So, Tennessee’s embarrassment, Senator Stacey Campfield, who believes AIDS would be a thing of the past if people would just stop having sex with Africans and monkeys, who believes that animals never have gay sex because he’s never seen it with his creepy safari binoculars, who gets kicked out of football games for being such a petulant, childish mess, and who has been pushing a bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” bill since the beginning of recorded time, which would disallow schools from even mentioning homosexuality to students, has actually seen his disgusting bill passed out of a Tennessee House subcommittee. Tennessee, you see, is tired of being passed over for the title of “Dumbest, Most Backward Hinterland in ‘Murka,” so we’ve been stepping up our efforts, as of late.
Go us!
Sen. Stacey Campfield’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill made it out of a House subcommittee today, banning discussion of all but “natural human reproduction science” before the ninth grade in public schools.
You can only talk about “natural human reproduction science?” Well, don’t say “turkey baster” either, y’all. And if you do, you’re in super trouble. But that’s not all:
Before the House education subcommittee acted, chairman Joey Hensley scored bonus points by admonishing all Tennessee parents not to let their children watch “Modern Family” on television because they might discover there are homosexuals in the world.
Coincidentally, President Obama says “Modern Family” is one of the first family’s favorite shows to watch in the White House. Hensley didn’t mention that, but we’re certain that if he knew it, it would only strengthen his belief in the show’s evil influence.
“I don’t think ‘Modern Family’ is appropriate for children to watch,” Hensley said solemnly after a Nashville preacher testified children might find out about gay people by seeing the show even if teachers aren’t allowed to say gay in schools.
You see, Modern Family very distinctly and humorously features a gay couple, and gay couples do not exist in nature, ever, because Stacey woulda seen it through the eyeholes of his Mexican wrestler mask, therefore we cannot talk about them! This is wingnut reality-denial in full bloom. Other programs on the hit-list: Glee, anything involving home improvement and all science networks. Gotta keep our Tennessee kids stupid so they don’t intimidate Joey Hensley and Stacey Campfield, y’all hear?
This is hilarious. Tennessee’s Stacey Campfield, author of the state’s now infamous “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, who last week explained, among other things, that AIDS is the result of a gay pilot having sex with a gay monkey, and who has an entire state’s progressives laughing and cheering after he was thrown out of a Knoxville restaurant this weekend, was interviewed by David Pakman today, and the interview is so full of goodness that I have decided to live-blog it. Let’s watch together!
0:30 Why is homosexuality harmful, Stacey? Well, he says that as long as you are having heterosexual sex with people who are not addicted to drugs or gay or “from Africa,” you should be fine. New campaign slogan for Stacey: don’t have sex with Africans!
1:40 David points out that anti-gay wingnuts are really fixated on what happens when two men have sex. [Note to Stacey: your chances of catching HIV through lesbian sex are basically nil.]
2:25 Stacey says homosexuality is harmful because the average homosexual lives nowhere near as long as the heterosexuals. David points out that Stacey got his info on that one from a widely discredited fraud named Paul Cameron.
2:45 Stacey prattles on awhile about how insurance is more expensive for gays, due to gay, before getting to his main point, which is that
3:40 Animals who are gay are not actually gay, because they don’t have buttsex. Stacey has never seen two animals having anal sex, therefore it does not exist. One wonders how much time Stacey Campfield has spent, with binoculars, trying to catch members of the animal kingdom having anal sex, and then one shudders.
4:40 David: “So when animals have gay sex, it’s more of an S&M thing?” Stacey: “Oh, I don’t know why they’re having gay sex, because I’m not an animal mind reader. Stacey: “If you get online you can learn all about animal S&M.” [Paraphrased quotes.]
5:20 Stacey says anti-gay bullying is no big deal because we already have bullying laws. I guess the kids who kill themselves are just collateral damage. Stacey brags that Tennessee’s schools are 46th in the nation. Take that, four other Southern states!
6:45 We don’t need to talk about heterosexuality in school either! It’s not just gayness that we need to remain mum about. All sex bad!
8:00 Do people choose to be gay? Stacey: “well, the activity is a choice.” We all use Activity Period differently, I guess…
8:25 Hahaha, Stacey, you got kicked out of a restaurant in your hometown for being such an unrepentant, misinformed, hateful bigot. Do you feel like you were unfairly discriminated against? Does this make you sort of possibly understand what discrimination is like? Stacey claims he wouldn’t go to a restaurant that refused to serve gays.
But I guess one where gays are welcome but bullied relentlessly is all good, right, Stacey?
I’d like to remind everyone, quickly, that Stacey also got kicked out of a University of Tennessee football game a while back, due to the fact that he was wearing a Mexican wrestler mask, despite the fact that it had been well-publicized that for the safety of all in the stadium, masks were not allowed for this Halloween game. But Stacey wanted to wear it, dangit! So he made the cops chase him around the stadium for a while and whined before they finally got tired of it and booted him. His maturity level doesn’t seem like it’s improved in the years hence.
Tennessee, for a second we were worried that you were losing steam in the America’s Stupidest State contest, what with the legislator in Oklahoma introducing a bill to ban the use of aborted fetuses in food the other day. We were worried how you would respond to this upping of the stupid ante, but you have delivered. We knew you would. Of course, yesterday, Tennessee wingnut senator Stacey Campfield asserted that AIDS came from this one time when a gay pilot had sexytime with a monkey in Africa, and that you can’t get AIDS from heterosexual sex, and all kinds of other bat crazy nonsense.
Today I got an e-mail from MoveOn.org asking me to sign a petition demanding that another Tennessee redneck legislator resign for these remarks:
To be delivered to: The Tennessee State House, The Tennessee State Senate, and Governor Bill Haslam
State Rep. Richard Floyd does not have the right to threaten transgendered women in his state. Hate speech like this should not be tolerated! Stop the cycle of hate now!
State Rep. Richard Floyd threatened to “stomp a mudhole” into any transgender woman who uses a public restroom in Tennessee. “Stomp a mudhole,” according to Urban Dictionary, means “To tear someone a new ass, to beat them to near death or to otherwise hurt someone to the point that they can not fight back.” We cannot tolerate such hate!
Nice! Tennessee is not only known for how intelligent our elected officials are, but also for the classy way they choose their words. It’s fair to say Tennessee has reclaimed her America’s Dumbstupidest title, I think.
Michelangelo Signorile interviewed Stacey Campfield, the temper tantrum-throwing, belligerently stupid Tennessee legislator who authored the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would prohibit teachers and counselors from even mentioning gayness in Tennessee schools, and Stacey came ready to reassure everyone that he hasn’t read even one book since the last time he was interviewed in the national media. Oh, these are some doozies, they are.
It’s gay kids’ own fault for being gay when they, you know, blow their brains out:
“That bullying thing is the biggest lark out there.”
“There are sexually confused children who could be pushed into a lifestyle that I don’t think is appropriate with them and it’s not for the norm for society, and they don’t know how they can get back from that. I think a lot of times these young teens and young children, they find it very hard on themselves and unfortunately some of them commit suicide.”
Nice of him to add the word “unfortunately.”
Just because things happen in nature, doesn’t mean they should be discussed in school:
“[Homosexuals] do not naturally reproduce. It has not been proven that it is nature. It happens in nature, but so does beastiality That does not make it right or something we should be teaching in school.”
Bestiality happens in nature. Wow. Is it “bestiality” when beasts are doing it with each other, Stacey?
Half of all plays are about gays. Stacey Campfield really pays attention to the theater, you guys:
“Homosexuals represent about 2 to 3 percent of the population yet you look at television and plays and theaters, it’s 50 percent of the theaters, probably more than that, 50 percent of the theaters based on something about homosexuality.”
And now, the dumbest thing Stacey Campfield has ever said:
“My understanding is that it is virtually — not completely, but virtually — impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex…very rarely [transmitted].”
Far be it from an average Tennessee wingnut to be able to pick out Africa on a globe, but it’s stunning that the man seems blissfully unaware of the fact that the sub-Saharan African AIDS epidemic involves lots and lots of heterosexual sex.
Stacey also believes that AIDS entered the human race when a pilot had sex with a monkey, though, a story which I thought had been debunked for so long that even wingnuts understood it was an urban myth. Apparently not in Tennessee. Mike debunks all that in his piece, and Stacey said other stupid things in the interview, so click.
In response to the Tennessee Senate’s passage of an amended version of Stacey Campfield’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, someone named Victor Stepien has written a piece in The Tennessean, and while he surely means well, so well, it misses the mark by a country mile.* Let’s see where this writer is coming from, shall we?
Victor Stepien, M.Philosophy, is a member of the International Young Democrat Union, the youth wing of the global organization for center-right political parties (IDU). He was a visiting graduate student at Vanderbilt University in fall 2009.
Aha! So of course today’s menu is faux-academic word salad with a side of overly conciliatory and ultimately weak argumentation sprinkled on top? It would seem to be so:
While the Tennessee bill, which passed 20-10 in the Senate on Friday, has been decried by the local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, most notably through the Tennessee Equality Project, its initial premise looks harmless.
Only if you’re not very observant and/or blissfully unaware of the patterns of the American Wingnut Legislator. Or if you have no sense of the history of this bill, as the bizarrely gay-obsessed and not-that-bright Stacey Campfield introduces it every year like clockwork.
Still, the bill appears to promote heteronormativity at the expense of homonormativity.
AND that’s when most Tennessee readers clicked “close tab” and decided to do the Sudoku instead. Lest anyone think I’m talking smack about Tennessee people, that is also when this Tennessee reader, this liberal gay activist Tennessee reader, clicked “close tab.” Rolling my eyes, I opened it back up…
It may become a slippery slope whereby some individuals are considered more equal than others.
Yeah, we’re already at the bottom of that slope in Tennessee. That’s why we’re fighting uphill, you see.
Anyway, the writer does point out, correctly, that kids are implicitly taught about heterosexuality — I mean, any time a children’s book ends with the prince and princess living happily ever after, we’re discussing heterosexuality. Of course, this is all done in an age appropriate manner, as kids don’t tend to be burdened with what the prince and princess actually DO on the first night of “happily ever after.” [Nor are they burdened with what "King and King" do, if their schools allow that book. Because it's not about sex!]
The piece really goes off the rails after that, though. Drawing a parallel between the Tennessee bill and a law in the UK during the Thatcher years, in which a similar ban on talking about gayness in schools ended up having a silencing effect on curriculum even at the university level, the writer asserts:
It s not difficult to see how this could also happen in Tennessee, given the culture of political correctness sponsored by the left that has shackled American higher education for four decades.
Yeah, dude, that’s Tennessee’s problem in a nutshell: all the liberals who silence opposing viewpoints in the name of higher education. I’d ask what planet the writer is beaming in from, but I don’t want to know the answer. He’s obviously gay-supportive, but as with all wingnuts — and yes, the writer is a wingnut — his support is tinged with a bizarre resentment found especially among conservative academics, and the festering sore of an idea that if the liberals weren’t controlling the flow of information, then higher education would be more flush with conservative ideas and people. It always has to be a “PC conspiracy.” They can never accept the fact that higher education is full of liberals because being highly educated leads to being more liberal!
Now, in Tennessee, Sen. Campfield has gone the other way [away from inclusion, etc.]. There is no doubt his heart is in the right place and his bill aims at protecting children from the difficult choices adults have to make.
Oh GAWD. “There is no doubt his heart is in the right place”? Really?! Faux-academic born yesterday say what? No. Campfield is a wingnut with a particular bur up his ass regarding gay people. He’s not an intelligent man, but neither do we have any reason to assume him well-intentioned. Of course, if the writer had taken a perfunctory look at Stacey Campfield’s history, I wouldn’t have to be wasting my time typing these words.
Okay, I’m annoyed now, so I’m going to go look at pictures of the 2012 GOP frontrunners for a giggle.
Ew, as a Tennessean, I am so embarrassed to be bringing you this news. From the blog of the Tennessee Equality Project:
The Senate voted to approve an amended version of SB0049 by a vote of 19 to 11.
[...]
Tennessee Equality Project observes that the amended version of SB0049 no longer makes direct reference to sexual orientation. However, SB0049 and its House companion (HB0229) remain a threat to safe schools in Tennessee. The State House of Representatives is expected to review HB0229 as early as January of 2012. TEP will continue to advocate against both versions of the Don’t Say Gay Bill.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A bill passed Friday by the Tennessee Senate would forbid public school teachers and students in grades kindergarten through eight from discussing the fact that some people are gay.
Opponents deride the measure as the “don’t say gay bill.” They say it’s unfair to the children of gay parents and could lead to more bullying. Supporters say it is intended to give teachers clear guidance for dealing with younger children on a potentially explosive topic.
If this makes it all the way through, it will of course be tied up in litigation and laughed at by the judiciary, but this is what happens when you hand truly stupid people the keys to the statehouse.
You remember Stacey Campfield from the other day. If you don’t, he’s the bizarre Tennessee State Senator who introduces a bill every single year to ban any discussion of homosexuality in Tennessee’s schools before high school. It’s a bill to address a nonexistent problem, but Stacey Campfield is absolutely obsessed with all things gay, so it’s kind of his hallmark issue. One would think he might have constituents to answer to, but we digress.
Anyway, Stacey went on the lovely David Pakman’s radio show today, and a good time was had by all:
Stacey Campfield bumbles a lot when he’s answering questions, but that’s because he’s not very bright.
Heterosexuals are everywhere once you grow up. You eat lunch with them. You take them to prom. Sometimes you have to share a cubicle with one and talk about his or her hobbies. Many kids even have one in their home or family. Aren’t kids exposed to enough heterosexuality in the media and in their homes without being forced to hear about it at school, too? They don’t need this explained to them! They should be memorizing state capitals and increasingly their utility!
People would not choose to be attracted to members of the opposite sex if someone had not read them a book in their childhood about a male and female duck forming a family. Curse whoever read that book! Such attractions are powerfully distracting! They ended Edward VII’s promising career!
I, for one, was smart enough to tell those storybook ducks to go to hell.
Read it all, for it is enjoyable. Especially this play on the whole “God didn’t create Adam & Steve, he created Adam & Eve!” nonsense:
If God intended us to frolic about in the buff with members of the opposite sex, he would have created Adam and Eve, rather than allowing us to evolve slowly over the course of geologic time until we reached our present position.
Almost exactly a year ago, we visited the Wingnut Wonder of Knoxville, Stacey Campfield. Embarrassing, even by Tennessee’s admittedly low standards, Campfield was at that time in the Tennessee House, pushing his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would prohibit teachers from discussing gayness in school. He brings it up every year, actually. When he first introduced it in 2008, here’s how he described the [utterly fake] problem faced by Tennessee schools:
“If I were to say ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’ or ‘George Washington and Martha Washington were husband and wife,’ there are groups out there that would say we were pushing a heterosexual agenda. To keep those lawsuits from coming, I thought we should still be able to talk about that side of it,” Campfield says.
Still no lawsuits on that front, but you never know! At the time I said this:
Really? Because Jack and Jill have been going up that hill for quite a long time now, but nowhere near as long as it’s been since George and Martha gay married each other heterosexually, and I haven’t heard of one lawsuit. Perhaps I don’t read the missives from Campfield’s mothership.
And I still don’t. This is also the same man who got kicked out of a University of Tennessee football game because he drunkenly refused to take off his Mexican Wrestler mask. Oh, and:
Over the years, Campfield has proposed other controversial legislation, such as replacing the state’s food tax with a tax on pornography and requiring the state to issue death certificates for aborted fetuses. In 2005, Campfield compared the state’s Black Caucus to the Ku Klux Klan when they refused to let him join because he is white.
FAST FORWARD ONE YEAR LATER.
Due to in-your-face stupid voters, Stacey is in the state Senate now, and guess what? He’s pushing his “Don’t Say Gay” bill again! Unfortunately, Tennessee’s leg has gotten a lot wingnuttier in the past couple of years and it’s actually going better for him:
After some convoluted maneuvers, a Senate committee Wednesday approved a bill that will prohibit teachers from discussing homosexuality in kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms.
The measure (SB49) is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, who unsuccessfully pushed the same idea – nicknamed the “don’t say gay” bill – for six years as a member of the state House before he was elected to the Senate.
As introduced, the bill would have put into law a declaration that it is illegal to discuss any sexual behavior other than heterosexuality prior to the ninth grade.
It required a couple of amendments in order to pass — a study to see if gayness was being taught in schools! — but it passed. My god.
However, there’s more fun in Stacey’s world lately, because as I said, he’s Tennessee’s most embarrassing legislator, and he’s not that bright. Del Shores offered to debate Stacey on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which is Stacey’s own legislation, and the gentleman scholar actually asked for a $1,000 retainer to participate in the debate. That is, um, kind of illegal!
Campfield has been criticized on some blogs this week for seeking a $1,000 “retainer” fee to debate the “don’t say gay” bill with Del Shores, a Texas-based movie producer and director who has made films on homosexuality.
State law includes prohibitions on a legislator taking compensation for work related to legislative duties except for his or her salary and expense payments due from the state. Another statute prohibits legislators from accepting an honorarium except for travel expenses.
Of course he now claims the retainer was for travel expenses, which is different from what he said to Del Shores on Facebook:
“I will happily debate you. I require a $1,000.00 (sic) retainer fee and all expenses covered. You can do with the rest all you want.
$1,000 AND expenses covered! That is different! As I said before, Campfield is not known for being particularly bright.
It remains to be seen whether Campfield will be brought up on ethics violations or anything of the sort, but we can be sure that whatever happens, old Stacey will do something embarrassing again pretty soon. He’s like clockwork.
That’s the Tennessee way.
Almost exactly a year ago, 
