Seth Cotlar: In 1994 the superintendent of the Dallas, Oregon school district cancelled plans to have middle school students take a field trip to view an exhibit on Anne Frank. The "problem" was that the exhibit talked about how LGBTQ folks were also persecuted by the Nazis.

In 1994 the superintendent of the Dallas, Oregon school district cancelled plans to have middle school students take a field trip to view an exhibit on Anne Frank. The "problem" was that the exhibit talked about how LGBTQ folks were also persecuted by the Nazis.

Ultimately the superintendent backtracked a bit and ok'd the field trip as long as parents gave their permission. This op-ed in the Salem Statesman Journal (hardly a leftist rag) made it fairly clear how the homophobia of 1994 carried a whiff of the 1930s. It's surprising how direct they were.

The context here was that the far right organization called the Oregon Citizens Alliance had put an anti-gay measure on the 1994 ballot. This was their third run at this. The OCA was quite influential and popular in more rural and Republican parts of the state. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Or...

1994 Oregon Ballot Measure 13 - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

The OCA of the 80s & 90s was the inheritor of the far right grassroots insurgency that Walter Huss began organizing in 1962, and which sought to gain power by taking over the Oregon Republican Party. As of today, I'd say that takeover is pretty much complete. sethcotlar.substack.com/p/when-did-t...

When did the conspiracy-obsessed, fascist-friendly far right first get a foothold in the Oregon Republican Party? Would you believe me if I said 1962?sethcotlar.substack.com A story about that time in 1962 when a group of former Silver Shirts and present white nationalists and Christian supremacists came close to taking over the Multnomah County Republican Party.

One of the leaders of the OCA was Scott Lively. He's since been active promoting legislation in Uganda calling for the death penalty for LGBTQ folks. www.splcenter.org/fighting-hat...

Scott Livelywww.splcenter.org A veteran of the anti-gay movement, Lively has been actively propagandizing against LGBT people since the early 1990s, but he's perhaps best-known for co-writing the thoroughly discredited, Holocaust

The main figurehead of the OCA was Lon Mabon. He's kept a low profile over the past few decades, but he's now making terrible salsa that he's trying to sell in supermarket gourmet cases across Oregon. www.wweek.com/news/2023/10...

Lon Mabon Terrified Portlanders With Ballot Measures but Now Sells Them Gourmet Salsawww.wweek.com

The Measure 13 promoters even put out their own, short-lived newspaper. This edition was in Walter Huss's archive. He was, of course, a very avid supporter of this anti-LGBTQ crusade.

Just the name Lon Mabon gives me the heebee-jeebees.

I really want to get a hold of Lon Mabon to see if he has any OCA paraphernalia I can snag for my research.

I've never lived in Oregon, but I got married to an Oregonian in Portland in the early 90s. Hearing the name Lon Mabon tonight after so many years sent a chill down my back here in Boston.

I hesitate to call Scott Lively one of the OCA's leaders, but as the group's communications director he was a prominent face and quite vocal. He also tended to be the biggest firebrand.

In 1995, he published The Pink Swastika, which claimed homosexuals were behind the Nazis and the holocaust. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pin...

The Pink Swastika - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

The OCA's relationship with the state GOP was...complicated. The goal was to take over the GOP, but it largely didn't. The OCA's third-party challenge to Republican Attorney General Frohnmayer caused issues, especially because they cost him the governorship.

The OCA's anti-gay politics also didn't help them, as many conservatives tended to back away from them because of the controversy behind such measures, primarily 1992's Ballot Measure 9.

It also didn't help that Lon Mabon was, as one conservative politician described him, a tyrant. He was not pragmatic, increasingly ran the OCA as his own petty fiefdom, and his uncompromising nature alienated many conservatives, including some of the OCA's past members.

"The majority of people in the Dallas area think that homosexuals shouldn't have minority status" is a very strange wording.

“Minority status” should be read here to mean “oxygen”

Indeed. Read literally, it suggests that Voves believed that the majority of people in the Dallas area wished that gay folks were in the majority. Or put more plainly, that they wished they were gay. Of course, there’s no reason to expect bigots to be logical, or to understand what words mean.

At least everyone knew where he would have stood in 1930s Germany.

"The majority of people in the Dallas area don't think homosexuals should have minority status." That's kind of the fucking point.. if one group is in the majority, the other group is the minority. The level of cognitive dissonance is staggering.

History as a conservative problem. Bring me my fainting couch….

These people like it that Nazis persecuted LGBTQ people.

Real “are we the baddies” moment

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