JOAN-E’S RAG – JOAN-E’S HALL OF SHAME

Last week she listed her heroes, this week its the zeroes.

In my last article I featured GLBT straight allies whom I feel are heroes in our community. Of course, there were many more I could have mentioned, which is a very good thing. We continue to need those great voices to combat the many voices of hateful dissent in the world.

This week, I offer up my Hall of Shame with ten of those hateful voices. It’s a long read, but it’s important to know our enemies as well as we know our friends.

Anita Bryant

American singer and spokesperson, Anita Bryant had a string of hits in the 50′s and 60′s including the song “Paper Roses.” A member of the “Southern Baptist Convention,” the former second runner-up in the Miss America Pageant led a huge and sadly successful campaign to repeal the Dade County ordinance, which protected against discrimination on the basis of homosexuality. She has stated that “as a mother I know that homosexuals cannot reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children. If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes, people who sleep with St. Bernard’s and nail biters.”

Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell is an American Evangelical Christian preacher who founded the “Moral Majority,” an organization described as “pro-family, pro-life, pro-defense and pro-Israel.” Labeled the “founder of the anti-gay industry,” Falwell stated, “gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you,” and that the Metropolitan Community Church (the historic GLBT religious organization) is a “vile and satanic system that will one day be utterly annihilated, and there’ll be a celebration in heaven”. He claimed Teletubbie’s were trying to recruit children to be gay and blamed gays and lesbians for the 911 attacks in New York.

Jesse Helms

Jesse Helms was a five-term United States Senator who served as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995 to 2001. Not a friend of the African American community, Helms famously opposed integration, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and tried to stop Martin Luther King Day with a sixteen-day filibuster. His love affair with our community is similar. He apposed all gay rights legislation, opposed any funding of AIDS research and created the travel ban on HIV-postive persons travelling to the U.S. – the only such ban in the western world. Helms described gays as “weak, morally sick wretches.”

Dr. Laura

Initially quite tolerant of GLBT persons, Dr. Laura Schlessinger began showing up on the GLBT radar in 1997. Her U.S. national talk show began to change, becoming more conservative in nature. Ultimately, she stated that homosexuality was a “biological error,” compared GLBT parenting to pedophilia and suggested “conversion therapy” to cure homosexuality.

Larry Spencer

Canadian Larry Spencer once served as Member of Parliament for the riding of Regina Lumsden Lake Centre. Larry Spencer was elected to parliament in 2000 as a member of the then Canadian Alliance Party and served as the Family Issues critic. Prior to that he had been a minister in the Baptist Discovery church. In 2003, he announced that he would support any initiative to outlaw homosexuality in Canada. These comments, and a belief that gays were going to seduce and recruit young boys in playgrounds and locker rooms, forced his removal from caucus. He ran in 2004 as an Independent Conservative and lost to Tom Lukiwski.

Tom Lukiwski

Tom Lukiwski, a small business owner, was chosen by Canada’s Conservative party to run against Larry Spencer in the 2004 national election. Not to be outdone by his predecessor, in 2008 it was revealed that Lukiwski had stated on video tape that, “there’s A’s and there’s B’s. There are A guys like me, the B’s are homosexuals faggots who have dirt under their fingernails that transmit diseases.” He was re-elected to his seat that year.

Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum is a former Senator from Pennsylvania who has also has held the third most powerful job in the Republican Party. In 2003, Santorum stated that “he had a problem with homosexual acts”, and “that whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether its sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable traditional family.” Santorum, his record on GLBT human rights and his many comments on our community have inspired such hatred that within the gay community that the word “Santorum” is now used to describe … well, I suggest you Google it!

Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan, the Conservative Correspondent and Senior advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan has railed against the GLBT community for decades. He has said the following on AIDS: “gays have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.” He challenged several Mayors of New York City to cancel the Gay Pride parade or else “be held personally responsible for the spread of AIDS.” He followed all this by saying that sex between two men was “not only immoral but filthy.”

Fred Phelps

Fred Phelps and his family live on a family compound in Topeka Kansas and run the Westbro Baptist Church. Their regular events include picketing with signs that say “God Hates Fags” and protesting at performances of “The Laramie Project,” a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard. Of the play, Fred Phelps says, “the Laramie project is a tawdry little bit of banal fag melodrama – sordid, cheap, unaffecting, drearily predictable, without the least artistic or literary merit or redeeming social value. Indeed it’s only purpose is to promote sinful, soul damning sodomy by playing on the sick maudlin emotions of doomed godless America and there-by to recruit ill-bred teenagers to lives of sin, shame, disease, death and hell.”

Tim Hardaway

Tim Hardaway is a former National Basketball Association player and five-time All Star. During a radio interview Hardaway was asked his thoughts on fellow player John Amaechi, who had recently come out. Hardaway responded, “I wouldn’t want him on my team, I don’t think he should be in the locker room while we are in the locker room.” He went on to say, “Well you know I hate gay people, so let it be known. I don’t like gay people and i don’t like being around gay people. I am homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or the United States.” He said that if he had one or more gay teammates he would try to get them fired.

To end on a happy note, Tim Hardaway went on to show great remorse for his actions. Representatives for the YES Institute, where Tim has attended many classes about issues facing the GLBT Community, stated that Hardaway is genuinely sorry and has formed a real continuing friendship with their organization.