Creep of the Week: Stacey Campfield

Remember "Field of Dreams," the movie where ghosts tell Kevin Costner, "If you build it, he will come" to convince him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond? Apparently Tennessee Rep. Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) heard some voices of his own say, "If you say it, they will do it." Inspired, he introduced legislation that would ban teachers from discussing homosexuality in their classrooms.
According to The Memphis Flyer, Campfield introduced the bill after learning that the National Education Association had passed a "resolution that suggests schools provide information on diversity of sexual orientation and gender identification in sex-education classes."
"I think the schools should stick to the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. And maybe some civics," Campfield told the Flyer. "But teaching transgenderism to middle school students … I don't think that's the road we should go down. I think that's what parents should be doing."
Ah yes, I remember my first sit-down with my folks so they could teach me about transgenderism. It happened shortly after my mother told me that when a man and a woman wanted to have a baby, they prayed to Jesus real hard.
But don't worry. Lest you think Campfield is totally anti-sex, his bill allows discussion of heterosexuality. "If I were to say 'Jack and Jill went up the hill' or 'George Washington and Martha Washington were husband and wife,' there are groups out there that would say we were pushing a heterosexual agenda," Campfield told the Flyer. "To keep those lawsuits from coming, I thought we should still be able to talk about that side of it."
Um, actually, you are pushing a heterosexual agenda, and it has nothing to do with George and Martha Washington. Leave them out of it.
Needless to say, some folks are concerned about the implications of such a bill. After all, a lot of famous writers and composers and even athletes were gay. Oh, and a lot of students, past and present, are gay, too.
Students like Jeremy Hooper of the blog GoodAsYou.org, who describes himself as "someone who was taught within the Tennessee public school system."
"[T]he homophobia surrounding me often made school in my rural Tennessee town feel like a gay-shaming incubator," Hooper wrote in a Feb. 1 post. "I even eavesdropped on some teachers, my supposed guiders, making comments about the evils of gayness. The spectrum that was conveyed to me as acceptable did not include the type of person that I knew I was. It was like a mental war between my own in-born intellect and the mind-fuck that was being fed to me from the outside."
If Campfield gets his way that "mind-fuck" could soon become law. It's an accomplishment he could list next to his other career highlights as outlined by the Flyer: "Over the years, Campfield has proposed other controversial legislation, such as replacing the state's food tax with a tax on pornography and requiring the state to issue death certificates for aborted fetuses. In 2005, Campfield compared the state's Black Caucus to the Ku Klux Klan when they refused to let him join because he is white."
God bless America, indeed. Or, better yet, God help us.