Unmitigated Bigotry in Alabama

Oh, this really takes the fucking cake:

Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

"I don't look at it as censorship," says State Representative Gerald Allen. "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children."

Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple" has lesbian characters.

Allen originally wanted to ban even some Shakespeare. After criticism, he narrowed his bill to exempt the classics, although he still can't define what a classic is. Also exempted now Alabama's public and college libraries.

Librarian Donna Schremser fears the "thought police," would be patrolling her shelves.

"And so the idea that we would have a pristine collection that represents one political view, one religioius view, that's not a library,'' says Schremser.

"I think it's an absolutely absurd bill," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

First Amendment advocates say the ban clearly does amount to censorship.

"It's a Nazi book burning," says Potok. "You know, it's a remarkable piece of work."

But in book after book, Allen reads what he calls the "homosexual agenda," and he's alarmed.

"It's not healthy for America, it doesn't fit what we stand for," says Allen. "And they will do whatever it takes to reach their goal."

Who does this motherfucker think he is?! Censorship isn’t healthy for America. Bigotry isn’t healthy for America. Small-minded, sanctimonious, ignorant, prejudiced, witch-hunting, piece-of-shit dirtbags who bloviate about a fictitious “homosexual agenda” while simultaneously managing to find homosexual undertones in everything he reads aren’t healthy for America.

I love these fucking cretins who go on about how gays will do “whatever it takes to reach their goal” without the slightest trace of irony or the merest glimmer of recognition that the goal is simply to have the same goddamn rights as everyone else. How shockingly radical!

And who is it really that’s willing to do “whatever it takes” to reach their goal? When was the last time, in the name of pursuing equality, the LGBT community and their supporters asked that any piece of literature be banned? In other words, when have the LGBT community and their supporters ever championed ignorance? And that’s really what Allen is doing—he’s fighting for ignorance. He’s arguing to take some of the most amazing literature ever written in the English language—Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Alice Walker—and make it unavailable to children because he’s afraid they might learn to be tolerant, instead of a hateful, piggish malcontent just like him. He’s arguing to hide the timeless, breathtaking beauty of works like The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Color Purple, and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down because they may open the minds of their readers to the idea that gays are people, too. And those are just works from the three authors mentioned. Look at who else’s work Mr. Allen would be willing to get rid of, all in the name of preventing literature from doing what it does best—teaching its readers about how wonderful the world is, and the people in it:

Plato
Oscar Wilde
Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein
Henry David Thoreau
Virginia Woolf
Hans Christian Anderson
Walt Whitman
Proust
Willa Cather
Somerset Maugham
W. H. Auden
Lord Byron

And that’s just off the top of my head.

At least this explains their aversion to the Socratic method.

I wonder that Mr. Allen would have to say about this book I read once. It was about a dude who traveled around with 12 other guys and a prostitute, and they ate together, and slept together, and washed each other’s feet, and the main dude was always talking about how you’re supposed to treat other people like you want to be treated and all kinds of other liberal hippy shit. I dunno. It seemed pretty gay to me. We’d better ban that book, too.