Oklahoma's Sally Kern puts her foot in it - deep

CYBERSPACE, PLANET EARTH - A few days ago I ran across an item posted on Googlevideo.com (a great video site, excellent quality and good choices, generally) about an Oklahoma representative (Sally Kern) who was recorded giving a pretty ignorant, pretty hateful speech condemning homosexuality.

I'm deliberately understating what she said.

It sounded a little like the rants you used to hear in the 1950s and 1960s: Godless Communists are trying to take over our nation. Watch out, Watch out!

Here's a direct link to the clip:

Gay-bashing speech

I forwarded it to a few folks, but today her speech was being covered in all the major media. Oklahoma - a state that already gets a black eye generally for being backward - got whacked again for having a wacko legislator. (I did like the musical Oklahoma, but that's another story.)

San Francisco Chronicle story

I am amazed, not so much that a legislator from Oklahoma gave an anti-gay speech, but at how powerful the internet is that major media could not ignore this relatively small incident. It also raises an interesting specter regarding free speech.

Sally Kern will now become much more careful about what she says in public. Ok, maybe not Sally - she will now hit the talk show circuit - but certainly her like-minded legislators will.

So the question is: Is it better to have her position known? Or better to have her keeping it hidden?

Perhaps that intellectual giant Bill O'Reilly can ask her directly.


Bill O'Reilly