Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, has authored a bill to ban works with homosexual themes and characters from public libraries, school and college campuses.
He said if it passes in next year’s session of the Legislature, the institutions would be required to remove all the offending materials from their bookshelves.
“I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," Allen proposed.
What an extraordinary plan. It would create, overnight, an industry of excavation and disposal that would easily eclipse the toxic waste dump at Emelle in scope and size. Even the book-burnings of Nazi Germany would pale in comparison.
Great fleets of garbage trucks would be pressed into service to haul away the works of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, A.E. Housman, Gertrude Stein, Noel Coward, Jean Genet, Andre Gide, Gore Vidal, Evelyn Waugh. Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, E.M Forester, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Alice Walker, William Burroughs, Lawrence Durrell, Petronius, Honore de Balzac and countless others.
*snip*
On second thought, it might be better if the lawmakers decide to abide by the Constitution and bury Allen’s bill instead.
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