By Charlie Smith
Charleston, SC
There are between 200,000 and 300,000 gay people in the state of South Carolina. What we have learned as gay citizens in SC in the past two months is that we have no right to be present in the literature or even the policies of our own public colleges and universities. We are unfit for service on the Boards of Trustees (but not necessarily the presidencies) and the General Assembly has the right to cut off the funding of public institutions of higher learning if those institutions’ policies in any way allow their closeted LGBT students to come to new and positive understandings of themselves as human beings. It is amazing what positive outcomes can happen to people when they are removed from the stifling influences of those who have taught them to be ashamed of themselves, like Bright and Fair, who, by the way, are neither.
It is an important function of our colleges and universities to provide better tools for self-understanding than those provided by Leviticus. Believe it or not there have been a few somewhat more positive literary and scientific revelations about human sexuality than Leviticus since 1000 BCE. Christians like Bright and Fair were still riding dinosaurs then. Now dinosaurs like Bright and Fair are more apt to be riding the backs of gay people.
The real shame here is that the General Assembly has no means of bringing their own closeted gay members to the correct understanding of themselves, as hypocrites who use their closets for snipers’ nests of course. Perhaps Lee Bright and Mike Fair should turn their attentions to disclosing and discrediting their own closeted colleagues and leave our colleges and universities alone.
If they are that obsessed with rooting out homosexuality, why not start in their own backyard, the SC House and Senate? We could even include the executive and judicial branches if we really wanted to be thorough. There are lots of folks you can start with…and they are almost all in Bright’s and Fair’s own party. You can actually Google it. Let’s get started, Mike and Lee. Who’s going to be first?
