"Echoes of the Dade County, Florida war rumble on, and Anita Bryant, the Orange Juice girl who became chief protagonist on the side of the victors, emerges as a composite Lucrezia Borgia and Madame Defarge: Militant piety in a Jacobin cap. Miss Bryant is accused of fomenting mass hysteria; of bringing shame upon the nation; of engineering, unassisted, a massive defeat of democracy, and of single-handedly thrusting the country back into the dark ages. Mercy me! One small lady did that? One frenzied letter to our leading herald here in Seattle manages somehow to link Miss Bryant with the anti-Chinese "hysteria" that allegedly overtook the whole country at the turn of the century, the Japanese "exclusion act" of the 1920s (it wasn't exclusion, it was an entry quota), the Japanese resettlement act of World War II, and something the writer calls the "expatriation" of Filipinos. Maybe she means repatriation, which is decidedly different. "Will this country never free itself of this mass hysteria?" the writer asks. "Must every generation shield its children from those few individuals who can tolerate nothing that does not incorporate their own life style...?" Talk about hysteria! Now, honestly, does any reasonable person really suppose Anita Bryant managed all that? Isn't it possible that the homosexual community is itself responsible in large measure for this controversy? After all, no one paid them much attention, on the job or off, until they started jabbering publicly about their sex lives, like the cretins in television and the movies who suppose their bedroom activities are somehow of interest to, or the business of, everyone else."
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Baptists from the United StatesSingers from the United StatesWomen singersGospel singersWomen activists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Robert R. "Bob" Roberts, KIXI-AM radio broadcast commentator in Seattle, WA, in a radio piece entitled "Anita Bryant: Convenient Kicking Object for Boobs and Hysterics", as quoted by Anita Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation's Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality (1977), p. 149-150
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anita_Bryant
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Anita Bryant
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