With the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 behind us, it’s important to reflect on the state of national security. For weeks now, pundits have been waxing philosophical about whether or not America is truly safer today than it was a decade ago. Most of them are full of shit, of course. Making people take their shoes off and confiscating bottles of water and cans of Aqua Net at the airport is Security Theater, pure and simple. After all, the failures that allowed the terrorists onto those planes 10 years ago were at the CIA and FBI level, not because some baggage screener missed a box cutter.
Still, there’s one threat that not enough people are talking about. A threat so dire that it makes terrorists look like Teletubbies (still scary, mind you, but comparatively harmless). That threat is, of course, homosexuality. But people are afraid to speak out. Afraid that the homosexuals will enact revenge on their families if they expose the terrifying truth.
One woman, however, is brave enough to speak in public about this terrible danger our nation is facing. That woman is Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kern.
You may remember that Kern has spoken on this issue in the past. A few years ago she called homosexuality “the death knell of this country.”
“I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat,” she said.
She then compared homosexuality to cancer: “If you got cancer or something in your little toe, do you say, well, you know, I’m just going to forget about it because the rest of me is fine? It spreads. OK? And this stuff is deadly, and it’s spreading, and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation.”
Mind you, Kern thought these comments were limited to the audience she was addressing. But somehow in this day and age when everyone has a cell phone and every cell phone has a camera and/or video recorder, her address was recorded, and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund had a field day making the video go viral. Kern and her right-wing apologists make a big deal about how the video was “selectively edited,” and yet she stands by what she said and continues to say the same thing.
In an Aug. 31 interview with Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, Kern restated and “clarified” her “gays are worse than terrorists” line of thinking, proving that her original comments were not taken out of context or misunderstood.
“You know if you just look at it in practical terms, which has destroyed and ended the life of more people? Terrorism attack[s] here in America or HIV/AIDS? OK?” she said. “In the last 15-20 years, we’ve had maybe three terrorist attacks on our soil with a little over 5,000 people regrettably losing their lives. In the same time frame, there have been hundreds of thousands who have died because of, uh, having AIDS. So which one’s the biggest threat?”
This is, of course, a completely faulty comparison. Not to mention the fact that it rests on the assumption that all gay people have AIDS and are using it as a biological weapon of sorts. Also, since Kern is so concerned about AIDS, I’m sure we can expect her to sponsor bills to increase HIV/AIDS research and prevention funding in Oklahoma.
Of course, to Kern, gays are a sort of biological weapon, sights set on all of the young people in America. Because gays are all about making everybody gay.
“And you know, every day our young people, adults too, but especially our young people, are bombarded at school, in movies, in music, on TV, in the mall, in magazines, they’re bombarded with ‘homosexuality is normal and natural.’ It’s something they have to deal with every day,” Kern said. “Fortunately we don’t have to deal with a terrorist attack every day, and that’s what I mean.”
See? That’s what she means. That gays are a constant, devious threat to the people of this nation and terrorists are only a sometimes-threat; therefore, being gay is worse than murdering someone. No duh and obviously.
And to think Kern is baffled that people call her homophobic and a bigot.
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock ’n’ roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister.