I’ve always understood that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In Conway, Arkansas, it’s paved with manure.

On June 27, a gay pride parade was due to take place in Conway, population 26,000. Around 6:30 a.m., a person with strong opinions and productive cows spread manure along the parade route. City workers cleaned up the route – no doubt mumbling words like “union” and “gas mask” – and about 275 folks proceeded to march in the event.

According to the Associated Press, parade organizer John Schenck said, “We want to let people know that gay people don’t just live in cities.” The mound of poo in front of his home, as well as along the parade route, indicates one thing: message received.

Protesters turned out for the parade carrying signs, heckling marchers or turning their backs on them and praying. As the aroma lingered, I imagine several prayed for fresh air. I have to hand it to the 275 people who marched. Their Pride was no corporate-sponsored, government-endorsed, urban bash. The challenges to their parade were much more demanding than figuring out whether the lesbian karate group would be a good buffer between the leather men and the Radical Faeries.

In early August, 35-year-old Wesley Bono pleaded innocent to a misdemeanor harassment charge. The farmer admits he spread the three tons of manure all right. But he says he was merely flexing his constitutional rights. “Under the First Amendment, a man is allowed to protest,” he told local television. “That’s what I was doing.” Sounds like more manure to me.

“The First Amendment doesn’t allow you to do whatever you want,” Lambda

Legal attorney Brian Chase noted on PlanetOut news. “It allows you to say whatever you want.”

If that critical distinction isn’t enough for the farmer, he might look at things this way: the Constitution doesn’t mention dung. Perhaps an oversight on the part of the founders, but there you are.

It isn’t hard to imagine others using Bono’s interpretation of the First Amendment. Picture gays in Idaho planning a parade only to wake up to a roadblock of potatoes or wheat in Kansas and peanuts in Georgia.

The farmer’s fertilizer frolic wasn’t the only bizarre happening in Conway on June 27. Phillip Beard and Christine Brown, two deejays with an FM station in Little Rock, apparently aimed to make fun of the marchers by distributing gay porn. A 16-year-old said Beard, wearing only a little black swimsuit, gave him a blue DVD. So like Wesley Bono, Beard and Brown also saw the inside of a courtroom recently pleading innocent to handing out obscene material to minors.

How does handing out gay porn make fun of gays? I can hear them now; “This gay porn is sure to get those gays once and for all.” They’ll have time to ponder the matter. Their trial is set for early October. Bono’s trail will be in mid-September.

The real question is what is it about gay pride that made these people go ever lovin’ berzerk? Has their sense of decency, humor and smell completely abandoned them?

On the plus side, the behavior of the anti-gays might give Arkansas gays some latitude. Next to a straight guy in a Speedo handing out gay porn, the least convincing drag queen should look downright normal.