A&M is no longer that little ol’ ag school of yesteryear when just a little hazing of “fish” in the Corps or building gigantic homecoming bonfires were all in a day’s curriculum on campus in College Station.  The 12th Man, which helped the football team win all those games, and the lifelong camaraderie that made you an Aggie for life is now being overshadowed as the university is now saying the quiet part out loud – that it’s funded and controlled by a bunch of pot-bellied bigots who believe that only white guys should be in charge and only strict compliance to the party line will keep you enrolled or working for A&M.  Overstated?  Hardly.  A&M is now openly censuring and threatening any academic who strays out of line, speaks a word of criticism of a state official or teaches the “wrong” history in class.

Case in point is that of Joy Alonzo, a respected opioid expert and A&M professor.  A deeply experienced and award winning pharmacist, Alonzo has brought millions of dollars in research grants to the university and is an expert in opioids, teaching the use of Narcan and other treatments to those addicted.  This last spring she gave a guest lecture at UTMB about opioids in Galveston, but before she could drive back to College Station, she had been reported for criticizing Dan Patrick.  From there the story reads like something out of the 1930s Germany where academics and intellectuals were silenced for saying the wrong things.  Within two hours, A&M Chancellor John Sharp was communicating with Patrick and his chief of staff.  Alonzo was immediately suspended, pending an investigation.  Alonzo was terrified.

Among his communications about the complaint, Sharp sent this email to Patrick’s office: “Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”  –  signed “jsharp.”  Within another couple of hours, UTMB leaders sent an email to its students saying that Alonzo’s comments “about Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and his role in the opioid crisis did not represent the opinion of the university.”  The email included a formal censure of Alonzo, even though they didn’t even know specifically what the hell she had even said.

Here’s where the story gets worse, if that’s possible.  Alonzo was reported by a well-connected mole in the classroom who happened to be a daughter of Texas land commissioner Dawn Buckingham, a long-time Patrick ally, and a freshman med student at UTMB who attended the lecture.  Patrick had endorsed Buckingham’s campaign, and she is also close to Sharp and attended his wedding.  You know exactly what happened.  Daughter called Mom, Mom called Patrick, Patrick called Sharp and the fire was lit.  Within hours Alonzo was suspended and threatened with firing by Sharp who was kowtowing to Patrick.

Since the investigation turned up NO ONE who could actually testify as to any wrongdoing, Alonzo ultimately kept her job (I certainly hope she’s looking for another) and is back to work at A&M, but the irreparable damage is done.  The infuriating thing about this entire sorry episode is that no one even knows exactly what Alonzo said that was so offensive.  Other students couldn’t remember anything except a vague reference to Patrick’s office.  The only clue is in Alonzo’s lecture slides that correctly stated that the state legislature, rather than funding opioid treatment programs, legislated stronger criminal charges for those selling the drug.  UTMB is just as culpable in this circus as A&M since it fired off the student email and censure of Alonso ON THE SAME DAY the complaint was filed and before any investigation was completed.

Add this story to the one about Kathleen McElroy, the UT professor of journalism who was recently hired to resurrect the A&M journalism program.  McElroy is an A&M alum.  Previously mentioned pot-bellied redneck alums found out about her hiring (she’s African American and had dared to have a job as an editor who wrote about diversity at the NYTimes) and raised so much hell about her hiring that the university actually reneged on it’s offer of a five-year tenured position, changing it several times, ending up with a one-year untenured position.  Since she is already a tenured professor at UT, she wisely rejected the offer.  The president of A&M and the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences ended up resigning over the sordid incident (not the hiring, but the reneging).

There is most certainly something rotten in College Station, and I’m not talking about overripe fruit in the cafeteria. A&M has been taken over (again) by hate filled racists and radicals trying to repeal the 20th Century and return the college to the bad old days.

“Sieg Heil!”  Fits better now than the quaint “Gig ’em Aggies!”.

My son – Let’s call him Elliot for privacy’s sake – was born in 2007. For four days the doctor tried to induce labor, to no avail. During what was to be the last exam before they stopped trying to induce labor for a few days, my water broke. Several hours later, as the nurse was checking my progress, my husband made a joke. I laughed and out came Elliot, right into the nurse’s hand, without a single push.

Elliot was a wonderful baby. He was very serious. By 3, he could converse with adults easily. By 4, he could read. At age 7, he read all 7 of the Harry Potter books in 3 months. My husband and I weren’t sure that he would read the last book without having nightmares, but, I’m a librarian by education and I quite simply am never going to tell a child they can’t read a book that they have the ability to read. He was ok. He cried, just as I did, at the ending of book 6. He rode that wave of grief all the way through book 7, and the Battle of Hogwarts. This awoke in him a steadfast advocate of justice. No injustice was too small to ignite righteous outrage in this boy.

When he got to middle school, he was accepted into the National Junior Honor Society (NJHS). He kept his grades up and performed twice the number of required hours of community service. He did everything from picking trash up off the road, cleaning the local Democratic Party office where I volunteered, and collecting peanut butter for a local food bank.

When the invitation came for the NJHS award ceremony, Elliot did not want to go. It was a formal dinner, you see. He really hated wearing dresses. He didn’t understand why he was supposed to wear one. He was a guy, and guys wear suits. The problem was, everyone saw him as a girl.

You see, my son Elliot was assigned the female gender at birth. Throughout his life, he focused on doing all of the things he loved, mostly wearing t-shirts and comfortable pants. He knew, from the time he went to pre-school and got sent to the girls bathroom, that everyone had it all wrong. But he didn’t know the words or have the courage to tell anyone.

Elliot went to that NJHS banquet wearing a suit. Parents and students alike that had known him his entire life agreed: he had never looked happier. He was glowing. He was exuberant and when the kids started to tease him, with twinkles of amusement in their eyes, he laughed deep belly laughs that echoed off the school gym walls. “You look like a Presidential Intern!” one kid said, while another picked up his trumpet and made a decent attempt at playing “Hail to the Chief.”

From that day forward, Elliot changed. He had always had a boyish taste in clothes, but it was not just that. One night, just a few weeks after wearing the suit, he asked us to sit down at the table.

“Here it comes,” I thought. “She is going to come out.”

And he did. “Ok. I’m just going to say this. My – my – my pronouns are he/him and I’m transgender.” His shoulders shook with emotion. A tear sprouted from his eye. “And I’d like to be called Elliot.”

His father and I both reached out. I placed my hand on his, and my husband placed his hand on his shoulder. “Ok,” his dad said.

“Ok, honey,” I said.

We talked for about an hour. We asked questions, he asked questions. We told him we would support him absolutely. We found a doctor that provides gender-affirming care. Many people who call gender-affirming care “child abuse” think that means surgery and hormone treatment. They’re wrong. Mostly it’s just a doctor that treats you like a human if you’re a teenage boy who happens to be going through trouble with his periods. It’s a doctor that swabs your throat for strep without any comment about gender at all. And when the time comes, it’s a doctor that helps the patient when time comes to transition and live the life they’ve always dreamed of.

I’ve lived in Texas long enough to know that half the state has decided they hate my son, and me by extension. Hell, half of my extended family proudly condemns anyone on the LGBTQ spectrum. I have done my best to shield Elliot from this, but there is only so much I can do.

The day I read about Abbott’s order, mandating doctors and teachers report to Child Protective Services the parents of any transgender children, I was full of fear and righteous outrage. The state wants to have the ability to investigate my child’s private parts to make sure that we haven’t altered them. They want to look at their medical records.

I imagine that this enforcement will lead to, somewhere in Texas, a child pulled out of their family’s home by CPS until the case can go up the appeals court. A private group for parents of transgender children in Texas rallied together to share GoFundMe’s for families that fear for their children and need to flee from the state as soon as possible. Elliot came home and told me that one of his teachers promised to never, ever report him. Imagine a child needing to hear that! At an age where every child is finding their place in the world, Texas Republicans through word and deed tell these kids they don’t have one.

Last month, Children’s Hospital in Dallas closed their Genecis clinic to new patients – the only clinic in the southwest that had a gender-affirming care clinic. Conservative Texas politicians and activists targeted the clinic, going after the hospital system’s board members with protests and accusations of child abuse.

Had they asked, they’d know that the Genecis clinic did not, at any age, provide medicine or procedures that are irreversible. Trans children are often given puberty blockers or hormones that stop being effective if they miss a dose.

There is no abuse going on. Texas doctors are doing their best to give these children the gender-affirming care they need because Transgender children have sky-high suicide rates. Simply seeing them and treating them with kindness is all the physicians need to do to uphold their oath to do no harm.

The decision to close this clinic does clear harm to children. It’s evil, and it’s cruel.  How can Republicans claim to be for small government when they want to investigate a kid’s genitals?

Texans need to put a stop to this obnoxious race to be the most racist, bigoted, mean governor in the country.

My family will be ok. I can work from anywhere in the world, and we have the means to pick up and move somewhere safe. But I don’t want to. I am Texas. Elliot is Texas. We shouldn’t have to leave because the government doesn’t like the way we parent. It’s not abuse to let your kid explore who they are. It’s not abuse to let your child live life the way they were meant to, the way that makes them happy. Trans children harm no one.

I should also mention that there is a huge right-wing movement in North Texas right now to ban books. Any book that involves LGBTQ subject matter, or even just characters that happen to be LGBTQ and also do things like save the world or make a new friend. They’re trying to ban books about Black history. Books like Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights, We the Students, Supreme Court Cases for and About Students, and This Book is Anti-Racism. We can’t have kids reading this kind of liberal nonsense, now, can we!?

I implore each and every Texan that reads this to please contact your state rep, your US Rep, your local school board, city council, literally anyone in power in your local area, and condemn this ridiculous order from Abbott. Throw in opposition to banned books, please. School board meetings are open to the public and you have a right to be heard, even if they won’t let you read the books that tell you what your rights are.

It’s time for Wedge Issue Bingo!  In a desperate effort to stay in power, Republicans invent new wedge issues lies every two years designed to piss off the base and drive them to the polls.  AND, they invent these divisive issues while howling about how Democrats are being divisive.  The really amazing thing is that it works like a charm election after election.

So, let’s list all the wedge issues that republicans have conjured up in the last 20 years or so.  Feel free to add to my list.  I’ll start with the Golden Oldies, then add newer issues:

God
Guns
Gays
Christian Nation
Death Tax
Wedding Cakes
School Vouchers
Welfare Queens
Deficit Spending (only when Dems are in office)
Gun Grabbers
Tort Reform
ACORN
Planned Parenthood
Abortion on Demand
Partial Birth Abortion
Gang Wars
Government is the Problem
Government Takeover of Healthcare
Death Panels
Voter ID
Vote Harvesting
Voter Fraud
Hillary’s Emails
Transgender
Public Bathrooms (related to Transgender)
Boys Playing Girls’ Sports
Concealed Carry of Guns
Open Carry of Guns
Unlicensed Open Carry of Guns
Rioters (Only Non-White)
Immigration
Open Borders
Taco Truck on Every Corner
Illegals Vote and get Welfare
Vote by Mail Fraud
Massive Voter Fraud
Anthony Fauci
Vaccines will Kill You
Science Isn’t Real
Mandates are Equal to the Holocaust
Critical Race Theory
Critical Thinking is Bad
White Replacement Theory
Books are Actually Porn
Parental Control of Education
January 6th was “legitimate political discourse”

That’s my list, but I’m sure I’ve missed some.  Ready, Set, Go!

There is a plaza in Berlin now called the Bebelplatz.  When it was constructed in the mid-1700s, it was known as the Opernplatz, because the State Opera house is on the plaza’s east side, but that is not why it’s famous.  I visited here a few years ago, not to see the opera, but for another important reason.  In May of  1933 this was the location where ritual book burnings began in Germany, led by the German Students Association, which, along with the Hitler Youth, the SS, and the SA (Brownshirts) were groups that grew out of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party.  The ritual burning on May 10th followed an inflammatory speech by Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s head of propaganda.

On the first night, 20,000 books from the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research) were burned.  On other nights, thousands of other “unGerman” books, written primarily by Jewish authors, were burned on the plaza.  One of those authors was Albert Einstein.

On the site of those book burnings is a memorial that sits in the plaza.  Called The Empty Library, it’s a 16′ by 16′ below ground room surrounded by empty bookshelves that would hold the 20,000 books burned on that first night.  The ceiling is a glass panel so you can see it from the plaza above.  It is impressive.

If I could, I would charter an airliner from Texas to Berlin and put all the book banners on it, including Greg Abbott all the way down to that Little Shit Matt Krause (who briefly ran for Texas AG against a rogue’s gallery of weirdos trying to unseat Indicted for Fraud and Insurrectionist Ken Paxton).  It’s Krause who compiled a list of 850 books he wants banned from Texas schools which includes books by Pulitzer Prize winners.  These clowns need to see where their politics is going.

Texas has been under the control of Republicans since 1997 and the results are exactly what one would expect of a system rotten to the core like ours.  Wedge issues designed to keep the base stirred up are now fed in a continuous stream including the normal guns, God, gays, school vouchers, abortion, non-existent voter fraud, immigration, and all people not white.  The latest is now CRT, mandates, science, and books.  If you listen closely, you can hear the voice of Josef Goebbels and Adolf Hitler in the words of book banners.  The language of these wedge issues eerily echoes their language as they took over the German government and started killing what would end up being millions of innocents they deemed to be “unGerman” and unacceptable.

There is a plaque at The Empty Library that is inscribed, “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings”.   Inspiringly, Texas students are not taking this latest move by finger wagging book banners.  Last week at a meeting of the Granbury ISD outside of Fort Worth, a high school junior told the panel,

“No government — and public school is an extension of government — has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.