I reminisced recently about the 1977 NCAA game Arkansas played against Wake Forest, and it got me looking at some of the other events of that year. You forget a lot in three decades.
It was when the Democrats won back the White House, and began trying to purge the nation’s memory of Watergate and Vietnam. Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the nation’s 39th president on January 20, and the next day, he pardoned all the draft evaders from the war.
His predecessor, Gerald Ford, was also in a forgiving mood on his last day as commander-in-chief when he pardoned Iva Toguri, better known as Tokyo Rose, who had been convicted of treason in 1949 and spent six years in prison. She died in a Chicago hospital at the age of 90.
But out west in 1977, there was a man on death row who wouldn’t get a pardon.
It would be the first time in four years that a person would be executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court had reinstated the death penalty. It took place in Utah, and at that time, the state known mostly for Mormons and beehives had two methods of killing convicts - firing squad or hanging. Gary Gilmore was allowed to choose between the two.
His reply was, “I’d prefer to be shot.”
Back east and way down south in Miami, it was unusually cold, even for January, and that city saw its first ever snowfall. It hasn’t happened since.
Perhaps the bizarre Miami weather was a sign from above for Florida and the rest of the nation to watch out for a former orange juice-promoting beauty queen, who was about to come out of her sexually political closet.
Florida’s Dade County had passed a human-rights ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In response to this, Anita Bryant felt called to lead a campaign to repeal the ordinance. The campaign was based on “Christian beliefs regarding the sinfulness of homosexuality,” and the perceived threat of “homosexual recruitment” of children.
Those concerns inspired the name of Bryant’s political organization, “Save our Children,” which called for opposition to gay rights, and gave birth to the religious right.
Phrases like, “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children,” and, “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes, and to people who sleep with St. Bernards, and to nail biters,” were common in Bryant’s campaign speeches.
(Having actually slept with a St. Bernard myself, I take strong exception to her comment. My best friend when I was a kid had a beautiful St. Bernard named Nick, and he used to go with us when we camped out. I guess the scars from those traumatic nights must have caused me some permanent damage I don’t yet know about. But I agree with her about the nail biters. There’s no place in a decent society for them.)
It was pearls of wisdom like these, and other personal attacks on homosexuals that drew tens of thousands of new recruits into the movement. The Rev. Jerry Falwell also came to Miami to help out.
But it was Bryant herself who first led fundamentalist Christians into politics. And on June 7, 1977, her campaign led to a repeal of the anti-discrimination ordinance by a margin of 69 to 31 percent.
The following day, Bryant stated, “In victory, we shall not be vindictive. We shall continue to seek help and change for homosexuals, whose sick and sad values belie the word ‘gay,’ which they pathetically use to cover their unhappy lives.”
Soon however, the fallout from her activism had a devastating effect on Bryant’s entertainment career. And her contract with the Florida Citrus Commission lapsed in 1979 because of the negative publicity resulting in boycotts of Florida orange juice.
Bryant’s marriage to Bob Green ended in 1980 (I know I’m missing a good St. Bernard line here), and ten years later, she married her second husband, Charlie Hobson Dry.
They tried to reestablish her career in a series of small venues, but success has been elusive, and they have left behind them a series of unpaid employees and creditors. They filed for bankruptcy in Arkansas in 1997 and in Tennessee in 2001.