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18. Swallowing Fruit from the Tree of LIfe
69 Plays16 days ago
Helen leads Sarah through the life and activism of notorious homophobe and orange juice queen, Anita Bryant. The two talk about how anti-gay activism both has and hasn't changed over the last 50 years, and try to learn some lessons from the gay activists of the past.
You can listen to "Squeeze a fruit for Anita" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at-rLX5DwsU
You can watch Anita Bryant get hit in the face with a banana cream pie here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBX6UvHpLj0
You can join our discord by clicking here.
Check out our Patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium and our website at https://www.odiumsymposium.com.
Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Introduction to Anita Bryant's Story
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi all, Helen here. It's Pride Month, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at one of the biggest villains of the 20th century anti-gay movement, Anita Bryant, the orange juice queen. We see both the violence and the sexual obsession that powered her rhetoric, and we talk about lessons we can learn from gay activists in the past. But mostly, we have fun discussing the downfall of a massive loser. I hope you have as much fun listening to this as Sarah and I had recording it.
00:00:26
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:41
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you... I'll suck you in your goddamn face. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:00:59
Speaker
some level of masochism.
00:01:02
Speaker
Hi, this is Helen. This is Sarah. Welcome to Odium Symposium, a podcast about the production of bigotry.
Engagement and Community Promotion
00:01:10
Speaker
So just a quick reminder before we start, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash odiumsymposium for $5 a month. We'll read your message on the show, you'll get early access to episodes, and we're going to continue to produce connoisseur-only episodes from time to time, although mostly you're just being nice to us.
00:01:28
Speaker
Also, all listeners are welcome to join our discord and you can find a link for that in the description.
Anita Bryant's Early Life and Career
00:01:34
Speaker
Before we get into the sort of bulk main topic of the episode, I want to tell you a quick story.
00:01:41
Speaker
March 25th, 1940, a farmhouse in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, which is like a tiny village, like, i don't know how big it is. I had never heard of it before researching for this podcast.
00:01:55
Speaker
there was a baby that was born and declared dead. okay Okay. The grandfather who was there at the birth has this like classic moment of like American masculinity and tells the doctor like, no, I'm not going to accept that. Like if you don't save this baby, like I'm going to kill you. And by some accounts, the doctor does this by some accounts, the grandfather does this grabs the baby. That's like,
00:02:22
Speaker
Dips the baby in a pan of ice water, which like somehow resuscitates it. The baby starts crying. There's all this like black, like, like it's described as in in some accounts as like the baby is like black sludge under her skin or something like this, or like in her body. Like she's engorged with this, like in a later interview, she says black poison.
00:02:45
Speaker
I don't know what this is. And I also don't even know if any of this is true. it could just be family lore. The grandfather gives her some moonshine and she like coughs up like a bunch of black poison and like then shrinks down to normal sized baby and starts crying.
00:03:04
Speaker
Shrinks down to normal sized baby. So so she was yeah she was so full of poison that she was... What, like a little seal or something? Yeah, like something like this. Yeah. Like, this is the descriptions I could find. I couldn't find a single one that I was like, yes, this fit this fits in with my knowledge of, like, how medical science works.
00:03:21
Speaker
Okay, that's disgusting. That's horrifying. Yeah, so this is the birth, but... This experience causes the grandfather, it seems, to like discover religion.
00:03:32
Speaker
None of the family was particularly religious, ah but after this experience, they start going to a Southern Baptist church, or more regularly going. I think they were sort of just like... you know, whatever ambiently religious.
00:03:44
Speaker
The grandfather also like is like, oh, you're gonna be my, you know you're this wondrous baby. Starts encouraging her to like pursue singing and performance. Oh, thank God the baby's not Ayn Rand. Okay. She has her first public singing debut in church at the age of two years old. Right around that time, actually, her parents divorce.
00:04:04
Speaker
um which is like a really traumatic experience for her. But then they remarry a year later. She starts singing with the church more regularly. She becomes a theater kid. Her parents divorce again. She wins when she's like 18. She wins Miss Tulsa and then goes on to win Miss Oklahoma.
00:04:20
Speaker
And then she goes to the Miss America pageant. And she gets second runner up. So that's third place. So she has this like meteoric rise. She's like producing music. She's like a beauty queen. Huge overachiever. Yeah. Most babies haven't survived being bloated with poison until their second or third year.
00:04:38
Speaker
Exactly. So, and all throughout this she's like really like religion is important to her, God is really important to her. So you can imagine this like beauty queen and religious theater kid.
00:04:52
Speaker
So from the beauty queen second runner-up, so third place at Miss America, she gets some scholarship money, she goes off to college. She briefly considers joining a sorority.
00:05:04
Speaker
but is scandalized by the loose behavior that she sees going on there. I don't know if you knew this, but women sometimes sit on men's laps before marriage.
00:05:16
Speaker
Wow, I don't think that should be allowed. i think we need to reform society around preventing that. She produces all these like albums. She gets all these like top 100 songs. She's this kind of celebrity that we don't really have. Like that definitely still exists, but it's a much smaller, I think, type of celebrity, which is pop star who is famous for being kind of a religious prude. We do get a little bit of that today, I think.
00:05:41
Speaker
But it's like, it's super niche. But she becomes like Lyndon Johnson's favorite singer. She gets well known for singing Battle Hymn of the Republic. Like this is her thing. But that's, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. So she goes to Miami.
00:05:57
Speaker
She meets this DJ. He's like the number one DJ in Miami. And we're going to get a little bit more about their like meet cute story later. But she just thinks he's like, he's so cool. And she doesn't really think she has a shot with him. But then he continues to pursue her and they start dating.
00:06:11
Speaker
Again, this is like people telling the story, like her telling the story later. And there's reasons to believe some of this might be exaggerated, some not. But he takes her to meet his parents. Like they have dinner.
00:06:22
Speaker
And he grabs her hand under the table. What? What? Yeah, she's really upset by this because she's like, I'm just meeting these people for the first time. She's like 20 at this point and he's 29 in this story, by the way.
00:06:34
Speaker
And she's like, I don't want his parents to think I'm some loose woman who would be okay with this kind of thing. But then when he lets go
The Anti-Gay Movement and Campaigns
00:06:41
Speaker
of her hand and she managed to like pull her hand away, he's put a ring on her finger.
00:06:45
Speaker
And she's like, okay, I guess we're engaged. This is the cheesiest bullshit I've ever heard. Yeah, right? Are you fucking kidding me? So it's either like she actually got engaged out of embarrassment and not wanting to make a scene. Or really what happened here is this is her idea of like a romantic proposal. Yeah. Is like a dude forcing himself on her. I immediately do not believe this happened. Right. So she does kind of flout convention a little bit because she's so famous. She keeps her name. So her husband is Bob Green, but she keeps her own name, which is Anita Bryant.
00:07:23
Speaker
The orange juice queen. So she continues to be like really successful. She marries Bob Green. um As I already said, she becomes Lyndon Johnson's favorite singer. She sings at his funeral.
00:07:36
Speaker
in 1973 she also sings at the 1971 super bowl and like later in an interview is like i managed to keep my clothes on like so she is like that's what i'm saying she's famous what a bitch kind of for being a prude right like she's a successful singer not just a prude but like a super judgmental and cruel one already exactly exactly And the main text going to talk about is an interview with her.
00:08:02
Speaker
And so here is from the short bio at the beginning of the interview. The couple moved to Miami Beach. And in 1963, after she was told by a gynecologist that she was barren, the Greens adopted a son, Bob Jr. She disproved her doctor's diagnosis the next year, when her daughter Gloria was born.
00:08:21
Speaker
Five years later, she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The union of Green and Bryant proved to be financially fertile as well. Wow. yeah Okay. Yeah.
00:08:33
Speaker
He became her personal manager and she soon became a much sought performer at state fairs and conventions. She also became a favorite at advertising agencies, representing Coca-Cola, Holiday Inn, Kraft, and since 1968, the Florida Citrus Commission as its sunshine girl.
00:08:54
Speaker
She traveled for six years on Bob Hope's USO tours. Lyndon Johnson let it be known that she was his favorite singer. Baptist preachers invited her to deliver Sunday sermons, a rare enough occurrence in that fundamentalist religion. religion She wrote nine books, including a cookbook that emphasized the theme of coping with life through faith in Jesus, and they all became one million sellers in religious bookstores.
00:09:21
Speaker
Now, after I read this, I was like, okay, I want to pivot the entire episode. Let's just go through the Jesus cookbook. Like that's such an insane concept. Look, here's my cookbook about like life with Jesus and also how to make banana bread. Like, i love it. We're not doing that. Yeah.
00:09:39
Speaker
No. So, okay. So why are we talking about her? So i'm going to give an even quicker biography of a woman named Ruth Shack. She was born in 1931.
00:09:50
Speaker
She knew from a very young age that she wanted to go into politics. There's this really cute quote from her in a later interview where she says, when other young girls wanted to be Shirley Temple, I wanted to be Huey Long. Huey Long was like a famous left populist Senator who criticized FDR for like not being radical enough in 1976 She runs for County Commissioner of Dade County, which is now called Miami Dade County It's one of the three counties that makes up like the greater Miami metropolitan area and it includes downtown Miami and Miami Beach
00:10:22
Speaker
And her husband Richard Shack was Anita Bryant's agent. So Anita Bryant donated money to Ruth's campaign and I think like spread the word in her church and like kind of helped her get elected. Not like in a huge way, but like, you know she had this measure of celebrity and she was like, oh, this is my friend Ruth. Like you should, you should vote for her.
00:10:43
Speaker
Now in 1977,
00:10:46
Speaker
Some gay activists approached Ruth about sponsoring an amendment to the county anti-discrimination ordinance to add what they called like affectional and sexual preference was how they kind of referred to it at the time in a lot of similar ordinances, but basically homosexuality to the list of protected attributes. So the amendment would make it illegal to discriminate in like housing considerations or employment, illegal to discriminate against people for homosexuality.
00:11:11
Speaker
One of the guys who was behind this, like who came to her with it was a This guy, Bob Kuntz, who he seems cool. He like he was a psychologist and he lost his job when his bosses saw like a pamphlet on his desk for some like gay organization, like not like just basically some small evidence that he was gay and they fired him. And this was like a really common occurrence. So they were like, look, people's lives are being destroyed.
00:11:37
Speaker
We need this law. This was already like a growing movement. DC, Minneapolis, a couple other cities like had already passed laws like this. So Ruth is like, yeah, sounds good. Like we should do this. I agree. There's this, you know, interview where she talks about when she ran, like all of her opponents were these men in blue suits. So she made sure to always wear these like bright yellow dresses to really stand out and make this point that she was a change. Right. And so she really, i mean,
00:12:00
Speaker
There's some like cringe stuff also later, but she seems cool. Like she was like, yeah, like my job is to like figure out like where there is injustice and like fight to make things better. And she has in a bunch of ways done that. And this is an example of that. So I think she's cool really surprised that she has any sort of positive relationship with our main character so far. Well, that's going to end very quickly. Yeah, I imagine so. Anita Bryant is like, hey, you can't sponsor this. This is really bad.
00:12:25
Speaker
And Ruth is like, no, that's not true. It's not bad. It's good. And Anita goes, well, you know, you don't understand the real risks here. Like, what if, you know, like the homosexuals want to recruit our kids? Like, what if one of your daughters turns out gay? And Ruth is like, yeah, that would be a normal thing that would happen. And I would support my kids if they turned out gay. And Anita is like, we can't be friends anymore. And starts to campaign against the amendment.
00:12:47
Speaker
Day of the hearing, the county commission is going to decide on the amendment. Dade County Commission meetings are not usually that well attended, but the room is packed. All these people want to speak and be heard on this. There's religious protests outside with people with like dumb signs saying shit like God says no. Who are you to say yes? And don't legislate immorality, right? Like all these just like religious slogans.
00:13:11
Speaker
Anita Bryan speaks up and and gives this like speech at the thing about again about like homosexuals indoctrinating children and Some of the commissioners like vote against the amendment and say like oh i've read my bible and it told me to say no Like there's some like pretty I mean it's not shocking to us to see like the amount of religion here But it's like yeah, it's always a little bit frustrating to see how much people will just be like yes Like I am making this decision because like my bible told me that and it's like yeah there's any pretense that like we're not a country of these like religious bigots is just totally fake but actually the amendment passes five to three and anita bryan's furious and so she's like
00:13:52
Speaker
okay, we got to repeal this. She starts a campaign called Save Our Children, and their first measure is to force a voter referendum to repeal the amendment. So basically there's just, you know, the way that the county commission works, there was a mechanism where if she got enough signatures, it would be forced to go to a vote.
00:14:12
Speaker
Throughout all of this, I think it's really important to note, like, the focus, the rhetorical focus and the strategic focus was on gay people recruiting children here in the Save Our Children thing. This was like in part essentially stated as like a strategic thing. Like if you look at the history of like Save Our Children, in this organization, it's not clear the extent to which like Anita had this like thought consciously. But people, you know, they did a poll and they found in 1977 that Women in Dade County actually opposed repealing the measure two to one and were like, I have gay friends. They seem fine.
00:14:46
Speaker
Like, this isn't scary to me. And so they were like, we really want to hammer. You should be worried about your children. I mean, this kind of rhetoric has always existed, but they really like blew up like, okay, the the focus for the anti-gay campaign in America is going to be telling people homosexuals can't reproduce naturally. So they need to reproduce by indoctrination and they're going to indoctrinate your kids.
00:15:05
Speaker
an argument I'm extremely familiar with. I will tell you that when I was on Twitter and I saw someone who thought of themselves as a liberal or leftist and was extremely transphobic, I would just drop in and be like, by the way, I'm going to turn your grandchildren trans.
00:15:24
Speaker
And it would just be like sticking an electric probe into like a very connected part of their brain and turn it on. They would flip the fuck out. Now, was this productive? Yes. It produced tremendous amounts of amusement for me.
00:15:40
Speaker
So I actually think this is an important point to make here. Also, I read up a bit on Anita Bryant. Most of my sources actually are from like the interview and and material accompanying this interview. But I did listen to some other podcasts and I did read like Wikipedia pages and some other articles and a lot of people commenting on this.
00:15:57
Speaker
like to comment on, like, the absurdity of this claim that homosexuals are recruiting children. And yes, like, this is an exaggerated lie, but... Oh, that's the end of our podcast right there, when you say but right there. We're canceled. It's over. It's over. Yeah, we're canceled.
00:16:13
Speaker
When they talk about not wanting, for example, teachers to be gay and to be openly gay, like, they understand children having gay role models, whether it's teachers, like, you know in the school or whether it's just...
00:16:26
Speaker
professional adults who are allowed to go about their lives and in public say, I am gay, that's what they're calling indoctrination. And like for the record, like I think we should be allowed to do that, right? Like I disagree with you that it's indoctrination, but that's the thing they mean when they say indoctrination. Like yeah allowing gay people to be role models is actually an important thing and it's good. And I think that there is often rhetoric around like, oh, you know, gay people just want to like live their lives and they're not trying to indoctrinate. And it's like, no, we're not trying to indoctrinate you, but we are trying to live our lives openly and be available to other people, younger people who want role models. Like that is actually an important part of gay life. Yeah, like we value our role as people who can like help nurture the next generation of people who share these characteristics with us. It's important. And yeah, we do want to make your kids more happy with being that way if they so choose or if it is in their nature than you want them to be.
00:17:25
Speaker
we're We're indoctrinating them. We're fine with that. Yeah, so so we're a pro indoctrination podcast. That's right. We're coming for your kids That's all we have to say about that So the campaign was actually successful and the measure the amendment was repealed two to one So like they were very successful at whipping up this fear But it also really galvanized like a growing gay rights movement, right? like Throughout the 70s, the gay rights movement had been growing. Stonewall in 1968. I see the issue here. I see the issue.
00:17:57
Speaker
Which is that they tried to pass that legislation originally, and that was divisive. And that caused people to be so distant from each other when actually they could have remembered what they had in common. That's so sad. i don't know why i don't know why these queers keep doing this. That's like...
00:18:18
Speaker
almost exactly rhetoric that was going around at the time. I mean, it's so frustrating how little things have changed on that front in some ways. Like obviously the legal situation has changed in a lot of huge ways, which we'll get into, but yeah, we're still like in a lot of ways, like this was around the time that like the anti-gay rights movement really took off. So Anita Bryant becomes like the villain for the gay rights movement. She, I think it's like dying down a little bit, but she continues to be like a popular character at like drag shows, right? Like she continues to be this like villainous figure in the gay rights movement today. Huge backlash.
00:18:53
Speaker
People call for a gay cot of orange juice. You get some really good protest signs. My favorite one, which I like desperately want on a t-shirt. So she had one of her slogans for the Florida Citrus Commission. She, cause one of the most popular things was she was in these orange juice ads that were like all over the place. Florida Citrus Commission would commission these ads and she was in them. And one of the slogans was a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine. or I think it was just a day without oranges, like a day without sunshine. So like the favorite sign I've seen Is a day without lesbians is like a day without sunshine which I desperately want on a t-shirt. Yeah, that rolls and There's a very popular cocktail Called the screwdriver which is vodka and orange juice So as part of this boycott a lot of bars started serving the Anita Bryant cocktail Which is vodka and apple juice So i see that's why I asked you to get some vodka and apple juice because we're going to drink some Anita Bryant cocktails and Watch a couple quick videos now I'm gonna probably cut a lot of this because I think I think one of these videos won't really work So we'll just have to tell you to look it up if you're listening to this
00:20:07
Speaker
I've got my apple juice and my vodka. I'm making my Anita Bryant cocktail as we speak. I don't normally drink either of these. So like I've made a big investment in this episode. So how's the Anita Bryant?
00:20:18
Speaker
You know what? It's not bad. Nice. So... Newsmen were questioning Miss Bryant about her national crusade against gay persons when four self-proclaimed homosexuals from Minneapolis interrupted today's proceedings.
00:20:31
Speaker
If we were going to go on a crusade across the nation and try to do away with the homosexuals, then we certainly would have done it on June 8th after one of the most overwhelming victories in the country. um But we didn't. we we We tried to avoid it and went into a place called Norfolk, Virginia and were met with protest and um all kinds of problems. Wow, that is a perfect hit.
00:20:58
Speaker
a nativeryant cocktail well a leak is the fruit pie <unk>s pray let's pray for him right now needa let's pray anita one wow that is a perfect hit Yeah.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, so she just got smashed in the face with a cream
Public Backlash and Personal Controversies
00:21:15
Speaker
pie. It was gorgeous. I gotta say, I think that beats the Richard Spencer punch for me. Just in terms of like, yeah comic timing, the way it was filmed, the satisfaction, just gorgeous.
00:21:26
Speaker
So the other one is a song, and I'm probably going to include it at the ah like the outro. But it's these two women who I think are lesbians. I love gay women so much. I couldn't get like a good video of it. I couldn't get good in information about who the musicians were. Like their names are Annie O'Brien and Rosie Carter. They're singing that at the World's Fair in Texas in 1977. But one, i just thought it was a very fun song.
00:21:51
Speaker
sung by cool, I assume, lesbians. And it also shows like people were just like making fun of her nationwide. Like she was like, it was easy to make her seem like a square because she was like, in addition to being this bigot, she was just extremely lame.
00:22:07
Speaker
So the main text we're going to focus on today 1978, she an interview Playboy. she does an interview with playboy At first, she doesn't want to be in Playboy. i think for obvious reasons, right? like She does not like the articles, yeah.
00:22:23
Speaker
So first, the interviewer is this guy, Ken Kelly. He's going to write it for Rolling Stone, but then there's some editorial differences. And so they have a conversation and they end up convincing her like, okay, this can go in Playboy and that'll be okay.
00:22:35
Speaker
So, interviewing Playboy. This was actually how I decided to do this episode. I was in a thrift store and they had a rack of vintage Playboys. And so I saw like, which one of these am I going to get? And there's this one that says, Anita Bryant speaks her mind on gays, Jews, prisons, hell, and Jimmy Carter.
00:22:52
Speaker
There's some good articles in this issue of Playboy, by the way. So I have a bunch of excerpts in the interview. I'm going to read them. I'm going to be the interviewer. So I want you to do your best Anita Bryant impersonation on the basis of not having ever heard her. I guess you kind of did to hear her speak in that other video where she got hit in the face with a pie.
00:23:10
Speaker
But yeah, just however you know however it you feel to perform this. Here's the opening of the interview. Have you always been obsessed with homosexuality? and Not at all.
00:23:22
Speaker
If I had been, would I have waited until 1977 to speak up? We could have gone on the offense long ago. We would have tried to shut down their publications, which anyone can pick up at a local hotel, and would show that they could do what they want with kids of whatever age they want, and even what kind of sex they can have.
00:23:45
Speaker
Okay, I'm terrified I'm going to like alienate the listener because that voice is too annoying. So i'm going to try I'm going to go ahead with something a little more normal, I think. Okay. The homosexuals have their national directory, and it lists Miami as the most open city in the nation.
00:24:02
Speaker
I got involved only because they were asking for special privileges that violated the state law of Florida, not to mention God's law. You know, when I was a child, you didn't even mention the word homosexual, much less find out what the act was about.
00:24:20
Speaker
You knew it was very bad, but you couldn't imagine what they tried to do exactly in terms of one taking a male role and the other taking a female role.
00:24:32
Speaker
I mean, it was too filthy to think about, and you had other things to think about. So when I finally found out all the implications... It was a total revelation for me.
00:24:44
Speaker
So the guy interviewing her here is a journalist by the name of Ken Kelly. I actually think he does a quite good job in this interview of like asking follow-up questions.
00:24:56
Speaker
He reminded me, it reminded me a little bit of reading like Chotner interviews and my take on all the Chotner interviews, which is like journalism has degraded so much that like we have one journalist left who asks follow-up questions and he is like widely revered as like the Like a prophet. like But the other thing I found out when I looked into it is he wasn't out at the time, but he's a gay man.
00:25:22
Speaker
so he's gay and she's saying all this stuff to him. Oh my god, gays, like how do they even have sex? It's disgusting. It goes against God's law. Absolutely. This is rancid. And it's so funny that the interviewer is like, are you obsessed with homosexuality? And she's like, I just...
00:25:39
Speaker
can't stop thinking about how they penetrate each other, about how one takes the female role. yeah It's been a total revelation for me. No, I'm not obsessed.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, so he asks, like, I think a good follow-up question to this, which is like, you're saying you didn't really know what gay sex was until recently. Then when you opposed the Dade County Ordinance, at first you didn't have a clear idea what you were opposing?
00:26:03
Speaker
Well, I knew some things because Bob had told me. He is nine years older and he has taught me a lot of things about sex. He was born in the Bronx, and I was raised in the Bible Belt.
00:26:16
Speaker
What can I say? i mean, you have visions of, well, now, what can they do as two men in bed or two women in bed? But I didn't really know the nitty-gritty of the thing.
00:26:29
Speaker
Until when? I'm not going to tell you. Wasn't it when you got a letter in January 1977 with an explicit picture enclosed? Okay, yeah.
00:26:41
Speaker
And I mean, i was absolutely appalled. I just couldn't believe it. And then afterward, a local police sergeant gave a presentation in our church basement with slides and all about child pornography, and it shocked our whole congregation. We understood then just how debased The whole thing was.
00:27:03
Speaker
I mean, it's a sin under the laws of God. And sin is like leprosy. It starts with just a little speck. And you don't even notice or care. You think, that's not going to hurt me. And all of a sudden, it begins to spread. And you still don't worry until the sores spread to the shoulder and the pus starts oozing.
00:27:25
Speaker
But by then, it's too late. God says the wages of sin are death, and one little sin brings on another. The homosexual act is just the beginning of the depravity. It then leads to, what's the word?
00:27:40
Speaker
Sadomasochism. It just gets worse as it goes on. You go further and further down the drain, and it just becomes so perverted, and you get into alcohol. Hold on, i'm going to take a sip of my Anita Bryant cocktail.
00:27:55
Speaker
and drugs, and it's so rotten that many homosexuals end up committing suicide. The worst thing is that these days, so many married men with children who don't have a happy marriage are going into the homosexual bars for satisfaction.
00:28:11
Speaker
If they're not careful, they're going to get caught up in it totally. You believe in a kind of sexual domino theory then? Lots of wives and former homosexuals have testified to me about these things. Yeah.
00:28:28
Speaker
It's just like...
00:28:32
Speaker
This is depraved. This is where the interview starts. Like, it's going to keep escalating from here. oh my God. There's that sense of the inversion or the upending or the disobedience of the hierarchy as an infection. There it is. You just like let one little bit in, and then it spreads, and then it takes you over.
00:28:55
Speaker
And that acts as a counter-argument to the thing you can easily observe, which is that the homosexuals have no fucking power. like She personally got an amendment in Miami, defeated. like She crushed them yeah under her heels, and yet they have to be the threat.
00:29:14
Speaker
So there's quite a lot in this interview that I was like, this is very funny, but... It's just all deranged nonsense. And so I had to pick like which chunk I wanted to include just to see like the level of how we're operating. So this is very, very soon after that.
00:29:33
Speaker
Wait, first, can I ask how discredited his domino theory at this point? Um, kind of medium, I would say like, It seems like kind of a snide question for the interviewer to ask.
00:29:47
Speaker
Like she had been actually already kind of outspoken about supporting the war in Vietnam as like a war of like God versus atheism. and So I would say that we're at...
00:29:59
Speaker
A place with domino theory where like most self-respecting people with a reasonable political analysis are like realizing like, yeah, this doesn't make any sense. But when you ask me about like the bulk of the American populace, I don't know.
00:30:13
Speaker
Gotcha. This is Reagan is going to get elected in the next couple of years. Right. It's like that's kind of where we're at with like this kind of this kind of politics. Okay, didn't your biggest shock about homosexuals come when you realize that male homosexuals eat each other's sperm a Miami reporter briefly quoted you as saying the reason God calls homosexuality an abomination is that homosexuals eat spermatozoa the building block of blood so therefore homosexuals are swallowing and presumably but presumably Digesting the essence of life Okay, wait before I even read the response I just have to ask
00:30:50
Speaker
Is Anita Bryant at this point presumed to be unaware of the concept of women swallowing a man's sperm? That is something I think he wants to get to the bottom of with this question. Okay.
00:31:04
Speaker
i did not um I did not say that to any reporter. I'm not that stupid. Did you say it to anybody?
00:31:15
Speaker
i was overheard. talking to a reformed homosexual on the phone, and I had no idea our conversation would ever get printed. It was a very personal thing, and I never dreamed it would get printed. The reporter deceived me. I was very naive about the media then. Since then, I've been trained.
00:31:37
Speaker
At that time, I was like a babe among the wolves. But you did say it It was a personal thing. I don't want to talk about it. Why not? Because it's just too... gory...
00:31:52
Speaker
tora for most people to comprehend.
00:31:58
Speaker
You could take this opportunity to explain yourself rather than let it stand as an overheard conversation. Well, I was witnessing to this guy and I didn't let on that I knew he had been a homosexual. And I threw the question at him because I wasn't sure myself and I wanted to find out. I had read about this phenomenon, but I wasn't sure it was true. See, I was at my desk one night and I was reading and studying and it was about one in the morning. And when I read about it, you mean swallowing sperm?
00:32:32
Speaker
Yeah, when I read about it, i about fell through my chair. i said, oh god, this can't be true. That was the first time I really knew. i mean, I had seen in writing before what they did in bed and so forth, but I never knew that they ate the male sperm.
00:32:52
Speaker
I just wanted to fall off the chair. So when this guy called, I wanted to really find out if what I'd read was true. So I said very casually, oh by the way, do you know that homosexuals eat the male sperm?
00:33:07
Speaker
what did he say? He said yes. And? And I still couldn't believe it Why not? Well, throughout the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, men are referred to as trees. Helen, what the fuck is happening?
00:33:28
Speaker
What? Where is she going with this? Okay. Even in the Garden of Eden, when God referred to the tree of life, he was talking about the whole spiritual salvation of men and so forth.
00:33:43
Speaker
And in the New Testament, it says Jesus was called the fruit of the womb, which is very interesting because even the homosexuals know this.
00:33:54
Speaker
Did you know there is a group in Seattle that calls itself the Fruit Loops? So? Why do you think the homosexuals are called fruits? It's because they eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of life. God referred to men as trees. And because...
00:34:19
Speaker
and
00:34:21
Speaker
because And because the homosexuals eat the forbidden fruit, which is male sperm, there is even a jockey short called Forbidden Fruit.
00:34:35
Speaker
Very subtle. Did you know that? No, we've only heard a Fruit of the Loom. think there's like a 90% chance that she's mixing up Fruit of the Loom with Forbidden Fruit, but okay. Yeah.
00:34:50
Speaker
You see, I agree with the anti-abortion people that the beginning of life is when the male sperm fertilizes the female egg. The scriptures talk about John the Baptist jumping in the womb when he was in the presence of the Mother Mary when Jesus was still in the womb. Okay, that's very complicated.
00:35:11
Speaker
And that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit. That was the beginning of life, and I believe that. I cannot deny what I know to be true.
00:35:22
Speaker
That's why homosexuality is an abomination of God, because life is so precious to God. And it is such a sacred thing when man and woman come together in one flesh and the seed is fertilized.
00:35:37
Speaker
That's the sealing of life. That's the beginning of life. To interfere with that in any way, especially the eating of the forbidden fruit, the eating of the sperm.
00:35:53
Speaker
That's why it's such an abomination, I can't deny it. When I discuss this with Christians, it revolts them, especially when they don't know the Bible and cannot see sin in its most hideous forms.
00:36:06
Speaker
You really turn people off when you speak in these blunt terms, and they can't believe I'm saying it But you have to tell them that it's true. It's there. It's logical. And it makes the sin of homosexuality all the more hideous, because it's anti-life.
00:36:24
Speaker
Degenerative. Surely, you must know that the eating of sperm is not confined to homosexuals. In fact, it's quite popular in heterosexual relationships these days.
00:36:36
Speaker
It's true. I agree with you. The abomination is spreading. so This is fucking crazy. yeah this is what I mean by, i think he does a really good job of doing this interview where he kind of presses her just enough to really let her just portray who she is and what she believes, right? Like...
00:37:00
Speaker
Anybody reasonable reading this is like, oh you're insane, right? like To my mind, this is exactly the purpose of talking to bigots. First off, you're not doing it for yourself.
00:37:13
Speaker
You're not doing it to convince them. You're not doing it to uncover the intellectual depth that surely undergirds their concepts. You're doing it to give them just enough to to hang themselves with, to show how ridiculous they are to a third party, to expose their own absurdity.
00:37:36
Speaker
And then that's it. That's all you need from them. Yeah. It's hard to know how to even comment on this. Like, it's funny that your immediate thing of like, okay, why does she think like swallowing sperm is a gay thing? It's like, well, you're right. It's not.
00:37:48
Speaker
But she sees the two as linked, right? She sees that like deviant acts within heterosexual relationships are... sort of a consequence of like the spreading abomination of homosexuality.
00:38:03
Speaker
So I think, you know, this really shows you like where she's at, what she believes. And it's kind of sad that like she was such a political force and able to affect such political change. It kind of sucks. You know, when you talk to leftists, they'll portray basically anything they do as a revolutionary act.
00:38:20
Speaker
You know, like I'm eating Froot Loops dry. that's a rebellion against the intended form of eating food yeah or whatever. yeah And like, I think that's silly, but also the right wing kind of does think that way. Yeah. In their view, all these struggles are like even more interlinked than we think of them as being. Yeah.
00:38:44
Speaker
He presses her a little bit. He lets her kind of get away with this like grandstanding about the Bible and doing all this biblical rhetoric. But he's kind of aware like, okay, we gotta like... She'll run to talking about the Bible like immediately like this It kind of feels like that's where she feels safe And so he does he lets her do some of it because I think it's an important part of who she is But he he does want to press around okay Let's actually talk about like you did this political activism like tell me about that and so He asks her like why Why did you stand up and say something if you hadn't been political before?
00:39:13
Speaker
She had been kind of political. i mentioned she had spoken out about the Vietnam War. There was also some, like, controversy where there was some performance where Jim Morrison of The Doors, like, exposed himself. And then later he was going to perform. And she like she led this thing, like, the rally to restore decency or something. Like, it was just, like, she had done these kinds of, like, things that a lot of people would refer to as, like, not political that are these, like, kind of cultural...
00:39:38
Speaker
campaigns but just like about being a prude i really wonder if john stewart and stephen colbert were aware of that when uh i actually almost accidentally said yeah so he asks her like what made you do this what made you stand up and she says look it's about protecting children right and she does her whole protecting children's shtick she talks about you know anti-discrimination law would have made it it So that schools and even private and parochial schools had to hire, quote, flaunting homosexuals. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution. And so if you think that homosexuality is a sin, you should be allowed to discriminate. And she, again, brings in this whole, like, oh, and, you know, if we give gay men rights, like, what's next? Like, we have to give rights to people who want to, like, have a dog as their lover. Like, just all of the stuff that we're familiar with. And I think this clip is kind of interesting to talk about. Under the proposed ordinance, every sexual deviation would have been legally acceptable among school teachers.
00:40:36
Speaker
Right behind the homosexual community in Dade County was a group of prostitutes who were going to initiate similar legislation permitting whores to stand up in front of kids in the classroom and proclaim their sexual deviation and then ply their trade ad infinitum. The issue had nothing to do with what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. If two men or two women live together and don't flaunt their deviant lifestyle,
00:41:09
Speaker
Fine. Let them do what they want. But when they try to interfere with my right as a mother to raise my children the way I see fit, then I draw the line.
00:41:23
Speaker
okay First off. Yeah. The reflection of current day rhetoric is immaculate. This line of argument has not changed anything.
00:41:34
Speaker
At all second then as now total bullshit. This is like highly self-aware Bullshit you know how we know it's bullshit back that I mean it's bullshit now, too, but the rhetoric hasn't changed at all despite the fact quote-unquote homosexual acts were illegal at the time Like, it was a criminal offense to have gay sex.
00:42:00
Speaker
So this whole thing about, like, you can do what you want in the privacy of your bedroom as long as you don't flaunt it, like, that was, like, materially not true. And actually, one of the slightly, i would say, you know, cringier moments from Ruth Shack, who I was talking about earlier, is she talked about one of the things that motivated her towards supporting this anti-discrimination ordinance was...
00:42:24
Speaker
seeing police raids there were regularly police raids on gay bars and like places where gay people would hang out and she was like you know and it's really hard seeing you know men in suits being like carried away by the cops And I would say like, you know, I also feel bad not only about the men in suits, but like everybody who's hanging out at like, you know, the gay bar, right? But it's just a load of horseshit, right?
00:42:48
Speaker
it's It's a self-aware horseshit. She doesn't think actually that that's true. When she says like two men or two women live together and don't flaunt their deviant lifestyle, she like has to at least mean like also they are not allowed to have sex. If she's not concerned about this stuff unless it's being shoved in her face, then why is she up at 1 a.m. reading about men swallowing each other's sperm? What's going on there? yeah Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, I was reading about it and like I fell out of my chair at 1 a.m. But it's just, yeah, it's... Oh my god. i gotta say, this Anita Bryant cocktail is hitting. So the interviewer continues to like press her a bit about the sort of obvious discrepancies in all the things she's saying.
00:43:26
Speaker
And we noticed earlier, right, there's the moment where she talks about, like, when she's talking about gay people eating sperm and the guy's like, well, you know, did you say it? And she's like, oh, I didn't say that her reporter. I'm not that stupid. She likes to play this game of, like, oh, I know how ridiculous I'm being. And there's this really wonderful little short exchange that I think really illustrates the game she's playing quite well. Have we heard anyone else talk about how bigots will understand and even acknowledge how ridiculous they're being?
00:43:53
Speaker
They're just like not obliged to care about words in the same way we are. odd.
00:44:02
Speaker
A moment ago, you lumped homosexuals into the same category as murderers. But I'm not saying homosexuals are murderers. You're saying they're just as bad.
00:44:14
Speaker
No, i don't say they're as bad. God says it. It's in the Bible. The first Corinthians, I think. Yeah, so throughout this whenever she kind of tries to walk herself back from these absurd claims Sometimes it's not explicit, but it's always like oh no It's not me saying that it's God right? So it's like oh you actually do think all of those things are true and you there's this extra layer of like you think you have like a Personal relationship with the creator of the universe who is telling you that these things are true and
00:44:45
Speaker
So it's even worse than if she just believed gay people were evil. So that's like a lot of the grandstanding. Then we get into some of the details of like the actual campaign. She really talks a lot, as you can see. Like she's she really loves the sound of her own voice, it seems.
00:44:57
Speaker
So I'm going to kind of skim some of it and and try to cut out just the important bits here. i assume my rendition of Anita Bryant has been 100% accurate so far. Oh, yeah, it's actually it's uncanny.
00:45:09
Speaker
So he asked her like, okay, let's go back to talking about Miami. Like, you you know, you decided to take a stand. Like, what happens next? And she says, well, you know, I wrote a letter to the county commissioners.
00:45:21
Speaker
the homosexual leaders united against me. She's constantly talking about the the militant homosexual activists, like the homosexual leaders, as this, like, nebulous block, very much in the way that anti-gay and anti-trans people talk today about, like, trans rights activists or, you know, the militant queers.
00:45:38
Speaker
One little funny moment, she said, you know, they called the Florida Citrus Commission, threatened a national boycott of Florida orange juice. The commission was upset. The committee, you know, the Florida ah a Citrus Commission was like,
00:45:50
Speaker
why Why are you doing this? like Can't you just like sell orange juice and be normal? like we want buy Why interviewing Playboy and talking about how much it shocked you to think about how men are swallowing each other's sperm? like What does this have to do with orange juice?
00:46:07
Speaker
They don't actually drop her as the spokesperson, at least yet. They do some polling and they find that they're going to lose 11% or whatever. of like Or 11% of those polled said they might boycott on the basis of this and they decide like that's a... ah drop they're willing to tank because like the risk of dropping you know whatever right they're like okay this is fine but it's like they're not super happy and then she says that the homosexuals threatened to quote sue my ass off like she won't say ass like she was just talking about eating sperm earlier but here or she's like she's spelling the word ass she's such a fucking loser it's wild yeah on the one hand it kind of sucks that she had this political success and it would take years like it wasn't until the 90s that the the non-discrimination ordinance came back which kind of sucks on the other hand it's really lucky that she's so lame and it was so easy to make her such a laughing stock because she really galvanized the gay rights movement at the time
00:47:06
Speaker
Like it really became this like easy to to focus on figure. So she's like, she started getting a bunch of threats. She wrote that letter first to the county commissioners. She went on a radio show, a local radio show with a Christian DJ.
00:47:22
Speaker
And she's really like worried like do I have what it takes to like do this right and and this is her version of events is that she is worried about whether she has like the personal courage to like stand up and take a stand on this right so all of that gloss with like what if I get canceled? Exactly so she brings her daughter goes on this radio show and talks about the need to protect children from the homosexuals. This is just beautiful like it was great.
00:47:47
Speaker
I'd brought my daughter Barbara with me, and when we started driving back after the show, there was a drizzly rain, suddenly, in front of us. There was a car crash.
00:47:59
Speaker
It was a real bad accident. I swerved around it, and to this day, I don't know how, we escaped death. We were real shook up. I pulled over to the side of the road, and I said to Barbara,
00:48:11
Speaker
Let's just pray, okay Let's thank Jesus for saving us from this accident. I took her hand and we prayed. Barbara's like me. I mean, when she was born, she was 42 years old. She looked up at me and said, if God can help us like this,
00:48:31
Speaker
Can't he help you win against the homosexuals? I tell you, my tears started coming, and I knew then we would win.
00:48:44
Speaker
ah this is the most... psychopathic least self-aware shit imaginable point one she sees this car crash happen right in front of her she swerves and barely avoids it like it's very clear this is an immediate thing there are not like emergency responders on the scene or something like that and she's like you know what this is a great moment to pray this is a great moment to commune with my daughter about the nature of homosexuals second this supposed connection with her daughter is so fucking funny dude it's so fucking funny this is like that reoccurring twitter bit where you make fun of someone who's like making up shit that they're
00:49:36
Speaker
children said about politics except she's saying this in like a national interview that tweet where it's like my son asked me like are the protesters gonna vote in november like he's a 40 year old vox journalist and i fucking hate him
00:49:54
Speaker
yeah no it's it's incredible wow this is beautiful this is wonderful odm helen thank you for taking this up Yeah, i' was just like I was having so much fun reading this interview, and it was so hard not to be like, what if we just do an episode which is us just performing the entire interview, like start to finish, and then just like, that's it. And I was really tempted to do that, but obviously we can't do that because, well, I don't own the copyright for the interview, right? So like we can excerpt it for fair use, we can't just perform the whole thing.
00:50:22
Speaker
That was mete my main consideration actually. Okay obvious follow-up question which the journalist asks because there is an obvious follow-up question
Views on Gender Roles and Personal Relationships
00:50:30
Speaker
Wait a minute your daughter's nine years old Did she know what a homosexual was like how did you explain to her what a homosexual was like what you know when you were a kid you didn't know like What have you told your nine-year-old daughter about homosexuals right in this universe? Homosexuality is basically like on the tier of like bestiality or something like that so it's like what have you been telling your nine-year-old about exactly? Yeah, so she's like, yeah, well, you know, we had a very practical conversation on like on at their age level. And he was like, yeah, how how do you explain homosexuality to nine-year-old? This is her response. Well, now you've got me on the spot.
00:51:06
Speaker
Basically, we explain to our children that marriage is a sacred vow and that in Genesis, God said he knew man was incomplete and man needed a helpmate, so God made women and that man and woman were meant to come together and multiply the earth.
00:51:23
Speaker
I explained in simple terms to the little ones that some men try to do with other men what men and women do to produce babies, and that homosexuality is a perversion of a very natural thing that God said was good, and that it is a sin and very unnatural.
00:51:43
Speaker
I explained to the children that even barnyard animals don't do what homosexuals do Yeah, credit to the interviewer. He immediately says that's not true.
00:51:55
Speaker
Like there's ample evidence that animals, barnyard animals, even like other human cultures around the world, like homosexuality has been instituted, has been part of tribal cultures. It exists at all these different levels as like a naturally occurring thing and as like a socially occurring thing, like you're just wrong on that claim. And she goes, well, I've never heard of it. And also God says it's wrong. So that's the point.
00:52:19
Speaker
Right? And it's like... Okay, alright. So, again, she's doing the classic thing, right? Pull the eject seat lever on that line of argument. You got me on the spot. Okay, let me cover over by doing some biblical rhetoric, right? And then he's like, whoa, the thing you said is not true.
00:52:36
Speaker
And she's like, oh, well, no, God says it The reason that she's emphasizing repeatedly, like, how simple all the stuff she's explaining to the kid is, is because none of it is simple.
00:52:47
Speaker
It's like... actually quite arcane to be like God knew man was incomplete and so he made a helpmate and they were meant to come together and multiply the earth and there's like a physical act involved with that and so sometimes there's a thing that's like makes babies that men and women do and also that men and men can do it and then that's unnatural and like all that stuff and It is really important to her that this be so basic, so obvious, so simple that like, really she shouldn't even need to explain it to a child. Like that's kind of the whole point of quoting the child in the first place, right? Is to have the child be like, even I, a child, with my mere wisdom of babes can see that homosexuality is fucking nasty.
00:53:38
Speaker
But like, it's just not that way. It isn't. All of this is like tremendously complicated. And it's so important to her to paper that over and sand it down into just like this natural order.
00:53:51
Speaker
And I think we'll see a little bit more of this also a bit later on. But you can also see how tied in with misogyny this is right? Like, you know, the the odium of this episode really is homophobia here. But...
00:54:04
Speaker
Already we're seeing and we're gonna see later some stuff that you know This could be an episode about misogyny if I had just focused slightly differently on the stuff she said right and you didn't do that because you're a misogynist You got me oh, I'm on the spot now.
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'm on the spot now um oh You don't even have the Bible to fall back on Helen you're so screwed. Yeah, I'm gonna talk about Neon Genesis Evangelion lore It's so simple if you really think about it.
00:54:35
Speaker
So No, so the interviewer then asks like okay, well you're teaching your kids about homosexuality like How would you feel if one of your kids turned out to be homosexual?
00:54:47
Speaker
I would never disown my children No matter what I'm a firm believer in taking my children in my arms every day and saying I love you every day I have a real bugaboo myself. If I fail as a mother to my children, then I have failed completely. My family is my first priority. If one of my kids chose the homosexual lifestyle, I would sit down and explain to him that he's hurting no one but himself, and that God cannot tolerate that kind of sin in his life, and that lie will have to suffer the consequences of sin.
00:55:28
Speaker
particularly in knowing that he will never be happy choosing the way of the devil rather than God's way. But you would regard yourself as a failure if that happened?
00:55:41
Speaker
Yes. If my kids don't become happy, worthwhile, responsible citizens, then I will have failed everything.
00:55:52
Speaker
All else will have been in vain. The career. Everything. Everything. Nothing else really matters. I mean, I don't believe that, but yeah.
00:56:03
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, obviously she's going to disown the kid. Come on. She's like, she's fine with sending the kids to prison if they're gay. Like, I think that's pretty clear.
00:56:16
Speaker
Oh, they're going to talk about prison. So, okay. So he asked a bit more about her kids. Like, did your kids object or were there any issues with your, or like with your kids when you took your, your anti-homosexual stance and,
00:56:28
Speaker
and She has this like funny little moment and she takes forever to say it so again i don't want to like clip the whole thing but she has this funny little moment where she's like yeah like There was at one point where our daughters Gloria and Barbara were like we don't want to hold hands with our friends because we don't want people to think that we're homosexuals and And she's like, no, no, no, that's fine. Like having friendship with other young girls is fine. And it's not, you know, perverse homosexuality. And it's important that you don't view your friendships as being warped by this thing.
00:56:59
Speaker
And she also says, and also you shouldn't tease effeminate boys. And the interviewer was like, wait, you told your children that it's wrong to harass boys who are effeminate. And she says, yeah, it's not Christian to harass effeminate boys.
00:57:13
Speaker
Because kids are very influenced by their peers. So we needed to teach them not to do that because it's a really common thing to do. But it's really important that you don't bully kids because that's not Christian. And especially if it's a false accusation.
00:57:29
Speaker
a false accusation? You shouldn't be bullying effeminate boys because if you call them gay for being effeminate, you might be falsely accusing them, which would be... Okay, right at the start, you know, there was something she was clearly choosing not to examine, which was how this abuse of gay people was like spilling over to her kids, harming them, causing them to like be afraid of stuff that even she regards as like natural, normal, healthy, something to be encouraged.
00:58:04
Speaker
But then, oh oh, that twist at the end, that twist of the knife yeah where she's like, Like, the problem with bullying effeminate boys is like, oh what if they're not actually faggots who deserve to be bullied?
00:58:19
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So she finishes up with this little chunk, which is really funny. In a way, she's actually made a significant advance on the turfs of today who are like, we can always tell. At least she admits that she can't.
00:58:30
Speaker
The militant homosexuals in Miami accused us of printing a kill the queer for Christ bumper sticker. I mean, and never would we endorse that kind of thing.
00:58:43
Speaker
That would be disrespectful to homosexuals as human beings. We would never say queer or faggot. I mean, homos is not that bad, really, but we would never say it.
00:58:56
Speaker
And that's a much more honest position than the militant homosexuals take. Yeah. it This is fucking killing me. Do we need to point this out to the listener? Do we need to? like I don't know if we need to. I mean, maybe it's worth saying, like, this, holding this up is like, oh, I don't say slurs, and so I'm not homophobic, basically.
00:59:17
Speaker
Like... Well, she's saying the slurs. Yeah, exactly. like
00:59:29
Speaker
But you know what? She's really working the fucking use mention distinction here. i gotta say. we would never say queer or faggot. By the way, when that appears on the page, make sure it's in quotes so that it's okay that I said it. And then like also insisting like, ah, homos is okay. But we wouldn't say Just joking. weird homos is chill i wouldn't say homos but i would say militant homosexuals like it's just so bizarre they go back and forth for a while where she tries to insist that calling someone gay the sin is the homosexual act and there's no such thing as a homosexual in the way that like gay people intend which is to say like someone who just prefers being with men
01:00:16
Speaker
basically she wants to say you know you're not born that way there's no like identity here there's no right it is like a sinful act and so we need to fight like on a terminology level and she kind of goes around in circles on this for a while with the interviewer so i didn't include any of it but it is really reminiscent of a lot of like weird like anti-trans bigotry today where people are always trying to fight these terms like oh i can't use pronouns because that's seeding ground to this thing like it's exactly the same tactic of just like making up these like Bizarre objections on terminology and to be like oh, this is the kind of grammar They're forcing me to call them gay when really they're like people who do the homosexual act, right? It's just Mm-hmm.
01:00:56
Speaker
It's just totally nonsense. The guy Is clearly having some fun. He starts asking her about like, okay, what about bisexuals? Like is there more hope of salvation for bisexuals? Oh those don't exist. Come on be serious and she actually goes like well, I can't really say that like there's more hope for bisexuals because a bisexual might think like, oh, it's not as bad because I only do it sometimes. But, you know, you know you're you're dabbling in sin, which is like just as bad as as sinning. They're in a promiscuous area, she says, and she finishes up with it. She finishes that up with, they're enjoying their cake, but not eating it, you see, which like doesn't make any sense.
01:01:37
Speaker
Isn't that like the best possible outcome? You get the full enjoyment of the thing, but you don't actually destroy it. So that's why I'm a bisexual. I'm coming out this Pride Month as a bisexual because I want to enjoy my cake without eating it. I'm so i'm so proud of you and in honor of Pride Month.
01:01:56
Speaker
I'm not going to call you things I would never say anyway, like queer or faggot. Yeah. ah or Homos which actually is completely fine, but you know, I'm not gonna say it ah So, okay, so he then starts to ask like okay, so you do this campaign like what were the what were the consequences of standing up and and and starting this campaign and so she starts saying well, you know, we got threats blackmail and the thing is I couldn't really sort out here what was her exaggerating versus the reality. It does seem like, based on the reporting I could find, like she did get threats of blackmail and and obviously there were threats of boycotts. I mean, there were boycotts, but there was all sorts of intimidation. it wouldn't surprise me if she got death threats, not in the slightest.
01:02:44
Speaker
In fact, I will say if any of our listeners have a time machine you feel like going back in time and sending death threats to Anita Bryant, like feel free. We encourage it. Yeah, I mean, i do think a lot of this happened.
01:02:57
Speaker
It is in this interview that she shares the story about, like, being born, like, nine pounds and, like, full of sludge and then being fed whiskey and, like, spewing up this black poison until she's, like, normal baby-sized again.
01:03:11
Speaker
And so, like, I just don't, I mean, just don't know how to how much to believe, like, any factual claim she's making here. And I do think that some reporting was based on this interview as well. So it's hard for me to sort out without, like,
01:03:22
Speaker
you know, this being my full-time job, like, what exactly was the nature of all of the threats she got? But it seems like she did get death threats. She did get, there were bomb threats. She did have to travel with extra security.
01:03:32
Speaker
Here, she's just saying, like, she lost a lot of work. So this is one thing that we can actually, like, actual reporting backs this up. She, Her big, like, source of income is this Florida Citrus Commission thing, which she didn't lose at the time.
01:03:46
Speaker
But she also performs at all these conventions. She performs at state fairs. Basically, anytime she was, like, maybe going to get hired somewhere, activists would do protests and they would call and they ran this, like, big boycott campaign. And it was largely successful. And she lost out on a lot of opportunities. Yeah.
01:04:02
Speaker
And so she really starts talking about, you know the militant homosexuals will go to any extreme to get me out of my livelihood. People were trying to say that she was responsible for, in various places, there was a campaign in New Orleans to say that she was responsible for local suicides of gay people.
01:04:19
Speaker
So like a big part of the sort of backlash to her anti-gay activism was people trying to directly say, you know, not like she is responsible directly for like hounding someone to suicide, but trying to draw this connection between her and this campaign is the reason why you see rates of suicide and violence against gay people.
01:04:39
Speaker
That's interesting and really difficult, I think. I mean, there's a lot of people in today's like right-wing influencers sphere who are engaging in stochastic terrorism, who are trying to drive like queer and other marginalized people to suicide or to cause them to die by other means. And...
01:04:59
Speaker
Arguments like that are very hard to sell, certainly in the media sphere. But I think like even in conversation, there's like a strong resistance to it.
01:05:10
Speaker
People are much more okay with killing by statistical means. Yeah, I think it's interesting. And I think it's interesting also how much it seems like that actually did gain some ground versus today, like anti-gay and anti-trans activists are much more open about trying to do that violence, right? Like you actually get TERFs saying stuff like there's like famously, what's her name, Posey Parker.
01:05:36
Speaker
In the uk who started calling on men like oh if they're gonna start letting men in women's restrooms Like I call on men who want to protect women like if you have a gun like go in and like enforce, you know You know protect women right we should maybe clarify for those who are not so familiar with the turf sphere that the names are transposed here from the name of the famous actor This is like a totally different person. This is like a Nazi. Oh, yeah. No, this isn't Parker Posey. This is Posey Parker, who is, yeah, a pretty prominent anti-feminist, anti-trans.
01:06:12
Speaker
right-wing, like, white supremacist, basically. Yeah. Anyway, so she starts complaining about this, and yeah, she she really is sort of inventing, in some ways, the the cancel culture grift. We were really surprised that they had the power to do what they do.
01:06:30
Speaker
It's not the democratic way at all. If we had lost, we would have said, well, we feel bad, but that's it. Well, they lose and they punish you for winning.
01:06:43
Speaker
i had no idea of the viciousness or vindictiveness of the homosexual community. I was very naive in that respect. She started her campaign in response to a political loss. Like, this is just a lie. This is just a lie. It's so annoying. You know, there were all these fucking memes in 2020 that were like,
01:07:05
Speaker
that were like you know what? At least we accept our losses. And when I say in 2020, I'm working on a technicality here because they were before Jan 6.
01:07:21
Speaker
Yeah. like but These people do not accept their losses. Yeah, it's wild. There actually was a case of a lawsuit that was filed against her.
01:07:34
Speaker
There was a murder of a gay person in San Francisco where the murderer, like, I forget if they cited specifically Anita Bryant, but like mentioned Save Our Children and like mentioned this campaign.
01:07:48
Speaker
And so people related to the victim like tried to sue her. The lawsuit was thrown out because like the action happened in California. Like this is a weird legal thing that I don't quite understand. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really explain it.
01:08:03
Speaker
Like the action happened in California, but like her activism was in Florida. And so there was like a jurisdictional technicality that the lawsuit got thrown out. Unclear if you really, there were grounds for that lawsuit to begin with, but there was this growing sense of like,
01:08:17
Speaker
people saying, you know, she's responsible for this violence in this kind of statistical way. You know, the guy, he asked, like, do you feel any responsibility for this? Like, what is your response to this claim people are making that you bear responsibility for these?
01:08:30
Speaker
And she says, look, like, I don't have anything to do with any murders. There was a homosexual murder every day in San Francisco, which is like a, like, horrible dog shit thing to say.
01:08:42
Speaker
It shocks me that people think I'd have something to do with it. And... Oh, this is a really funny detail. Around the same time, so like the spring in 1977, it's around when she was like really at the side height of the news, there was a massive hurricane that's called that was called Hurricane Anita.
01:09:05
Speaker
That was not like historically destructive, but destructive enough that they've retired the name Anita. They won't name any Hurricane Anita. Like there won't be any more Hurricanes Anita. Oh my god.
01:09:16
Speaker
And so people like made fun of her for that. But you know, like the weather service actually like specifically wrote to her and was like, we picked these names like a decade in advance. You had nothing to do with it. But yeah.
01:09:28
Speaker
This is Anita Bryant hearing about like all the deaths that her activism has caused. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. This is the, if you haven't seen it, it's someone saying, wow, but then in a thought bubble is thinking, base, base, base, base. So here's what she has to say in response to this. Like, do you feel bad about this? My stand was not taken out of homophobia, but out of love for them.
01:09:59
Speaker
Look, I'm not as stupid as people make me out to be, especially concerning homosexuality. In Richmond, four of them came up to me. One of them gave me the record Hurricane Anita and looked at me like he was waiting for me to faint dead away or turn pale, and I said I was familiar with it, and I wrote down a scripture and said...
01:10:23
Speaker
I love you. And one other guy came on real strong and he said, you've broken my heart and I cry all night and day because you hate us.
01:10:35
Speaker
I said, I don't hate you. i love you. i took his hand and said, I love you. Can you say you love me? the guy started shaking. He said, I can't say that.
01:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, why would he? He probably hates you. You fucking suck. You're a cause of a lot of trauma in his life. There's no oblig obligation for anyone to love this bitch. Fuck her. God. No, but it's such a like... it's It's so much part of this evangelical Christian mindset of...
01:11:09
Speaker
this like right-wing Christofascism, It's like, oh, we're doing it all out of love, right? It's it's so frustrating. I mean i don't know it's ah It's a dialect of cry-bullying, right? It's like, oh, you're so mean to me. And actually all I'm doing is extending the love of my heart out to you for your well-being. Yeah, and so they go back and forth about this for a bit. She does more explaining the Bible. And he, I think, has a really good line of attack here. And he asks her, in some jurisdictions, homosexual behavior is now prosecuted as a misdemeanor. Are you in favor of returning it to a felony status?
01:11:47
Speaker
Yes, I think so. Anytime you water down the law, it just makes it easier for immorality to become tolerated. Let's say two adult men are caught in bed fornicating.
01:12:00
Speaker
Under felony provisions, they could be sent to jail for 20 years. Do you think 20 years in prison would rehabilitate them? Well, why make it easy for them? I think it only helps to condone it and to make it easier for kids who wouldn't be so concerned if it were just a misdemeanor, whereas a felony might make them think twice, especially the younger ones.
01:12:25
Speaker
What if it doesn't? Boys should spend 20 years in jail for one act? If they're on good behavior and everything, and they really... What are you saying? That someone will be rehabilitated and turned away from homosexuality in prison? Surely you know that prisoners are gang-raped routinely. Someone jailed on a homosexual charge is particularly vulnerable. You must to know that. They'll have plenty of time to think.
01:12:47
Speaker
Just because prisons are corrupt and not doing the right job in rehabilitation because they don't have enough spiritual emphasis, it doesn't mean that there should not be a strong punishment for that.
01:13:02
Speaker
She keeps trying to make these kinds of biblical, like, oh, we have to punish sin, we have to punish sin kinds of arguments, and he keeps kind of pressing her on it. And it kind of ends at this point... Are you saying to do away with the law totally?
01:13:16
Speaker
Look, I'm just thinking of a deterrent to keep young people from going into it. That's why you've got the ministry in the prisons. They're trying to find an answer there.
01:13:27
Speaker
Maybe the answer is to put the homosexuals in a different place in the prison. That's already the case. Do you think that would deter them from homosexuality? How familiar are you with prisons? Have you ever performed inside one? Yes, I did the Huntsville Prison Rodeo.
01:13:43
Speaker
It was great. The audience was very captive. Yeah, there's a little note here specifically that she laughs at her joke about the captive audience, which fuck you. Okay, but he says, did you get a firsthand look at the prison conditions?
01:14:01
Speaker
and No. i've read about them, and and I have mixed feelings, because I've heard a lot of radical people who come out and say the prisons are terrible. But you know where they're coming from. They want to do away with law and order, because they're rebellious against God.
01:14:21
Speaker
I know what the cause of the prisons is. The cause of sin So for one sin, the sin of one man making love to another man, you would send them to jail? That's the Christian approach?
01:14:35
Speaker
As a Christian, I know the only answer is the gospel. man, this is really exposing like the raw violence on just underlying this logic. It's just total nonsense. And I think he does a really good job here because, you know, obviously i would say sort of abstractly the argument is against homosexuality being a felony is an entirely different one. But he's correct here to even point out like even in your claimed morally superior world of like homosexuality being a sin, the thing you're arguing for makes no sense. And you actually do just have this vindictive hatred of of gay people that you want to put the in prison and you don't really care and you don't really claim you know all these claims about like oh I love the homosexual even though i hate the sin is like that doesn't really mean anything because what does your love mean your love is worth nothing your love is worth throwing people in prisons where you know the conditions are bad and you've discounted anybody saying anything about these prisons conditions being bad because well that's just what happens with sin and has nothing to do with just like the violence of the state and
01:15:38
Speaker
Really terrible stuff. It's striking how clearly they put themselves in the position of a vindictive God. Do you know what I mean? They're talking about this God like as specifically portrayed by Jesus, God of forgiveness and mercy.
01:15:55
Speaker
But they have really personally want to be in the role of the punisher, the executioner, the one who causes the sinner to be violated.
01:16:07
Speaker
That's so important. Yeah. It's such a fascist impulse. It really is. It's just the boot stamping on the face. Absolutely. She's trying to run away to just talk about gospel here, right? Like she wants to talk about the Bible because she can tell like she's losing this exchange because the things she's saying make no sense and they are exposing her as this violent extremist.
01:16:25
Speaker
The bad kind of violent extremist, to be clear. so They talk a bit about religion and he wants to really sort of show the like emptiness of her religious beliefs here and so remember that like the headline for this was Anita Bryant speak or not the headline but like the sort of the grabbing thing on the cover of Playboy was Anita Bryant speaks her mind on gays Jews prisons Helen Jimmy Carter so we've covered the gays and prisons and The Jews thing... Oh,
01:16:55
Speaker
It's not great. Basically, I didn't clip any of it. Not because it was, like, so odious I couldn't clip it, just because it's... They go around in circles for a while. But basically, she's saying, you know, the only people who are going to be saved are people have accepted Jesus into their lives. And so he basically gets her to say, like...
01:17:14
Speaker
Yeah, so you think all Jews are going to hell. And she's like, well, you know, some Jews accept Jesus. And she's like he's like, yeah, well, what about the vast majority who don't? And she's like, well, I can't speak for them, right? It's not up to me. We can't know God. He's like, isn't it like wild to think that like all these Jews are going to like burn in hell for eternity? Like, is that really what you believe? And she's like, well, I wouldn't pretend to know the mind of God. And it's like, okay, but yeah, you think that. And she's like, well, yeah, if people don't accept Jesus. They're going to burn in hell.
01:17:38
Speaker
And it basically just goes around like that for like a long time. And I think that was important because she had a coalition, like Save Our Children did have this broader coalition of different sorts of religious leaders. And so, you know, there was, she talks about, I forget if I included in in it in the clips, but she talks about like rabbis being involved in this campaign, et cetera. And like,
01:17:58
Speaker
you know, I think that I don't know for sure that this like fractured that relationship. And in a lot of cases it probably didn't. But I think it really, you know, continues to expose her as someone who doesn't like you if you are not exactly the Southern Baptist that she is. Eventually,
01:18:12
Speaker
they start to talk about God's role for women. She talks about how women are like designed to be more submissive and women are made to submit. They're made that way. And she says, look, like I struggle with this because like I was a really, you know, i had I had to learn to submit to my husband, Bob.
01:18:30
Speaker
And this I think is the like, this is the main misogyny odium we're going to get. By the way, there's like a 100% chance that she's the breadwinner in the household. Well, it's sort of complicated because remember that Bob is her personal manager. So like their projects are very tied together.
01:18:47
Speaker
And like, yes, absolutely. Like functionally, yes. But I think handled all the money. Can she get another manager if Bob isn't around? Well, probably, right? Can Bob get another Anita Bryant if she's not around? Yeah.
01:19:03
Speaker
Yeah, we're gonna actually circle back to that shortly. Okay. But that's a good question to have in mind. Oh, yes.
01:19:14
Speaker
For me to learn to submit was one of the most difficult things in the world, because from the time I was a little child, I was a very hard-headed, independent human being.
01:19:26
Speaker
Yet God showed me my weaknesses, showed me where I was the weaker vessel in many respects, And I still didn't want to recognize that it was in real submission when I was able to let Bob take over that I finally realized I was usurping his authority by not allowing him to be the person God meant him to be.
01:19:50
Speaker
Submission really means to throw oneself under. So the decision an equal person has to make is to become the one underneath, and that's a matter of choice.
01:20:01
Speaker
Jesus Christ is a terrific example of one who submitted, and either he was who he said he was, or he was the greatest liar ever on the face of this earth.
01:20:13
Speaker
I am not intimidated by being called the weaker vessel, because I know that in many areas, I am the stronger vessel. Ooh, you can get in trouble with your fanbase for saying that kind of thing.
01:20:26
Speaker
I mean, for a long time, I really would have been in agreement with the feminist movement, particularly for the anger I had toward my father that I transferred to Bob.
01:20:37
Speaker
i usurped bob's authority in many ways for many years and our marriage was rocky really rocky until i recognised was in rebellion against god and i got right and submitted i'm not saying it was easy I've read some of the feminist materials these days, and some of them get so uptight when the Bible refers to man, when God talks about the individual.
01:21:03
Speaker
But there was much discrimination in the Jewish heritage against the woman. So when Jesus Christ came, he freed them and made them equal spiritually.
01:21:14
Speaker
Now, we all know there's a tremendous difference between men and women, but we have different roles. It really bothers me that these feminists get so uptight.
01:21:25
Speaker
They have this attitude. It's so rebellious, not only against God, but against man. You can tell they hate men, and they hate even the Word of God. They want to change the Word of God.
01:21:41
Speaker
really self-explanatory stuff here. How is she reconciling this, you know, being an outspoken woman with being this kind of like the needing to follow the biblical order?
01:21:54
Speaker
Well, she's kind of not, there is this sort of like really big tension psychologically, but she's sort of identifying, oh, I had this, this hatred of my father. She talks a bit about it. I didn't really get a ton of details, though, about what specifically. i think largely she talks about, like, her father abandoning the family by, like, divorcing her mother. But it seems like her father also was just, like, not great.
01:22:15
Speaker
And she's like, oh, I pushed that anger onto Bob and I wanted to not listen to Bob and I was in rebellion, but our marriage was rocky, but it was because I wasn't submitting and sort of projecting that animus towards men onto the feminists, right? Like she's accusing the feminists of being man-hating and she's like, oh, but I'm the one who's really man-hating.
01:22:38
Speaker
She's like, I've actually experienced exactly this sort of oppression that they talked about. And I got over it. And that's what yeah that what's that's what makes me mily morally pure and not uptight. It's so funny to see Anita Bryant describe someone else as uptight. This is like this rhetorical trick that we see in excusing the far right and condemning the left all the time today. It's like, oh, they just have this like...
01:23:10
Speaker
ah sexless prudish element to them and meanwhile the person speaking is like the most oppressive prudish and just like domineering and stricturing person you've ever fucking heard of Yeah, that kind of continues on here. So she talks about her childhood. He asks her about like her relationship with her father. And this is when she tells the story about being born dead and then being dipped in ice water and saved and blah, blah, blah. And then they get to her meeting her husband.
01:23:40
Speaker
And then Bob Green entered your life. That was in 1959? Yeah, oh right after I went to crown the new Miss Tulsa, Bobby Darin was the emcee for the ceremony and he asked me for a date.
01:23:53
Speaker
I told him I had to leave for a disc jockey's convention in Miami that night to promote my records, and that's where I met Bob Green. He was a real big, glamorous disc jockey then.
01:24:07
Speaker
Bob met me at the Miami airport, and I took one look at him and went, well You know, he was a real dreamboat. He drove this neat, white T-bird with his name on the side. !
01:24:22
Speaker
With his name on the side? Yeah. Oh my god, that's embarrassing. He wore these silk suits. What the hell am I dying?
01:24:35
Speaker
my god, okay. Yeah. He came on real strong. He looked totally different than he looks now. he was so good looking.
01:24:47
Speaker
And he was in shape and it was incredible. Oh my God, she's talking shit about him. She's like, look at what a fucking uggo he turned into. he wasn't like that back in the day. I know you're thinking it. I know you're like, I can't believe this guy is dating Anita Bryant. But like, what's funny is she goes on, she goes on even more to be like, oh, he was so good looking and I was worried that he wouldn't be a nice boy because he was so good looking. like she talked about how attractive he was. And so I don't even know if she fully processes how much the like the one line of he looks totally different than he looks now just like reveals the animus.
01:25:25
Speaker
Right? Because it in the wash of text because she goes on, you know, this is like the first third of her answer. She goes on to talk about how hot he was and how like dreamy he is. But like also just, yeah, like this dreamy guy in his silk suit driving the white T-bird with his name on it. the fancy Miami DJ. Like, oh my God, that's the hottest man you can imagine is like a Miami DJ with a silk suit driving a white convertible with his name on it.
01:25:54
Speaker
but but Straight women are so funny. I'm sorry to all our straight woman listeners, but like, you know, it's true. You're so funny, guys. Yeah, I can forgive you for for that joke on the grounds of my bisexuality. I'm kind of an ambassador between... Right, so she talks about, you know, he was really... She was actually engaged at this point. And so she like didn't... She like spurned his advances of a date, but then she decided that she actually did like him and she breaks it off with her fiance and...
01:26:25
Speaker
She like really stresses here like, oh, he was just like, so he was after me. Like he wouldn't take no for an answer. he kept calling, like all these calls, letters every day, like behavior that just sounds like this guy's a stalker. But I guess to her, i was like, oh, this is so dreamy, right? Like the silk suited DJ who's writing you a letter every single day and constantly making long distance calls.
01:26:44
Speaker
Fun little detail here, because Playboy asked like, oh, did he, you know, so he was also religious, right? Because like clearly religion is important to you. And she's like, well, no. And in fact, I was really worried that he wasn't going to be saved. And I almost like backed out of it. But then on the night before our wedding, he converted, like he converted, he found Jesus and he was born again.
01:27:06
Speaker
What? Yeah.
01:27:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, she specifically says Bob was born again the night we got married. Or the night before we got married. That's fucking wild.
01:27:21
Speaker
And of course, like, this is all fantasy. Whatever element of truth there is in this is accidental. But it's still, it's so fascinating that she's even willing to entertain the concept of her, Anita Bryant, getting up to the night before the wedding and, like, still not knowing if her husband is going to be saved.
01:27:40
Speaker
She must have, like, such a powerful desire to, like, inject some drama into the story of their relationship for her to be willing to save her. Well, yeah, there's also, like... the possibility like maybe she genuinely was like yeah like I'll be saved and like hopefully he'll be saved but like that's between him and Jesus right like she does have this like pretty in my mind like hateful position towards like oh yeah I don't hate these other people I just know they're gonna burn in hell for eternity right like it is kind of like this psychopathic worldview There's an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine finds out that her boyfriend is like super religious and it had never come up before because he didn't really talk about it. But she actually finds out because he's got all these like Jesus rock stations like pre-programmed in his car radio. And she asks him like, are you religious?
01:28:25
Speaker
And he goes, yeah, I'm born again. And she goes, like, is it a problem for you that I'm not religious? And he's like, no, it's fine. You're just going to burn in hell. But like we can still be together.
01:28:37
Speaker
And so then she dumps him because he's not upset enough that she's not religious. Yeah.
01:28:45
Speaker
And like, yeah, maybe that maybe that's just the the dynamic there, right? i mean, I know people who struggle with exactly this thing with regard to their like highly religious parents. Like, yeah they have personal relationships that are for the most part, like, I don't know, pleasant, I guess.
01:29:03
Speaker
But it's just impossible to like... process this rock-solid belief that your parents apparently have that you are going to die and you are going to be tortured brutally for eternity but also like they love you and they accept you the way you are yeah like what does that mean it doesn't make any sense it doesn't make sense i mean also like look at the way like jd vance talks about his wife right like
01:29:35
Speaker
The same kind of shit, right? He's like, oh, yeah interfaith marriage is hard. Like maybe she'll come around someday. But, you know, if she doesn't like she's burning in hell. Yeah, them's the breaks. So, okay, so talks more about her life. In 1974, he asks about, like, she had a nervous breakdown in 1974, and she's like, oh, I almost had a nervous breakdown, but actually I was okay. And the the militant homosexuals love bringing this up because they really want to say, oh look, she went crazy.
01:30:01
Speaker
But she, i mean, she did have, like, a really hard, particularly hard year. a good friend of hers died. Her husband had a heart attack. He was okay. But she was like, if he died and my friend's gone, like I'm going have to raise the kids totally alone.
01:30:16
Speaker
And then her grandfather died. And this brought up a lot of stuff about like her relationship with her father and her relationship with her grandfather and like processing her feelings about men in general.
01:30:27
Speaker
And so she was really doing bad in 1974. She's going to become a feminist. It's happening. The interview at or interviewer asks her... Did you consider seeing a psychiatrist? Here's your response.
01:30:39
Speaker
No, it was so painful. It was like I felt i'd be committing a sin by going to a psychiatrist. Can you imagine that?
01:30:50
Speaker
I thought it would be denying Jesus. And I knew that a lot of psychiatrists tell you things totally contrary to biblical teaching, such as in order to get along with your husband, go out and have an affair or something like that. But friends of ours told us this about this Christian retreat in Rosemead, California. It's sort of a Christian counseling center, quite famous.
01:31:18
Speaker
Maribel Morgan and lots of famous Christian people have gone there. So I decided I had to do something, that God was sending me out there. The night before I went, I told Bob, I don't think I'm ever coming back. i really thought that.
01:31:36
Speaker
I was so scared and weary. We arrived at night, and I met the psychologist, and I liked him very much. I was told to come back the next morning and to plan on staying for at least two weeks.
01:31:54
Speaker
When we got to the hotel, I just could not sleep. I didn't want to wake Bob, so I went into this tiny bathroom and closed the door and got down on my hands and knees and just started praying.
01:32:09
Speaker
Something from way down deep inside of me was trying to come out. It was so strange I took a legal pad and a pencil and started writing down these things that were bugging me. I filled 17 whole pages. Okay, so she has this moment of like introspection and realization.
01:32:31
Speaker
And what is the realization she has? That she hates men because of her father and she's transposed that hatred onto Bob, which is like why their marriage is difficult. It's actually not because Bob sucks at all. It's because she hates men. Also...
01:32:46
Speaker
The reason her friend died, and didn't clip this part because it's like too upsetting to read in a way, I don't know. The reason her friend died is because Jesus realized that she was holding back.
01:33:02
Speaker
Like she was confiding in her friend too much and not in God. And so her friend, like God took her friend. That's fucking sick. She's such a sicko. Oh my god. Whoa, I'm sorry. I don't have anything intelligent to say about that. I'm just like, Lord.
01:33:21
Speaker
It's sort of like she doesn't like come right out and explicitly say that. She tries to kind of hide it. Like I think that she doesn't, she knows that that's a crazy thing to say, but I mean, yeah, it's what she believes.
Reflections on Homosexuality and Personal Struggles
01:33:33
Speaker
Or at least it's it's what she wants us to think she believes. She says she realized like she can't divorce Bob. She knows what divorce does to a child. so she's going to stay with Bob. That's that's the realization she had.
01:33:45
Speaker
And she really says, you know, and and Jesus helped me through all of this. And, you know, I would have slept around with guys or whatever. I am a sinner saved by grace, right? She really leans on this. Like it's my relationship with Jesus that saved me. We're almost getting to the end here.
01:33:56
Speaker
But, you know, she mentions I'm a sinner. So the interviewer asks, what are your sins? Oh, I don't know. Maybe the sin of intolerance.
01:34:10
Speaker
That's exactly what those you call militant homosexuals say about you. I just meant it as a pun. a pun? What pun? I try not to be intolerant.
01:34:25
Speaker
All I'm saying is I don't have anything to brag about. The reason I can relate to the homosexual is because I've had emotional scars in my own life.
01:34:38
Speaker
I really felt the rejection of my father, and that is one of the things that maybe led someone going into homosexuality. Look, I don't hate homosexuals.
01:34:51
Speaker
That's the truth, no matter what they think of my motives. I've always said, I love the sinner, but I hate the sin.
01:35:01
Speaker
yeah Hey, nice pun, Anita. Yeah, so first obvious thing. What? How is that a pun?
01:35:16
Speaker
That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, she's just really scrambling for some way out of like having admitted with under only the slightest possible pressure of someone asking what are your sins, that she's a massive fucking bigot, that she's cruel.
01:35:31
Speaker
Can't you take a pun? Yeah, so the part I was talking about before... I think when I got to this part later on, I like held the two together. So she says, you know, her friend, her friend's name was Teddy. Her friend died and she had a really intimate relationship with this friend.
01:35:47
Speaker
She could talk to her about things she couldn't even talk with Bob or her pastor about. And then she was like, you know, how am I supposed to deal with the prospect of raising my kids without having this this friend around to lean on anymore? It was like God wanted to put me flat on my back so the only way I could look was up. He knew I was holding out on him and he wanted the whole of me, not just part of me.
01:36:06
Speaker
So that's the part that I'm glossing is like essentially saying God took my friend because I was leaning on her too much. But then especially when we get to this part about like I can relate to homosexuals because I've had emotional scars and I hate men. It's like, okay, maybe she had like gay feelings for this woman. Maybe not. Right. I think this is the part we're talking about. you know, there's this impulse to like locate.
01:36:28
Speaker
to do that kind of dunk, like locating homosexuality in homophobic bigots. And I kind of could see it, but I don't even really think that's happening here. I just think that, like, it's broader than that. She's just an absolute sicko, right? She's just terrible and narcissistic and, like, incapable of, like, having genuine human connection. I mean, this this just sucks. do notice that the way she frames this punishment by God is highly sexual god laid her out you know yeah put her under him and i don't know the temptation to speculate is like is very real especially around like the connection between her understanding of herself as shaped by the rejection and cruelty of her father and her tendency to conceptualize
01:37:21
Speaker
harm and the imposition of an order on the world as like this intrinsically sexual thing and yeah i don't have enough to like actually tie all that together but it's certainly suggestive Yeah, and I think it's not even necessarily suggestive of like, oh, she's repressing like gay feelings. It's like she has this obsession with sex and this complex around sexuality that she's just projecting out, right? And...
01:37:51
Speaker
Even if we see like she thinks of homosexuality not as just right. She first of all sees it as like purely sexual. It is a purely sexual thing. She rejects the notion that homosexuals like exist as like a type of person. It is like a sinful sexual act, which is already in it's itself very homophobic. But she also thinks that other deviant sexual practices sadomasochism eating sperm like things that deviate from her very rigid view of like what sex is and should be are part of homosexuality right so clearly there's something going on here i don't think we need to really speculate that oh it's
01:38:29
Speaker
she's gay secretly or has is repressed homosexual right she's just really awful and you can really see the trauma oozing out of her when she talks about having emotional scars that's not a lie we can't really like interpret from what she says precisely what those are but like This is a person who is suffering. And to the extent that that suffering caused her to be cruel to other people, i don't know, I feel a little sorry for her to that degree.
01:39:00
Speaker
Although for the most part, I'm just like, well, I wish she'd suffered a little harder, but just like not put it on other people. I think there's a temptation here as we're like profiling the subject to really understand...
01:39:13
Speaker
the trauma that she's experienced, like how she got to be this way. And I just really don't care almost about the temptation, right? Because I think as we've seen, she's not going to be convinced.
01:39:24
Speaker
And I don't think she needs to be, right? My goal isn't for her to be convinced or swayed or for people like her to be convinced or swayed. Like she needs to be defeated. And yeah. And so there's one little last point bit of this interview that I was maybe going include, but I think I'm just going to gloss over it. It is quite funny.
01:39:44
Speaker
So the interviewer asks her about what she thinks about feminists. It's like you said you had the sympathy for them, but you always talk about them as if there's some kind of conspiracy against decency.
Decline and Changing Beliefs
01:39:55
Speaker
And she says, well, look at the Houston Women's Convention that had happened the year before.
01:39:59
Speaker
ah The government gave the feminists $5 million, dollars but Phyllis Schlafly didn't get anything. it was a closed shop. It was almost communistic. Just, I don't know what she means by that. Like, she just calls them communists.
01:40:13
Speaker
Because, you know, they didn't let in Phyllis Schlafly and those who truly represent the grassroots of American women. And so the guy's like, oh, so it's the communists' fault. Like the communists are working together to keep the patriots out. And she's like, yeah, look, it's, ah they didn't even pledge allegiance to the flag. They didn't sing the national anthem. It's it's it's total communism.
01:40:34
Speaker
ah Who needs the Equal Rights Amendment? The key to women's rights is to activate the laws. This part is my favorite. Don't talk to me about discrimination. I've experienced it. I'm one-eighth Cherokee. Oh my god.
01:40:48
Speaker
She pulled an Elizabeth Warren? My dad was aroused about. Low man on the totem pole. We didn't even have a decent house in. say that. You can't say that. Yeah. It's... I praise God that I live in a land of plenty where someone can come from the bottom and go up. If you want to make it, you can.
01:41:06
Speaker
And they talk a little bit about Carter versus Reagan and Carter had spoken out against some other anti-gay ordinance. And so she was against Carter and was like, I'm going to vote for Reagan if the election were tomorrow, but I think I can get to Carter and blah, blah, blah.
01:41:18
Speaker
So that's the interview. So after this interview, she has like a real big fall for popularity. Like, I do see some people talking about this interview as being a turning point. Like, Wikipedia says, like, the Playboy interview is a real turning point. And it is often quoted as this, like, moment. But I think it was a broader collection of things than just this interview. This interview was just placed at the right time.
01:41:37
Speaker
In 1980, she gets divorced. she gets divorced Oh, that's not going to go over well. Yeah, so it doesn't go great for her. So she's working on this, like, plan, and she talks about this a bit in the interview. She's working on this plan to start, a like, a ministry that's going to, like, help gay people by, like, allowing them to confess and, you know, and come back into the fold or whatever. But it's also going to help all these other groups, right? She wants to start this big, popular, like, ministry project.
01:42:02
Speaker
And there's basically a fight with Bob over this because he, like, they're both running it, but there's, like, this power struggle over it and that, I think, presses on some other tensions. I mean, obviously, their marriage was not great already.
01:42:14
Speaker
And so she leaves him, gets a divorce. She continues to lose even more work because now, already in, like, 1978, she had run to be, like, the vice president of like, the Southern Baptist Conference and...
01:42:25
Speaker
enough like even baptist leaders were like no you're too homophobic we can't vote for you which is like really saying something once she gets divorced like the hardcore christians don't like her at all and in fact even bob at some point says in an interview like i don't recognize like civil divorce because of my like religious beliefs so i still think of her as my wife Oh my god. There's an interview with their son because they interview him when he's an adult like it's an interview in like 2012 or something and he's like yeah it was a really tough time I don't think my dad ever really got over like what happened he was really stuck on that time he really blamed like gays and lesbians for his career falling apart and I really think it was just that he was a dick to my mom and he kind of sucked. Yeah.
01:43:13
Speaker
You blame the gays and lesbians. Oh my god, what a yeah fucking loser. Here's an article, or so here's ah here's a little snippet from Wikipedia. In a 1980 Ladies Home Journal article, she said, The church needs to wake up and find some way to cope with divorce and women's problems.
01:43:35
Speaker
and She also expressed some sympathy for feminist aspirations, given her own experiences of emotional abuse within her previous marriage. Bryant also commented on her somewhat relaxed anti-gay views, saying...
01:43:49
Speaker
I'm more inclined to say live and let live. Just don't flaunt it or try to legalize it. Okay, I mean, that's not relaxed. No.
01:44:01
Speaker
Those are the same views. Like, yeah, those are the same views. You're just pretending like, oh, I'm normal now. You can be normal to me now. It's normal now. That, of course, never happened. Like, she's still, like, she died last year.
01:44:17
Speaker
I think actually she died in December 2024, but her death was announced in January of last year. Feel free to edit it in air horn, by the way. Gay people everywhere celebrated. Like, Anita Bryant did. Like, good riddance.
01:44:29
Speaker
She... that's so uncivil. Ugh! Yeah. Ugh! I'm having a fainting spell. Helen! And it's wild that even... There she's like starting to realize like, oh we actually, the feminists might have a point because actually my life is falling apart in divorce and I had to deal with this emotional abuse from my husband. Hmm, the church really should change.
01:44:52
Speaker
Yeah, maybe being subjected to the destructive impulses of men for my whole life is like not actually good. Yeah, and so in 1980, she also actually loses her job as spokesman for the Florida Citrus Commission.
01:45:07
Speaker
It's often, when the story is told, it's often like, oh, she spoke out, she did this campaign, huge gay backlash. She loses the spokesman, like she loses the position as spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission.
01:45:20
Speaker
It's not really clear what the causality is, and it seems very likely that they actually dropped her after the divorce. It might have been mostly the divorce. It might have been, you know, the divorce was sort of enough controversy that they were like, okay, that's the straw that broke the camel's back. Like, we need to find a normal spokesperson for orange juice because we need one who's not going to be like...
01:45:40
Speaker
talking about gay men eating sperm and then having like big public divorces and like doing all this shit right like Mm-hmm. I can forgive the fag bashing, but the divorce is a little step too far What they actually said in the statement was that she was quote worn out as a spokesperson. Holy shit yeah Jesus.
01:46:01
Speaker
Bob Green's career is kind of over, but also so is hers. Like, she doesn't really do much. She remarries in 1990. This guy tried to start a business called Anita's Music Mansion, which is going to be, like, her musical performances combined with, like...
01:46:18
Speaker
a bunch of preaching and that's not really successful so that goes bankrupt and then she and her husband actually filed 11 a little more sedate with the new guy he has his name on the side of four-door sedan instead of convertible yeah They move, they file chapter 11, they stay together, but she moves back to Oklahoma.
01:46:39
Speaker
In 2021, her granddaughter publicly came out and announced her upcoming wedding to a woman. hell yeah. That said, I'm having a difficult time deciding whether I'm going to invite Anita. You know, it's tough having her as a grandmother, you know.
01:46:57
Speaker
hu so all right well i'm amazed that she was considering it but sure so you know if we want to put any stock in that claim she said earlier that if any of her kids came out as gay she would consider herself like a failure and nothing else would have been worth it a second air horn moment because she was still alive when this happened and i'm gonna close out with so we watched the video of her getting hit in the face with a pie which there's like actually the the clip that i showed and just you can find on on youtube like recently released this like hd like rescan of the footage it's like really crisp you get like a really good view of her getting hit in the face with this pie good i'm gonna fall asleep to that tonight just put it on loop that interviewer was with her so companion piece cruising with anita that's just like what it was like hanging out with anita bryant and at one point he talks about
01:47:57
Speaker
the incident where she gets hit in the face with a pie. And like, she really liked his reaction and didn't like her husband's. So i don't know if you saw in the video, the husband was like, oh, you know, let him go. Like, no retaliation. Like, let's pray for him.
01:48:09
Speaker
And apparently, like, behind closed doors, she was like, yeah, that was like a really weak and cowardly response. Meanwhile, the interviewer, like, scooped some of the pie that got on his lapel and, like, chucked it back in, like, this sort of faux show solidarity with her. Based gay reporter Moggs Cuckhusband.
01:48:27
Speaker
So they're they're in the limo like afterwards, and like the mood is kind of solemn. I found the pie box, I announced brightly. No response. It's a banquet banana cream, and the price is, let's see here, 69 cents.
01:48:41
Speaker
Man, I was just talking to my girlfriend the other day about how bad I wanted a banana cream pie. Bob regards me solemnly. You know what, Ken? Anita doesn't even know what that means.
01:48:52
Speaker
Anita jerks her head around faster than the proverbial speeding butt. oh "'What what means, Bob? Huh? What what means? Answer me, Bob!' Bob averts his eyes. His larynx dances a jig and his cheeks flush.
01:49:08
Speaker
Anita instinctively apes his embarrassment. Bob looks out his window. Anita looks out her window. I look straight ahead. Now, as I say, put yourself in my place right now.
01:49:21
Speaker
Wouldn't you jump at the chance to tell Anita Bryant something about the birds and the bees, if only for the exquisite irony of it all? Well, I jumped, you betcha. Anita, give me a pencil and paper.
01:49:32
Speaker
Bob snorts. What are you going to do? Write it out for her? and Just give me the pencil and paper. Anita quickly proffers her vinyl notepad with the built-in pencil holder.
01:49:43
Speaker
Four foreign eyes are squarely trained on my lap as I scrawl a large figure six, around which I snugly cushion a large figure nine.
01:49:55
Speaker
Anita looks, understands. Anita gasps. The round brown eyes, her emotional scoreboard, tilt back in their sockets. is Is that what it means?
01:50:08
Speaker
Bob looks out his window. Anita looks out her window. I look straight ahead. I feel like a child molester. Yeah, kind of weird vibes from the reporter, but also kind of hilarious. Making this 69 joke, and then Bob being like, yeah, she doesn't get it.
01:50:26
Speaker
And then him being like, oh, this is an incredible opportunity to make
Legacy and Cultural Impact
01:50:30
Speaker
her uncomfortable. Like... Yeah. I'm just sad that he was too early to make a 420 joke to her. Yeah. So here's how he closes his article about hanging out with Anita Bryant. For better or worse, Anita is a natural symbol.
01:50:45
Speaker
America has a nasty track record when it comes to symbols, be they George Lincoln Rockwell or Malcolm X. Bluntly put, Anita fully expects that she will be assassinated.
01:50:58
Speaker
Her eyes moisten when she ponders the reaction of her beloved children, but she also knows that she can be a much better mother once she's safely situated upstairs.
01:51:09
Speaker
And after 38 years of mortal travail, after the decades of fear, envy, guilt, bitterness, sadness, disappointment, and exhaustion, Anita is quite content to claim her just desserts, thank you.
01:51:24
Speaker
Imagine, no more orange juice to push. Hallelujah. Oh, come on. Yeah. Come fucking on, man.
01:51:35
Speaker
The predictability of her claiming this mantle of victimization prematurely, you know, I'm a martyr. I'm a, I'm a martyr in the future. i'm sure it'll happen eventually. And I'll be really happy when it does. i'm going to be such a cool martyr, but like, you know, give me the accolades right now.
01:51:53
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it's this, I'm sure I'm going to be assassinated is such a, like, narcissistic thing. And so it's so fitting that, you know, no matter what we know about how much she was lying or telling a truth about what she believed in this interview, like, she did see herself as being this firebrand figure that was going to make great change and and become martyred. And really, she just...
01:52:19
Speaker
didn't matter after this her entire campaign political effect seemed to be to make things worse for gay people in miami dade county for a period of time and then also really galvanize a growing gay rights movement and then just kind of disappear right like she didn't really have any success after this She just didn't matter, right? She just, like, flamed out. And I really wish this is what happened to cancel culture grifters today. Like, I really wish they didn't have such staying power these days. like You really wish they weren't being installed as head of CBS? Exactly. I was just about to say that. Like, she just...
01:52:59
Speaker
like went to go live in Oklahoma after having to file bankruptcy. She didn't get to run all of CBS. like It's really a shame. The time washing machine has failed us. you know it was It promised us that we would be back into this eternal cycle of these cancel culture grifters just like wandering off into the wilderness.
01:53:18
Speaker
Meaningless, helpless, irrelevant. And no, instead they're in charge of everything. They're installed. They're our masters. Yeah. But, you know, I think the last button I want to put on this is one of the reasons I wanted to do Anita Bryant is it can be really frustrating covering some of these guys where we like talk about their positions and how wild they are and...
01:53:44
Speaker
how odious they are and then we also have to reckon with the fact that like they won and like you know we did the nick fuentes episode and then we're like oh yeah by the way like the groypers run the government right right nick is making six thousand dollars a night and the groypers are in the government Yeah. And so, you know, it is, I think, telling to see that a lot of the rhetoric is still around. A lot of the strategies of the anti-gay movement are still very similar.
01:54:11
Speaker
And they've just changed the targets in a lot of, you know, in some cases to be more focused on trans people. But, you know, as that is having more success, the target is sort of shifting back to gay people more broadly. It's nice to have like a story where like we kind of won, right? Like she kind of did just like die in obscurity and miserable with like a lesbian granddaughter who was like, yeah, I kind of don't like her. And a son who was like, yeah, i just kind of don't want to think about it too much. like and And the point is, none of that happened by civil debate, right?
01:54:40
Speaker
Gay activists got together and were like, we're going to humiliate this woman and make her a laughingstock. And they did that, and that was correct, and she suffered for it, and that's based. So...
01:54:51
Speaker
yeah at the same time it wasn't enough like she's self-destructed it was the destructive tendencies of the right that like ultimately tore her down to her lowest level and i do think a lot of the self-destructiveness a lot of the anger you're seeing here like it is true i think When we see like cancel culture grifters today, they're often really exaggerating the extent to which they're being canceled. But I think it is actually true. She did face huge backlash. She did face like a huge hit to her income and to her success. And she did really have to try to reorient her life around this like...
01:55:31
Speaker
backlash that she got which i think is a good thing but i think it's also you know i do think that actually gay activists had a big hand in this story we gotta make their imaginary social martyrdom real Whatever steps we can take toward that, that's very positive. Yeah, and that's what it's saying. Like, I think there's a part of her social martyrdom here which was real. Like, she was, like, regularly the butt of jokes on, like, Carson and other, like, late-night shows. Like, SNL would regularlyly regularly do, like i need it like, Anita Bryan sketches. Like, they make fun of her there.
01:56:04
Speaker
She was the butt of a lot of jokes. And in part, that was because like she was easy to make fun of because she's kind of a loser. I mean, we saw the things she believes and says when she's in front of, you know, when she knows she's on the record. But, you know, she was really famous before that. And I think it was people intentionally going to like push her into revealing who she was that but caused this. So, yeah.
01:56:27
Speaker
So just some lessons to take as we're building woke to, you know, no more civil debate. But I think that just leaves us with FAG ratings. So we got to decide how much of an FAG Anita Bryant is. So on this show, we use the world's most advanced system for the measurement of bigotry.
01:56:49
Speaker
We rate each of our subjects on a three-part scale with a number from one to five for each. In exceptional cases, we might go up to a six or down to a zero. First, how ferocious are they?
01:57:02
Speaker
Second, how arrogant are they? Third, how gullible are they? Yeah, so... For Ferocity, I'm kind of leaning towards a four.
01:57:16
Speaker
I want to hear what you're thinking. If it were just the stuff about, like, I stumbled out of my chair when I learned that gay people eat sperm, I mean, that's kind of, like, the funniest stuff and the sort of most out-there stuff that we had in here. But when we get to, one, the implementation of, like, a specific political project to allow the discrimination against gay people...
Conclusion and Reflections
01:57:36
Speaker
the like arguing for the criminalization of homosexuality up to the point of being a felony like it is i think at least a four I think to I think to go to a five it's hard for me to think about whether she's a four or five most of the fives in the past have been someone on a level of like I guess that's not really true the fives in the past was just Shane Wolf because people who do directly pro-Holocaust stuff or like outright Nazis. We usually tend to give a six. So we've given a six to England. We gave a six to Jean Respe. And for that reason, we even gave a six to Nick Fuentes.
01:58:16
Speaker
So that reason, I think she might be a five. Because she's not eliminationist to the point of, like, we need to round them up and put them in camps. Well, Shona Wolf had a lot more going on.
01:58:30
Speaker
You might remember that he was also very interested in the corrective rape of women, or so I interpreted his book as saying. That's true.
01:58:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to say, like, like, how much does she really mean by this, like, you need to submit to men? And maybe because she falls short of directly talking about that kind of like sexual disciplining.
01:58:55
Speaker
I think you're right. I think it's probably a four. Okay, arrogance. I don't know what to do with arrogance. I'm kind of at a loss on this one, honestly. Wait, really? Yeah, a little bit.
01:59:05
Speaker
I don't know. To me, it's an obvious five. Like, okay, hold on. Before you decide, here's the picture at the top of her Playboy interview. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, I see what you mean. All right. She might be a five.
01:59:22
Speaker
Yeah, so for the listener, because this is an audio medium, there's just like three pictures of her talking, but it's from this angle that's like a little below, and she's really preaching. I don't know, she just looks so arrogant. It's just her looking really arrogant. It's hard to really, i think, explain why.
01:59:38
Speaker
i think I was getting taken in a little by the sort of rituals of humility she puts forward as part of her performance of Christianity, because she's never talking about how...
01:59:51
Speaker
She is the hand of God that is going to bring this cleansing revolution the world. Do you know what I mean so So actually she ends the interview. I didn't clip this part in, but she ends the interview with, you know, she's talking about Carter and Reagan and she's like, I'm going to vote for Reagan. and And the interviewer asks, like, would you consider yourself like running for political office? And she's like, well, I don't know. Like, I don't think so. i'd really rather stay home with my family.
02:00:21
Speaker
But you know, whatever god calls me to do I might have to do and he's like would you know if god called you to like run for president would you run for office? Yeah, okay. So he says what if god tells you you have to run for office? Well, I can't answer until it happens I feel I can be much more effective as a mother coming from my own motivations But if god came to you next year and told you run for office, you wouldn't refuse. I can't refuse god anything so it's like There is the level of arrogance of like everything she's doing is like because god is telling her to right and like Yeah, I mean, the non-arrogant answer to that is just to be like, God's not going to do that.
02:00:55
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So, all right. Gullibility. Gullibility requires a little explanation. So each of our subjects has a role in the production of bigotry. And a higher gullibility score means that they're inhabiting that role without any awareness of what of doing so.
02:01:13
Speaker
And a low score means that they're hyper aware of their role. So gullibility for me is a little harder because... Especially because we just looked at this one interview, which is like such a like media product like she's so you know, she is constructing it as much as the interviewer is I Guess we should say like what is her role?
02:01:33
Speaker
And to me, her role is like political activist, right? Like her role is to start a movement towards like specific political ends. And i guess, you know, I could see an argument for going higher in gullibility on the basis that what does she think her role is? She thinks her role is basically to do that, but because she is serving God and protecting the order of creation.
02:02:05
Speaker
So on some level, that's like high gullibility because she's obviously not doing that. But on some level, like that doesn't really matter. And like she knows that what she's doing is like a political project, that she is like leading a movement. that's what she thinks she's doing that's what she did so i'm tempted to say like a two or even a one i'm trying to think of a reason for this to be a two and honestly i can't it's not just that she's enacting a political project she i think has a very clear understanding of what her specific role is in the enactment of that political project and
02:02:41
Speaker
and what it means for her to go out there and speak her mind. And she even you know has an awareness of like ways that she should and she should not do that. And she's not always good at acting according to where those lines are. Sometimes she'll talk to a former homosexual reporter and tell them about her feelings about eating sperm. And sometimes she'll talk to an active homosexual play by a Playboy reporter and tell them again about her feelings about eating sperm. And that'll sabotage the whole project. So maybe she's not like the best at what she does, but I think she has a very clear sense of what it is she does.
02:03:30
Speaker
So I think she's a winner. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think, yeah, I gave Janice Raymond to two and you gave Janice Raymond to one. And I think actually largely they're kind of very similar in a lot of ways. Like...
02:03:45
Speaker
I think my giving of Janice Raymond to but a two had a lot more to do with I thought she had a role in the production of like more broad misogyny that she didn't quite understand. Like there were some other layers happening there. But insofar she has this like religious view of the order of the universe that she is like going out to enact like I think they're very similar figures on that front and like the gullibility front and I think I would agree that she's a one.
02:04:13
Speaker
So yeah, so I think I agree that I made Bryant's a one and that means that, you know, we've talked about maybe adding up all three numbers here is not the best because gullibility kind of functions differently than the ferocity and arrogance. So combined ferocity and arrogance,
02:04:31
Speaker
Gives her 9, which is close to the highest combined score of a 10. And callability is a 1. All right, well, that is our scientific measurement of Anita Bryant. Next time you use some orange juice as a chaser for some sperm, think about her.
02:04:49
Speaker
God, I just might. I just might. All right, goodbye. by
02:05:03
Speaker
We was reading the paper overtold this morning, battle all the best to do. It seems the crazy politicians think they got a mission to keep us from going astray.
02:05:15
Speaker
Now you'll be tutored by the state on how to choose your mate and in what mission you may lay. Now take a great part in deciding on what highway you'll be riding. If it ain't straight, you'll have to pay.
02:05:31
Speaker
So let's all squeeze a fruit for Anita. Pass a little juice around. Have a head of sunshine if you need to.
02:05:42
Speaker
Open your mind so she can close it right down. Well, nobody's perfect. But things are getting out of hand. Because while Anita's preaching, who'll be teaching us to love our fellow man?
02:06:05
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
02:06:20
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you can write a loving name. Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:06:37
Speaker
some level of masochism.