Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [32]
Unlike the secular humanists, militant homosexuals were not invented by theologians. In 1969, a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn sparked a series of riots that mixed violent resistance with flamboyant kick lines. One participant later published a firsthand account of the Stonewall Riots in a book called The Gay Militants. The riots catalyzed the formation of confrontational gay rights organizations, such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, which newspapers described as militant homosexual groups.
The right wing did not seem overly concerned about homosexuals throwing bricks at New York cops, perhaps because they had already given up on New York City as brimstone fodder, but when Miami introduced an ordinance in 1977 to guarantee equal employment and housing rights for homosexuals, the nascent right-wing myth machine roared into action. It began with a beauty queen.
Anita Bryant, former Miss Oklahoma, former mediocre pop singer, spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, Good Housekeeping magazine’s “Most Admired Woman in America,” was very concerned about discrimination, so she sent a letter to the Dade County commissioners who were to vote on the proposed ordinance. The letter stated:
I have never condoned nor teach my children discrimination against anyone because of their race or religion, but if this ordinance amendment is allowed to become law, you will in fact be infringing upon my right or rather DISCRIMINATING against me as a citizen and mother to teach my children and set examples or point to others as examples of God’s moral code as stated in the Holy Scriptures.ah24
Bryant’s rhetorical judo move to represent herself as the aggrieved victim of discrimination was one of the earliest instances of the Freudian projection that would become a staple of persecution politics. It was not Bryant who was discriminating against homosexuals; it was the militant homosexuals who were discriminating against her. You can almost hear Freud murmuring from his funeral urn, “They hate (persecute) me, which will entitle me to hate them.”
Bryant’s suffering, however, did not impress the Dade County commissioners, who voted 5-3 in favor of the ordinance. But Bryant was not ready to give up her right as a mother to discriminate against the homosexuals who were discriminating against her. She campaigned for a referendum to challenge the ordinance, declaring:
No one has a human right to corrupt our children . . . Before I yield to this insidious attack on God and his laws, and on parents and their rights to protect children, I will lead a crusade to stop it as this country has never seen before.25
Naturally, Bryant called her crusade Save Our Children.
Over the course of the campaign, Bryant reinvented the Militant Homosexual as a devious and deviant conspirator:
What we are standing up against is militant homosexuals who are highly financed, highly organized, and who were able to ramrod the amendment through in our city.26
The true objective of the militant homosexuals, according to Bryant, was not the right to hold jobs and buy houses. Since they were unable to reproduce biologically, their only hope of survival was “to recruit your children and teach them the virtue of becoming a homosexual.”27
In addition to pioneering the projection strategy, Bryant also wrote the script for the slippery slope to bestiality, fretting that if the gays were granted rights, “Next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail-biters.” The prospect of militant nailbiters and St. Bernardophiles unleashed on the streets of Miami was evidently even scarier than that of militant homosexuals. Thankfully, it has yet to occur, even though Miami homosexuals did eventually get their rights.