Culture War Continues in Georgia & Utah

Anyone who thought the culture wars had moved to the backburner — Roll Call, is that you? — should take a look at what’s going on in the states.

You will remember that a couple weeks ago I posted about Georgia legislators teaming up with the Christian Right to end Queer Studies. The star of that campaign is Republican State Rep. Charlice Byrd. The video above features an excerpt of her speaking from the House. (The full video, via Andy Towle, is here. More here.)

Also from Georgia, the UGA vice president charged with dealing with reporters on sensitive topics apologized to the Catholic League for a poster featuring Michelangelo’s image of God giving life to Adam to promote the use of condoms:

“Carefully open condom wrappers with your fingers — don’t use a sharp object,” advised the poster, which was placed in dorms by the university health service as part of Sexual Health Awareness Week, which ended last Friday. As all of you know.

The Catholic League, in a complaint filed today with UGA vice president for student affairs, Rodney Bennett, said the university had “hijacked” an icon of Christianity.

“I hasten to add that the University of Georgia would never choose a depiction of Muhammad to hawk condoms. Indeed, only a few years ago an inoffensive depiction of this Islamic figure in a Danish cartoon led to murder and churches being burned to the ground. One can only imagine what would have happened had he been portrayed pushing condoms to youth,” wrote League president Bill Donahue.

Some of us believe Michelangelo’s homoerotic art suggests, er, a good fit for the condom ad. The apology, and complaint, came 5 days after the poster came down.

And from Utah we have state Sen. Chris Buttars. Steve Benen:

In 2006, he blasted the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education as “wrong to begin with.” Last year, Buttars raised a few eyebrows by launching an initiative to use the state government to “encourage” private businesses to promote “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.”

This week, Buttars shared his thoughts on gay Americans. Ali Frick has some of the highlights:

* “To me, homosexuality will always be a sexual perversion. And you say that around here now and everybody goes nuts! But I don’t care.”

* “They say, ‘I’m born that way.’ There’s some truth to that, in that some people are born with an attraction to alcohol.”

* “They’re mean! They want to talk about being nice — they’re the meanest buggers I ever seen. It’s just like the Moslems. Moslems are good people and their religion is anti-war. But it’s been taken over by the radical side. And the gays are totally taken over by the radical side.”

* “I believe that you will destroy the foundation of American society, because I believe the cornerstone of it is a man and a woman, the family…. And I believe that they’re, internally, they’re probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of. Yep, the radical gay movement.”

Buttars added, “Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide.”

More on Buttars’ comments here, here and here.