Holy Crappola. So I’m back in Chattanooga until the end of the week, and since there is nothing to do, I flip on the local news. This is all I see: the whole town is embroiled in a debate over whether gays should be illegal in Rhea County. Read that again. Not gay marriage. Being gay.

Rhea County is a few miles north of Chattanooga and contains a town named Dayton. Rhea County commissioners (all 8 of them) unanimously voted to ask for a change in the TN criminal code making it illegal to be gay in their county. Apparently, gay people really bug the shit out of some of the residents of Dayton, TN. Now if I were gay, Rhea County would be the last place I’d live anyway, but nobody has the right to make a law saying you cannot live somewhere, citing that your lifestyle is a “crime against nature”.

Luckily, State Representative Jim Vincent has said in a radio interview (and I’m paraphrasing) that what the Rhea County commissioners have done is not legal and that he could not and would not go to Nashville to present their point.

If you think you’ve heard of Rhea County and Dayton, TN then somewhere in the deep recesses of your memory, you remember the story about a substitute teacher talking about a monkey. Dayton is famous for the Scopes Monkey Trial. You remember it, that is, if you didn’t go to school in Rhea (remember…Scopes lost?).

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