groups of Americans who stand to lose under the policies he has articulated and the people he is choosing to surround himself with as cabinet members, Department heads, and advisors. If you aren’t GLBT, female, any color other than White, an immigrant, a child of an undocumented immigrant who was brought here as an infant, or a person with a disability you have nothing to fear, so stop telling me I don’t either.

     Many of the “Give him a chance crowd” voted for him because they did not like seeing what they thought were their privileges being reduced in any way, and by “reduced” I mean shared with those who had been historically denied what was theirs by right of citizenship and that everyone else had.

     No one is attempting to take anything away, but they have been attempting to get that which should have always been theirs too, and to get those who had all their rights to see that this was not so for everyone.

     Those who were afraid they will lose their rights, or simply do not want to share them with other American citizens and voted as they did, are the last ones to tell people to relax and lighten up as what they now have is going to be taken away unless Donald Trump in word and Deed lied to his supporters.

     When it comes to GLBT rights, I keep hearing references to gains made in the last eight years being under threat, but which apparently can be regained with a little work.

     But the reality is that those gains did not happen because of the last eight years, but, using Stonewall as a starting point, they were finally acknowledged after 40 years of work, and that those who did the work for those 40 years are about to see things potentially going back so the same work will have to be done again.

     There are some older people who had finally begun to experience that for which they fought, and were happy in the belief that they would be the last generation of GLBT people who had had to live in the conditions against which they fought.

     Saying the gains happened in 8 years is to dismiss the years that it took to get those gains.

     To give a better perspective, these are some major actions, battles, and successes that took place during my lifetime, and I am more than eight years old:

1951: The Mattachine Society, the first national Gay rights organization, is formed by Harry Hay, considered by many to be the founder of the Gay Rights Movement.

1955: The first Lesbian-rights organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis, was established in San Francisco in 1955.

1956: Daughters of Bilitis became a pioneering national organization.

1962: Illinois becomes the first state in the U.S. to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.

1966: The world’s first the Transgender organization, the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, was established in San Francisco.

1969: The Stonewall Rebellion made the GLBT Rights Movement one universal equal rights and acceptance.

1973: The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders, and Harvey Milk ran for city supervisor in San Francisco on a socially liberal platform and opposed government involvement in personal sexual matters. Milk came in 10th out of 32 candidates, earning 16,900 votes, winning the Castro District and other liberal neighborhoods. He received a lot of media attention for his passionate speeches, brave political stance, and media skills

1976: San Francisco Mayor George Moscone appointed Harvey Milk to the Board of Permit Appeals, making Milk the first openly gay city commissioner in the United States. He then ran for but lost a State Assembly race by fewer than 4,000 votes. Because he believed that the Alice B. Toklas Gay Democratic Club would never support him politically, Milk co-founded the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club.

1977: Activists in Miami, Florida passed a civil rights ordinance making sexual orientation discrimination illegal in Dade County. But this brought Anita Bryant into things with her Save Our Children organization, a Christian fundamentalist group, and in the largest special election of any in Dade County history, 70% voted to overturn the ordinance.

1978: On January 8, having run against 16 other candidates, Harvey Milk was sworn in as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and he sponsored a civil rights bill that outlawed sexual orientation discrimination, with only one supervisor voting against it, and Mayor Moscone signed it into law.

     John Briggs proposed Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative, the purpose of which was to fire any teacher or school employee who publicly supported gay rights, whether or not they were Gay themselves. Partly because of the Briggs initiative attendance greatly increases at Gay Pride marches in San Francisco and Los Angeles. President Jimmy Carter, former Governor Ronald Reagan, and Governor Jerry Brown spoke out against the proposition.

On November 7, voters rejected the proposition by more than a million votes.

On November 27, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another San Francisco city supervisor, who had recently resigned and wanted his job back. The San Francisco Gay Democratic Club changed its name to the Harvey Milk Memorial Gay Democratic Club.

1979: About 75,000 people participated in the National March on Washington for Gay Rights in Washington, D.C., in October. It was the largest political gathering in support of Gay rights to date.

1980: At the 1980 Democratic National Convention held at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Democrats took a stance supporting Gay rights, adding the following to their plank: “All groups must be protected from discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, language, age, sex or sexual orientation.”

1981: On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter with a report on an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP)  in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. Because of a June 1982 report of a group of cases among gay men in New York City, the syndrome was initially termed “GRID”, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency until health authorities realized that nearly half of the people identified with the syndrome were not homosexual men, and the name was changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). But the original name had given false fuel to those with anti-Gay animus.

     Because it was originally thought that only a ignorable population was getting AIDS, through the lack of both policy and financial support the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was severely handicapped during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The Reagan Administration did not understand the essential role of Government in disease prevention, and had no interest in addressing it anyway in spite of the CDC’s clearly documented dangers of HIV and AIDS early in the epidemic because, benefiting from pandering to the religious right, it went along with the religious right’s claim that it was God’s punishment being delivered unto the Gays. By refusing to deliver prevention programs, the Reagan Administration allowed HIV to become more widely spread rather than being kept under control.

     This resulted in local GLBT Communities having to design their own programs to deal with AIDS which included networks of doctors and the creation of hospices, as well as counselors for patients and those left behind in the event of death, a model that was adopted by mainstream society when it was finally accepted that everyone could get AIDS.

    It also called for resistance to politicians proposing total isolation of people with AIDS, the worst example being William Dannemeyer, former U.S. Representative from California’s 39^th district from 1979 to1993, who advocated for enforcing mandatory quarantines for people with AIDS which included Manzanar style internment camps from which people with AIDS could never leave and to which no member of the family or friends of the quarantined could ever go and visit since he believed people with AIDS emitted a spore that caused infection and anyone who visited would not be then allowed to leave as they would have been exposed and could carry the exposure home with them.

     By 1989 there were 27,408 reported deaths, many yet to die, and many more infected with HIV, many of those, assuming it only hit Gay men, had no reason in their minds to get tested, and so were not only unaware they were infected, but in ignorance spread the virus to millions more.

     By 1995, AIDS was the leading cause of death for adults 25 to 44 years old with about 50,000 Americans dying of AIDS-related causes. African-Americans made up 49 percent of AIDS-related deaths. But death rates began to decline after multi-drug therapy became widely available, a practice which in the early years of the epidemic resulted in a doctor who was effectively treating his patients in this way having his medical license revoked by the state of New York.

     There are 1.2 million people infected with HIV, and it is strongly believed 1 in 8 Americans are infected, but just don’t know it.

1982: Wisconsin became the first state to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

1984: The city of Berkeley, California, became the first city to offer its employees domestic-partnership benefits.

1993: The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was instituted for the U.S. military, permitting gays to serve in the military but banning homosexual activity. Although President Clinton intended this to be compromise with those who wanted to keep the prohibition against gays in the military, it led to the discharge of thousands of men and women from the armed forces.

On April 25, an estimated 800,000 to one million people participate in the March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. The march was a response to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. The march also protested rising hate crimes and ongoing discrimination against the LGBT community.

1996: In Romer v. Evans, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s Amendment 2, which denied Gays and Lesbians protection against discrimination, calling the discrimination protection  “special rights.” According to Justice Anthony Kennedy, “We find nothing special in the protections Amendment 2 withholds. These protections . . . constitute ordinary civil life in a free society.”

2000: Vermont became the first state in the country to legally recognize civil unions between Gay or Lesbian couples. The law stated that these “couples would be entitled to the same benefits, privileges, and responsibilities as spouses.” But marriage was still defined as heterosexual.

2003: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that sodomy laws in the U.S. were unconstitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.”

In November, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that barring gays and lesbians from marrying violated the state constitution. The Massachusetts Chief Justice concluded that to “deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage” to gay couples was unconstitutional because it denied “the dignity and equality of all individuals” and made them “second-class citizens.”

2004: On May 17, same-sex marriages became legal in Massachusetts.

2005: Civil unions became legal in Connecticut in October.

2006: Civil unions became legal in New Jersey in December.

2007: In November, the House of Representatives approved a bill ensuring equal rights in the workplace for Gay men, Lesbians, and Bisexuals.

2008: In February, a New York State appeals court unanimously voted that valid same-sex marriages performed in other states must be recognized by employers in New York.

In February, the state of Oregon allowed same-sex couples to register as domestic partners allowing them some spousal rights of married couples.

On May 15, the California Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. But influenced by conservative “Christian” groups, most noticeably the Mormon Church, on November 4, California voters approved a ban on same-sex marriage called Proposition 8 which threw into question the validity of the more than 18,000 marriages already performed. Although the California Supreme Court upheld the ban in May 2009, it ruled that those couples married under the old law were still legally married.

November 4, voters in California, Arizona, and Florida approved the passage of measures that banned same-sex marriage. Arkansas passed a measure intended to bar Gay men and Lesbians from adopting children.

On October 10, the Supreme Court of Connecticut ruled that under the state’s Constitution same-sex couples have the right to marry, and that the state’s civil union law did not provide same-sex couples with the same rights as heterosexual couples.

On November 12, same-sex marriages began to be officially performed in Connecticut.

Now the “last 8 years” begins

2009: On April 3, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously rejected the state law banning same-sex marriage, and twenty-one days later, county recorders were required to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

On April 7, the Vermont Legislature voted to override Governor Jim Douglas’s veto of a bill allowing Gays and Lesbians to marry, legalizing same-sex marriage. It was the first state to legalize gay marriage through the legislature, not the courts..

On May 6, the governor of Maine legalized same-sex marriage in that state, but citizens voted to overturn that law and Maine became the 31st state to ban it.

On June 3, New Hampshire governor John Lynch signed legislation allowing same-sex marriage. The law stipulated that religious organizations and their employees would not be required to participate in the ceremonies. New Hampshire was the sixth state in the nation to allow same-sex marriage.

On June 17, President Obama signed a referendum allowing the same-sex partners of federal employees to receive benefits. They would not be allowed full health coverage, however. This was Obama’s first major initiative in his campaign that promised to improve Gay rights.

In December, after 12 years of advocacy that included dealing with at least half a dozen superintendents, changes in School Board members, a bevy of reprimands, a court case prompted by actions that resulted from some opposition, multiple appearances before the  Board by many people, at least one connected death, possibly two, some rather strange behavior on the part of administrators, including “Family” members, and some of the most far fetch arguments in opposition, the school board of the Oklahoma City Public Schools finally voted to add the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to its policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination.

2010: March 3, Congress approved a law signed in December 2009 that legalized same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia.

August 4, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause writing “Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment. Proposition 8 perpetuates the stereotype that gays and lesbians are incapable of forming long-term loving relationships and that Gays and Lesbians are not good parents.”

December 18, the U.S. Senate voted 65 to 31 in favor of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, with eight Republicans siding with the Democrats to strike down the ban. The ban was not lifted officially until President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed that the military was ready to enact the change and that it wouldn’t affect military readiness.

On Dec. 18, President Obama officially repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy.

2011: June 24, New York passed a law to allow same-sex marriage making it the largest state that allowed Gay and Lesbian couples to marry.

2012:February 7, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled 2–1 that Proposition 8, the 2008 referendum that banned same-sex marriage in state, was unconstitutional because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the ruling, the court said that the law “operates with no apparent purpose but to impose on gays and lesbians, through the public law, a majority’s private disapproval of them and their relationships.”

February 13, Washington became the seventh state to legalize Gay marriage.

March 1, Maryland passed legislation to legalize gay marriage.

May 9, President Barack Obama endorsed same-sex marriage. “It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he said. He made the statement days after Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan both came out in support of gay marriage.

Nov. 6, Tammy Baldwin. a seven-term Democratic congresswoman from Wisconsin, prevailed over former governor Tommy Thompson in the  race for U.S. Senate and became the first openly Gay politician elected to the Senate. Maine and Maryland voted in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, and voters in Minnesota rejected a measure to ban same-sex marriage.

2013: Feb. 27 several Republicans backed a legal brief asking the Supreme Court to rule that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right. More than 100 Republicans were listed on the brief, including former New Hampshire Congressman Charles Bass and Beth Myers, a key adviser to Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential campaign.

March 26, the Supreme Court began two days of historical debate over gay marriage as it considered overturning Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act.

April 29, Jason Collins of the NBA’s Washington Wizards announced in an essay in Sports Illustrated that he is gay becoming the first active athlete in the NBA, NFL, NHL, or MLB to make the announcement.

May 2, after same-sex marriage legislation passed in both houses of Rhode Island’s legislature, Governor Lincoln Chafee signec it into law.

May 7, Governor Jack Markell signed the Civil Marriage Equality and Religious Freedom act, legalizing same-sex marriage for the state of Delaware.

May 13, in Minnesota, the State Senate voted 37 to 30 in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. The vote came a week after it passec in the House.

June 26, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional by 5 to 4 vote. The court also ruled that the law interfered with the states’ right to define marriage.

Aug. 1, Minnesota and Rhode Island began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Oct. 21, in a unanimous vote, the New Jersey Supreme Court rejected Gov. Chris Christie’s request to delay the implementation date of same-sex weddings. Same-sex couples in New Jersey began to marry. When just hours later, Christie dropped his appeal to legalize same-sex marriages, New Jersey became the 14th state to recognize same-sex marriages.

Nov. 5 Illinois became the 15th state to recognize same-sex marriages when the House of Representatives approved the Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act

Nov. 12, Hawaii became the 16th state to recognize same-sex marriages when the Senate passed a gay marriage bill, which had already passed in the House. State Senator J. Kalani English said, “This is nothing more than the expansion of aloha in Hawaii.”

2014: Jan. 6, The United States Supreme Court blocked any further same-sex marriages in Utah while state officials appealed the decision made by Judge Shelby in late December 2013, creating a legal limbo for the 1,300 same-sex couples who had received marriage licenses since Judge Shelby’s ruling.

Jan. 10, The Obama administration announced that the federal government would recognize the marriages of the 1,300 same-sex couples in Utah even though the state government had just decided not to do so.

May 19, Same-sex marriage became legal in Oregon when a U.S. federal district judge ruled that the state’s 2004 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage violated the Equal Protection clause in the U.S. Constitution.

May 20, a judge strucl down the same-sex marriage ban in Pennsylvania. Until then the state did not even recognize domestic partnerships or civil unions.

Oct. 6, The U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear appeals of rulings in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin that allowed same-sex marriage.

Nov. 12, The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request to block same-sex marriage in Kansas

Nov. 19, A federal judge struck down Montana’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Nov. 20, The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request to block same-sex marriage in South Carolina making it the 35th U.S. state where same-sex marriage is legal.

2015: June 26, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry and that states cannot say that marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples. “Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

July 27, The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) National Executive Board by a 45-12 voted to end its ban on gay adult leaders. The new policy does still allow church-sponsored Scout groups to ban gay adults for religious reasons.

2016: But even with the June 26, 2015 landmark Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, the GLBT community is still fighting against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations.

On May 13,  President Obama weighed in on the “toilet wars”—legislation being hashed out in some states about which bathrooms transgender people have the right to use—with the guideline: students may use bathrooms according to their self-identified gender.

Saying the gains happened in 8 years is to dismiss the years that it took to get those gains.

     So being told to lighten up is to be told to forget what you did to get this far.

     No, we old warriors have a right to be angry, some were killed in the effort and many died in the 80s because we were not worthy of the country’s attention, and the beneficiaries of our work should also be aware that what took 65 years of fighting to gain is about to be taken away, and they need to do what is needed to stop that.

     In some places, especially Massachusetts, young GLBT people, not so much the T’s since they have just recently received protections, have lived without housing and employment discrimination, went to schools where legislation requires that school districts have policies and procedures to prevent and deal with instances of bullying because of sexual orientation and, now, gender identity, and teachers have to attend mandatory workshops to learn how to handle it, and same sex marriage has been around most of their adult lives.

     The older people know what will come if certain things happen under this new administration, and will think, “Crap. We have to do all that fighting again?”, while the younger GLBT people will wonder what the hell happened and ask, “What do we do now?”.

     Four words to remember, First Amendment Defense Act.

     Discrimination is back nationwide if this bill passes, and the president signs it. He has indicated he will.

     “Be of good cheer” may be a warm and fuzzy biblical bit of advice, but tell that to someone being mistreated, and it loses its warmth and fuzziness.

      So don’t tell me I have some obligation to relax, get over it, and wait and see what happens.

Am I being cautious or paranoid?

                                                

When I started my blog some 10 years ago, first on a parent website and then independent, I thought doing one a day was going to be easy. I was retired, after all, and had the time to do cartoons and write my opinions down that could only be a parttime exercise at best during my years of teaching. I had no idea that at times, like the past administration, there would be multiple daily cartoon ideas that in rough draft or final product had to be discarded as the president followed one bumble with another each more impressive than the last, with a final cartoon settled on just before I went to bed hoping nothing that could cancel its relevance would happen before the timed publication as I slept.

However, I will be heading to a reunion of people with whom I spent a good part of my youth, those formative years from 14 to 21. Some I have seen since and some are to be met again for the first time, in one instance my English teacher from 1964.

Facebook may keep many in touch now but being in the same room with these people is a whole different and greater level.

Since this is Gay History Month (yes, I call it that and have earned the right to do so), unless I have the time, I will repost previous blogs dealing with large and small moments in Rainbow History.

I have chosen the ones involving History with which I was involved.

If time permits on the trip, I will blog in real time, but as reunions go, that time could be greatly limited.

So, here is some Gay History.

October is GLBT History Month.

There are many stories out there and a lot of history. Throughout October I will be including some of my own story mixed in with the political blogs.

This entry relates how the major part of my adventure in the Oklahoma City School District began, and I have included pictures of the GLBT History Month poster, now an unbelievable 23 years old, that played a major role.

Compiled in the last years of the last millennium, it is shorter than what would be listed today as more history has been made and more people have become active in the struggle for GLBT rights and closet doors have been removed more quickly and in greater numbers.

October being National Gay and Lesbian History Month, in 1999 I prepared a poster to hang on one of my classroom bulletin boards that consisted of the same four-hundred and fifty names of Gay people I had listed on a very large, oversized poster that had hung in my middle school classroom for two years. The poster listed various groups of people, from politicians, artists, and religious folk to sports and historical figures. It also contained people from many ethnic and racial groups. It was a very inclusive list that I simply hung on the first Monday in October, making no reference to it whatsoever; the words “Famous Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual People” being the only indication of what the list was.

I had made the poster while I was staying at the home of a Lesbian teacher with whom I had worked at the middle school, and who was beginning a relationship with another good friend of mine from the same school where we both worked. I had temporarily moved in with her after a particularly difficult break up with my significant other, and had helped her when she was taking certification classes for school administration by editing and correcting the grammar and spelling of the various reports she had had to write. For all intents and purposes we were like brother and sister. I had helped her handle the break-up of her most recent relationship, and was very supportive of the new one she was forming. I had no idea that once she became a substitute administrator at the high school, for the sake of moving up and keeping whatever position she would obtain, her attitude would turn completely negative toward things Gay related. As a matter of fact, she would eventually become the most anti-Gay administrator at the school when she became assistant principal and had a chance to become the principal.

Knowing that for many of the students, if not all, actually seeing such a list publicly displayed with no shame or embarrassment would in all probability be a new experience, I was prepared for whatever reaction they might have, hoping, of course, that it would not be too negative. I was quite pleased and proud of their reaction as it went from a small degree of shock and a little laughter the first day, to calling friends in between classes on the second day to see “The Poster”, and finally by the third day looking at it like any other piece of information that a teacher might hang in a classroom. They were mature about it for the most part.

There was one senior in my third hour class that I referred to as the “Rebel Without A Clue”. Somewhere along the line he had dropped out of school, moved to another state, held a job, and for whatever reason chose to return back home to finish his senior year. He only needed one final semester of credits to graduate and felt that because he had been in the real world, he was beyond the other seniors and my equal as an adult. He rebelled against anything and everything presented to the class without taking the time to assess it, never taking the time to see if he actually would have liked some of the things we did. He promoted his rebel image without restraint.

He was absolutely adored by another student in the class who was having some personal problems both at home and in school, and who apparently saw in his rebelliousness something to admire, with her adoration so intense he could do no wrong. She looked on him with puppy eyes, and if we watched a video she would make sure her hand fell close enough to him in order to lightly caress the back of his neck when the lights were The day came when he thought that my treatment of the class was demeaning. In reality, because he was often absent and constantly indiscriminately rebellious, he was unaware of those times when I was joking with the class, and the class was joking along with or back at me. Class to him was like returning to some show on cable after going through all the stations with the remote expecting to pick up the original show where you left off. Apparently he assumed the class froze while he was away from it, so long standing jokes or references to something that happened during another class escaped him. He did not seem to understand that occasional visits to class interfered with continuity when he stood up in class on the third day of the poster’s appearance in reaction to a joking remark I had made to another student, and gave a rather incoherent and totally out of touch speech condemning my negative attitude toward the members of his class and my obvious ignoring of his equal standing with me. As he stormed out of the room announcing he was going to report me to the assistant principal, his most adoring fan rose to join him in his walk out. Once he was gone, and the laughter of the other students subsided, we returned to what we had been doing. Even the students did not see his action as appropriate or even called for.

On their way to the office the “rebel” and his moll were met by another student who had only been in my class for two weeks, and had only attended twice, and the three continued on to find the right assistant principal to whom to report. At the time, the assistant principals were not the disciplinarians needed at a middle-class, “inner-city” high school. They each favored the students from their own ethnic groups, and students knew which was the best one to go to in order to get what was wanted, or avoid the discipline that was called for.

Toward the end of my last class on the day of the very mini-walk-out I received a note from the Dean of Instruction (an invented position without much of a job description which put the holder of the job at the mercy of those administrators with identifiable job descriptions) requesting that I come to his office before leaving for the day.

The three students had reported on me to an assistant principal. Two of them were concerned about what they considered my less than acceptable treatment of my senior class with the “Rebel Without a Clue” voicing the complaint while his adoring fan merely nodded in agreement. The third student, who had joined them in the hall and was not privy to what had happened in the classroom that or any other day, had chimed in that she was offended on religious grounds by my Homosexual Poster, but the other two had said that as they had Gay friends the poster did not bother them. The vice-principal they had gone to referred the matter to the Dean of Instruction as he was the one that was to evaluate my teaching performance, but the only complaint he was directed to address was the poster. The other complaint was never dealt with. It was simply ignored.

Since I had not only worked with the Dean at the middle school, but he was the one who had pursued my transfer to the high school, we were on friendly terms. He admitted he was aware that I had had a similar poster in my middle school classroom and was aware of my work with the district to include GLBT students in policies on bullying, harassment, and non-discrimination, but he had been told to deal with the complaint, and so he was doing just that.

I explained that October was Gay and Lesbian History Month; that it was important for the students to see during this month that there were many Gay people who had made major contributions to western civilization just as it was important for other groups during other designated months like Black History Month, or Hispanic Heritage Month to see what their people had contributed; and that Gay students see that there were actually positive role-models for them. My confidence was bolstered by my involvement on the district’s diversity committees and the committee chair‘s advice regarding the spirit of the policy as opposed actual language.

In spite of his acknowledging that these were lofty goals, his concern was that I could not justify the poster on the grounds of multiculturalism as the various cultures were not represented; only Gay people were. His argument smacked of the erroneous belief that “Gay” was a white man’s thing, and revealed that he had not bothered to actually read the list, or the names of Asian-Americans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans would have been noticed.

His suggestion for remedying the situation was for me to go out that night and expend my own time, energy, and funds on purchasing posters that represented all minority groups, something my poster already did. I asked if I would be required to do the same when I acknowledged the months set aside for other groups such as Black History Month, or Hispanic Heritage Month, and if he or the person who objected to the poster would be willing to give me the funds to oblige this suggestion. My poster, after all, was already inclusive, so this would be an extra, unnecessary expense. I also let him know I could not follow his suggestion because I was attending the “Stop the Hate Rally” that was taking place that evening at the Myriad Gardens in downtown Oklahoma City, the irony of which to me was just short of pointed.

He then suggested that in the future I seek permission from an administrator before posting anything that someone might consider controversial. As I did not see information natural to Gay people to be controversial, I did not see how I, or any teacher for that matter, could anticipate what an individual might perceive as, or choose to call, controversial.
As far as I was concerned, when that meeting ended he had done as he was directed, having spoken to me about the complaint, and I had justified why the poster should hang in spite of the single complaint lodged.

The following day before classes were to begin, the Dean of Instruction entered my room by the front door giving my room a quick survey before exiting out the back. Later that morning a student office aide delivered a note from the Dean of Instruction requesting that I report to his office before leaving school for the weekend, a meeting at which he expressed his disappointment at my not following his suggestion, and further suggesting that it might be a good idea to remove the poster by the beginning of the school day on

I gave the situation a lot of thought over the next two days, and concluded that to take down the poster would not only be a negative message to Gay students and their straight peers as well, but it would go against what I had been trying to do with the district and would legitimize the complaint of one student out of a student body of over 1400 students and a class load of well over 150. And, as I was following the spirit of the Diversity policy that the committee had been working on, the feelings of the members of that committee, and the explanation of the chair when asked what we should do in light of the absence of our final proposal and wording, I saw my actions as being supported by the district and its policies.

And so it was on that Monday morning as he once again passed through my room before classes began that I gave a letter to the Dean stating that I chose not follow his suggestion to remove the poster because it would not be in the best interest of the Gay Students or their peers; it contained people of all ethnic and racial groups; and that the student who allegedly complained was from the majority religion, race, and sexual orientation who had many outlets at her disposal including Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Bible study groups and a host of heterosexual related school sponsored activities. I went further to point out the uniqueness of the treatment of this poster as teachers did not have to have planned posters reviewed by administrators, and many classrooms featured posters not directly related to the curriculum. My poster served a valuable purpose.

A student office aide came to my room during the first class that morning to deliver a summons to the Dean of Instruction’s office. I replied with a quickly written note that explained in writing that I was leaving at noon to make sure I arrived on time for the funeral of a friend‘s mother, and, therefore, could not make the requested 1:00 p.m. meeting.
As I was dashing through the hall a little after noon, the dean met me and asked for a convenient time to meet. I suggested the next morning, but not too early as we would both probably want our morning coffee. We set the time of the meeting at 8:45 a.m., and off I ran.
After the funeral I returned home to find a message on my answering machine from the news department of a local T.V. station asking me to call the news director. Thinking they had reached me in error, and wanting to let them know that in case the story they were following was important, I returned the call and was asked for my reaction to the impending reprimand to be given to me at the meeting to take place at 8:45 the next morning. Obviously I could not give a reaction to the news of which I was not aware, and although I did verify to the news director that there was to be a meeting between the Dean of Instruction and myself in the morning, I could not confirm that I was getting a reprimand. Further, I was confused as to how she could possibly have known about it before me anyway.
It turned out that the parent of the student who complained about the poster had apparently called the news department after someone from the school had called him with the information about the purpose of the next morning’s meeting. I did not know how to handle this violation of my rights if it were true, and agreed to call the news director the next day with my reaction if I did get a reprimand, but only after I had time to deal with it. I then immediately called the local chapter of my union to ask advice.

I am convinced, although I cannot prove the suspicion, that the funeral interfered with the time-line that was to have had our meeting take place that afternoon before the parent of the student who complained was to be called as a way to pacify him. Apparently he had threatened some sort of protest in front of the school if the poster was not removed, and someone felt this could be avoided if the parent was kept informed about how I was going to be handled.

If we had had the meeting that afternoon, whoever called him could have reported a reprimand was given. As it was, he could only be told I was about to get one. Still, this was a personnel matter which should have been addressed with me before announcing it to the public.
For the rest of that evening there were quite a few phone calls made between me and the union, the union and the central administration building, and me and the head of the public relations department of the school district to get advice on the parameters I must follow with the press as an employee. I went to school headquarters to meet with the P.R. director who never returned to her office, and had to settle with contacting her at a child‘s birthday party by way of her emergency pager number, only to be told to avoid anything related to personnel matters.
To get away from the situation I attended a political affair at a club in the hotel in the Gay District where the president of the local American Federation of Teachers managed to trace me down to tell me that the deputy superintendent was asking me not to go to school in the morning to avoid any potential demonstration that my attendance might provoke, and to ask if I would mind going to my classroom to help remove objectionable material. Neither of us thought I would even consider that last request.

Apparently the principal feared that the parent had organized a picket line, and he wanted anything the parent might find objectionable removed from my classroom before school the next day so that if the parent somehow got to my classroom in the morning he would not see anything to which he could object. To this end, the principal had gone to my room that evening with the Dean and an assistant principal to remove anything Gay related, but found he had to contact the union president to see if he could get me to go to the classroom and help remove things. His major concern by the time the union president found me was a huge chain with rainbow colors on it that the student had included in those things that bothered her, having now expanded her complaint beyond the poster. The chain could not be found, and the principal feared that if the parent saw it in the morning there would be a scene. The fact that he was in the room and unable to see the chain should have been an indication of the extent to which the student had exaggerated her discomfort with those things in my room.

I refused to report to the school on the grounds that I would not be party to the removal of the “Gay things” and my expressed fear that to enter the school so far after hours could set me up for a charge of trespassing.
That night on the nine o’clock news there was a report on my poster featuring the father of the complaining student accusing me of “teaching homosexuality” when Bibles and prayers were banned from schools. The student also appeared in the reporter‘s video looking threatened and emotionally injured, expressing offense at this affront to her religion. My name was mentioned, and the parent reported that I was to receive a reprimand the following morning as proof that I was in the wrong.

The following afternoon I was contacted by the local station which had aired the report asking for my comment on the reprimand they thought I had received earlier in the day. I told the news director that I had been asked to take the day off, which would not count against my personal sick days, so I had had no meeting and had not received any reprimand yet. I agreed I would contact her if I got some direction on how to handle this as it was all new to me, and, therefore, a little unsettling. The news director then asked if I would speak to a reporter in general terms, but I asked for some time to consider this.

Hearing nothing from the district, and with support coming only from the Union and a few friends, I called the local station back a little later in the day agreeing to talk. Upon the arrival of the reporter and cameraman to my home, the reporter asked if she could see what the fuss was about, and I handed her a copy of the list of names I had hung on the bulletin board. She was markedly disappointed that it was merely a list with no pictures, saw no actual story in it, and then sat and read through the list occasionally expressing disbelief in a name or expressing satisfaction that someone she had suspected was indeed included.

We spoke for at least thirty minutes covering the importance of Gay and Lesbian History Month, why it should be treated just as all the other history months were, and why I thought the poster was a positive thing. As she was leaving and I thanked her for what appeared to me to be a positive interview, she told me that in all reality there was no story here. That night the station ran a little from the story of the night before, showed about thirty seconds of me showing the list to the reporter and explaining the impotence of acknowledging Gay History Month, and that was it.

Well, at least that was it for that episode, but it was the beginning of events that took the next 10 years to resolve to the benefit of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender students in the district.

Remember when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey and certain GOP senators from red states voted against federal aid money to deal with the damage because they were liberal states and this somehow made helping their citizens somehow un-American?

Then when Houston got hit by enough of a storm as to cause extensive flooding and senators from there pushed their rowboat up to the capital to load it with funds for the good Americans.

California is drying up and having wildfires more often than before. Hurricane season has begun with a wallop and promises to be intending more, and many East Coast location, red and blue are going to get hit. We have seen rains bring huge floods. It is clear that FEMA needs more money, and that would call for more standby funds.

As Ian approached, on September 24, after Biden approved emergency aid to the state, the federal government began coordinating a response and moving food supplies and had more than 1,300 responders prepared in case the damage caused by the storm was as predicted or worse.

As Ian was clobbering the islands on its way tom Florida, the senate voted on a bill that would allow for billions in general disaster relief with some going to hurricane recovery efforts.

The bill included an additional $18.8 billion allocated to FEMA that could be used for Hurricane Ian, however, 25 senators refused to vote for the bill with Rick voting against it and Marco Rubio skipping the vote.

The bill passed anyway, and then Ian rammed into Florida.

Within hours of voting against additional funds in one case and just not seeing enough reason to do vote either way in the other, both Scott and Rubio requested funding to “provide much needed assistance to Florida” in a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee chairs.  

In spite of his lack of support for increased FEMA funding, when asked after the stot, how FEMA was doing, Rubio replied,

“they’ve all been great. As I’ve said, the federal response from day one has been very positive — as it has always been in the past and we’re grateful for that.”

At least being the first big storm of the season, by Rubio’s thinking the state of Florida was very fortunate to get the funds first before others might need and good luck to those citizens who will be hit last.

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If it is so that personhood is attained at conception, if the future mother lives alone in a single apartment with the lease agreement stating that additional residents will result in a rent increase, will she have to pay that increased amount, perhaps with back payments, obviously without the other tenant contributing anything toward rent while benefiting from living there at the mother-to-be’s expense.

Will car-pool lanes become available to pregnant people?

At the movies, will one adult and one child ticket purchases be required as, I would assume, they would be on busses and trains.

Will the entrance to places or the participation in any activity that involves the phrase “one at a time” make certain places inaccessible with participation in activities denied.

And lastly, if for whatever reason the fetus is responsible for the mother’s death during pregnancy, a chemical anomaly, a poorly placed womb kick, or at birth, perhaps the baby’s reaction to passing through the birth canal making the whole process life-threatening in obvious and less obvious ways, or, as in my case, having to be manually turned around as my feet, facing the exit, rather than pushing out had any efforts on my part pushing up into my mother’s innards. She lived a long, happy life in case you wondered, but this could have gone differently if the Doctor was less than good or my mother’s constitution was weaker.

Such a fetus-person caused death would not have been a deliberate act on the part of the person, but an accidental one, an act of involuntary manslaughter that had many witnesses and cannot be denied. Would this person be charged with the crime, or would this be the case that shows that the law does not apply equally to every person?

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It’s not just another example of the canary in the coal mine which, if carefully looked into meant the warning only touched those near the cage. It was more like Cassandra running around telling the Trojans not to take the bit wooden horse inside the gates but, by the intervention of some petulant god, the people either ignored or simply did not hear the warnings.

Signs are there, but carefully subtle. Some know the big picture and the ways to get there. They are after all in charge and are the ones formulating the plan

As soon as the people of the city realize that all the upgrades of any kind like reconfiguring route 18, the Highway to Cove St., and this new wave of urban renewal and gentrification is not for the benefit of those who already live here, but rather the new people from Boston they hope to attract to New Bedford when the commuter rail connection is finally complete, the opposition to change will become more focused, but, sadly, too, late.

In past blogs I have mentioned the true history of New Bedford Mass as opposed to the incorrect impression of the city that is based on passed down misinformation and the need to justify white flight and using it as a political weapon in election years like the present Bristol County sheriff who resurrects the image of roving bands of immigrants taking jobs and public assistance while threatening the city with crime ala Dickensian London and its street thieves.

The intention of city leaders began to become clear  when, in spite the passage of a 2016 ballot question that sought to halt charter school expansion, the mayor of the city gave away the Kempton Elementary School free of charge to a charter school with no offset to the taxpayers and calling for people in that neighborhood to, like the victims of gentrification, find some other school while the for-profit charter school business can make a profit and the public school district would lose $15 million annually.  

For ten years the school district worked to improve the schools by introducing new, innovative programs that did just that and raised the graduation rate from 59% to over 80%. It instituted college level courses and worked with area colleges and universities along with businesses to make for a more inclusive education with more future opportunities for students.

Charter schools are supposed to offer something different, not what is already there. What charter schools claim they can do, the city’s public school district had already done, They are not needed here as they are in cities that have not done what New Bedford did, and they actually weaken the very programs that revived the school system over the last 10 years.

Another group of people got together to form a charter school business, with hopes, it would seem, of possibly getting a free school building just in time to have seats to offer to the people moving here because of the train.\this charter school was str0ngpy opposed by the community and eventually the company decided not to come the New Bedford.

This might seem like a victory for the vigilant in the community, but just as was the case with the Kempton School give-away, there could be a secret, backdoor meeting with the parties who will benefit without any input from the school board or anyone not in those meetings,.

The canary in the coal mine.

Property management companies, mostly from out of town and state, have begun purchasing properties at prices far above the local cost of living but, sadly, below what the price of housing elsewhere is, and the rents of apartments are doubling and tripling.

There is money to be made as the city reawakens, but it is not for the people already here who have been keeping the city alive.

The target of all the buying, building, remodeling, and rent increases are those with the reason to  move here but who may have some reluctance or hesitation about having their children schooled among the great unwashed. With new charter schools offering the same thing as the city has done successfully, newbies will assume the conditions in the public schools make charters necessary and want their children in them.

The charter school thing may have been a sign in that action that we all missed. A new park might be just what the children of then neighborhood needed, but they will not be the children there to use them.

For the sake of those replacing the displaced the city will be transformed.

There are signs.

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