C-R-A-Z-Y Lady Is Crazy. No. Really.

 

We all had a pretty good laugh at the woman who got up in front of the Lincoln, Nebraska city council and railed on about homosexuality in response to the proposed "Fairness Ordinance" extending anti-bias protections to the LGBT community.

 

Select quotes:

1. "A huge percent of gay men in school grounds molest boys, partly because they don't have AIDS yet."
   
   

2. "Whitney Houston was found without clothes in a bathtub. Every corpse found without clothes has a partner who did away with them."

3. "P-E-N-I-S goes into the anus to rupture intestines. The more a man does this, the more likely he'll be a fatality or a homicider."

You get the drift. We all had a good laugh. We all might want to rethink that laugh:

[Jane] Svoboda lives at an assisted-living facility in Lincoln and is listed as a protected person, according to court documents. Her brother, Patrick Svoboda of Ogallala, is her conservator because she is incompetent, the documents say.

He was unaware of the video's popularity, but wasn't surprised -- he knew it would be a matter of time before she got in trouble somewhere.

He said he's disappointed the video garnered such attention and jokes without the whole story.

"To me, it shows how little society really cares about people with mental health issues," Patrick Svoboda said. "She does have a very tender heart ... but anything she says is certifiably schizophrenic ... she's not some crazy conservative."

Apparently, she speaks in front of the council regularly at their open mic sessions, which allow anyone of the general public to speak for up to five minutes on any topic. And believe it or not, this might not be the most outlandish speech she's ever given. She's talked about "Chinese subliminals," radio signals sent through our cell phones, brought a large stick figure and said it was the ghost of her mom and regularly hands out fliers on the U Nebraska campus.

I empathize with her brother and his comments, to be sure, and see his point. I have a mentally challenged brother and my mom was, well, possibly less than stable. And I've spent tens of thousands of dollars in therapy to come to grips with my own....shall we say, unique?...mental and emotional challenges. I don't think I'm normal in the way most people would define that term, but then I don't think there is a normal anymore.

But here's the thing: in her speech, she sounds perfect rational and reasonable for a right-wing conservative. She may not honestly believe what she's saying...indeed, it's possible she picked up these thoughts along the way and is merely echoing what she's learned and not what she believes, as a parrot would...but it's such a convincing performance that we all took her as being not unusual for that sector of society.

That says a lot more about that sector than it does about this woman. Still, we probably all should take a look in the mirror tonight.