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In the afterglow of the 2004 Presi-dential election, Alabama State Representative Gerald Allen, a Republican from Cottondale, proposed a bill proscribing all state-funded representations of homosexuality.

The resulting ban would extend to gay political events on state property, university productions of plays by Tennessee Williams or Tony Kushner, and an array of library books.

The public entities affected would include the Alabama school system, public libraries, state-sponsored cultural institutions, state colleges, and branches of the University of Alabama.

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"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," said Allen when reporters asked what he would do with books ejected from state property. Into the hole would go Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Ned Rorem's diaries, James Baldwin's Another Country, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and hundreds of other titles. Sisters, a lesbian-tinged 1981 historical romance by Vice Presidential consort Lynne Cheney, would qualify at last for the interment some literary critics have long recommended.

The bill notes that Alabama state law already requires sex-education curricula to stress "that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state." An existing statute prohibits teachers from telling public school children about "illegal sexual conduct... in such a manner as to indicate that they have a legitimate right to decide or choose illegal conduct." The legislation would specifically forbid the state of Alabama to "sanction, recognize, foster, or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy or sexual misconduct laws of the state."

"That's not the state of the law in this country any more," says Paul Cates, Director of Education for the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project. "That's just plain wrong."

Allen may have forgotten that in June 2003, when the US Supreme Court struck down the Texas sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas, the decision voided or gutted similar provisions nationwide, including the sodomy statute of the state of Alabama. The state's Attorney General, Bill Pryor, has admitted that since Lawrence, Alabama's interdiction against consensual sodomy is "unenforceable." The sodomy law remains on the books, however, and invites interpretation.

The bill will not be considered until sometime during the 2005 Alabama legislative session. Its disregard for the First Amendment renders it facially unconstitutional and unlikely to pass even in Alabama-- a state that hosts a movement to have the Ten Commandments emblazoned all over public buildings, and to have "In God We Trust" inscribed on classroom walls.

A prominent Tuscaloosa businessman, State Rep. Allen has ties to the Christian Coalition of Alabama and the state affiliate of the Family Research Council. Overzealous "pro-family" legislation is among the Baptist church deacon's specialties. Early in 2004, he introduced a bill promoting an amendment to the Alabama constitution defining marriage as a "unique relationship between a man and a woman." Though the Alabama Marriage Protection Act of 1998 already banned same-sex marriage, Allen sought to forestall the possibility of "activist judges" providing loopholes for the gay agenda. The bill died when it failed to come to a vote at the end of the 2004 legislative session.

The ACLU of Alabama hopes to nudge Allen's book-banning bill toward a similar fate.