There have been some pretty outrageous reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of marriage equality. Just last week, for instance, an associate justice in Louisiana actually suggested that gays shouldn’t be allowed to adopt because they molest kids. Well, we came very close to seeing something that may have been even more embarrassing. The county commission in a central Missouri county actually voted to lower the American flag below half-staff on county property in protest of the Supreme Court decision. However, after a storm of protest, the commission backed down only 24 hours later.
Dent County is located roughly halfway between St. Louis and Springfield. It’s mostly rural; the nearest city of any size is Rolla, half an hour to the northwest. Until this week, it was best known as the hometown of Congressman Jason Smith, who served as speaker of the state house before going to Washington in a 2013 special election.
But it briefly became a national laughingstock on Monday. At its regular meeting, the three-member, all-Republican county commission voted unanimously to observe one year of mourning over the Supreme Court decision. To mark this period of mourning, the commission planned to lower the American and Missouri flags flying atop the county courthouse and judicial building below half-staff on the 26th day of every month from July 26 through June 26 of next year. June 26 is the day that the Supreme Court issued its historic decision making marriage equality the law of the land.
Notice how far the commission wanted the flag lowered. Flags are lowered to half-staff to mourn the deaths of important dignitaries and local servicemembers, as well as to mark national tragedies. And yet, the Dent County commission wanted the flag lowered below that.
The presiding commissioner, Darrell Sikes, read a letter into the record saying that while he and other elected officials would comply with the decision, they would do so under protest, since they believed it sanctioned “what God speaks of as an abomination.” He called the marriage equality decision “one of the saddest, most momentous days in our nation’s history,” and believed lowering the flags would remind county residents of “this despicable Supreme Court travesty.”
Skiles told The Salem News that he was so outraged by the decision that he was willing to lower the flags himself. One of his two colleagues, Gary Larson, supported lowering the flags, saying that the decision amounted to “death to a part of our freedom.” The other commissioner, Dennis Purcell, said that the next step would be legalizing polygamy.
You’re probably wondering–what county commission would think this was a good idea at all? Well, Dent County, like most of central Missouri, has turned redder than an overripe cherry. In the last four elections, it has given the GOP candidate a punishing 65 percent or more of the vote.
But to really get a feel for how red this county is, consider the 2012 Senate race. Dent County voted for Todd Akin by an eye-popping margin of 53-39 over Claire McCaskill–even after Akin made his appalling comments about “legitimate rape.” By comparison, McCaskill destroyed Akin statewide, taking 55 percent of the vote to Akin’s 39 percent.
But this decision was too much even for some residents of this crimson-red county. Skiles said on Tuesday that he had gotten calls from a number of veterans and military personnel about the commission’s vote. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that while many of them were as appalled by the Supreme Court decision as he was, they felt lowering the flag went too far. A petition on Change.org calling for the commission to drop the flag-lowering plan garnered 1,100 signatures in less than 24 hours.
Skiles planned to schedule a special commission meeting on Wednesday afternoon to cancel the flag-lowering order. He understood that Purcell and Larson would vote to rescind the order as well. However, Salem resident Jimmy Cotner, an openly gay man who served in the Navy, doesn’t think the commission would have reversed course so fast “if the public outcry were not so great.”
From where I’m sitting, it says a lot about Skiles and his colleagues that they even thought this was a good idea in the first place. It cannot be repeated enough–these three men wanted the flag lowered below the traditional position of mourning for fallen servicemembers and the deaths of the president and other important dignitaries. If this isn’t proof that the level of civility in this country is at an all-time low, I don’t know what is.
