Prof. discusses Bryant, 1970s anti-gay activist
Harvard professor Mark Jordan disucssed anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant in his Friday lecture at the Rockefeller Center.
By Nicole Newman
Published on Monday, April 20, 2009
Beauty-queen-turned-evangelist Anita Bryant gave the religious right its anti-homosexual voice in the late 1970s, Mark Jordan, a Harvard University Divinity School professor, told an audience gathered in the Rockefeller Center on Friday. Jordan examined Bryant's rhetoric in his lecture, "Christian Moms Beat Homosexual Recruiters Again and Again," which also featured a panel discussion.
Referring to Bryant as "the Sarah Palin of her day," Marie Griffin, a Princeton University professor and member of the panel, said Bryant was "part beauty queen, part soccer mom and part politician."
Bryant, who was also a singer from Oklahoma, gained national attention as an anti-gay rights activist in 1977 when she campaigned to overturn a local anti-discriminatory ordinance in Florida. The campaign quickly led to a national fight between gay activists and religious organizations.
Bryant portrayed gay people as a domestic threat to traditional family life, Jordan said, defining a homosexual in her autobiography as a "communist-resembling militant" who she might "as well feed garbage to."
Bryant said she believed that gay people could influence children's sexuality and argued that children required protection, Jordan said.
"It is not difficult to understand why she preconceived young people as victims in the hands of the militant homosexual," Dartmouth women and gender studies professor Michael Bronski, a member of the panel, said.
Jordan said Bryant's role as an anti-gay activist was largely an act, arguing that she did not actually believe what she was saying. He claimed, for example, that Bryant did not write her published autobiography, "The Anita Bryant Story."
The story's seemingly incoherent narrative surprisingly "emphasizes her lack of prejudice against homosexuals," Jordan said.
Bryant's anti-gay "play" was a mechanism to mask her own marital problems, Griffin said.
Society needs to mock Bryant to counter her message, Jordan said.
"Some drag queens can do Anita better than Anita can," he said.
Bryant's rhetoric continues to dominate the language of the religious right, panel member and Dartmouth religion professor Ronald Green said, explaining that her rhetoric helped shape the pro-life movement.
"She taught political activism to the religious right," Green said. "Baptist churches, at first, welcomed Roe v. Wade."
This attitude ended after Bryant's campaign, he said.