For the last fifteen years, the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Civil Rights has run a series of summits called the LGBT Rural Summit Series in farming communities across America. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, mostly about making a go of it as a farmer, which is a tough job. And since this has been happening for years, you’d think nobody cared. Nobody, it seems, except Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh took to his radio show last week after learning of the summit. He’s convinced, for some reason, that the “Obama regime” was attempting to recruit lesbians to farm the land:
“I’m like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers. I never knew that lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing. I never knew it. Here comes the Obama regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up. They’re going after every geographic region that is known to be largely conservative. They never stop, folks. They are constantly on the march.”
Leaving aside Limbaugh’s somewhat poor grasp of modern farming technique and the proper verbs for plows, his perceptions appear to be at odds with the reported facts by the USDA, which places roughly 10% of LGBT couples in rural areas, and the summit mostly exists to help the farmers who are already there. Besides, it seems unlikely that lesbians might somehow reverse the trend of agricultural employment, which is predicted to lose nearly 50,000 jobs over the next decade. Really, if things get that bad, farmers might need all the help they can get, lesbian or otherwise.
(via The Daily Dot)
