Writer and self-described germ terrorist Dan Savage is at it again, this time with a campaign to pee-bomb the North Carolina governor’s office in response to his stance on transgender bathroom access.
Savage, who is an executive producer of “The Real O’Neals” on ABC, tweeted this suggestion on Tuesday:
Trans people should start dropping off jars filled with their urine at @PatMcCroryNC's office so his staff can oversee its safe disposal.
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) May 9, 2016
In a follow-up tweet Thursday, Savage clarified his idea a bit. (After all, he’s not a monster!)
I said "drop it off," not "mail it in." No reason to punish innocent mail carriers. https://t.co/9v8WpKfpdq
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) May 12, 2016
Savage’s proposal received the endorsement of Huffington Post’s editorial director Noah Michelson, who called it “a brilliantly gross idea to protest NC’s Anti-LGBT Law.”
This isn’t the first time Savage has used bodily fluids as a weapon.
In 2000, he came down with the flu in Des Moines, which he optimistically saw as an opportunity. Savage wrote that he hatched a plot to use his germs to “terrorize” conservative Christian presidential candidate Gary Bauer, apparently as revenge for his stance on gay marriage.
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“Naked, feverish and higher than a kite on codeine aspirin, I called the Bauer campaign and volunteered,” Savage wrote in Salon. “My plan? Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary.”
Savage said he visited the campaign office to “cough on everything.” It got grosser, if not better. “I started licking doorknobs,” he wrote. “The front door, office doors, even a bathroom door. When that was done, I started in on the staplers, phones and computer keyboards. Then I stood in the kitchen and licked the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack.”
Savage’s coup de grâce: Handing Bauer himself a pen he had thoroughly masticated. “Score!” Savage wrote. “My bodily fluids—flu bugs and all—were all over his hand!”
After Bauer’s Iowa campaign director threatened him with criminal prosecution, and after readers responded in disgust with his plan, Savage penned a follow-up, urging people to “read it as a humor piece.” He added that “because I may go to jail there are things I can’t comment on, but I can assure everyone that licking doorknobs is an exaggeration.”
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Additionally, Savage launched a campaign to Google-bomb Rick Santorum, urging his online following to use the politician’s last name to describe “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” The largely successful Google-bombing campaign ruined Sen. Santorum’s Google search results for years, much to his frustration.
He also ran an online campaign to change the online definition of “saddleback” (as in Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church) to “the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities”. This campaign was not as successful as the Google-bombing of Sen. Santorum.
We’re unaware of any other contemporary media darling who has so often used the scatological as a political tool. If you know of one, kindly refrain from telling us.
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Steamboat Institute.