With all the other problems the Republicans are having right now, I’m astonished that they still have time to have a state, local, and national freakout about transgender people sneaking their penises into the ladies’ room. And, yes, that really is how they look at this issue, which is a little jarring to my ears.
Take a look at this. It’s a bill that Texas Governor Abbot says will prevent “grown men being in restrooms with our little girls.”
The bill is set to be signed into action on May 18th 2016. It was filed by state representative Debbie Riddle. It states that anyone who can not conform to traditional standards of identifying with biological gender, may not use any public restrooms, as no such restrooms exist for them.
Riddle says “If a man can’t dress and act like a man, he can use the restroom at home.”
I’m 47 years old, and I’ve never heard a single person complain about this issue in my entire life. The number one complaint I hear about public restrooms is that they are dirty, smelly, and disgusting. A bill to do something about that problem might make people happy.
The whole idea here is that there is no legitimacy to the very idea of transgendered people. That’s clear by representative Riddle’s suggestion that men who can’t act like men should just stay home if they expect to use the bathroom. If they want to do the things that the rest of us do, like go to a three-hour baseball game and chug 32 ounce beers, they can just dress the way their penis suggests they should, goddamnit, and not skulk around the ladies’ stalls trying to look up the skirts of our pre-nubile daughters.
That’s a Texas attitude to modernity right there, in a nutshell.
I struggle to sympathize and come up with any softer descriptor than ‘assholes,’ but I just can’t do it.
It’s probably the insistence on projecting perversion into everything when that would never even occur to me that gets my dander up.
Just let people take a leak in peace, for Chrissakes.
Get a life.
Find someone who actually needs some help, and lend them a hand.
It’s always revealing and not a little bit creepy when Republicans articulate their actual concerns.
With actions like these, we need a thousand-yard-wide video screen to fully observe their projections.
But it is just creepy weirdness. Imaging if your first incoherent thought about trans-gender people was that they wanted to molest people in bathrooms. Honestly. There’s probably a clinical diagnosis for it.
Who are these people? And the religious aspect is just bent and not in a good way. No wonder they need hand sanitiser everywhere.
The part that gets my head swirling about these bathroom laws is what’s the enforcement mechanism? You try to prevent the unliked person from using a toilet until the po-po arrives? And then what, if the “suspect” can’t provide a certificate, up goes the skirt, down goes the undies and we’re checking sex organs?
Fantastically coherent small government principles they got there…
Good point. These people are unhinged.
Well, I don’t know about you, but when I see a mosquito control truck, I develop an immediate need to break in and rub one out.
Our young perverted one found his calling as a “Freedom, Faith and Family” candidate for the GOP while serving his prison term.
Sounds legit.
Maybe the sex police can do double duty. When they’re not inspecting, they can hand exiting people their own little pristine towel served from a silver plate. One class act deserves another.
They needed new material since bestiality gave too many “conservatives” a bright idea of something to try. After all, if someone as posh as David Cameron can go for a dead pig, …
I have trouble believing it is an actual concern outside of a small group of religious extremists.
This is pure distraction. It’s yet another sign they have no substance to offer in governance. THIS is their big product for this election cycle.
As usual, it’s whole purpose is to punish marginalized and minority people. That’s what they are about.
Boo, re. your conclusion: In our swiftly changing society, bigots of all stripes who don’t want to let go of their misunderstandings need a lot of help. They’re losing their previously firm grip on America.
these asshats are beyond help…they lost their grip on reality a long time ago.
“Just let people take a leak in peace, for Chrissakes.”
Pretty much sums up my feelings. Just leave people the hell alone.
My Old-school Republican father would have agreed. Just leave people the hell alone was pretty much his entire political view. I miss the days when the GOP could at least appear sane.
I know quite a few republicans and conservative independents, as anyone who follows me on FB knows. Hell, even a good number of self-identified Christians.
Most of the people on the right that I know, and that’s obviously not a scientific sample- think this shit is stupid and pointless.
The sex-patrol business is very lucrative. Think of the lobbyists who funnel $$ to these politicians, who always have their hands out. The link below is just a piece of the sex-patrol network–executive pay for religious broadcasters. Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, is one of the big players in this business. There are many others. It’s an industry.
http://diymedia.net/religious-broadcast-executive-pay-10-years-later/7366
in the past. Possibly into the future. Nevertheless, I must commend you when commendable. Many recent posts have struck me, including this one.
The vast majority of people are not LGBT. If we can make them afraid of LGBT people, we have a political majority right there on this issue. Therefore we make LGBT a big issue, and scare people with it. It may be bully boy tactics, but if it works…. QED.
Is there any other minority we can scare people with?
“Is there any other minority we can scare people with?”
The discouraging thing is that if TPTB exhaust the list, they’ll invent something. I swear if humans were identical except for the number of hairs on their heads, somebody would count them. Variance has its negative side effects. Since the beast of divide and conquer has been around since the beginning of man/woman, it requires constant vigilance. Thankfully, Progressive policies temper it.
Just divert attention from the real problems. They all do it. It has worked for decades. Some say not any more, which I find highly questionable. Even the Clintons are now for same-sex marriage after they weren’t and she publically opposes TTIP ‘as it stands’ after it glittered in her eyes like the ‘gold standard” (as a former high government official in Washington you have to be batshit crazy to talk about ‘a gold standard’, or is she supporting its reestablishment after all these years as a substitute for Glass-Stegall?). She has a whole shitload of shiny trinkets and baubles to distract the cruder types from their daily woes as articulated by Bernie Sanders, who she must curse the first thing when she gets up in the morning and the last thing before going to bed.
As an antidote I recommend this rant by Anis Shivani on Andrew Sullivan’s recent lamentation about the noxious superabundance of democracy in the USA (Plato and all!), which BooMan noted a few days ago. How does this extreme warmongering Bush toady dare to crawl out of the woodwork after all the death and destruction he encouraged with his arrogant attitude (British class and all that).
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/our-awful-elites-gutted-america-now-they-dare-ring-alarms-abo
ut-trump-sanders-and-cast-themselves-as-saviors.html
Very smart (and outside the bubble) from Anis Shivani (and with the proper amount of disgust with all the bubble girls and boys). The last point he makes, although it’s no stronger nor critical than all the others ones which makes taking the time to read it worthwhile:
Off-topic, but accurate.
It’s the Frog Pond variation of Godwin’s law.
Regardless of the initial subject, all threads here follow a tropism to Hillary bashing.
Yep, I don’t recall Clinton taking this offensive position on bathroom use, but apparently it’s always a good time for some to demagogue against the almost certain Democratic nominee. It’s a super great idea for people who want progressive governance.
Oh, Hitler has not even been named but according to you he might as well have been. Criticism of Hillary Clinton is legitimate and appropriate. She’s not a goddess, you know (like Eva Braun, Frog Pond’s equivalent of Godwin’s second law), she’s a very adroit, deceitful politician who antagonizes and creates scandal and hoopla like no one else—going on some 30 years—and lines her pockets in such in your face way that I have to respect her for her chutzpah. She and her husband are what I call a Bonnie and Clyde. She makes Trump look like an amateur.. She will arrive in the Oval Office a very damaged piece of goods. Yes, she will achieve her lifetime ambition but she will receive very little credit for her trouble. We will be the victims this time round.
Clinton is where the left and right wing wrap around and meet at infinity.
Infinity? The concept strikes me as very alien to someone as prosaic as HRC.
The supposed topic of this post has nothing to do with HRC. My point was the prevalence of people at this site who are so obsessively anti-Clinton that Clinton bashing gets frequently added to discussions that have nothing to do with the Clintons.
” … she’s a very adroit, deceitful politician … “
That is a subjective opinion, not an established fact.
What is an objective fact is that she is the preferred candidate of Democratic voters, especially those that are actually registered as Democrats.
I completely agree about the weird way that comments on damn near anything here lead to Hillary bashing, but that was not at all my intention. I was primarily agreeing with the opinion that Hillary Clinton is going to have a hard time responding to Trump’s inevitable insults. And yes, I think a lot of her problem is going to be tied up with the fact that she seems to be incapable of a sincerely heart-felt response to anything. I don’t think that’s because she’s devious. I think it’s more to do with her tendency to view everything as complicated and deserving of a rather detached, non-emotional, complicated answer.
” … I was primarily agreeing with the opinion that Hillary Clinton is going to have a hard time responding to Trump’s inevitable insults. … “
You might be right, we will have to see. I would think the tactic Elizabeth Warren uses here (tweet at top of post) is simple enough even Hillary could master it.
https:/www.balloon-juice.com/2016/05/08/excellent-read-did-donald-trump-just-hand-the-senate-to-eli
zabeth-warren
This is true, and yet oblivious at the same time:
“The worst offenders of all are the American left’s cultural warriors, who daily wage some new battle over some imagined cultural offense, which has nothing to do with the lives of normal people but only the highly tuned sensibilities of those in the academic, publishing, and media ecospheres.’
It is really born out of a complete ignorance of politics. This is who fricken people are. Good Christ do really need to read Marc Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar again? Things like the transgender bathroom are easy to understand, and easy to have an opinion. It conveys an easy form of self-righteousness.
Want to improve living standards? That shits complicated. Hell a lot depends on the slope of the IS-LM curve. Better Education? Complicated.
Social issues dominate because they are visceral. The right has always understood this. The right has been screaming about bathrooms since the ERA for Christ sakes.
So yes, it’s all a bunch of nonsense. But this is what is important to elite liberals. Because many really don’t have any understanding of economics anyway.
This is what liberalism became in reaction to Reaganism. Some of it matters. Gay rights matters. Women’s rights matter.
But in the reaction to liberalism any semblance of social solidarity was lost. Hell, we just nominated a defender of welfare reform.
Sanders suggests maybe we can revive it. He gave a start. But I am not optimistic it will happen soon.
If increasing our investments in social welfare programs were a winning political issue, Bernie would have run on it hard and had more success in the primaries. Instead, he talked about the issue very little on the trail. That’s because he understood, as much as he and we believe that we should increase these investments, that it remains at the moment an overall loser of a political issue.
That’s an electoral reality. If you can’t win elections or be a part of a coalition which wins elections, your issues don’t get full attention. If your issue is not popular, then politicians are unlikely to become supportive of it.
This is how we were able to stop the privatization of Social Security. This is why trade deals, even ones you and I agree are harmful to many Americans, may be added onto rather than subtracted from; the majority of the American people are in general support of international trade:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/181886/majority-opportunity-foreign-trade.aspx
If we are willing to move away from the reflexive “corrupt politicians” meme, we can be brought into understanding that until we have the voters with us, we will not win on many of the issues we most care about.
I share very little in common with you.
This is the excuse we always get from neolibs.
Frankly, this is just moronic:
Bernie talked about Free Tuition and Single Payer in every speech he gave.
It is just not close to the mark.
Perhaps centerfielddj was using “social welfare” in the way you used “welfare” when you wrote “welfare reform”.
Yes, I was.
Attempting to dispense with the electorate argument I am making here by stamping a “neolib” label on me is weak.
I just finished working on the campaign to increase the minimum wage in California to $15 an hour. We flat beat our moderate Governor and pocketed that win, will work on quicker and higher increases in cities with a higher cost of living, and will work on many more wins for the working class in this and in subsequent years. I don’t have to answer to you about my work or my political views; they’re plenty left-wing.
I’m voting for Sanders but we need to finish baking the cake with the electorate. They’re not in support of Sanders’ full agenda yet, and the DNC had nothing to do with that. I don’t know why you wish to resist this; there’s so much evidence to show this is true.
It was choice.
Isn’t this just ginning up the same response that the GOP was after in 2003-04 with all those petitions and votes in the various states to ban same-sex marriage? My recollection is that that was a very successful venture, perhaps enough so to tip the 2004 presidential election. Or is that an urban legend?
Yes it is. Red meat to placate the vermin.
Their challenge is that they don’t know any transgendered corporations. And their concept of ‘help’ does extend beyond saluting corporations looting and polluting.
A lot of restaurants and bars in (admittedly gentrified) DC just have single stalls that are unisex and then a shared sink area.
I’m glad that they’re open about what they really want, though: trans people need to just stay home and cease to exist. Pure eliminationist rhetoric.
Hmmph
Palin: Paul Ryan’s Career is ‘Over’ for Not Supporting Trump
By ALANA ABRAMSON May 8, 2016, 11:13 AM EST
Sarah Palin will work to defeat House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary reelection challenge, she said Sunday.
“I think Paul Ryan is soon to be ‘cantored,’ as in Eric Cantor,” the former Alaska Governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate said on CNN’s State of the Union. Cantor, the former House Majority Leader and Virginia congressman, was unexpectedly defeated in June 2014 by Tea Party conservative David Brat.
Ryan is being challenged in an August primary by Wisconsin businessman Paul Nehlen, who has pledged support for Trump as the presumptive presidential nominee, “because it will have been the will of the voters that got him there,” he said in a statement.
Palin further slammed Ryan for not extending the same support for Trump.
“His political career is over, but for a miracle, “Palin added, “because he has so disrespected the will of the people and yeah, as the leader of the GOP, the convention certainly, he is to remain neutral, and for him to already come out and say who he will not support, was not a wise decision of his.”
Not sure where the teabaggers are on this, but Ryan was on their hit list before now.
What do the Democrats have going in their primary? Or is this another seat that they made no real effort to challenge?
It appears to be another seat we did not bother with.
It’s sort of ironic to read this just below a discussion of off-topic comments.
I have never come across this problem in all the years and many cities that I’ve been to in the United States using public bathrooms.
With these laws, it’s hard to pick out – and I don’t know why i bother – but amidst all the burning Stupid there’s one particular facet to the rhetoric from backers of measures like this that always bugs me: We’re going to discriminate against all transgender people, because we don’t want men in women’s bathrooms.
Of course, that’s exactly what such measures require, but it’s as if FTM trans folk don’t exist for these people. I can’t decide whether that’s because they think such people don’t exist, they don’t think women exist at all, they think it’s perfectly natural for a woman to want to be a guy (doesn’t everyone?), or they get turned on by the prospect of a woman (sic) watching them pee. Probably all of the above.
Evidently these laws are needed to stop the imaginary horde of rapists and child molesters who have been cross dressing to gain access to women’s restrooms.
It seems that gay marriage as a get-out-the-vote issue doesn’t work any more. And there’s not much left for the GOP to do on abortion. When the courts are imprisoning ladies who miscarried for 20 years and laws are not allowing exceptions for rape or incest, the Family Research Council’s work is almost done.
Still the GOP has inventive campaign consultants and legislative aides.
EXACTLY! Our local Shell would gag a maggot! It’s unisex and I can’t imagine a woman using it. I only use it for ten seconds when desperately needing to urinate. Porta-potties smell better.
“The number one complaint I hear about public restrooms is that they are dirty, smelly, and disgusting. A bill to do something about that problem might make people happy.”
Bigger problem: they are far too rare! Also, ask a woman about fairness, etc., in public bathroom availability — a disgrace!