I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. -Mark Twain

People like to say the conflict is between good and evil. The real conflict is between truth and lies. -Don Miguel Ruiz

I friend on Facebook posted the notice that she’d died, and my first reaction was, Oh…her… There have been so many others since, but all of those are standing on her shoulders. The damage she did wasn’t merely to cancel that Dade County anti discrimination ordinance, or even to spawn dozens more local fights against The Homosexual. What her campaign did was decisively show republicans that they could us as a way to drive their voters to the polls.

She made herself the face of that campaign. They called it Save Our Children. The dark heart of it was a smear attack, utilizing the trope of homosexuals as child molestors. But we were also sexual predators, psychopaths and disease spreaders. During one appearance Jerry Falwell stood with her in front of the assembled crowd and said “so-called gay folks will kill you as soon as look at you.” That was how they intended to win an election to repeal the anti discrimination ordinance.

By 1977 gay people in south Florida had made progress. Police raids of gay bars were ended, The ’72 Democratic Convention, held in Miami featured openly gay San Francisco political activist Jim Foster who gave a speech on gay rights. We were seen in the local papers more as an oppressed minority than a threat. Still, it was thought the vote would be nail bitingly close. It wasn’t.

The day of the vote, from the apartment mom and I shared in the Washington DC suburbs, I watched all the news broadcasts late into the night for anything about the results in Florida. There were other elections going on that night all across the country, but there was nothing in any of the election reports about the Dade County repeal. We were a people not fit to speak of during family hours. Finally I fired up my shortwave radio and found a BBC broadcast that gave me the news. Her hate campaign won 4 to 1 against us.

For the republicans it was an epiphany.  Now they had another tool besides racism to reliably drive their voters to the polls. In some ways it was even more effective than race baiting, which also used the image of the black man as a sexual predator. Decades later that Save Our Children message would work for them during the fight over California Proposition 8. It still works for them. 

The day after the vote, as I walked to the store for some snacks and a soda, I counted off 4 people to 1 as I passed them by on the street, still trying to grasp the magnitude of it. All those people I would never know just to look at them, who would vote me and everyone like me out of existence the moment they had a chance. I would have to go on knowing.

And now she’s gone, but the evil she set into motion lives on. What is the profit in winning the world but losing your soul? She won her victory and it destroyed her. The obituaries when they mention her life before the rampage give it little more than a passing notice. She died known more for the hate campaign she waged than for anything else she ever did with her life. That is what hate does. It does not share power within a person. The pop singer became the hate monger, because that was all that hate would allow her to be.

She eventually withdrew from the public spotlight. The singing career was over, which she probably missed. She could have turned it all around with an eventual apology and declaration that gay and lesbian citizens are our neighbors, and that we are all equal in the eyes of her god. She had the entire rest of her life to make amends. But she never apologised for what she did, never moderated her views when asked, and when she died I am certain she regretted nothing about that campaign.