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My wifey's home state continues to embarrass her

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Katie just can't catch a break from me. I tease her about Alabama's backward racist, homophobic ways, and then yet another story comes forth with characters you just cannot make up. Check out this story from the Birmingham News...Gay book ban goal of state lawmaker.
An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.


Homophobe redneck Gerald Allen, submitted the bill in advance of the 2005 legislative session, which begins Feb. 1

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

A spokesman for the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center called the bill censorship.

"It sounds like Nazi book burning to me," said SPLC spokesman Mark Potok.

If the bill became law, public school textbooks could not present homosexuality as a genetic trait and public libraries couldn't offer books with gay or bisexual characters.


Want to give him a piece of your mind? Here's his contact info (no email is available):
State House: Room 531
11 S. Union Street
Montgomery, AL 36130
Work Phone: (205) 556-5310
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2 Comments:
  • Crap like this just makes me sick. Burning, burying, cutting up books because they say stuff you don't like. The worst example of it had to be when fundies started burning Jane Yolen's "Briar Rose" because it had a gay character. A book about the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust, being burned. I'll just let that one sink in for a while.

    Should Allen's little moron law pass, he'll find me in front of the bulldozer, pulling an Arthur Dent.

    By Justin Cognito, at 2:48 PM  
  • It's just crazy-making. I cannot understand how this wingnut can be serious, or worse, get elected with these views. They are so fundamentally (pun-intended) unAmerican.

    By Pam, at 2:57 PM  

Pam :: permalink