Sometimes a news article just jumps off the screen and laughs in your face.  Via Box Turtle Bulletin…  If you have any doubts about the depth anti-gay hate in this country, read this:

Kentucky legislators pass Holocaust resolution

The General Assembly yesterday approved a resolution calling for expanded opportunities for Kentucky public schoolchildren to learn about the Holocaust and other acts of genocide.

House Joint Resolution 6 is named after the late Ernie Marx of Louisville, a Holocaust survivor who made a life’s mission to spread education about the horrors he witnessed.

It passed the Senate on a voice vote and the House by a vote of 83-12. It now goes to Gov. Steve Beshear.

The resolution would direct the Department of Education to make curriculum materials available for optional use in public schools by March 2009.

The material would be part of the Kentucky Program of Studies, which has state approval but is not required.

The resolution reflects four years of efforts by middle-school students at St. Francis of Assisi School in Louisville, where Fred Whitaker offers instruction on the Holocaust and takes students to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

He said the pupils began lobbying for legislation that would give students in public schools access to opportunities to study the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

"These middle school students really knew something we should all know," Whitaker said. "They really knew there was something powerful that (happens) to anyone when they study the Holocaust and genocide."

Not powerful enough for some, apparently…

The Senate deleted a clause in the House version that cited other people the Nazis deemed "undesirable" because of their "race, nationality, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, religion, and political ideology."

Whitaker said he received indications earlier in the session that the reference to sexual orientation was a "red flag" that could have endangered the bill.

Dig it.  It took them Four Years, just to get the Kentucky statehouse to agree that school kids should probably learn something about one of the greatest human catastrophes of the twentieth century…Maybe.  We’ll suggest they learn about it, but not require it.  And then someone spies a clause in the bill suggesting that school kids learn that there were other victims besides Jewish folk, and that would have been fine too except for the homosexuals.  You know…these guys…

But the republican majority leader tut, tuts, any suggestion that they wouldn’t have been fine…really…with including the gay victims of the holocaust in their Completely Optional Curriculum…

But Senate Majority Leader Dan Kelly, R-Springfield, said in an interview that was never an issue for Senate leadership.

He said he had no problem with curricula discussing homosexual victims of the Holocaust as long as it’s "age-appropriate."

Whitaker said that, even without the language on other victims of the Nazis, "you can’t study the Holocaust and not also come across pink triangles," the insignia that homosexual prisoners were forced to wear.

You know goddamned well you can.  For decades after World War Two nothing, Nothing was ever said about the pink triangles, until gay scholars started digging into it based on rumors and stories they’d heard from survivors.  I started learning about the Holocaust in Junior High schools (middle school these days) and it figured in every lesson on that period of time for the rest of my grade school years and Not Once did I ever hear mention of the pink triangles, or how the Nazis had toughened Germany’s seldom enforced anti-gay laws, even before they enacted the brutally antisemitic Nuremberg laws, or how when the death camps were finally liberated, the surviving Jewish prisoners were released, as well as the gypsies, the Slavs, the intellectuals, the opposition party members…hell, even the communist prisoners were let go…but not the pink triangles.  They were considered vermin by both the Nazis, and the American liberators. 

Yes Mr. Republican Majority Leader Sir, you can goddamned well teach about the holocaust and not once mention the fact that gay men were rounded up by the Nazis too and shoveled into the death camps.  That was the status-quo all during both our school years wasn’t it?  And you’d like very much to go back to that status quo wouldn’t you?  Because you know most of your voter base doesn’t think the Nazis did anything wrong when it came to exterminating homosexuals don’t you?   And you know goddamned well you’ll loose votes if you do anything to suggest otherwise don’t you?  If you have no problem with curricula discussing homosexual victims of the Holocaust, then why didn’t you have that line put back into the bill?

The Holocaust museum says the Nazis arrested about 100,000 men as homosexuals and that an unknown number died amid brutal conditions.

Marzian said she could accept the Senate changes.

"You have to compromise in legislation," she said.

You did a great job of putting the knife into it Kelly.  You had your boys whisper that the bill Whitaker and Marzian worked on four four years was dead unless they deleted the line about gay victims of the Holocaust and they did it and now you can look at the cameras and claim you’re shocked, shocked, that anyone would bother caring about all that.  This is why you’re majority leader isn’t it.  You could have had it fucking put back in and insisted to your caucus that it stay there and you didn’t, and make no mistake, everybody knows who ripped that little page out of the history books and why.

And one other thing they’ll always know…  In 2008, over sixty years after World War Two, Kentucky school children still aren’t routinely taught about the Holocaust, and won’t be because after four years of trying all the Kentucky state house could do was pass a bill that suggests they learn about it.  That was about as far as you could go without loosing the bigot vote, wasn’t it Kelly?  And now you get to play civilized man for the cameras. 

Whitaker said he regretted that Marx, who died last year at age 81, didn’t live to see passage of the bill.

If it’s too much to ask that your schools teach about what happened to six million Jews I suppose it’s way too much to ask that it also mention the unknown thousands of gay victims too.  Especially when you and your fellow republicans need to be able to gay bash for votes every few years.