Admiral Jeremiah Denton died today.
Admiral Jeremiah Denton was a Vietnam war hero.
After his bomber was shot down, Admiral Denton was incarcerated by North Vietnam for seven years and seven months.
He was tortured.
He was starved.
He survived.
He told the truth on national television, under the noses of his sadistic North Vietnamese torturer-captors.
On May 17, 1966, Admiral Denton used Morse Code to spell out the word "Torture" before television cameras when he was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese.
Admiral Denton devised a system of coughs, sneezes and sniffs to communicate with his fellow incarcerated Amercan Prisoners of War (POWs).
Since POWs suffered chronic illness in drafty and vermin-ridden cells, the North Vietnamese never caught on that coughs, sneezes and sniffs were their way of communicating with one another.
Admiral Denton was the most senior POW, and the first off the plane in 1973. He wrote When Hell Was in Session, later made into a TV movie starring Hal Holbrook.
Confined in cells as small as a refrigerator, Admiral Denton survived. He would have despaired had he known his incarceration would last seven years and seven months, but he said: "It was one minute at a time, one hour, one week, one year and so on. If you look at it like that, anybody can do anything."
Later, Admiral Denton was elected to the United States Senate from Alabama as a Republican, the first one elected from Alabama in 112 years.
Senator Jeremiah Denton worked to enact abstinence-education legislation, working with Senator Ted Kennedy, my first boss, intending to prevent teen pregnancies.
In December, 2005, I had the honor of interviewing the retired Admiral and former Senator Admiral Denton for Out in the City, the GLBTQ newspaper then published in Jacksonville, Florida.
What a wonderful man he was -- I was honored to interview him.
I telephoned Admiral Denton while writing an investigative cover story about bigoted anti-Gay policy that was adopted by Clay County School Board in 1992.
The article was called "Farenheit 4.51: Clay County's Culture War" (January 2006).
The offensive anti-Gay Clay COunty, Florida School Board policy stated, and still states today, in haec verba: "Any instruction on homosexuality shall occur only in conjunction with instruction on sexually transmitted diseases."
The policy is word-for-word identical to one adopted in a Washington State school board. It is similar to those adopted in other redneck and peckerwood jurisdictions where intolerance rules, and the First Amendment Establishment Clause is violated, and Article VI, cl. 3 of the U.S. Constitution is disobeyed ("no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.")
The policy, Clay County School Board Policy 4.51(C)(3)(c), would even prohibit a teacher from saying anything supportive to a Gay student contemplating suicide.
Since suicide rates among Gay and Lesbian teenagers are thrice that of heterosexual teenagers, the effect of the Clay County School Board policy is cruel, sadistic and ultimately anti-life as well as anti-Gay.
The policy was adopted at the behest of bigoted extremists in Clay County, who attempted to blame abstinence education policies for their backwoods backward Nuremberg Law.
Admiral Denton, the former U.S. Senator who sponsored abstinence education, told me that they were lying. Abstinence education was about preventing pregnancy, not about marginalizing Gays and Lesbians.
As a former Navy Admiral, former U.S. Senator and devout Roman Catholic, Jeremiah Denton was outraged. He quickly told me that Clay County School Board members were clearly lying to me.
The legislative history of the abstinence-education bill had nothing to do with homosexuality. It was about preventing teen pregnancy.
Period.
Thus, I had the story of the School Board's mendacious savagery from the abstinence-education law sponsor's own voice: Clay County School Board members were lying (just like the School Board members in Pennsylvania who adopted "Intelligent Design" based on theocracy).
There was some awkwardness on my part. I wasn't sure whether to call him "Admiral" or "Senator," or both. Jeremiah Denton quickly solved that problem.
"Just call me Jerry," Admiral/Senator Jeremiah Denton said to me after just a few minutes.
We stayed in touch, and he asked for, and I offered, a few modest suggstions on how to pass federal legislation to make it easier for shipping companies to export food aid to the hungry worldwide, giving them tax relief.
President Ronald Reagan was right -- Jeremiah Denton was "a true treasure."
Admiral Denton was a true patriot, who helped me expose the bigotry of Clay County School Board members against GLBTQ students.
He reminds me of what former St. Augustine City Commissioner William Leary said in response to the Ku Klux Klan on December 10, 2012, in adopting Fair Housing ordinance amendment banning "sexual orientation" discrimination. Commissioner Leary said, "I was elected to make secular decisions."
A deeply religious man, Admiral Denton respected separation of Church and State.
We shall miss him, and others like him who served in Congress and spoke their minds, and served in Vietnam, "when Hell was in session."
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