Teach Your Children Hell? No!
Hillsborough County voters smote the Terry Kemple campaign a death blow on Tuesday. Despite raising more money than any other candidate in the four candidate non-partisan race, Kemple's extreme beliefs and religious agenda may have turned voters off as he barely managed a humiliating third place finish with less than twenty percent of the vote.
SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER DISTRICT 6
383 of 383 Precincts Reporting
Benjamin Fink 11.83% 12,939
April Griffin 48.37% 52,883
Sally A. Harris 20.63% 22,557
Terry Kemple 19.16% 20,953
Incumbent April Griffin garnered close to fifty percent of the vote and will face surprise second place finisher Sally Harris in a runoff in November.
Teach Your Children Hell: Kemple Leads School Board Money Chase
A divorced family man who believes that teachers should have the academic freedom to bring God into the classroom but that they should never, ever, be allowed to mention the theory of contraception, is vying to fill one of the 7 positions on the Hillsborough County School Board, a group which is responsible for overseeing the 11th largest School District in the US.
District 6 candidate Terry Kemple was born to dirty fucking hippie parents and quickly fell prey to the evil secular elements of society - a society which forced him to choose to make himself a slave!
He continues...
And asks:
By the early 1980's, Kemple had evolved into a weak, drunken godless shell of a human being, but his pickled brain nonetheless made him a legend in his mind as he purposelessly motored the Northeast on boozy two-wheeled excursions, occasionally threatening his minor offspring with "a ride to Pennsylvania."
Kemple reinvented himself in the mid '80s. He was an alcoholic, divorced, separated from his daughters for 10 years. He would come by on his motorcycle to see the kids in Connecticut. He would say crazy things like, "Let's take a ride to Pennsylvania."...
In 1986, Kemple paid a visit to his oldest brother, Morry, headmaster of a Christian school in Jacksonville. He went to a tent revival on Sunday with Morry's family.
The star speaker was Tim Lee, the famous evangelist who had lost both his legs in Vietnam. Like Kemple, Lee had been rebellious, godless....
In the revival tent, Kemple felt overwhelmed. Tim Lee had lost his legs. He had lost his children. He went back that night to hear Lee tell the story again.
Kemple told brother Morry he wanted to change. Morry urged him to get started. "Find a church that preaches the Bible." Kemple lived just a few blocks from Bell Shoals Baptist Church. First thing he did was join the Bible class for singles.
First, Kemple leveraged Bible verses to convince his new church lady girlfriend to get a divorce. Then they married and Terry leveraged his shiny new Jesus-loving family-man cred to take on some of the most pressing issues of our times.
He has made the protection of children his mission. He has hosted sexual abstinence rallies for thousands of teenagers, lobbied for right-to-life laws, declared war on lap dancing. He cruises Christian Web sites. He collects evidence of God's banishment from classrooms, of pornographers' subversion of the First Amendment.
Kemple articulates an absolutist view — that homosexuals are stealing children from Christians by indoctrinating the young to gay lifestyles. He calls it the "homosexual agenda." Gay marriages pose the biggest threat of all.
Recently, Kemple has fought to give teachers the Academic Freedom to refute the Darwinist lies that are taught as "Biology," and he was a big part of the successful Florida campaign to deny the homosexuals their perverted marriage agenda item. Oh, and he wants kids to be taught abstinence only. In elementary school AND in college.
And how does that play out in the arena of sex education in public schools?
One of the things that's mentioned most frequently in the Bible is sexual immorality and how we are supposed to refrain from it. Much of the education that our kids get today... encourages them to become sexually involved at earlier and earlier ages....I'm old enough to remember when we weren't encouraged to have sex in school, and we didn't have sex.
So are you saying that schools are encouraging kids to have sex?
Yes....
So then I don't suppose you would agree with the proposed legislation called the Healthy Teens Act that would require school districts to emphasize abstinence while teaching students how to protect themselves from disease and pregnancy?
No....
So you're advocating abstinence only sex education for college students?
Why not? We need to turn that group around and give them some inducement not to be sexually active.
I'm not actually old enough to remember when we didn't have sex. If I ever do get that old, I hope that someone will shoot me.
The District 6 race is crowded, but only the top 2 vote getters in the 4-way non-partisan primary will advance to the November ballot. Incumbent April Griffin, backed by unions and other progressive groups, should be favored, but Kemple's church connections are proving to be lucrative.
Challenger Terry Kemple jumped to an early lead in campaign contributions, reporting $16,100 in April compared to $3,024 for incumbent April Griffin.
Griffin, 41, of Temple Terrace, is seeking her second term on the board and said she will report about $16,000 in contributions by the next deadline. Her donors include Iron Workers Local 397, the Hillsborough County Agricultural PAC, and retired principal Manuel Duran.
...Kemple, 63, of Brandon, president of the Christian-based Community Issues Council, said he has benefitted from the generosity of friends at church and in the community.
Kemple expects to report a total of $27,000 in contributions by the July 23 deadline.
Fifty-three of Kemple's 63 contributions are for $100 or more, and 20 are for $500 or more.
He received $300 from Orlando personal injury attorney John Stemberger, president of the conservative Florida Family Policy Council, whose interests tend to attract campaign money and votes, political analysts say.
Other top Kemple contributors include Bart Azzarelli of Dallas 1 Construction and Development in Thonotosassa; Mary Ott Wood of Plant City, president of Florida West Coast Credit Union; and 411 Communications of Tampa, a consulting firm whose clients have included Attorney General Bill McCollum and former U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez.
Griffin and Kemple will probably advance to the next round to face each other in November when Kemple's experience as an organizer combined with his notoriety and fundraising prowess among the local fundamentalist crowd could be enough to propel him to victory in a race that is off of most voters' radars.
He certainly has a fundraising advantage right now, and he seems to be going out of his way to appear reasonable to low knowledge voters - his official website is useless if you want to know anything about him. Luckily, some person has put together something a little more informative than the official Terry Kemple site.
But more important than making fun of him is supporting incumbent April Griffin.
The other side has been very successful in organizing to win local down ballot races such as this one for School Board. They know how important these positions really are, and they are praying to win.
Spread the word about Terry Kemple: make sure voters in November know who they they are voting for and what their candidate stands for. Kemple's fundamentalist machine is going to turn out for him. We have to turn out voters for April Griffin.
Support April Griffin for Hillsborough County School Board District 6.
And click through to this site to learn a lot more about Terry Kemple.
Kemple Runs a Fundamentally Stealth Campaign
Terry Kemple, the Bell Shoals Baptist based Christian crusader against everything from bikini bars to bathrooms is running for a seat on the Hillsborough County School board. This a county wide seat to oversee almost 200,000 students and over 11,000 teachers working at about 250 schools in the 8th largest school district in the country.
Per his campaign website, his primary qualifications for the job include the stunning feat of once having managed a full blown baker's dozen of helpers and the fact that some of his grandchildren are in school. No mention of his own educational achievements or background, but he's deeply religious, so Jesus will help him get up to speed.
Kemple is running on ideas that are both substantive and designed to inform voters of his oft repeated beliefs that the Christian creation myth should be taught in science classes and that abstinence only should be taught from 6th grade through college graduation comprised of meaningless drivel about accountability and cooperation and can be boiled down to the three simplistic phrases that anchor his "platform" while managing to say absolutely nothing:
That gruel is pretty thin. Where are the rants against Darwin and calls for teachers to have the "academic freedom" to proselytize? How about demands to build the public school calendar around Christian holidays? And what about abstinence only?
Any bill that goes beyond abstinence-only is "antifamily and anti-God" because it will encourage sex outside marriage, said Terry Kemple, a Christian community activist in Brandon who once ran a sexual-abstinence ministry.
"You don't give kids an option like that without expecting them to exercise the option," said Kemple, who has also been active in opposing the state's proposed new science standards because they embrace Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. "There should be an unequivocal, zero-tolerance program. 'You will not have sex.' That's it."
Don't the voters need to know about Terry Kemple's stands on these divisive issues?
Apparently Mr. Kemple is running something of a Stealth campaign. It's a good strategy in this non-partisan election in which there wont even be a "D" or an "R" next to any candidate's name on the ballot, since his name recognition in the religious right community is huge, and the lack of any fairly recent public activism on his part has allowed most other voters to gratefully forget all about Terry Kemple and the numerous odious stands he has taken in the past.
So come November, certain churchgoers with church approved voting lists in hand will be sure to check the box for Kemple, and a certain percentage of uninformed voters will check that box out of name recognition, and some will check it randomly, and when all the checks are added up, the 8th largest school district in the country might have Terry Kemple as one of its members.
Which makes his platform more of a campaign strategy:
"You can't expect what you can't inspect."
Terry doesn't want the voters to inspect his actual views...
"Concentrating on using the resources we have to their maximum is far more important than worrying about how to get more."
The religious right community will provide the votes...
"Together we can make a difference."
Jeebus for everyone! Bwaaaaahahahahahahahaha!!!
Thankfully, someone has taken the time to put together a site that is infinitely more informative than Kemple's own official campaign site. It's one stop shopping for all of Terry's krazy krusades.
You can learn about Terry's DisPepsi campaign. You'll reminisce about days gone by as you read about and fondly recall the billboards of yore featuring made up "quotes" from our founding fathers, and you will wonder how our kids have survived this long without Terry's guidance as you learn about his heroic efforts to excise Darwin from our public schools.
Link to this site often, and send it to any of your friends who vote in Hillsborough County. If the electorate is informed, Terry Kemple can be sent back to Bell Shoals to drink Coke and our kids might just be allowed to learn.