I’ve never lived in South Carolina, and frankly don’t want to, and have only an outsider’s impression of the state. A story in today’s news doesn’t improve my opinion of South Carolina or the people who live there. If the good citizens of South Carolina want to be taken seriously, they’ll have to do better than this.
In a story picked up by AOL News today, “An openly gay chief of police has been fired by a South Carolina mayor who was caught saying he preferred alcoholics to homosexuals. Crystal Moore, a 20-year veteran with the Latta Police Department, … has not faced disciplinary action in her two decade career. … [M]any in the community, including city officials, are questioning whether the real motive behind the firing was … the fact he allegedly doesn’t like gay people. Council member, Jared Taylor, provided WBTW with a recording of a phone call in which the mayor makes several anti-gay remarks. ‘I would much rather have – and I will say this to anybody’s face – somebody who … drank too much taking care of my child than … somebody whose lifestyle is questionable around children,’ Bullard said on the call. ‘I’m not going to let two women stand up there and hold hands and let my child be aware of it, and I’m not going to see them do it with two men neither.'”
Well, that’s South Carolina hicks for you. It’s not fair to blame South Carolinians for embracing slavery or starting the Civil War anymore, because all of those people are dead, and most of the South Carolinians who joined the Ku Klux Klan and lynched blacks are dead now, too. But as this news item illustrates, South Carolinia remains a cultural backwater populated with more than its fair share of hicks, bigots, and ignoramuses.
I won’t pretend that Seattle, where I live, is a perfect utopia of understanding and tolerance. We have some idiots. But Seattle isn’t South Carolina. Most people around here are smart enough to figure out that seeing two women holding hands won’t cause kids to become gay. People in Seattle are better educated than South Carolina’s rubes and most of us know something about how chromosomes work. I have a brother with a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of California who wrote a textbook on animal social behavior and he says homosexuality isn’t exclusively a human behavior, it’s a biological phenomenon that’s been observed among a variety of domestic pets and wild animals. In short, you don’t learn homosexuality, you’re born with it, and it’s not something you can avoid or unlearn. I would be okay with people who don’t know this if they’re open minded about new information. The trouble with people like this South Carolina mayor is they have unshakable beliefs that no amount of science, fact, logic, or reason can penetrate. They’re convinced they’re right, and that’s that, usually with some preachy Bible-thumping mixed in.
I’m not gay. I’ve known gay people, and they’re okay, I personally wouldn’t marry them, but they work out fine in professional, business, and social relationships. I had an uncle, now deceased, who probably was gay. He never married and lived with a male friend for most of his life. I’m not positive he was gay, because people of his generation hid it, to avoid discrimination or worse. He fought in the Korean War, back when they didn’t have “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He was as good an American, as much a patriot, and as fine a soldier as anyone else. He deserved to be judged for his character and actions, not what some yahoo thought of his chromosomes. The smartest lawyer I know is a lesbian, and I have great respect for her professional abilities and accomplishments, and it doesn’t bother me a whit that she lives with a woman, or that she and so many others would happily click this link now instead of wanting to view a heterosexual alternative. It’s their life with their choices and desires to fulfill. I’d feel more comfortable leaving a child in her care than with that mayor. I have a lesbian couple as neighbors a couple houses down the street. They’re nice people, they love their dogs and take good care of them, and I don’t worry about how nature arranged their chromosomes, either. If Mayor Bullard has a problem with it, my suggestion to him is buy a house on my block, don’t move to my neighborhood, just keep himself and his idiotic prejudices in South Carolina, and that way he’ll get along fine with me and my neighbors.
You could argue that we need places like South Carolina. Otherwise, where would we put these people? As long as there are people like Mayor Bullard, we have to stash them somewhere. I don’t want Mayor Bullard in my neighborhood. We have kids here. 