Do Tom Coburn and Alan Keyes have some kind of bet to see which one can sound nuttier?? If so, Coburn may be defying the odds and pulling into the lead.
The campaigns of U.S. Senate candidates Democrat Brad Carson and Republican Tom Coburn exchanged sharp remarks Monday over an August comment Coburn made about “rampant” lesbianism in southeastern Oklahoma schools.
At an Aug. 31 town hall meeting, Coburn said: “You know, John Burkeen is our rep down here in the southeast area. He lives in Coalgate and travels out of Atoka.
“He was telling me lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now, think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?”
School officials were confused:
Southeastern Oklahoma educators said they were mystified by Coburn’s August comments.
Joe McCulley, the school superintendent in Coalgate, chuckled when asked about the remark.
“I think he’s spreading rumors. He knows something I don’t know. We have not identified anything like that. We have not had to deal with any issues on that subject — ever,” McCulley said.
Hugo Superintendent Dwight Davidson also was puzzled by the remark.
“Going on six years, I have never heard of one incident of that nature,” he said.
The Carson campaign released the videotape, so there’s not much possibility that he was misquoted. Coburn’s spokesman said the remarks were, you guessed it, “taken out of context.”
I do wonder what the question was.
P.S. Rejected titles for this post include, “Ooohhh-klahoma, where the lesbian sex epidemic comes sweepin’ through the school bathrooms,” but it’s just too many syllables to match up with “where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain”.
P.P.S. One of the dorkier political discussion I’ve had is about which states have best/worst Senators. If Coburn wins and Barack Obama lives up to his promise, the question will soon be settled for liberals: Illinois is the best (Obama & Dick Durbin) and Oklahama is the worst (Coburn and James “Outraged by the Outrage” Inhofe).
P.P.P.S. All of this becomes a lot less funny when you read stories like these two. But note that it’s not just a red state thing–the two follow-ups are about a girl from Newark:
Survival is a part of everyday Newark, but for Felicia it intensified in May 2003 with the killing of her friend, a 15-year-old lesbian named Sakia Gunn, who was at a bus stop downtown when she rejected a man’s pickup attempt with the declaration that she was gay. A fight followed and Sakia was stabbed to death.
Everyone knows Matthew Shepard’s name, I think, and rightly so. Had any of you heard of Sakia Gunn? I hadn’t. I don’t know whether this is because I’m less well informed than I thought; because the death of a teenager in Newark is always considered less newsworthy than the death of a teenager in Wyoming; or because it doesn’t fit quite as well into the standard narrative about homophobia. Probably some combination.
I’m off on quite the tangent here, but a provision adding sexual orientation to the federal hate crimes statute was recently deleted by a conference committee even though both houses of Congress had voted in favor of it.
I know some people oppose all hate crimes laws, and that’s perfectly defensible–though it is beyond me why it is all right to elevate someone’s sentence from life imprisonment to death because he was motivated by “pecuniary gain”, but wrong to increase someone’s sentence because they were motivated by a particularly destructive form of hatred*. I know some people oppose federal hate crimes laws because they don’t want violent crimes handled by two different sets of prosecutors; that’s also defensible–though the provision Congress just rejected was written to minimize that conflict.
What is not defensible to me is saying that killing someone because they are black or white warrants an increased sentence, but killing someone because they are gay (or straight; the law applies equally to both sorts of crimes) does not. Not being murdered for your sexual orientation is not a “special right”.
*We also consider motive in our political asylum laws. It is not enough to show you have a well-founded fear of persecution; you must show you have a well-founded fear of persecution because of your race, ethnicity, religion, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
He was telling me lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.
Who is that one girl? And do all the other girls have to wait to go to the bathroom till they go home?
I’m sorry, Katherine. I realise this is a serious post. But when people come out with crap like this from Tom Coburn, I have two near-equal reactions: one is to mock, and the other is an unprintable scream of rage.
Homophobic bullying is a serious problem. It’s not caused by the presence of out gay students: it’s caused by the presence of bigotry among the students, and indifference (or active encouragement of bigotry) by teachers. Assholes like Tom Coburn mixing in are adding fuel to the fire. (The Safe Schools Coalition website for further information on this specific issue.)
No, don’t worry about it, it’s a totally schizophrenic post. It didn’t start out serious at all, but then I remembered that Post series….but mockery is still encouraged. For example:
If I were a reporter I would be so tempted to furrow my brow and ask Dr. Coburn an earnest question about the Self Abuse Pandemic sweeping the boys’ rooms. I guess asking about the medical side effects might be going a little bit over the top….
I would think that rampant lesbianism would be popular among young men if the lesbians in question were exhbitionist.
And yeah, it doesn’t seem like a workable school policy. I was thinking one girl per classroom could go to the bathroom at a time, but you’d obviously need to coordinate between all the classrooms on the floor or you’d risk just providing more privacy for the All Girl Action.
I seem to recall from high school that speculation regarding rampant lesbianism in the bathrooms was met with enthusiasm rather than concern.
And for a little blogospheric navel-gazing, is it gut check time for the Red State crew? I understand voting for someone on balance because you think the good outweighs the blemishes. But if the blemish is, among other things, bizarre gay-baiting? The good must be really good.
Doh! Sebastian by a nose.
The solution? Co-ed bathrooms!
“… where the porn grows as high as a lesbian’s eye!”…
Or that favorite showtune, “Lezzie with a fringe on top”.
I think the real question here is why aren’t lesbians “rampant” in the OK Oklahoma pan-handle. Does the proximity of both Texas and Kansas promote hetrosexual preferences?
Homophobic bullying is a serious problem. It’s not caused by the presence of out gay students: it’s caused by the presence of bigotry among the students, and indifference (or active encouragement of bigotry) by teachers.
Students at my high school would find any guy they could to taunt as being “gay,” regardless of that person’s orientation. It seemed to satsify some need. Any guy who was nonconventional in general, but particularly anyone who wasn’t good enough in sports or tall enough or strong enough was a fair target.
I watched something quite remarkable in my own life at high school. In the 9th and 10th grade, when I was tiny and scrawny, I got the “gay” thing a lot (OK, so there was something there)…BUT then, in the 11th grade, when I shot up like a tree, not only did my classmates drop the name calling, the coaches started inviting me to join the sports teams…suddenly I was a “jock.” Nothing about my demeanor/personality had changed (I was still gay trying to pass for safety’s sake). It was a perception shift in my class mates and teachers based on something as mindless as my physical appearance. I did join a few teams and enjoyed the attention that brought from fellow students, none of whom, suddenly, gave much thought any more to my orientation. It was really the strangest phenomenon.
What this taught me, though, was that 18 year olds don’t really have much of this figured out. What they do know, because their parents and society at large have taught them this, is that being “gay” is the worst of the worst. They often are confused about their own orientation, so it’s not like they’re genetically convinced being “gay” is wrong. All they know is that calling someone “gay” is to really hurt them or marginalize them. It’s power, and if it weren’t “gay,” it would be something else…I look forward to the day when the worst of the worst is “unkind.”
My high school changed completely from when I started to when my little sister graduated. It went from 0 out people that I knew of, to the gay-straight alliance becoming the most popular clubs and school, and even a little bit of experimentation being the trendy thing in some circles…Lesbian chic, in suburban Long Island. We couldn’t believe it.
I think it was always different for guys, though, and never easy. And just about every teenager is confused and insecure about these issues–I think that contributes to homophobia even among those will know better in a few years.
had other people here heard of the Sakia Gunn murder? I’m really curious to know whether it’s my own obliviousness or something else.
I seem to recall from high school that speculation regarding rampant lesbianism in the bathrooms was met with enthusiasm rather than concern.
As I’ve often remarked, I love it when Fred Phelps [Warning: not work-safe or, really, spiritually-safe] comes to town because teenage lesbianism runs rampant through the streets 😀
Back to the topic, I have to say that I find the whole scenario implausible. Crude chauvinism that it may be, how the hell did they get the girls to go to the bathroom one at a time? I thought that was genetically impossible…
had other people here heard of the Sakia Gunn murder? I’m really curious to know whether it’s my own obliviousness or something else.
I hadn’t, but that’s not really my beat. I’m not particularly surprised, though, because Newark *is* a hell-hole…
I wonder if Tom Coburn et al. would be able to prove their statements encouraging homophobia did not result in violent acts?
“I do wonder what the question was?”
The question was as follows:
“Dr. Coburn, can you think of anything else to blame liberals and Democrats for in this great country of ours, besides being gummint-loving socialist elitists, unAmerican traitors and baby murderers? You know, something that would really scare the American electorate into voting for you as well as making a pretty entertaining dirty movie which the libertarians in our big tent could make a tax-free buck from?”
That is a direct quote, taken out of the context of observing today’s Republican Party (usual exemptions provided) for the past (fill in a number) years.
Katherine: only through the article you referenced.
had other people here heard of the Sakia Gunn murder?
I hadn’t (and you’d expect that kind of thing to make the news in the Bay Area, given the demographics out here). Did the Gwen Araujo case get much play nationwide?
had other people here heard of the Sakia Gunn murder?
The saddest thing about Katherine’s 2nd WaPo link in her P.P.P.S. is that the poor guy managed to muster up some courage, then struck out with a guy at Abercrombie & Fitch, fer crissakes. If anything should have been a gimme . . .
I had heard of the incident, but I couldn’t have remembered her name if you held a gun to my head. Josh, the Gwen Araujo case was pretty well-covered nationally as far as I recall. It was often on Yahoo! News and in the WaPo, anyway. (I’ve known a lot of transgendered people, so maybe I was more aware of it than the average schmoe. There’s been a lot of such murders in Washington, DC as well.)
Linked here. No, I’d missed the Sakia Gunn story, and that whole post series, as well, but then all of my news/etc. reading has been drastically off the past few weeks.
One more thing: recently a lot of sites, and especially Republican sites, have expressed concern about incidents of politically motivated vandalism, violence and intimidation directed against them. Some people have expressed concern that Democrats were turning into “brown shirts.” Others have suggested that this was the “inevitable result” of the “plain hatred” directed against President Bush since his inauguration.
I think all of us, Democratic or Republican, agree that those crimes are reprehensible and disturbing–more disturbing than if the same crimes were committed with no political motive. Fortunately, no one has gotten hurt (as far as I know).
Now let’s compare that to the statistics on hate crime that the FBI collected in 2002. According to those statistics, there were 1,464 offenses commited that were motivated by sexual orientation bias. 1,440 of these, and 16.3% of all hate crimes, were motivated by anti-gay or anti-bisexual bias.
If you assume that all groups were equally likely to be victims of each type of crime (probably not a very good assumption, but I don’t have a better method), and round to the nearest whole number, in the year 2002, anti-gay or anti-bisexual bias was the motive for:
–2 murders
–1 rape
–169 aggravated assaults
–292 simple assaults
–506 incidents of intimidation
–21 robberies
–21 burglaries
–25 larcenies
–1 motor vehicle theft
–6 cases of arson
–383 cases of property destruction or vandalism
–2 other crimes.
–8 “crimes against society”, whatever that means.
recently a lot of sites, and especially Republican sites, have expressed concern about incidents of politically motivated vandalism, violence and intimidation directed against them. Some people have expressed concern that Democrats were turning into “brown shirts.”
The concern flows equally the other way, viz. Neiwert’s sterling work in that regard at Orcinus.
yeah, I know….but a lot of Republicans are skeptical of hate crimes legislation, yet they seem to think the motive of a crime matters when it’s anti-them. Well, this type of crime is a lot more common and a lot more severe.
I downloaded the full 2002 report. Here are the actual numbers for crimes motivated by anti-gay or anti-sexual bias:
4 murders
3 rapes
206 aggravated assaults.
414 simple assaults.
433 incidents of intimidation.
43 robberies.
19 burglaries.
16 thefts.
0 motor vehicle thefts.
6 arsons.
286 cases of property damage or vandalism.
So, they were especially likely to be serious crimes.
Also, gay men were targetted several times as much as lesbians.
Hopefully no one is committing anti-sexual bias crimes. I meant anti-bisexual.
“Also, gay men were targeted several times as much as lesbians.”
Might in part be the difference in population sizes. Actually in view of the relative stigmas I’d think the rates should be wildly different.
Actually in view of the relative stigmas I’d think the rates should be wildly different.
Hmmm… Well, judging by recent posts on Redstate, some Republicans feel it’s a “stigma” even to mention the fact that one of Dick Cheney’s daughters is a lesbian.
Which is absurd: Mary Cheney is completely out, she and her partner are part of the Cheney family, and the only thing to be ashamed of is that Dick Cheney didn’t exactly protest the Constitutional amendment intended to make his daughter and her partner second-class citizens of the US. And that’s hardly Mary’s fault.
Hmmm… Well, judging by recent posts on Redstate, some Republicans feel it’s a “stigma” even to mention the fact that one of Dick Cheney’s daughters is a lesbian.
Lynn Cheney should be proud her daughter is a role model for gay Americans. All the rest of this is shameless politicking by the Cheneys.
It seems odd that gay men would be targeted for violence more often than gay women, because you’d expect that men, being generally bigger and stronger, would be more difficult targets. Is the difference here one of what upsets/angers bigots more? Or one of gay men being somehow more visible? Or just more readily available as targets, due to doing more public pick-ups or something?
–John
Hopefully no one is committing anti-sexual bias crimes.
Only in teen slasher flicks.
Oddly, Edward, I had almost the exact same experience. I was certainly no more inclined to play the dominance games in high school. But the whole dynamic changed between middle school and high school, too.
Also oddly, there was one guy in middle school that everyone knew was gay, and he made no secret of it. And as far as I know, he was left pretty much alone. After high school, a few guys came out of the closet. I was a little disconcerted to discover that the swim team manager was one of those, but I got over it.
I was a little disconcerted to discover that the swim team manager was one of those, but I got over it.
Ahh…the epiphanies that await us regarding the complexity of human beings…
The disconcerting part was he was the guy who handed out towels when we were exiting the shower. He admitted that being a manager was worth it for just that reason.
So, ridiculous for it to be disturbing, but as you noted, the human psyche is nothing if not silly. Or complex, if you’d rather.
He admitted that being a manager was worth it for just that reason.
OK, so that’s a bit creepy.
Having lived in Europe for a while, though, where nude beaches are not that uncommon, I do think much of our “modesty” about being naked in front of people who may find us attractive is an insecurity we’d do ourselves a big favor to get over. Unless we’re willing to enter into the realm of the Thought Police, we have to content ourselves with the boundaries of acceptable behavior here.
Then again, I know straight men who are more than happy to be admired, in any state of undress, by other men, so again…there’s a wide spectrum of silly, complex psyches out there to contend with.
Odd, too, how getting something wrong is just exactly the same as completely fabricating a part of one’s life. Life continues to amaze.
Oops. Retract; posted this to the wrong comments section of the wrong blog.
Sorry.
As I said, Edward, it was a little off-putting but not that big a deal.
“the wrong comments section..”
AND
“the wrong blog.”!!!
I’m trying to think of something funny to write, but that was funny enough.
Edward, I’m wondering what you think is going on with the phenomenon of ‘down-low’. I’ve only read about it on the internet, and I’m not at all sure if my summary is correct, but it is a phenomenon among black men where they engage in gay sex, but refuse to identify with typical markers of gay identity. Is it real? If so, do you think it is a response to the perceived powerlessness of gays or to currents within the black community?
I found Edwards “you love your GAY DAUGHTER very much and are such a great parent to your GAY DAUGHTER” a little sketchy. I had no problem at all with Kerry’s remark, because when someone tells me that being gay is or may be a choice, I often think “say that to a real gay person’s face.”
Now that the Massachusetts constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is unlikely to pass, it’s much easier to appreciate Kerry’s general record on gay rights.
As for the differing rates of crimes: the most common crime is assault, most assaults are commited by men, and:
1. when you remove domestic violence from the equation–and hate crimes statistics do–I think most men are ashamed of beating up a girl.
2. they feel more threatened by gay men than gay women.
Katherine, I think it’s also an issue that it’s hard (in police blotter terms) to distinguish between violence against women as women and violence against women as lesbians. (It may also be hard for the men carrying out the crime to distinguish between the two motivations.)
Interestingly, the RNC (and Lynne Cheney) appear to be, uh, banging the drum of Mary Cheney with all the strength they can muster. I’m curious: what do the Republicans on this site think about their remarks?
Speaking strictly for myself, this is the first time I’ve heard of them. But I’m above-average clueless where it comes to the latest RNC talking points.
I found this on livejournal, and liked it:
To which I say, Damn right!
First of all, Mary Cheney is out and has been out for years.
In fact, her primary occupation for several years was in some sense contingent on her sexuality (Coors’ liaison to the gay community). That’s why I want to know how Republicans perceive this latest… well, I guess it’s a talking point, I don’t really know.
That’s why I want to know how Republicans perceive this latest… well, I guess it’s a talking point, I don’t really know.
I was depressed by a 48-comment thread on Redstate in which it appeared to be seriously claimed that saying publicly that Mary Cheney is a lesbian is an attack on her. Which is such complete nonsense that I cannot quite believe anyone would say it out loud. I should stay away from Redstate, but I was interested in Bush-supporter opinion of the third debate.
I was going to say the wrong comment at the wrong time on the wrong blog, but that would’ve been too obvious.
Edward, I’m wondering what you think is going on with the phenomenon of ‘down-low’. I’ve only read about it on the internet, and I’m not at all sure if my summary is correct, but it is a phenomenon among black men where they engage in gay sex, but refuse to identify with typical markers of gay identity. Is it real? If so, do you think it is a response to the perceived powerlessness of gays or to currents within the black community?
Yes, it’s real, but I’m not sure how prevalent it is. I know plenty of openly gay black men. Of course I live on the island they were all shipped off to. 😉
Re the phenomenon: between my partner, my friends, and myself, I have first-hand accounts of similar behaviors in nearly every corner of the planet. There’s hardly a culture I can think of where homosexuality is outlawed that doesn’t have it’s parallel.
As for it’s existence here in the States where it’s no longer illegal, I believe it’s the black community. I was watching Tony Brown’s Journal the other day and a very spirited guest (sorry I can’t remember her name) said it’s been the same for years here in the States: black people must be better dressed, better educated, better spoken, look better, smell better, and certainly be straighter to just break even with their white counterparts.
How it gets fixed: my sense of it is that self-loathing, like all kinds of hatred, is taught. Gay men who feel the need to continue to pass betray a solid education in homophobia. When their parents change what it is they teach their children, the practice will stop.
That’s my take on it anyway, but it doesn’t address the double challenge gay black men face, so….
though it is beyond me why it is all right to elevate someone’s sentence from life imprisonment to death because he was motivated by “pecuniary gain”, but wrong to increase someone’s sentence because they were motivated by a particularly destructive form of hatred*.
Both elevations are wrong because they are both attempts to legislate thought crimes. The standard for determining guilt is did the man kill someone for reasons other self-defense or the specific defense of another. The only reasonable elevation should be based on the question of pre-meditation.
Fascism and pseudo fascism
Sexism is an identifying feature of fascism.