Hate Speech. Brill.

[vain_chan]

Have you heard this?

"The homosexual agenda is destroying our nation, okay? It's just a fact. Not everyone's lifestyle is equal. Just like not everyone's religion is equal. [...] I honestly think it's the biggest threat that our nation has. Even more than terrorism and Islam..." - Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern before the Legislature
(sallykern

Comments

[vain_chan]

O_o Wow. Um . . . Okay. Yeah, she's a backwards moron, but I think you're mixing a few things up culturally.

Oklahoma is--for lack of a better term--a 'red' state--meaning that they're generally conservative. It's part of what's called 'the Bible Belt' because if you're going to find ill-educated, bible-thumping bigots somewhere, that's a good place to start. Not a defense, just a statement of fact that that's where people who tend to think like that live. Rep. Kern was, to the best of my knowledge, speaking before the education council on which she sits and was not aware that she was being recorded; she was not addressing the whole of the Legislature. Short of the Senate and the Congress, not all the state/commonwealth Legislative bodies in the U.S. are continually monitored via a live feed because, well . . . there are a lot of them. Over 100 if you include the territories. And C-Span doesn't exactly make the ratings.

The press did respond (a link to the comments on one of the articles is in the "Edit" section), and while there has been outcry, there have also been a bunch of idiots people supporting her too. Enough for me to stop reading the comments 2 pages in. Again, Bible Belt. These commenters are the same people who support Intelligent Design.

Homosexuality is not illegal in the U.S., but that doesn't mean that a lot of people like it. Particularly in those red states. Even among liberals, there are not a lot of generalizations that can be made about people's opinions on homosexuality; it seems to fall on religious line and gender-identity lines. And, for better or worse, the U.S. is a deeply religious country (study from 2003, but there are more recent ones available if you really want to Google it).

As for compulsory voting in the U.S., it doesn't exist. >.> In fact, for us it sounds like a very bad idea. Not only does that seem to be some sort of massive violation of the Bill of Rights and thus illegal (every non-incarcerated citizen over 18 has the right to vote, but no one can force you to vote), but I can't imagine any sort of way that that would be enforced on 3 million+ Americans. Not to mention the whole mess of absentee ballots, which are already a pain. No one is going to spend the tax dollars to hunt down Jane Doe in Prague so that she can rock the vote against her will while we've already got a national debt the size of a black hole. Add state and local elections to that across 50 states and X amount of territories while taking state versus federal rights and accommodations into account, and . . . well, I'm sure you can understand why things would work a lot different here. A bill like that would never even make it out of committee, let alone to the President's desk. And states tend to get pretty pissy when they think the federal government is stepping on their toes. The U.S. is still a united federation of States, despite the ueber massive powers of the federal government; everything (for the sake of argument) is really just a consensus among fifty groups.

That all being said, the chick is a nutty asshat. Her constituents either weren't paying attention when they voted her in or--even more scarily--were paying attention and agreed. I included her email and phone number in the hopes that people will contact her and let her know that what she said was out and out bigoted and thus, unacceptable. Still, don't judge the whole country's electoral process on the votes of a bunch of people from random-county Oklahoma.

Damnit. Now I'm upset because she's making us look bad in front of the other countries. >,,>