From the Birmingham News, via Andrew Sullivan:
An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries. A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda." "Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday. Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.
It should be quite a mass grave: Proust, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Gore Vidal, Mary Renault, Marguerite Yourcenar, and a hundred others, to make a start.
