Moral Panic: “Save Our Children! 1977”
Anita Bryant's efforts to restrict civil rights in Miami
Of course, Moral Panics are usually trying to save children from something. Sometimes, children need saving from a real danger like lead paint or polio. Sometimes, they're not real but exaggerated fears like poisoned Halloween candy. But sometimes – like is happening today - children are a prop folded into a panic conspiracy to go after a political enemy.
Forty years ago, country singer Anita Bryant inserted herself into the center of a campaign to save children from homosexuality. That effort has not aged well.
The late 1970’s saw changes for gay people. Instead of hiding in the shadows and going unmentioned in polite company, they began to publicly identify as gay. This was not welcomed in all quarters of society, and consequently, gays were often turned away from employment and housing.
A decade earlier, the Civil Rights laws had been passed to protect racial minorities from the same type of discrimination. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act called for Equal Employment Opportunity. Title VIII of the 1968 Act called for Fair Housing. But, the question was open on whether those Civil Rights Acts applied to sexual orientation.
Today, we would run that decision straight to the Supreme Court, but in those days, it was taken up as a local matter in Miami, Florida. Responding to a complaint, the Dade County Metro Commission passed Ordinance 77-4 to extend Employment and Housing protections to Gay people. All hell broke loose.
Opposition came fiercely from religious groups under the banner of Christian morality and children’s safety. Anita Bryant and her husband Bob Green became leaders in the campaign to reverse the ordinance. Their protest and signature gathering efforts gained enough traction that a county-wide referendum was set for June of 1977.
Arguments about the freedom of employers and the freedom of landlords boiled over into wild slander and fears about a conspiracy of gay teachers recruiting youth into the homosexual lifestyle straight from public school classrooms. Christianity Today described Anita Bryant’s work as:
“…a campaign against a county ordinance that would have the effect of encouraging homosexuals to ‘come out’ into the open” (Christianity Today, March 18, 1977)
The issue of protecting civil rights to employment and housing for all people morphed into a referendum that would exclude only gays from those protections.
“Save Our Children from Homosexuality” was chosen as the slogan for the campaign to rescind the civil rights ordinance. Anita Bryant made multiple public appearances and conducted interviews to ensure the measure passed.
“’America is being changed,’ she says, ‘…through drugs, pornography, even through television shows, the promiscuity, the language, the subtle undermining of what a family is. I feel it’s brainwashing our children.’” (Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1977 Pg 33)
She bundled all the moral panics together for maximum effect but her actions were primarily focused on opposing gay civil rights.
Anita advocated for what was common at the time to “Love the Sinner and Hate the Sinner”. She claimed to love homosexuals and wanted to see them come to repentance and give up their ways. It’s hard to understand why she believed the best way to love homosexuals was to deny them employment and a place to live. She sang Christian hymns at her appearances and led prayers but, she couldn’t resist a snickering reference to gays as fruits in her rhetoric here and there.
Like today, wild science, sexual fixations disguised as disgust and outrage and hyperbolic claims of quasi-cannibalism punctuated the conspiracy allegations. Time Magazine reported,
“Bryant has stepped up her rhetoric, telling one interviewer that God does not like homosexuality because "the male homosexual eats another man's sperm. Sperm is the most concentrated form of blood. The homosexual is eating life." (Time Magazine, June 13, 1977.)
In June of 1977, the referendum passed overwhelmingly and the ordinance was overturned. Now a successful hero of the religious right, Anita Bryant took her campaign to Kansas to overturn a similar ordinance there. Protections for employment and housing would not be extended to gay people in Miami until 1993 and not nationwide until this year when the Supreme Court decided Bostock v. Clayton County.
It is not clear if or to what degree children were “saved” from homosexuality. Gay people did not retreat back into the shadows. Anita Bryant’s movement led to stronger efforts on the part of gays groups to organize for their rights.
That result was predicted by Billy Graham himself who proved more judicious in which political causes he participated in.
“I was also fearful that her campaign might galvanize and bring out into the open homosexuality throughout the country, so that homosexuals would end up in a stronger position. Whether that is going to materialize, I do not know.” (Christianity Today, Sept 23, 1977)
Today, “Saving [the] Children” as a slogan and hashtag has reemerged. Again, the cry is related to a conspiracy of sexualization and corruption of children. But this time, wilder and darker, with a sex trafficking ring and a Satanic cabal of the elites who sometimes engage in cannibalism. Just as in the past, children have been hoisted on a banner to polarize political opinion and add moral credibility to absurd and divisive beliefs.
Real sex trafficking of minors does occur, but the groups that have worked on the issue for years do not believe in or promote grand conspiracies. And the people that promote grand conspiracies have another agenda of anti-elitism and don’t seriously care about children or want to use the tools of law enforcement to do anything about it.
“The idea, in a nutshell, is to create a groundswell of concern by flooding social media with posts about human trafficking, joining parenting Facebook groups and glomming on to hashtag campaigns…Everyone agrees that child trafficking is very bad, and the argument QAnon makes is, ‘If you’re against us talking about this, you’re in favor of child trafficking.’” (New York Times, August 12, 2020)
Everyday on Social Media, I see it used as a diversion to dismiss other causes and concerns – such as masks or misdeeds by the administration – asserting that no concern is greater than evils perpetrated on children so no other concern need be looked at.
The real Save The Children wants you to know about the reality sex trafficking but not to believe in conspiracies.
“[Trafficking experts] had worked for years to expose facts about child trafficking, only to see them distorted and misused by partisan opportunists. And they worried that in addition to clogging hotlines, QAnon believers could undermine the movement’s bipartisan credibility. (NYT August 12, 2020)
Sources:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/57597087/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/57809497/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/57809736/
https://www.nytimes.com/…/qanon-save-the-children-trafficki…