Tennessee state Senator Stacey
Campfield once argued that his 'Don't Say Gay' bill protects kids
from things like bestiality.
With
a 6-3 party line vote on Wednesday, the bill, which would
prohibit the discussion of sexual minorities in public schools before
the ninth grade, won the approval of the Senate Education Committee.
It now moves to the full Senate.
Supporters say the bill is about
promoting age appropriate curriculum.
“If we're talking about
homosexuality, we are talking about specific acts that are going to
be unhealthy for anybody to engage in outside of marriage,” Matthew
Parsons, founder of the socially conservative group Something Better,
told
the local CBS affiliate.
Campfield has argued his measure would
give teachers more time to focus on the basics, such as arithmetic.
But
in a recent rebroadcast of a 2009 interview with SiriusXM's
Michelangelo Signorile, Campfield, who has sponsored the bill in
five previous sessions, likened being gay to bestiality.
While discussing the bill, Signorile,
who is openly gay, asked, “If you teach the civil rights movement,
why not teach the gay rights movement?”
“Because they're different types of
movements,” Campfield responded. “If I want to talk about the
bestiality movement, do you think we should be teaching that?”
Earlier in the interview, Campfield
mocked Signorile's claim that people are born gay – “You don't
believe that? Who are you kidding?” he rhetorically asked – and
insisted that being gay was a “learned behavior.”