OKLAHOMA CITY — A YouTube audio clip of a state lawmaker’s screed against homosexuality, which she called a bigger threat than terrorism, has outraged gay activists and brought death threats rolling in.
“The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation, OK, it’s just a fact,” Rep. Sally Kern said recently to a gathering of fellow Republicans outside the Capitol. “Studies show no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted, you know, more than a few decades. So it’s the death knell in this country.
“I honestly think it’s the biggest threat that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat,” she said.
The former schoolteacher has been a magnet for coast-to-coast condemnation ever since someone posted her comments on the Internet last week. State police said they are investigating death threats against her.
Back home in the Bible Belt, though, the response has been mixed. Kern has gotten support from her fellow Republicans.
“I would submit to you that the vast majority of the folks in our caucus, particularly those who consider themselves conservative, stand with and support Sally,” state Rep. Randy Terrill said.
Democratic Gov. Brad Henry, however, said Kern’s views are not representative of most Oklahomans. He said politicians should “think before you speak.”
“To have equated the gay community with terrorism . . . and to have called us the biggest threat to America is to dehumanize gay people in the worst possible way,” Denis Dison, spokesman for the Washington-based Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, said Friday.
Kern, who is finishing her second term, has tried unsuccessfully to pass bills to rid libraries’ children’s sections of books that have homosexual themes. She told the group that schoolchildren are being indoctrinated by gay activists.
Kern said she made the comments on about four occasions to small groups of Republicans, and she thinks the recording was made at one of these meetings in January. Various recordings of it have generated more than a million hits on YouTube.
Kern’s office received more than 23,000 e-mails in less than a week, mostly condemning her views, and thousands more to her home computer, many of them “vulgar, vile and profane,” she said.
Kern said she has no regrets for her statements and denies she was gay-bashing. Her Christian faith teachers her to be loving to individuals but not their lifestyle, she said.
Some people, including talk-show host Ellen Degeneres, did not take her remarks that way.
“Hi, it’s Ellen Degeneres, the gay one,” the comedian said when she left a message in a call to Kern’s office during her TV show last week. Degeneres said she wanted to talk to Kern about some “misinformation.” “I’m trying to figure out which society has disappeared that I didn’t know of,” she said.
Kern said she had no interest in talking to the entertainer.
“That would be like throwing myself into the lion’s den, and I’m not going to do that,” she said Thursday.
