State Rep. Sally Kern is Disconnected from Reality

"Our founding fathers were afraid of democracy. They called it 'mob-ocracy.' They wanted a republic. A republic is a government that's founded upon a standard of right and wrong. Okay? And that standard of right and wrong was the Bible."

These are the words of Oklahoma House of Representatives member Sally Kern.

Kern, during her tenure at the House, has identified herself strongly with a number of issues. These issues, selected from the plethora of topics relevant to our nation, are the ones that Kern apparently believes herself particularly qualified to commentate on.

For instance, Kern has long been a critic of the teaching of evolution in schools, and even introduced a bill in 2008 that might have made it illegal for teachers to penalize students for espousing young-Earth creationist views in science tests, if it hadn't been vetoed.

Evolution, as any first-year biology student will tell you, is the process by which the genetic composition of a population alters, generation-by-generation, with certain versions of genes being selected for or against by the environment.

Kern defines evolution as "the process of wanting to create something, or have something be perfect. Get rid of that which is not healthy and strong is going to be die off."

Kern has gone on to associate acceptance of evolution with Nazism, despite the fact that, under the Nazis, libraries were specifically instructed not to stock works promoting "the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism."

Whichever side of the issue you stand on, it's clear that Kern has no idea what she's talking about.

Kern's most notorious hobbyhorse is undoubtedly homosexuality. Earlier this year, a surreptitiously-made recording of her was leaked onto YouTube, in which she derided homosexuality as a "cancer."

Anyone can say something foolish off-the-cuff if they don't realize that someone's taking note, but Kern later defended the absolute truth of her remarks.

Whether or not you support gay marriage, it's undeniable that Kern's statements further illustrate her failure to grasp reality.

In her leaked YouTube speech, Kern claims that "studies show, no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than, you know, a few decades." I'd be interested to see the data collected by these studies, and to see how they account for cultures like the ancient Chinese, who seem to have been positively blasé about the phenomenon of homosexuality.

Nearly every emperor of China's Han Dynasty is recorded as having had male lovers, and that line alone persisted for 426 years, somehow managing to escape the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament god.

Another statement made by Kern in her YouTube speech, and on many other occasions, is that homosexuality has "deadly consequences" because it is linked to higher incidences of illness and of feeling "discouraged."

Forgetting the obvious irony of the latter comment, one wonders exactly what other disease statistics would imply about the demographics they apply to. For example, the majority of AIDS infections in the U.S. are currently taking place in the African American population. Does this make being black inherently unhealthy?

And what about the fact that there has never been a single confirmed instance of a woman contracting HIV through lesbian sex? Is this God's way of telling us that he wants to see more hot girl-on-girl action?

Or, to draw a more relevant comparison, what about the fact that a 2006 study conducted by Vanderbilt scholar Gary Jensen shows a strong correlation between homicide and dualistic belief (in this case defined as belief in both a god and a devil)? Would the correct response to this information be an attempt to legislate dualistic beliefs out of existence? Of course not.

For an ordinary citizen like me, drawing hasty and poorly-thought-out conclusions from statistics would be merely stupid. However, for someone who governs others with her views, this deficiency in understanding is dangerous.

In campaigning, Kern has made much of her Christian pedigree, even claiming that God directly instructed her to run for office and to become a "cultural warrior." Under examination, though, it quickly becomes apparent that her views on the Bible are as misinformed as her views on biology.

"There's more proof to verify the Bible than there is George Washington, Chaucer, and Shakespeare," claims Kern. "The actual time that Jesus existed 'til when people started writing and talking about him is just not a whole lot of years. And the actual time people start talking about Shakespeare and Chaucer and the things that we find about them is a lot farther years apart."

Obviously, Jesus's historical existence has no more effect on his attributed moral teachings than the historical existence of Socrates does on the legitimacy of the Socratic method.

However, if one wants to justify one's homophobia through belief that God at one point torched a city full of Sodomites, the historicity of the Bible takes on a new significance.

Kern's claims about Biblical history are so wrong that I almost don't know how to rebut them.

The Gospel of Mark, the oldest extant document mentioning Jesus, dates, charitably, at forty years after Jesus's alleged death. George Washington, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare, on the other hand, have all left extensive contemporaneous documentation.

When I met with Kern on September the 15th, 2008, her sincerity in these statements was undeniable. These are no sound bites deployed to cynically manipulate evangelical voters. Kern really believes these fantasies.

You might not be a Republican; you might not be a Christian; you might not be a conservative. But Sally Kern's actions as a component of the United States government reflect on us all, regardless.

When my meeting with Kern concluded, she warned me that, when I returned to university, I would find that 90% of my professors were anti-Christian.

"Not anti-religious. Anti-Christian."

I'll keep an eye out.