My friend Eugene Oregon noted today that a GOP lawmaker in Alabama is trying to ban books with gay characters from public libraries, including universities.
A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for “the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.” Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the “homosexual agenda.”
“Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle,” Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.
Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.
“I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them,” he said.
Just the kind of insightful brilliance we’ve come to expect from Alabama Republicans. It’s worth noting that Rep. Allen is an equal opportunity lunatic — he’d also ban books (fiction and non) that reference acts among heterosexuals that fall under Alabama’s sexual misconduct laws.
The Birmingham News reported that Allen’s effort could ultimately drive novels with gay characters such as “The Color Purple,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and “Brideshead Revisted” from library shelves and into his “big hole.” I wanted to add a book to the list — it’s called “Sisters” and it was written by Lynne Cheney, Dick Cheney’s wife.
In 1981, Lynne Cheney, part of a conservative movement that complains bitterly about popular culture and its negative effect on traditional families, wrote a lesbian romance novel. Laura Flanders, who was brave enough to read the book, described it as “celebrating and promotes the value of preventative devices, condoms, to women who want to remain free. It features a woman who has unmarried sex with the widow of her sister — all this by Lynne Cheney, the culture warrior of the right.”
In one particularly memorable, though poorly written, part of the book, Cheney wrote:
“Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.”
Best of all, as Taegan Goddard noted, the entire unedited text is now available online in blog format, so you can read Cheney’s novel without paying for it. I don’t imagine she’ll be complaining about this too much.
Maybe someone should print out a copy and mail it to Rep. Gerald Allen in Alabama. I’m sure he’d offer an interesting reaction.