SIVACRACY.NET

The Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate here in South Carolina (vying for Fritz Hollings’ seat), Jim DeMint, has publicly declared that gays and unwed pregnant women are unfit to be schoolteachers. This lead my wonderful USC colleague Laura Woliver to ask whether he would ban unwed fathers as well, and she couldn’t resist noting that the late U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond had fathered an out-of-wedlock child in the 1920s and then taught public school for a while. As a high school student I must have been absent or not paying attention when we reached the part of the curriculum where the teachers reveal their marital statuses and sexual orientations to the students, because I sure don’t remember it.

I read this morning that Tom Coburn, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, has announced he’s learned that “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom.” Audio here.

One could willfully misinterpret this as an argument in favor of coeducational restrooms, but I suspect he has other ideas about how he will address this, none of which I’m going to like much.

For the sakes of gays and lesbians everywhere, plus heterosexuals who for whatever reason are incorrectly assumed to be gay or lesbian, I hope neither guy is elected.