Republicans: 60 years after that party, why are we still tormenting LGBTQ community?

Sixty years ago, when I was a young reporter for the Kansas City Star, we had several perennial bachelors on the roster.

One weekend, the bachelors rented a vacant mansion near Swope Park and threw a party for the whole staff, with kegs of beer and a combo playing dance numbers. We had a great time.

The next day my wife noticed the diamond was missing from the engagement ring I had bought years earlier for $38 — money hard earned at $1.40 an hour, slinging bread pans in a Wonder Bread bakery.

Our telephone call to the mansion was answered, luckily, by one of the bachelors, who was sweeping the place with a push broom.

“Yeah, sure,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll watch for it.”

He did and, amazingly, found that flyspeck chip gleaming up at him from the litter. We had the diamond reset in its Tiffany mounting.

With my wife gone now, the ring with its diamond today adorns my daughter Amy’s necklace. Only years later did we learn that many of those fine fellows, those party-throwing journalists, were not just bachelors. They were gay men still struggling through slow decades of persecution.

I bring this up now because on Prime Video I just watched the British film, “My Policeman,” which dipped back that same 60 years to expose the agony as it might have played out. During that era, as usual, straight husbands cheated on their wives, wives on husbands. Men and women came together in motels, in cars on lonely roads.

But, mostly, churches and governments chose to make miserable only those LGBTQ folks (condemned also by a few Bible verses), while neglecting other rich opportunities to lay on the lash.

For example, Mark 10:11 states that “whosoever shall put away his wife and marry another committeth adultery against her.” Compare that verse to Leviticus 20: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife...the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”

The Pew Research Center reported in 2013 that 42 million Americans were at that time divorced and remarried. Executing the spouses would double the death toll to 84 million.

While making those in the LGBTQ community miserable, we virtuous straight folks in those days somehow ignored Deuteronomy 22:21, which dictates the fate of the non-virgin bride: “Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.”

The Bible also condemns to death “he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord” (Leviticus 24:10-16); “whosoever doeth work” on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2); and “everyone that curseth his father or his mother” (Leviticus 20:9).

Today most Americans have passed beyond that. The U. S. Supreme Court in 2015 legalized gay marriage, which — as a recent Gallup poll noted — 70% of Americans support. That includes even a majority of old-time Republicans, the sensible ones who believe in free elections and other American traditions.

How sad for “new Republicans” still struggling to peddle the gay issue. Best they can do nowadays is the trans athlete gimmick — how hordes of burly guys pretend to be female so they can play sports against frail girls. Just hordes of them, though the hordes are hard to round up. A University of California poll reports only seven-tenths of 1% of American youths even transition from boy to girl.

It’s a huge problem for those Republicans who believe America is great the way we stand: the rich get richer, ordinary folks stay stuck where they are, and the poor stay poor (many without medical care thanks to the GOP folks in Kansas). But maybe they can win after all if they just keep piling onto that seven-tenths of 1%.

Meanwhile, every time I see that teeny diamond sparkling on my daughter’s necklace, I fondly recall the gay Star bachelors who threw that party for us 60 years ago.

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.