For the Bible Tells Me So, Daniel Karslake’s 2007 documentary on the history of the religious right’s hate-hate affair with the gay community, begins with news footage of a celebrity who was once a household name, but is now long forgotten … and yet, thanks to Minnesota 6th District Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, she is not at all unfamiliar to us. The fallen idol is Anita Bryant, singer of “Paper Roses,” “Til There Was You,” and other hits from that bleak era in popular music between Buddy Holly’s death and the arrival of The Beatles (who, ironically, did an equally bleak cover of “Til There Was You”). In the seventies, Anita would become even more famous for her TV pitches for the Florida Citrus Commission, exhorting Americans to drink orange juice, with everything from toast to cheeseburgers to caviar, with the words: “It’s not just for breakfast anymore!” But, by 1977, the year of the footage featured in Karslake’s film, Bryant’s name became synonymous with one thing: homophobia.
That year, Bryant founded and became the spokesperson for a grassroots campaign called Save Our Children. She had begun SOC in response to a movement by the Commission for Dade (later Miami-Dade) County, in her home state of Florida, to amend a human rights ordinance so that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation would be outlawed. The amendment was slated for a vote in June, 1977, and Bryant, who belonged to the Northwest Baptist Church, a virulently conservative congregation that also fought against school desegregation, was not about to let gays and lesbians be given the same rights as those minorities her confederates failed to keep out of their schools.
With the help of her husband, Miami DJ Bob Green, and a little known pastor named Jerry Falwell, Bryant and SOC quickly gained support via petitions, direct-mailings, and phone drives. She also sought support, and gained nationwide notoriety, with public appearances in which she snarled statements like: “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.”
These words, of course, were echoed in 1998 by recently retired senate minority whip Trent Lott, who said that gays should be put in the same class as shoplifters and drunks (and who, according to the blogosphere, at least, might have left office out of concern for being outed by a rent boy). But the whiff of familiarity does not apply only to Lott. In fact, Anita Bryant bears so much resemblance, in terms of personal, spiritual and professional philosophy — not to mention physical appearance — to Michele Bachmann, that it’s enough to make one, well, bite one’s nails.
Back in 1977, Bryant launched her SOC campaign with this fearful declaration: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically
reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children." When Bachmann was serving as Minnesota state senator in 2004, she reacted to Massachusetts’ legalization of same-sex marriage with this eerily similar preoccupation in a radio interview: “Little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and perhaps they should try it.”
Unlike the juicer, who made no bones to the mainstream press about her notion that gay people love nothing more than to get their greasy little hands into kids’ pockets, the congresswoman, like most other current anti-gay fundamentalists, insists that she merely wishes to protect the sanctity of marriage. But, as her own personal and professional pursuits have shown, this is a diversionary tact to distract from her and her cronies’ determination to purge society of any gay person who doesn’t want to be “cured.” It’s just that Michele, like others of this peculiar mindset, has learned to be more careful in her language — at least that which she deploys in secular, mainstream settings — thanks, in no small part, to the woman who would be the homophobes’ first celebrity mascot.
Turning back the clock again to the year that disco — up to then the province of bars and clubs catering to all those sweating, pulsating gay men — took over the world, Bryant and Save Our Children did shore up significant support for repeal of the amendment. She not only became a darling of the religious right, helping to shine the spotlight on Falwell, as well as Phyllis Schlafley and Pat Robertson, but even enjoyed support from the conventional media, including Time Magazine and The New York Times.
At the same time, she inadvertently galvanized the gay rights movement, increasing its numbers several-fold, and sparking record-setting attendance for pride parades in major cities, most of which used her as an emblem of hate (in fact, here in Minneapolis, an Anita look-alike contest was part of the festivities). A nationwide boycott of Florida oranges began, and the Citrus Commission was inundated with phone calls urging them to dump the woman who so sweetly chirped, “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine!”
Barbara Streisand, Ed Asner, and other celebrities spoke out against Bryant, as did former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and President Carter. By the time the Dade County Commission voted in favor of repealing the anti-gay discrimination amendment, Anita and her people had won their political victory. But they also, as The Nation aptly put it, became “the best thing that ever happened to homosexuals.” This was largely due to the hateful one-liners the chanteuse (who, despite a high singing voice, had an intimidatingly low speaking one) would spit out before cameras and microphones, such as: “If homosexuality were the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce.”
The gaining strength of the gay community, and the beginning of the end of her crusade, is symbolized by the footage featured in For the Bible Tells Me So. At a press conference in Des Moines, one of several cities where discrimination ordinance amendments were to be voted on, Bryant discusses the protests and harassment she has received from the people she regards as pedophiles. As she does, a gay activist named Aron Kay rushes up to her and rams a pie in her face. While gasps fill the room, and Bryant’s husband implores attendees not to apprehend the assailant — whose specialty was sending the pastries into rightwing enemies’ kissers — but to pray for him, the singer growled, “At least, it was a fruit pie.” (For the record, it was just cream.)
Within months, Save Our Children would collapse, and Bryant’s performing and pitching career would come to a screeching, terminal halt. The Citrus Commission, and the many corporations for which she was a spokesperson, refused to renew her contracts. By the early ’80s, she was making pathetic attempts to renounce her hate-mongering, insisting the whole campaign was the idea of husband Bob, whom she divorced in 1980. This rapid fall taught many, if not all, antigay crusaders to be more careful in how they spoke to those outside their inner circles (Falwell and Robertson would continue to have a problem with this, especially after 9-11).
Thus, Michele Bachmann, who began her life as a “fool for Christ” around the time of Anita Bryant’s brief tenure as chief fool, made sure, by the time she ran for national office in 2006, to focus on the preservation of marriage and deny any links to homophobic institutions — even if those links were very much a part of her adult life.
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