- published: 30 Dec 2009
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Anita Jane Bryant (born March 25, 1940) is an American singer, former Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant winner, and outspoken critic of homosexuality. She scored four Top 40 hits in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including "Paper Roses", which reached #5. She later became widely known for her strong views against homosexuality and for her prominent campaigning in 1977 to repeal a local ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, an involvement that significantly damaged her popularity and career.
Bryant was born in Barnsdall, Oklahoma. After her parents divorced, her father went into the U.S. Army and her mother went to work, taking her children to live with their grandparents temporarily. When Bryant was two years old, her grandfather taught her to sing "Jesus Loves Me". She was singing at the age of six onstage on local fairgrounds in Oklahoma. She sang occasionally on radio and television, and was invited to audition when Arthur Godfrey's talent show came to town.
Save Our Children, Inc. was a political coalition formed in 1977 in Miami, Florida, U.S. to overturn a recently legislated county ordinance that banned discrimination in areas of housing, employment, and public accommodation based on sexual orientation. The coalition was publicly headed by celebrity singer Anita Bryant, who claimed the ordinance discriminated against her right to teach her children biblical morality. It was a well-organized campaign that initiated a bitter political fight between unprepared gay activists and highly motivated Christian fundamentalists. When the repeal of the ordinance went to a vote, it attracted the largest response of any special election in Dade County's history, passing by 70%.
Save Our Children was the first organized opposition to the gay rights movement, whose beginnings were traced to the Stonewall riots in 1969. The defeat of the ordinance encouraged groups in other cities to attempt to overturn similar laws. In the next year voters in St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon overturned ordinances in those cities, sharing many of the same campaign strategies that were used in Miami. Save Our Children was also involved in Seattle, Washington, where they were unsuccessful, and heavily influenced Proposition 6—a proposed state law in California that would have made the firing of openly gay public school employees mandatory—that was rejected by California voters in 1978.
There were bells on a hill
But I never heard them ringing
No I never heard them at all
Till there was you
There were birds in the sky
But I never saw them winging
No I never saw them at all
Till there was you
Then there was music and wonderful roses
They tell me in sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and dew
There was love all around
But I never heard it singing
No I never heard it at all
Till there was you
Then there was music and wonderful roses
They tell me in sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and dew
There was love all around
But I never heard it singing
No I never heard it at all
Till there was you