G_d Bless the Internet ...

When you live in Georgia, like I do, keeping an eye on Alabama is a spectator sport. Ain't nothin' dumb like Alabama-dumb and some folks over there want to keep it that way. So, comes State Representative Gerald Allen, Republican of Cottondale. (That's in Tuscaloosa County, for those of you who don't know, right cheek-by-jowl with the University of Alabama, Brother David Beito's illustrious institution.) Anyway, Brother Allen's got a bill that would ban the use of public money to purchase any work of fiction with gay characters or any non-fiction work that appears to condone homosexuality or any work of either sort that appears to condone heterosexual sodomy; and it would further bar any teacher from distributing material that or inviting a guest speaker who speaks in favor of tolerating homosexual behavior. Apparently, he would make the legislation retroactive, because he's prepared to"dig a hole" and toss the works of Auden, Proust, and Whitman into it, along with Brideshead Revisited, The Color Purple, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The librarian in Birmingham says that a broad interpretation of the legislation could cover half of the library's holdings. (Hat tip, Andrew Sullivan)

But don't forget the collected works of her Vice Presidency, Lynne Cheney. Yes, as Ed Cohn at Gnostical Turpitude reminded us last August, her Excellency published Sisters, a novel of lesbian love, in 1981. As its author, Sister Cheney is entitled to suppress the re-publication of the work, as she has done. Gary Nash and Jonathan Rees have noted that she's gone even further. She sabotaged the National History Standards a decade ago and recently had 300,000 copies of a Department of Education pamphlet that merely referred to the NHS destroyed. So, she's lately gotten with Brother Allen's program in a big way. But you can still get a first edition of Sistershere. I notice that the dealer has even dropped his price on it from $3,000 in August to $500 in December. Election year deflation, I suppose. Bless that dealer's greedy, little heart! Or, maybe it's the fact that Sisters is available on the net. That is, it was. As I composed these two pitiful paragraphs, sometime between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. EDT, Friday 3 December 2004, what I had access to, when I began, I was denied access to when I finished.* Maybe Brother Allen won't have to amend his legislation to deny the use of public funds to purchase computer equipment, after all. Be afraid. Be very afraid. (Hat tip to Moby Lives, which corroborates that Sisters was there). But if the folk who posted Sisters at Livejournal are smart, like the Chinese technicians were smart or the critics of Diebold voting machines were smart, they'll move that novel around the net so fast that Lynne Cheney's lawyers won't be able to keep up with it all.

*This site (scroll to the bottom) features brief excerpts from Sisters and the author's acknowledgments in the novel to historians G. J. Barker-Benfield, Linda Gordon, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.