Barnes and Noble exploration....

How bad is it at Barnes and Noble that fundie wackjob Brannon Howse feels he must boycott B&N? I mean, it's not like I can't go to the one near my place and check it out. I had some time to kill before a doctor's appointment and stopped off at the Ladue Crossing B&N to see what all the fuss was about. I will routinely spend long periods of time at a Barnes and Noble, so this was just peachy.

I inspected the books out front. No gay porn. Examined the bargain buys. No gay porn. I examined all of the displays that run down the middle of the store. No gay porn. It took me about 4 minutes to find the gay and lesbian section, and it was off in a corner, pretty far out of the way, nowhere near the center aisle, far from the bathrooms, and certainly not near the children's section. Indeed, it was rubbing its filthy, misguided genitalia against the Latino section and Sociology.

You know what struck me about the gay porn section? One book stuck far out from all the others: Ultimate Gay Sex. The same one that Brannon Howse's son was certainly not flipping through. It's abnormally large, the gay porn book is. I didn't pick it up (there was a cute girl reading right next to the gay section, and I did not want to give her the wrong idea), but I could read on the back that it had "over 200 beautiful color pictures of gay men having sex." This is about 10,000,000,000 fewer than are available for free on the Internet, where Brannon Howse lives. (Sure makes his crusade sound inane, dunnit?) I took their word for it. Don't need to see it.

I did some sizing up (stop thinking dirty thoughts, you filthy bastards). How much space was allocated to this "abomination," by which I mean, product appealing to the needs of people whose brains are structurally different than heterosexuals'? God makes fags, Brannon, you sexy (gag) fellow.

Most shelves in B&N are the same size, but there are some at the end aisle that are 1/2 as wide. The gay/lesbian section was five shelves of 1/2 sized shelving. I went over to the section that Brannon's favorite section, the Judeo-Christian section of the store. This includes Christian fiction (which seems to have Quaker love stories, at least judging by the disturbing covers), Judaica, Bibles, Christian self-help ("Have God do it for you"), and Christian theology. At Barnes and Noble, then, the Jesus section has 17 full-width shelves, also stacked 5 shelves high. This means that there for every book for a gay person to spank off to, there are 34 for Brannon to wiggle it at. 34-to-1 ratio, Brannon. That's what you are protesting. There is 4 times as much space devoted to JUST THE DAMNED BIBLE than there is to the entire section focusing on a topic of interest to about 10% of the population. And it's right next to the main aisle, front and center.

Of course, then I was sodomized with a pistol in the men's room, but that's another post. I blame it on the presence of the Bibles out where any child molester could get his hands on them.

In a related story, in philosophy, there was an entire shelve devoted to atheism, I was pleased to notice. Right where any child could reach them, Brannon. Muahahahahahahaha!

HJ