"The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell." -- Sean Ningen.
I hesitated to post this under the heading "in memoriam" because the last thing our society needs is to remember this man.
Do you know him? You should. His name was Robert Skolrood, and he died Tuesday. He was a former attorney and former instructor at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. He then became the head of the National Legal Foundation, a right-wing religious "legal foundation" dedicated to protecting fundamentalist Christians and to thwarting the efforts of fair-minded groups all over the country. He also was instrumental in writing Colorado's "Amendment 2" in 1992, which was struck down by the Supreme Court four years later due to poorly constructed and amateurish language that did nothing to disguise its blatant homophobia. From the New York Times:
The Colorado constitutional amendment sought to outlaw municipalities from offering anti-discrimination protections to gays and lesbians. Though the amendment was voted into the Colo. constitution by voters, the Supreme Court ruled, in Romer vs. Evans, that the amendment was unconstitutional because, far from simply preventing gays from receiving "special rights," as the state claimed, the amendment’s "sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests," as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
Kennedy also observed of the amendment that it "imposes a special disability upon those persons [gays and lesbians] alone. Homosexuals are forbidden the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint." Skolrood also helped write a similar provision meant to be amended to the city charter of Cincinnati, which voters passed in 1993 and which, despite the Colorado. amendment being struck down, was affirmed by a federal appeals court, with the Supreme Court declining to hear an appeal to the case in 1998.
Like most baby-boomer homophobic bigots, Skolrood had plenty of his own homosexual skeletons to hide. In 2002, when Skolrood was 73 years old, he allegedly made sexual overtures to a male police officer who was working undercover. At his trial, Skolrood denied making any sexual overtures, but he did plead no contest to a lesser charge, that of disorderly conduct.
The New York Times cited the newspaper The Roanoke Times in quoting Magistrate Judge Glen Conrad as saying, "That area has been notorious for problems of an unsavory sort," and, "there’s no question that you shouldn’t have been there."
Yeah. There's no question. He shouldn't have been there. He shouldn't have been anyplace where decent people congregate. He should have been shunned from American society and forced to think long and hard about why he spent his entire reptilian life fighting for the right to make other people's lives miserable. He should have been shamed publicly for his nauseating hypocrisy, and I for one am grateful that he was shown how irrelevant and foolish his life had been before he died.
Robert Skolrood, homophobic bigot and shameful representative of the legal profession, dead at 79.
