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.

Your move, Oklahoma.

Sign the petition here.

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.

The mark of a good wingnut is to never take responsibility for the harm their cohort inflicts on society. It really doesn’t matter what the bodycount is, or how close to home it is. For them, the ideology is all that matters, even if [as it so often is] their ideology is not only rotten but also easily disproven by a semi-literate child.

Tennessee is a prime example. After the suicide of a gay teen named Jacob Rogers, some wingnuts are doing their best to blame the deceased child, and his sexuality, for his death. Why? Because they care more about their beliefs than they care about this child, or any child:

Anti-gay conservatives are working overtime to explain away the suicide of young Jacob Rogers. They dismiss all the name-calling and bullying at his high school. Instead, they claim it was Jacob’s own fault somehow. In its latest radio report, David Fowler’s F.A.C.T. concedes “it’s wrong to bully people because of their sexual practices”

You know, there’s a Southern expression that’s fairly appropriate here, Mr. Fowler…

but blames Jacob’s death on his own alcohol and drug abuse and eating disorder.

But of course! And not only that:

According to F.A.C.T., it’s all “the rotten fruit of the all-about-me individualist culture that comes when we deny the existence of God and his image in us.”

Don’t blame the people who feed anti-gay discourse into society [people like F.A.C.T.], blame liberals! Blame everybody else!

In correspondence with the Tennessee Equality Project, the state’s main gay rights group, state Rep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, claimed gay people commit suicide at a higher rate than others and suggested Jacob’s sexuality itself drove him to kill himself. Ragan asked whether the suicide could have had “more to do with his own proclivities and behavior than anything to do with schoolmate bullies …”

Rep. Ragan: product of the Tennessee public school system right here. Also gay. The fact that you have a position of power is part of the reason the rest of the developed world makes fun of places like Tennessee. The fact that you would suggest, based on absolutely no factual knowledge of your own, that Jacob’s “proclivities and behavior” led him to suicide, essentially that you would blame Jacob’s sexuality, something he had absolutely no control over, for his death, is the epitome of callousness and petulant Southern hick ignorance, sir. While this is behavior I fully expect from members of Tennessee’s legislative body — I mean, come on, we’re not exactly known as a first world state — it’s particularly saddening, in an age where we all have Google and iPhones, that you remain so blissfully unaware of the world around you, and that you value your own bigotry more than you value Tennessee’s children.

Yes, it is true that Jacob was bullied for being gay, which led to his suicide, but let me draw you a picture* of the chicken and the egg in this situation.

So, that is how it works, Rep. Ragan. Plan your future statements and actions on this issue accordingly.

Oh wait, you won’t, because, as the piece points out, kids like Jacob aren’t what you’re trying to protect.

Blaming the victim is necessary to prevent Jacob’s death from damaging chances for passage of F.A.C.T.’s 2012 state legislative priority—a bill to make it easier for young bigots to bully gay schoolkids. This legislation brought by conservative Christians who oppose special protections for gay people actually gives special protections to homophobic bullies.

*This is why we have a graphic designer. So that I don’t play with my Paint program very often…

How many times have we heard from hardcore Tea Partiers that their cause “focuses on economic issues and doesn’t care about social issues?”

Of course, there’s an ample catalogue of evidence to refute that statement, but just in case we needed any more proof, look no further than the Tennessee Tea Party. They apparently missed the “social issues are verboten” memo when they released this tweet on Monday in reaction to news of Barney Frank’s impending retirement:

Some economic critique.

Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips issued a statement condemning the tweet, but according to Daily Kos, the Tennessee Tea Party is steadfastly standing behind its bigoted views.

When Barney Frank announced his retirement, many wingnuts sensed that their opportunities to point out that Barney Frank is a gay homosexual who likes men were about to fade away, so they decided to say it one last time.

The Tennessee Teabaggery Association [I'm sure they're called something close to that] is taking heat right now for one of those very comments:

The Tennessee Tea Party is trying to repair the fallout, following a derogatory post about Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank. Frank, who is openly gay, announced he will retire and not seek another term in congress.

The news of Franks retirement brought a derogatory tweet on the Tennessee Tea Party’s twitter feed. The remark was also posted on the party’s Facebook page as well. The tweet called Frank a pervert, and used a number of derogatory terms about Frank’s homosexuality.

Chris Sanders of the Tennessee Equality Project pointed out, in the nicest terms possible, that it’s pretty freaking sad that this Teabagger couldn’t think of anything to say about Frank’s policies, but simply figured it would suffice to call Barney a fag one last time. Here are Chris’s actual words:

“They chose to use terms that degrade the gay community. Can we keep the debate on policy, can we not get personal about people. Do you really have that much hate?,” said Sanders.

Seriously. Here’s what Tennessee’s High Priestess of Teabaggery, Tami Kilmarx, said about it:

“I am totally and completely responsible for anything produced by one of our staff or moderators. I am appalled by the language in the commentary. While privately and inwardly I may agree with the commentary, it is completely irresponsible for any one of us to write these kinds of commentaries. The individual who has written this commentary has been duly dealt with,” said Kilmarx in a Facebook post.

See?! She is simultaneously appalled by the bigotry, and also totally agrees with the bigotry! And here I’ve been saying for several years that what makes wingnuts so pathetic is their utter inability to hold two thoughts in their heads at once.

This is an anti-gay parallel, though, to the fact that many members of the Tennessee Association of Teabagging Practitioners and Chipmunk Taxidermists would never be unfriendly to the “lovely black family” who moved in next door and “keeps their yard so nice!,” but damn, you don’t want to hear what they say about black people around the dinner table.

Recently, Tennessee passed a bill which prohibited its cities from setting their own non-discrimination policies, or rather policies which are stronger than the state’s own pathetic non-discrimination law. It was pushed solely by the Family Action Council of Tennessee, a wing of the Family Research Council hate group, as an attack on LGBT people and our families. Regular readers might remember us posting a video of the extremely fey FACTn leader, David Fowler, wearing a pink shirt in a playground gloating about the passage of the law. A lawsuit has been filed to overturn the law, and the documents now being exposed, related to the passage of that law, are illuminating:

To satisfy attorneys in the gay rights lawsuit against the state last week, conservative Christian lawmakers coughed up 2,200 pieces of correspondence related to their wonderful new statute that overturned Nashville’s nondiscrimination ordinance in the last legislative session.

[...]

Just for fun, we pulled the filed marked “Sen. Mae Beavers” first and, right off the bat, we were delighted to discover an email to her from David Fowler—the Ralph Reed of Tennessee’s Christian Right and the driving force behind the state law. In this email, Fowler shockingly treats Beavers like a puppet on a string (do lobbyists really run things in Nashville?) and instructs her precisely what to say about the Tennessee Family Action Council’s bill. He obviously views Beavers as not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but useful just the same as his bill’s sponsor.

“The bill itself is not that complicated,” Fowler writes. “We don’t need more regulation of business and business sure doesn’t need the 348 different cities coming up with their own ideas of what a discriminatory practice is. That’s the line and you just repeat it like Glen Casada did last night when the bill passed the House 73 to 24.”

“Will the homosexuals be upset?” Fowler then asks. “Sure. But to be honest, they seem to be rather resigned on this bill.”

Ha, well, I know some of “the homosexuals” who filed the lawsuit, and they are anything but “resigned.” Or as the Nashville Scene writer put it:

Whoops! Fowler misread the temperature of gay activists there. Outraged by his law, they launched a campaign to embarrass just about every major corporation in Tennessee into renouncing it. When that was done, they filed their lawsuit painting the state legislature as a bunch of bigots.

Yep!

The truth of the matter is that Senator Mae Beavers probably isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it’s interesting to see just how much our opponents on the Religious Right view their elected officials as puppets. “We bought you, now read this word for word,” seems to be the order of the day.

The linked piece points out that, in order to prevail, those who filed the lawsuit must show that the bill was passed strictly out of bias against gay people, rather than to make it “easier to do bidness in Tennessee,” so it’s helpful that many of Tennessee’s major corporations are now squarely against the law. Reading the documents in Ms. Beavers’ file, showing e-mails spanning the wingnut diaspora, from the garden variety house-wingnut all the way up to Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, thanking her for standing up against ‘dem homoseckshuls, should give those involved in the lawsuit a hint as to what was really going on when one of Tennessee’s resident hate groups decided to lobby for special access to discriminate against LGBT people in the state.

By now, readers are probably familiar with the basic bones of this story. Two Wednesdays ago, Jerry Pittman, Jr., and his boyfriend Dustin Lee were on their way into a church service in Fruitland, Tennessee, when Jerry’s father, the church’s pastor, yelled, “Sic ‘em!,” at which point two deacons and Jerry’s uncle began to shout homophobic slurs and attack them physically, in order to prevent them from coming in. The story has shocked people across the country and around the world, as it has gone viral this week, causing millions of people who had never heard of Fruitland to shake their heads, appalled that something like that could happen in the year 2011 in the United States.

Quite frankly, Jerry is surprised to be in this situation at all. Speaking to him by phone this morning, I learned that the couple had commonly attended church there, and had felt as welcome as was possible in this extremely conservative pocket of West Tennessee. The week before the assault, Jerry’s boyfriend even attended a service alone and was invited onto the stage by Jerry’s dad, Jerry Pittman, Sr., to sing. How did this happen?

Grace Fellowship Church isn’t pro-gay, by any means, but Jerry described a status quo where people simply agreed not to discuss matters like homosexuality. As long as it wasn’t “in anyone’s face,” a live and let live arrangement was in place. The senior Pittman preached against homosexuality from the pulpit, but mostly when his son wasn’t there. Jerry’s stepmother, however, is completely supportive of him, and of his boyfriend, and he believes that this is the primary reason they hadn’t faced much vocal opposition in the church. However, when his father and stepmother started divorce proceedings, the floodgates opened and the church no longer felt the need to stay silent about Jerry, Jr. and his boyfriend.

Even then, why the violence?

“The church acted as four people, instead of as a congregation,” Jerry said to me, describing the day of the attack. His father had actually been arrested earlier that day, for theft over $10,000, related to the divorce, but had somehow, perhaps as a gesture of good old boy justice, made it back to the church in time to order an attack on his son. Though Jerry called 911, when the police arrived, they refused to take a report from the boys, and even allowed the men to continue shouting anti-gay slurs at them. The police report filed starts with the words, “I called Jerry Pittman…” [speaking of the father and pastor, of course]. Jerry, Jr. and his boyfriend filed charges against the four men the next morning.

Then the fun really began. One of the men involved in the attack, Eugene McCoy, filed charges several days after the fact, claiming that it was Jerry, Jr. who had started it. Then, last Thursday, one of the other attackers, Jerry’s uncle Patrick Flatt, was allegedly stabbed in his garage by two men in masks. He somehow survived. A couple of days later, according to Jerry, Eugene McCoy packed up some of his possessions and moved, only to have his house burn down the next morning. Draw your own conclusions on these incidents, but the investigations are pending.

Everyone is due in court on November 22, and Jerry is unsettled. He mentioned that he and Dustin are having a hard time finding a lawyer to represent them in their case, because in Gibson County, Tennessee, and surrounding areas, “no one wants to take the ‘gay’ case.” Apparently representing assault victims is just a bridge too far for certain members of the Tennessee Bar when the victims are gay. [Because of the counter-charges filed, it's a bit difficult for the District Attorney to represent both sides.] Jerry, Jr. lost his job because he’s missed too much work in the days after the attack, and he and Dustin don’t really feel safe at home.

Of course, it’s hard for a young gay couple to feel completely safe in rural West Tennessee in the first place. A news reporter from Jackson, Tennessee, in a “man on the street”-style report, asked someone what he would do if his son brought his boyfriend to church. The man’s answer wasn’t aired, because he said unequivocally that he would shoot them. Jerry did say, however, that they are receiving a lot of messages of support from people in the area, proving that not everyone in the South is hellbent on hating gay people.

For now, Jerry and his boyfriend will watch, wait and do what they have to do to get past this incident. As we have reached the tipping point in American public acceptance of gay people, we have had many hopeful moments for a future where all truly are treated equally in this society. Stories like these are stark reminders of the fact that, at least in some pockets, we still have a very, very long way to go.

I’m working on a story right now on the boys in Gibson County, Tennessee, who were assaulted while trying to attend a service at one of the guys’ father’s church. According to reports, the attackers were the boy’s father [the pastor] and two deacons [one of whom is the boy's uncle]. So here I sit, compiling my notes on that and making phone calls, and then I see this story, out of a different part of Tennessee:

MADISONVILLE, Tenn. – A 17-year-old senior at Sequoyah High School was reportedly shoved, bumped in the chest and verbally harassed by his principal last week for wearing a T-shirt in support of efforts to establish a gay-straight alliance (GSA) club on campus. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Tennessee sent a letter to the school district today demanding that students’ rights to free speech be protected in the classroom.

The ACLU has been assisting the student, Chris Sigler, in his and other students’ efforts to overcome resistance from school officials to establish a GSA. Principal Maurice Moser had previously threatened to punish students who circulated petitions about the club.

“It is totally unacceptable that a young man who was peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights would have his speech shut down by the public school principal,” said Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee. “Last week’s incident clearly illustrates the hostile environment LGBT students face at Sequoyah High School. Given this context, it’s especially important that supportive voices like Sigler’s can be heard in order to overcome the school’s resistance to a GSA.”

Here, I will answer my own question as to what the hell is wrong with Tennessee:

Anti-gay wingnuts are babies. They are not adults in any sense of the word. They react to any perceived slight to their fragile, ignorant worldviews no better than toddlers. They lash out and scream and cry and no amount of reasoning or coddling will sate them. The problem is that these babies are adult-sized and they have been granted positions of authority in Third World states like Tennessee. [Sorry if you're from there. So am I. I'm slinging shit at my own here.]

When the people we are brought up to show respect and deference to fail to pass the simplest smell test of what it means to be a “grown-up,” we end up with situations where high school principals physically assault kids, pastors and deacons physically assault kids, and state “family values” leaders bitch, moan and then gloat about what a good job they done did hurtin’ LGBT families across the state. And they know that, in the age of the internet, their antics travel fast, leading to millions of people at all points across the country and beyond beginning to mock, scorn and laugh at them, and in a way that makes it worse, as their resentment against the “cultural elites,” the people they hate and of whom they are secretly painfully jealous, causes them to dig their heels in even further and strengthens their commitment to hurting anyone who challenges their pea-brained worldviews.

It’s a sad situation, but that, in short, is what the hell is wrong with Tennessee.

[h/t Towleroad]

A gay couple in Fruitland, Tennessee was on their way to church:

“I went over to take the keys out of the ignition and all the sudden I hear someone say ‘sick’em,’” said Gibson County resident, Jerry Pittman Jr.

Pittman said the attacked was prompted by the pastor of the church, Jerry Pittman, his father.

“My uncle and two other deacons came over to the car per my dad’s request. My uncle smash me in the door as the other deacon knocked my boyfriend back so he couldn’t help me, punching him in his face and his chest. The other deacon came and hit me through my car window in my back,” said Pittman. He said bystanders did not offer assistance. He said the deacon yelled derogatory homosexual slurs, even after officers arrived. He said the officers never intervened to stop the deacons from yelling the slurs.

The couple filed assault charges. Everyone goes to court today.

[h/t Box Turtle Bulletin]

The man shown above is pastor Steve Gaines of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis. Though he is not a resident of the city of Memphis, Gaines really wants to make sure his church members know which candidates to support in the city’s upcoming city council elections. Of course, like most wingnut church-state separation deniers, he knows how to play cute with language in order to avoid those nasty laws against endorsing candidates outright. He walks right up to the line that shall not be crossed, drops his pants and whizzes all over the democratic process, essentially. Gaines sent this e-mail to church members the other day:

Gaines and his flying wingnuts have been heavily involved in the past several years in local Memphis politics, working tirelessly to make sure the city can’t pass a simple nondiscrimination ordinance to protect all citizens from losing their jobs over something as trivial as their sexuality. Indeed, it’s quite a sight to see when Gaines and his busloads o’ Baptists show up at City Hall, go in through the back door and spend the next several hours in City Council chambers spreading hate all over the place like trans fats at, well, a Baptist church picnic…

I digress.

The Family Action Council of Tennessee that Gaines references is a farm team for the Family Research Council, an SPLC-designated hate group. You might remember the head of FACTn, the fey David Fowler, as the man who recently soiled his proverbial wingnut adult diaper by floating a bizarre conspiracy theory involving insurance companies and hordes of homosexuals secretly teaming up for the purpose of making people like David unhappy. Before that, he wore a pink shirt and made a creepy video in a playground gloating about how successful his organization was in hurting gay families.

It’s also quite interesting that Steve Gaines has the balls to use the word “pro-family” in any sentence that doesn’t start with, “You’re quite a fool if you actually think I’m…,” as Gaines’ most notable act as Bellevue’s pastor, his greatest accomplishment, was when he decided to protect an admitted child molester for six months, keeping him on Bellevue’s staff and allowing him to counsel child sexual abuse victims. This is not a man who is motivated by concern for anyone’s children or families. Far from it, Gaines simply seems to have a weird fixation with homosexuality, even moreso than garden variety anti-gay wingnuts.

So let’s see. We have a state organization with a constant, unhinged need to hurt gay families, and a pedophile-protecting pastor who claims to want to protect children and families, and who really, really thinks he has the right to control the city council of a place that is embarrassed to have him as a suburban parasite. And on the other side, we have an organization which simply fights to protect the rights of the people the aforementioned men work tirelessly to hurt every day. Who’s “pro-family” again, please?

The Tennessee Equality Project is having a bit of fun with this. As an actual political organization which has the right to endorse candidates [i.e., not a church], TEP has endorsed candidates who will support equality for all citizens in Memphis, and who, yes, will replace the puppets pictured above. Here’s Jonathan Cole of TEP:

Truly pro-family voters will be voting for candidates who support the right of all people to earn a living, provide for their families and contribute to their communities without fear of unfair workplace discrimination. Voters can be proud to cast their vote in District 1, District 2, and Superdistrict 9-1 for pro-equality and pro-family candidates endorsed by TEP PAC: Kendrick Sneed, Sylvia Cox and Paul Schaffer. They aren’t likely to succumb to a false prophet like Steve Gaines.

Indeed! Early voting is already underway in Memphis, and Bellevue Baptist Church is an early voting location! Therefore, TEP is asking all equality-minded citizens of Memphis to go vote at Bellevue this Saturday at noon and wear purple to show the bigots of Bellevue what actual pro-family people look like. Who knows if Steve Gaines will be there or not — there might be a pedophile that needs protecting, you know — but TEP will be out in full force.

All three men pictured above are of the sort of caliber I would never trust to mow my lawn or walk my dog, but they unfortunately have seats of power, and are a primary reason Memphis has failed to achieve its goals of becoming a world class city. When the world looks at your city council and the first phrase that comes to mind is, “behind every good conservative Christian man is an extremely nervous sheep,” it’s hard to get ahead, you know? If you’re a Memphian, get out and replace them.