Tennessee: The Stupidest State?

Remember last year when Bill Maher conducted a "stupidest state" contest on his HBO show, "Real Time"? If Maher were to rerun the contest, Tennessee would win hands-down. There wouldn't even be any close runners-up.

(tennessee gov. bill haslam)

Right on the heels of the Tennessee State Senate passing a "Don't Say Gay" bill, (click here), Gov. Bill Haslam signed new legislation into law last night which would prohibit cities in the state from passing anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT individuals. The bill, HB 600/SB 632, would bar local governments from instituting anti-discrimination policies that are stricter than the ones in force at the state level. Under state law, it is not illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. The city of Nashville already had a strong civil rights ordinance protecting LGBT's, but the new state law would immediately void it.

The new law has already caused a rift between the state and the major corporations which do business there. The Tennessee Chamber of Commerce lobbied for the bill, claiming that differing ordinances from city to city would create "a burden" on companies who wish to do business across the state, but unfortunately for them, many major corporations disagree. Whirlpool said that it "opposes this legislation, which runs counter to our core values of diversity and inclusion." Comcast issued a statement which said that the company "absolutely disagrees with the Tennessee bill: 'At Comcast, we believe it's simple: discrimination is wrong.'" Many other national corporations which have strong diversity policies, including protections and benefits for gays and lesbians, agreed with Whirlpool and Comcast.

We wonder how quickly this new law would disappear if suddenly many large national corporations left the state of Tennessee citing a little known corporate rule which forbades the corporations from doing business with a state mired in hopeless stupidity?

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam's biography sounds like he came straight out of central casting for the Republican Party. Haslam went to a private prep school, he went to an elite private college where he belonged to a young people's Christian organization, then he worked for his father, who owned an oil company. A multi-millionaire, Haslam spent over $8 million of his own money just to win the primary in his run for Governor. Wow. Sounds like if the people of Tennessee aren't happy with what's going on in their state, maybe they should start looking for politicians who are a little more in touch with what it's like for real people out there, and not just those at the country club. Ironically, (considering that Haslam just helped to create an anti-gay state law), Haslam once worked for Saks Fifth Avenue, a company which wouldn't exist without gay people. Please.

Tennessee's quick retreat to the 19th Century aside, politically, we have to say we told you so. Last fall, when it looked like the Republicans would take control of the U.S. House, we told you not to worry, that Republicans always find a way to quickly shoot themselves in the foot, and their majority wouldn't last long. And how true that prediction is turning out to be. While the Repubs ran on a simple promise of jobs, jobs, jobs!, on a national level they've so far spent all their time trying to destroy Medicare, and on local and state levels, they're pushing wacky and devisive stuff like this new Tennessee anti-gay law. Let's see, combine pissing off the majority of the country with the inability to pass any job bills, and voila! you've got the recipe for the biggest beatdown of the Republicans in 2012 we've seen in decades. Bring it on, bitches!

Pray The Rube Away

Tennessee is embroiled in a three-ring circus, and if you're not clued into this story you're missing the greatest show on earth. The State Senate of Tennessee just passed a "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would prohibit the mentioning of homosexuality in elementary schools. The bill was sponsored by Republican State Senator Stacey Campfield, who is 42 and unmarried, and considered somewhat of a loon by both Democrats and Republicans alike in Tennessee. We could write for days about this topic, but we'll try to keep to the highlights of the story.

In response to the bill's passage, former "Star Trek" cast member and openly gay George Takei made a video in which he joked that if the children of Tennessee aren't allowed to use the word "gay", that they could feel free to use his name Takei instead. His video was posted on Yahoo's main news page, and in response, all the right-wing, Christian, nut-job homophobes came out in full force, posting hundreds and hundreds of comments in Yahoo's Comments section. The tone of the hatred in their comments for the gay community was stunning, but what was even more unsettling is that there is still, in 2011, so much unbelievable ignorance and sheer, profound stupidity out there about what it means to be gay. We posted our own Yahoo comment in which we said, among other things, that "the people who hate minorities have been around forever; first they hated the Irish, then Native Americans, then Jews, then Blacks, then women and now gay people." One guy actually responded to our comment by replying, in all seriousness, that we didn't understand what we were talking about because all those on our list were born with that ethnicity or gender while "gay people aren't born that way, they choose that lifestyle". Wow.

Faced with that kind of jaw-dropping ignorance, it would be easy to start ridiculing the entire State of Tennessee as a bunch of backwoods rubes, and believe us, the more liberal folks who commented on the story when it appeared on the pages of The Huffington Post did just that. But as easy as it would be to write-off an entire state as hopelessly stupid, it's important to remember that many in the state of Tennessee have been working their butts off to defeat Sen. Campfield's bill, and to call it out for its stupidity. Evidently, hundreds of Tennessee high school students protested the bill every morning for weeks at their local high schools, wearing t-shirts and holding signs with slogans which detailed their opposition to the bill. So before you contact your local Congressmen and ask them to support a bill which would kick Tennessee out of the United States for "crimes against intelligence", remember that there are a lot of people in the state who are deeply embarrassed by the actions of their state senate.

For those who follow national politics, Tennessee's actions shouldn't come as a complete shock. This is the state which elected Marsha Blackburn to Congress, who combines the dopiness of Sarah Palin and the looniness of Michele Bachmann with all the self-righteous fervor of a demented Sunday school teacher who is just itching to sentence others to burn in hell who don't think like her. That woman is just fucking scary.

And for those who understand history know what we were talking about in our Yahoo comment. The people who are afraid of "those who are different" and who lash out in hateful ignorance are not new. The same people who are screaming about gay people now are the same people who screamed at the Little Rock Nine, the nine African-American students who integrated Little Rock's Central High in 1957. Unfortunately, in our society, these screamers never go away, (and they certainly never learn anything), they just change the "others" who they hate and at whom they scream. The same women, pictured at right, who screamed in Little Rock in 1957, (aren't they attractive?), are the same people screaming hateful comments on the pages of Yahoo in 2011. It's profoundly sad that these people never learn anything. Once, many years ago, Oprah Winfrey had a show in which she hosted members of the Little Rock Nine, and unbelievably, even managed to find some of those White Little Rock Screamers, and every Screamer related stories of how deeply ashamed they were of their behavior back in 1957, and they were deeply apologetic for how ignorant they had been in 1957. What's amazing to us is that it always takes the "screamers" a couple of decades to understand the shocking ugliness of their behavior and the recessive backwardness of their thinking. Why is it that the screamers in 2011 never learn anything from history? Especially in a state like Tennessee, which was already the laughing stock of the nation once before in the 1920's with its Scopes Monkey Trial.

In the end, as we were laughing at the comments about Tennessee on the pages of The Huffington Post, one comment in particular stuck in our heads. One lady said that it was a shame that the much-hyped "Christian Rapture" didn't actually come yesterday, or we would have been rid of these Tennessee rubes. Which led us to think, maybe the rapture did occur, and all these hateful homophobes were "left behind". Maybe that should tell them something.

The Devil Made Me Do It

So Ken Mehlman has finally come out of the closet. Yep, he's gay. Mehlman, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee and George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign manager, has announced he's gay. Many Washington insiders already knew this, but Mehlman has made it official.
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Oh, Ken Mehlman, what to say to you? You headed one of the most virulent, anti-gay political campaigns in history, all the while hiding your own gay identity. Mehlman stated to The Atlantic Magazine that he secretly tried to work behind the scenes during Bush's 2004 campaign to try to quell some of the anti-gay sentiment in his own party. Who knows if this is true, we weren't in the room, but we do know that you, Ken Mehlman, stood by while people of your own orientation were demonized, ostracized, made the scapegoats for the moral destruction of America, and even, in some cases, beaten to death.
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You, Ken Mehlman, worked to elect and helped to run a political party and a White House which promoted many state-wide ballot measures that banned gay marriage, which promoted George W. Bush's 2005 State of Union Address in which he called for a federal constitution amendment to ban gay marriage, which promoted the squashing of hate crime legislation, and which prevented its representative to the United Nations to sign onto a resolution condemning the criminalization of homosexuality.
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Maybe you, Ken Mehlman, did speak quietly behind the scenes to try to improve the situation, but you also angrily defended and promoted the very people whose mission it was to discriminate against us and to deny our very existence. You are a moral coward. There is a special place in hell for people like you, Ken Mehlman, but we suspect you're already living it just by trying to sleep at night and look at yourself in the mirror.
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But now, putting aside the pitiful spectre of Ken Mehlman's self-loathing aside, his coming out puts a lot of folks, Republican operatives and gay activists alike, in a very strange, uncomfortable position. For the crazy right wing, it's another blow to the head in trying to sustain their belief that homosexuality is a perversion and inherently wrong. It gets harder and harder, pardon the pun, to maintain that position, pardon the pun, when so many of your own political party continue to come flying out of the closet. As Republicans keep coming out, one would think that even the most hard-lined gay-bashers would start to suspect that maybe they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to human sexuality, and that maybe their past beliefs about being gay are... well, you know, wrong. But we doubt it. These are the people that have putting one's head in the sand down to a science.
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More importantly, what does our community do with a newly "converted" Ken Mehlman. Mehlman has stated that he wants to work hard to help overturn Prop 8 in California and to continue to work to ensure that gay marriage is accepted nationally. He's even already started to help raise funds for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the group which supported the legal challenge to Prop 8. Chad Griffin, a political strategist who organized opposition to Prop 8, and Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar winning screenwriter of "Milk", are openly excited about Mehlman's help. Great! Right? Not so fast. Isn't this a little like putting Lindsey Lohan in charge of happy hour at the local all-you-can-guzzle bar and grill?
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Where is our self-respect as a community? Is no one in the leadership of the Prop 8 opposition ranks going to stand up to Ken Mehlman and say, "We don't want your help."? Aren't we just like the pitifully sad John McCain, who at one time fought for campaign finance reform, but then when he desperately needed funds to win his Arizona primary yesterday, he ended up spending $20 million to do it? In other words, do we stand up against people like Ken Mehlman, but then when things get tough, cash in all our values and self respect to greedily accept their help? Even now, according to public reports on www.opensecrets.org, Mehlman is still giving campaign money to those very Republican politicians who are most decidedly anti-gay.
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Yes, we'd like to defeat Prop 8 as much as anyone, but not with Ken Mehlman's help. He needs to go away, and get some very strong psychiatric help, and slowly come back and try to mend some of the horrific damage he caused in our community. Yes, he's now a bit sorry for what he did, but he also very recently worked incredibly hard to deny our very existence and our rights of equality as American citizens. Letting him have a hand in gay politics right now is a little akin to letting the fox too near the henhouse. Or in terms that Republicans can understand, it's a little like letting the toe-tapper too near the airport bathroom stall.