Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern (R) did not, in a recent interview with Concerned Women for America, renounce her controversial anti-gay comments. (Photo courtesy of www.okhouse.gov)
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REBECCA ARMENDARIZ
Friday, March 21, 2008
Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern, the anti-gay lawmaker whose tirade against homosexuality made national news last week, declined to meet with Parents & Friends of Lesbians & Gays and other activists at an Oklahoma City rally on Tuesday.
Later in the week in an interview with the Associated Press, Kern rejected demands that she apologize for her remarks.
“I see no reason to apologize for what God says, that homosexuality is a sin,” Kern told an AP reporter. “I will not apologize. I did not say anything false. I did not say anything malicious or hateful … they are trying to vilify me. That is their tactics.”
Gay activists across the country who’d hoped for a more penitent Kern were met with a no-show at the rally.
“A couple hundred people” were estimated at the state capitol at lunchtime, according to Rev. Loyce Newton Edwards, president of the city’s PFLAG chapter.
“I think the most powerful part [of the rally] is going to be when Rep. Kern’s constituents show up at the capitol to remind her that she has members of the LGBT community in her district,” Steve Ralls, director of communications for PFLAG, said prior to the event.
But Kern was a no-show Tuesday. The rally wasn’t intended to be a protest, Edwards said, but a way for “people of goodwill to say no to Sally Kern’s hateful message to stand together in solidarity.”
PFLAG ally Rev. Jim Shields, a retired United Methodist Church minister and a member of Kern’s district, had extended the invitation to Kern to have a “face-to-face, heart-to-heart conversation.”
“If she doesn’t show up, it would seem neglectful of her responsibilities to her constituents,” Ralls said.
Rep. Kern gave an interview to Concerned Women for America’s Matt Barber on March 14 and expressed no remorse for the comments she made during the rant, in which she said that homosexuality is a bigger threat to the United States than terrorism.
“I was just using a metaphor, just trying to make a point so that my fellow Republican colleagues and especially the church would wake up and realize that [gays] are a threat to the moral fiber of this nation, the traditional family and traditional marriage, one man and one woman, and that has been the bedrock of societies for thousands of years,” Kern told Barber.
Oklahoma state Rep. Al McAffrey, who is gay, said he ran into Kern at work after her speech was made public.
“Al, there’s a gay agenda,” McAffrey said Kern told him.
McAffrey said he didn’t have a confrontation with Kern, but that he did inform her that there is no gay agenda.
“The only agenda we have is equality for all, and if that’s wrong, then the Constitution’s wrong,” McAffrey said.
Though McAffrey expressed distaste for Kern’s comments, he emphasized that his main priority is taking care of his district. McAffrey didn’t attend the rally but said Kern’s speech was “the most asinine statement I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Edwards said that while support at the rally was strong, “there has been a deadly silence in Oklahoma about this event.” Though Andrew Rice, an Oklahoma state senator, has condemned Kern’s statements, no other state legislators have, according to PFLAG.
“If she had offered similar hateful views about African Americans, Native Americans or Jewish people, the calls for her resignation would have been swift and deafening, and from both sides of aisle in the State House. We wouldn’t even be debating her speech. We’d be saying goodbye,” said Chuck Wolfe, president of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, in an editorial calling for Kern’s apology published on the Huffington Post Tuesday.
Edwards said that the next steps include organizing town hall meetings around the city to educate the public about gay issues.
Kern’s son, Jesse Kern, 31, told Tulsa World, an Oklahoma newspaper this week that, contrary to rumors, he’s not gay.
Kern said he’s celibate by choice but not gay, the report said.
“First of all no one’s sexuality is anyone’s business,” Jesse Kern told Tulsa World. “It is not even my mother’s business … I practice celibacy to give to my God.”
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