Legislators seek to "punish" colleges for promoting homosexuality.

Northside Storm · Apr 29, 2014

http://www.wyff4.com/news/columbia-...colleges-for-promoting-homosexuality/24569410

COLUMBIA, S.C. —South Carolina legislators want to punish two public colleges for assigning books on homosexuality to freshmen.

The House budget writing committee tentatively approved Wednesday a spending plan for 2014-15 that would cut $52,000 from the College of Charleston and $17,142 from the University of South Carolina Upstate.

Republican Rep. Garry Smith says that's what the colleges said they spent on what he called a promotion of a lifestyle. He says he made the proposal after college officials refused to give students an option to read something else. He says it's about making a point.
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http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/03/13/3354801/south-carolina-lgbt-books/

For its first-year summer reading program, the College of Charleston assigned Fun Home, an illustrated memoir that documents the writer’s experience coming to terms with her sexuality in small-town Pennsylvania. A 2006 piece in The New York Times Book Review described author Alison Bechdel’s memoir as “a story about a daughter trying to understand her father through the common and unspoken bond of their homosexuality.” Bechdel’s father, a closeted gay man, dies in a car accident after his daughter comes out to him.
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Smith told the The State newspaper that the books imposed a perspective on students rather than promoting dialogue: “One of the things I learned over the years is that if you want to make a point, you have to make it hurt,” he said.

Attempted book bans, meanwhile, are nothing new for the antigay community, particularly in the South. A failed 2004 Alabama bill would have banned books by gay authors or with gay characters from public school libraries. State legislators in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas made similar unsuccessful attempts.
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Seems to be good fodder for debate here.

A reminder of why DOMA fell:

At one point, Justice Elena Kagan noted that DOMA targets only one group of Americans and that “Congress’s judgment was infected by dislike, by fear, by animus.” The 1996 House Report, she noted, reads in part: “Congress decided to reflect and honor a collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.”

Paul Clement, the attorney hired by House Republicans to defend DOMA after the Justice Department concluded that it was unconstitutional, said: “Does the House Report say that? Of course, the House Report says that. And if that’s enough to invalidate the statute, then you should invalidate the statute. ”
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Justice Kennedy's majority opinion concluded:

DOMA’s history of enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, conferred
by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than
an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence.
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So---

Predictable backlash? Something that will build momentum for equality in the judicial and political realm where it matters? The last gasps of ancient thinking on this topic?

Would be nice to hear your thoughts.

g1184 · Apr 29, 2014

“One of the things I learned over the years is that if you want to make a point, you have to make it hurt”
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I have a feeling these words will come back to bite him.

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Legislators seek to "punish" colleges for promoting homosexuality.

Northside Storm Contributing Member

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