Star politics: The echo of Anita Bryant

Daniel Desrochers
·9 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

On January 16, 1977, Miami-Dade County, Florida approved an ordinance that banned discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing and employment. The 5-3 vote came over the objections of people carrying placards that said “protect our children, don’t legislate immorality for Dade County.”

One of the speakers at the hearing was the singer and second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant: Anita Bryant. She said she was disappointed with the outcome “but this is just the beginning of our fight,” according to a Miami Herald article from the time.

She went on to found a group called Save Our Children, which led an effort to repeal the non-discrimination ordinance in Miami-Dade County. At one point the group took out a full page ad in the Herald where they said gay people used to be stoned to death and any tolerance developed toward the community was predicated on gays not “flaunting their lifestyle.” Bryant often suggested that gay teachers might molest children or recruit them to become gay.

Her campaign won overwhelmingly — around 70 percent of Miami-Dade residents voted on June 7, 1977 to repeal the non-discrimination ordinance.

This week kicked off Pride Month, the annual celebration of LGBTQ history and culture.

In the nearly 50 years since Bryant launched Save Our Children, there has been a rapid change in the public’s acceptance of LGBTQ rights. Same-sex marriage, which once seemed like a pipe-dream to many in the community, has the approval of 71 percent of voters, seven years after it became legal after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Fewer than 20 percent of Americans now think gay sex acts should be illegal, which was the law in some states until 2003.

Still the arguments used by Bryant remain.

In Florida, the legislature passed a law that forbids classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity for students in kindergarten through third grade. It also allows parents to sue school districts if they believe instruction in higher grades is not “age appropriate.”

Proponents of the Florida legislation argued that it was simply about protecting children from being exposed to concepts and ideas before they were ready. As opponents argued the policy would cause a chilling effect preventing teachers from mentioning a same-sex spouse or acknowledging that a student has two dads or two moms, conservatives began calling them “groomers.”

The term implies that teachers who speak about gender identity or sexual orientation are grooming children for abuse — an echo of the argument made by Bryant and Save Our Children.

The messaging made it to the U.S. Senate, where Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, spearheaded a letter to the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board asking them to update their ratings so parents could shield their children from LGBTQ characters. Instead of using the word “groomers,” Marshall and the five senators who signed the letter warned of “modeling behavior” where children imitate what’s presented to them on the television, concluding that people trying to show LGBTQ characters on screen are “suspect at best and predatory at worst.”

While both sexual orientation and gender identity were mentioned in Marshall’s letter, he tends to focus more on gender identity. Transgender people make up a small part of the population. Only around 0.7 percent of U.S. adults identified as transgender in 2021, according to Gallup.

Marshall opposes transgender rights and introduced a bill that would make it illegal for doctors to provide gender confirmation treatment to anyone younger than 18.

The bill hasn’t gone anywhere in Congress, but it’s part of a larger slate of legislation targeted at transgender children across the country. Others, like bills preventing transgender youth from participating in school sports that match their gender identity, have passed in a handful of states though a version was vetoed in Kansas.

One of the off-shoots of Bryant’s movement was an ordinance in California that would forbid gays and lesbians from being public school teachers, once again citing concern over children. Trailblazing gay politician Harvey Milk traveled the state to oppose the ordinance.

“I was born with heterosexual parents,” Milk said at one debate. “I was taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society with television ads and newspaper ads, fiercely heterosexual. A society that puts down homosexuality. And why am I a homosexual, if I’m affected by role models? I should have been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there would be a lot of nuns running around the streets today.”

More from Missouri

A county clerk in Missouri said she would remove people who have been appointed a court guardian — like people with disabilities — from the voting rolls, even if a court has expressly said they maintain the right to vote. Her plan comes as voting rights advocates worry about purges of voter registration lists ahead of the 2022 election.

Here are headlines from across the state:

And across Kansas

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, who is the likely Republican nominee for governor this year, tapped Katie Sawyer to be his running mate as lieutenant governor. Sawyer was the field director for Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall and is making the rare jump from staffer to candidate.

The latest from Kansas City

In Kansas City …

Have a news tip? Send it along to ddesrochers@kcstar.com

Odds and ends

Debates

Only three of the six most prominent candidates running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Missouri showed up to a debate this week in Springfield — Rep. Billy Long, St. Louis attorney Mark McCloskey and state Sen. Dave Schatz. In other words, the JV team of the primary, as all of them are currently polling below 10% in the race.

The three top candidates — former Gov. Eric Greitens, Rep. Vicky Hartzler and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt — all didn’t show.

There’s been a bit of debate over debates in the primary. Greitens won’t participate unless the questions are limited to policy (a.k.a. no asking about the allegations of sexual assault and blackmail that helped drive him from the governor’s office or the more recent domestic abuse allegations he faces from his ex-wife). And Schmitt wants to be on the same stage as Greitens.

All of this has irritated Long who, after Hartzler said she was looking forward to debating, accused her of being a “#transRINO.”

When asked what that meant, Long said: “someone that’s voted like a RINO their whole career but now decides they are really a conservative and wants you to accept and appreciate them as a conservative.”

Offensive understanding of what it means to be transgender aside, Long’s definition would make her a trans conservative, not a trans RINO (he disagrees).

DNC grant

Missouri Democrats got a grant through the Democratic National Committee’s Red State Fund to fund field staffers ahead of the 2022 election.

Basically, it means they’ll be able to hire people to register more Democrats in the state and knock on doors to support legislative candidates in the general election. It’s part of a larger attempt by the Democratic National Committee to invest more money in states where Republicans have won control.

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging power at the state level. Republicans have majorities in both the Missouri Senate and House of Representatives and hold all but one constitutional office: the state auditor.

Hawley and Hartzler

Sen. Josh Hawley campaigned for Rep. Vicky Hartzler in Missouri this week. Hawley, who endorsed Hartzler back in February, is trying to lend Hartzler some of his popularity among the Republican base in Missouri as she tries to catch up with Greitens.

There is no love lost between Hawley and Greitens. As state attorney general in 2018, Hawley launched an investigation into Greitens’ use of the messaging app confide and looked at whether Greitens’ campaign had improperly solicited donors from his charity, The Mission Continues. He also called on Greitens to resign and said allegations made against Greitens were “impeachable.”

For the Senate campaign, Hawley has also been helping Hartzler fundraise, providing a boost to her finances in a race where most of the major candidates have large political action committees supporting them. The two share the same consulting time, On Message.

Happy Friday

I’m gay and it’s Pride, so I’m going to use this section to highlight articles about LGBTQ history/culture and LGBTQ musicians this month. Here’s an article about a congressman who was worried former President Ronald Reagan had a cabal of secret homosexuals controlling him. It features one helluva lede. The only cocktail I recommend this month is a gin and tonic, which is my standard drink at a gay bar. And here’s a song by Lil Nas X.

Enjoy your weekend.

Daniel Desrochers is the Star’s Washington, D.C. Correspondent
Daniel Desrochers is the Star’s Washington, D.C. Correspondent

Looking for more?

Did someone forward this newsletter to you? You can sign-up here. If you’d prefer to unsubscribe from this newsletter, you can do so at any time using the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of this message.