Students at the alternative school, uncertain whether Sloan’s school would eventually displace them, walked out in protest, and several of them rioted. Stopped in their attempts to storm a Quality Food Center store, the rioters caused a few thousand dollars’ worth of damage to a Rite Aid pharmacy. (Sloan is a Rite Aid board member.) To date, the building has room enough to hold both schools, but the school district has not decided where each will go in the future.
In 1997, President Clinton nominated James Hormel, an attorney and heir to Hormel Foods, as ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel sailed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee only to see his appointment languish in the full Senate when it became a lightning
rod for family values proponents. In 1992, Hormel had contributed $500,000 to kick off fund-raising for a gay and lesbian research center at the San Francisco Public Library. When Hormel’s nomination came up for debate, the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), which describes itself as America’s largest nondenominational, grassroots church lobby, sent all the senators a book someone had discovered in the San Francisco research center’s collection: an anatomically correct coloring book. The TVC’s accompanying letter called the research center “wall-to-wall filth.”
Hormel contends the coloring book was an early work of radical feminism mislabeled as gay literature, and claims that the Republicans were more concerned about the symbol of a gay man winning confirmation, which he almost certainly would have done. Hormel believes the senators actually did not fall for the TVC’s stunt; they understood that the book was donated
by someone else. Nonetheless, enough senators were already against him to keep his nomination from moving forward.
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