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Famous Like Me > Singer > B > Anita Bryant

Profile of Anita Bryant on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Anita Bryant  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 25th March 1940
   
Place of Birth: Barnsdall, Oklahoma, USA
   
Profession: Singer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Anita Bryant (born March 25, 1940 in Barnsdall, Oklahoma) is an American singer who made a series of television commercials for Florida orange juice. A member of the Southern Baptist church, she is remembered for campaigning to repeal a local ordinance in Miami, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Singing from the age of two, she became Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and was a 2nd runner-up in the 1959 Miss America beauty pageant. She had three million-selling pop hits: "'Til There Was You" (1959); "Paper Roses" (1960); and, "My Little Corner of the World" (1960). In 1960, she married Bob Green, a Miami disc jockey, with whom she eventually raised four children. She became a spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission in 1969, and nationally televised commercials featured her singing "Come to the Florida Sunshine tree", and opining that "Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine". She became widely recognizable, doing advertisements for Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Holiday Inn, and Tupperware. She sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" during the graveside services for Lyndon Johnson in 1973, and performed the National Anthem at Super Bowl III in 1969: in short, prior to her excursion into politics, she had a lucrative, thriving career and a seemingly happy marriage.

In 1977, Florida's Dade County (now Miami-Dade County) passed a human-rights ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual-orientation. In response to this, Bryant led a highly publicised campaign to repeal the ordinance. The campaign was waged based on her fundamentalist Christian beliefs regarding the sinfulness of homosexuality and popular fears of homosexual "recruitment" of children and child molestation. Indeed, the concerns over homosexual recruitment of children inspired the name of Bryant political organization, Save the Children, Inc. Among Bryant's assertions during the campaign were "As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children" and "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nailbiters." On June 7, 1977, Bryant's campaign led to a repeal of the anti-discrimination ordinance by a margin of 69% to 31%.

The following day, Bryant stated, "In victory, we shall not be vindictive. We shall continue to seek help and change for homosexuals, whose sick and sad values belie the word 'gay' which they pathetically use to cover their unhappy lives."

In the aftermath, legislation was passed outlawing adoption by homosexuals in the state of Florida and Bryant led several more campaigns around the country to repeal local anti-discrimination ordinances.

Dade County, in 1998, repudiated Bryant's successful campaign of 20 years earlier and re-authorized an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The terrible results that Bryant predicted would result from an anti-discrimination law protecting homosexuals have not yet come to pass. The statute forbidding adoptions by gay persons in Florida, however, remains law.

Anita Bryant's political success galvanized her opponents. She became one of the first persons to be "pied" (i.e., hit in the face with a pie) -- in Des Moines in 1977 -- as a political act. Gay activists organized a juice boycott, some enclosing two dollar bills and requesting a copy of a nonexistent pamphlet linking orange juice with homosexuality.

The fallout from her political activism had a devastating effect on her entertainment career. Her contract with the Florida Citrus Commission also was allowed to lapse because the negative publicity generated by her political campaigns, the resulting boycott of Florida orange juice, and at least reportedly, because of her divorce.

Her marriage to Bob Green failed at that time and in 1980 she divorced him. She married her second husband, Charlie Hobson Dry, in 1990, and they have tried to reestablish her career in a series of small venues. Commercial success has been elusive, and they have left behind them a series of unpaid employees and creditors. They filed for bankruptcy in Arkansas (1997) and in Tennessee (2001).

Bryant was ridiculed in a 2005 episode of the tv show Will & Grace, in which it was implied that she was a lesbian or bisexual.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Anita Bryant