Posted April 16th, 2008 by Michael Airhart
Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 50,000 gay Germans were incarcerated and as many as 10,000 were slaughtered in the concentration camps.
But that horrible fact has been declared politically inconvenient by the religious right, and so Kentucky’s General Assembly has removed mention of gay victims from a new law making additional Holocaust-education curriculum materials available to eighth-graders.
The Senate deleted a clause in the House version that cited other people the Nazis deemed “undesirable” because of their “race, nationality, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, religion, and political ideology.”
Whitaker said he received indications earlier in the session that the reference to sexual orientation was a “red flag” that could have endangered the bill.
But Senate Majority Leader Dan Kelly, R-Springfield, said in an interview that was never an issue for Senate leadership.
He said he had no problem with curricula discussing homosexual victims of the Holocaust as long as it’s “age-appropriate.”
Whitaker said that, even without the language on other victims of the Nazis, “you can’t study the Holocaust and not also come across pink triangles,” the insignia that homosexual prisoners were forced to wear.
We’d like to know more about the Kentucky politicians who voted for legislative ignorance regarding the victims of the Holocaust.
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