When A Joke Is NOT A Joke

Don’t condemn someone’s way of life, confuse hateful remarks for jokes

Posted: Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:20 am

Did you know it is the year 2012?

Stacey Pritchard doesn’t seem to understand what that means.

Last week on “Anderson Cooper 360,” journalist extraordinaire Anderson Cooper interviewed people who had opinions regarding Pastor Charles Worley’s outrageous remarks about homosexuality.

Worley said that we need to “build a great, big, large fence 50 or 100 miles long.”

Why?

“Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals,” Worley said.

“Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out,” he said. “You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”

I’ll wait here until you do a YouTube search for this man and watch him say those words yourself.

Crazy, right? Not entirely of sound mind and body, if you ask me.

So after those inflammatory remarks, Cooper took to interviewing some of Worley’s congregation and supporters. This is when we get to meet the aforementioned lovely Stacey Pritchard.

Bless her heart. She is certainly standing by her pastor and the words he said, but she also wants to make sure that he didn’t really want to put gay men and lesbian women behind an electric fence.

Those may have been the words he said from the pulpit, but he didn’t really mean it, according to her.

Pritchard is under the impression that putting people behind an electric fence with the intent of killing them off eventually just isn’t done anymore.

Or that people couldn’t possibly be killed for their sexual orientation, so she didn’t see the problem with joking about it.

But as Cooper points out, “It’s happening right now in 2012 in Iraq and Iran.”

“This is a pastor that speaks the word of God,” Pritchard said. “Anybody can take it any way they want to. And if they don’t like it, they don’t have to. They can turn — turn around and go on.”

My problem is the fact that someone thinks the word of God is telling him or her to kill off an entire way of life.

That’s rather scary and important to note.

Like Cooper also said, “It’s called the Holocaust. It has happened. You said nobody is going to kill homosexuals. Homosexuals are killed around the world.”

Homosexuality is clearly far away from becoming a non-issue. Just as we need to stop mentioning that women are funny now, we also need to stop bringing up the simple fact that someone is gay.

Because once we do, people might start to accept people who are “different” and stop trying to condemn them to a life behind an electric fence.

Columnist Bruce Sallan wrote that he believes the show “Glee” is “portraying a fantasy world with minimal consequences for the experimentation and sexual promiscuity these young people indulge in.”

Perhaps it is a fantasy world, Sallan. Maybe it’s slightly unrealistic to portray a healthy relationship that also happens to be homosexual on television.

(In full disclosure, I haven’t seriously watched that show in a while, but I’m at least sure that the infamous gay “plotline” hasn’t been happy-go-lucky and easy for the characters.)

Obviously there are a lot of things that go into forming the opinion of the public. Social structures such as school, church and home have a big responsibility in raising people to be functional members of society. Let’s not ruin that by shoving our peers behind an electric fence.

Sami Main is a journalism senior at UF. Her column appears on Tuesdays. You can contact her at opinions@alligator.org.