I’ve talked about scale before. Yet, the thrust on that day was the impressive math skills of Majorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. In that case, somehow dozens had turned into millions and millions had turned into billions. I suppose we can call that the politics of hyperbole or exaggeration. Numbers are confusing you know. They tend to point to facts and facts are so useless when you are crafting an alternative narrative.

In this case we have seen two news stories that are obviously related. First, Ken Paxton has launched yet another investigation into Texas Children’s Hospital. This is not the first time. It’s usually at this point where we would remind the studio audience that gender affirming care is not illegal in Texas…yet. However, that is about to change. We can easily go down the rabbit hole and debate this issue back and forth. I suspect that most of the readers here are on the same side. Why is the party of “personal responsibility” and civil liberty somehow in favor of taking away autonomy and limiting freedom? It’s obvious that the GOP is no longer conservative in any traditional sense.

Yet, that’s not the question for today. The question for today is why we are even bothering in the first place. Lost in the maze of cruelty, drastic overreach, and religious zealousness is the fact that this impacts so few people. I have been on my current campus for nine years. We graduate between 300 and 400 students every year. That’s eight graduating classes (the first year we only had up to 11th grade). We have three more classes right now of the same size. Basic math tells me that we have had between 3500 and 4500 students roll through this campus. Let’s make it an even 4000. I know of only a handful of students that have been openly transitioning. That’s one hand. That’s 0.1 percent of the students that have rolled through this campus. I have no idea if we are indicative of the entire population or not, but I can’t imagine it is that different.

I will grant that there are any number of students that are privately grappling with their identity. Obviously, the state of Texas and those that govern it aren’t helping. Still, we aren’t talking about a lot of people. It’s the same thing as those conservatives that want to fondle girls because they want to make sure that some girls are actually girls when playing sports. Beyond the abject horror of these ideas is the extreme impracticality of it all. Are you to tell me that there is nothing else going on Texas or your state that you need to spend time on this? How many girls are we talking about here? My daughter played junior volleyball from the age of ten to the age of 15. I counted one boy that played and no one cared.

The cruelty is the goal. It’s a feature and not a bug. Beyond that is the ridiculousness of it all. We aren’t solving problems. We are inventing them. There isn’t a whole hoard of boys dressing up like girls and going into the girls bathroom. There isn’t a hoard of girls dressing like boys and going into the boys bathroom. Of course, no one has a problem with that for some reason. I don’t know anyone that has even seen a drag queen story hour being advertised much less attended one. Yet, this is what we spend time on. These have become our legislative priorities.

They have also become the battle lines we fight with family and friends over. We don’t fight over whether we should keep our democracy. We don’t fight nearly enough over military grade weapons killing our kids. We don’t fight to save the environment, pass true educational reform, overhaul the health insurance system, or combat the wealth gap. Nope. We fight over stuff that affects less than one percent of the population. Don’t get me wrong. We all know people we love and respect that deserve to be protected. They deserve to be themselves. They deserve their dignity. Sadly, many don’t agree. However, what we can all agree on is that government shouldn’t be spending time on any of this. Whether you think a girl should become a boy or vice versa is certainly a personal preference. Spending valuable time and resources litigating this in the public sphere is just proof the GOP isn’t serious about addressing any actual problems

Huh. Well, you can’t just believe everything you read on Twitter. I’m going to fact check this. It is far too ridiculous to assume that this is true. I mean, we all know they’re racists and they know we know that they know we know but they don’t think that we have any real proof because to them it isn’t racist if you don’t say the N word out loud. So they certainly wouldn’t, just a few weeks after Juneteenth, suggest that teachers must not tell their students that the KKK is morally wrong.

Anyway, I found a Huffpost link that links directly to the bill. So here’s the bill, hosted at capitol.texas.gov. 

Sure enough, “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong” is listed under things teachers “may not” do.

Since I started writing, they’ve removed the offensive language. It was absolutely true – they wanted our civics classes to NOT provide the context of racism when discussing the KKK. Which is like trying to discuss the composition of water without mentioning the two Hydrogen atoms.

Left in the bill is something just as ridiculous, just in case you thought this improvement made it better:

 

an individual, by virtue of the individual ’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;**

an individual should feel discomfort,
guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual ’s race or sex;

It all comes down to the poor snowflakes who can’t stand to learn the facts: an economic system based on race-based slavery inescapable by birth was perpetrated by people with the same skin color as them. I’m not sure why the state of Texas wants children to be taught that their actions won’t have any impact on future generations since they clearly want to teach that the actions of the past have no effect on our current situation. Generational poverty, racism, and oppression? Naah, throw that out and pull yourself up by your bootstraps!

I find it blatantly hypocritical that they’re giving the teachers the ability to tell children the facts of what happened but forcing them to not talk about any type of shame or guilt that a child might feel over what their ancestors did, and yet they didn’t want those same teachers the room to teach the context of what the racists did and why they did it. This is the same reason half of the deep south believes with all their hearts (bless them) that the civil war was fought over state rights.

Recently, I discovered a newspaper article where my husband’s 3rd great grandfather was named as a stop on the Underground Railroad. I showed the genealogical evidence to my husband and children and they were all proud and happy that they come from a long line of abolitionists. We have no slaveholders in our history. We have no more control over that than anyone else and who they are born to, yet I feel pride in these facts.

Either way, let’s leave education up to the educators and allow them to teach context where it is appropriate.

In the 10th grade, my history teacher taught me that slaves were better off with their “masters” because they had nowhere to go when they were freed. That’s a statement that was missing a LOT of context. Funny that the Texas legislature never made sure teachers didn’t teach that to their students.

As was widely reported this morning, Texas Democrats have decided to take their big blue butts to Washington, D.C. today. This will deny Texas Republicans the quorum they need to pass restrictive voting legislation that they were unable to pass in the regular legislative session, earlier this year. Whether they can be arrested outside of the state is unclear, but the House rules about the arrests are as follows:

“All absentees for whom no sufficient excuse is made may, by order of a majority of those present, be sent for and arrested, wherever they may be found, by the sergeant-at-arms or an officer appointed by the sergeant-at-arms for that purpose, and their attendance shall be secured and retained. The house shall determine on what conditions they shall be discharged.”

It’s a ballsy move by the Democrats and I am glad they are doing it. In terms of whether their reason is “sufficient” or not, the sergeant-at-arms will have to travel quite a long way to find them. They’ll have to stay gone for a while, as Abbott can continue to call a special session at least through the end of the summer.

Now, if the special session addressed the power grid or some other substantive legislation instead of Abbott’s campaign materials, I’d feel differently. This entire special session is a waste of the state’s time and money. There’s no reason to restrict the distribution of mail-in ballots. My granddaddy’s been voting by mail since he retired from the postal service in 1986 and he always gets an application mailed to him.

During the pandemic, my shero and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo successfully implemented drive-thru voting and 24 hour voting. Hidalgo allowed both Democrats and Republicans to vote using both of these options so I don’t know what the Republicans are so pissy about. Instead of trying to block Democratic counties to vote, they should be working on turning out their own voters. Instead, they call a special session to try and eliminate any voting technology or innovation faster than you can say “Varmint.”

Of course, for the last twenty years, the Republicans have made their tent so small that Greg Abbott might be seen as too liberal to govern in the upcoming gubernatorial primary, so it seems that winning more voters isn’t going to happen. All they’ve got left is meanness and trickery. If we don’t vote these schmucks out we get the legislature we deserve.

Governor Abbott, who is slimier than a bucket of snails, has called a special session of the Texas legislature. It is well within his right to do – as a Texas Governor can call a special session for any reason she wishes just so long as she states a reason. In this case, he has outlined 13 reasons that are so important that the Republican majority legislature failed to pass them in a regular session. I suggest you wipe your rear end with that memo and read my list, because it’s a hell of a lot more honest.

Reasons for calling a special session:

1. Democrats denied the legislature a quorum, and ain’t no way the GOP is gonna accept the fact that they lost a battle. See: Trump 2020 election.
2. He wants to distract from the power grid disasters of 2021 – there is no mention of doing any legislative work on the power grid or ERCOT, despite the fact that it’s the real elephant in the room – even bigger than Allen West running for Governor.
3. Texans must perform genital checks on children playing tee-ball.
4. One-upping his Republican primary opponents Huffines and West by using state funds to build a wall. He never seemed interested in doing so until he was up for re-election against GQP candidates crazier than him.
5. He needs to dog-whistle the racist voters by using the words “Critical race theory.”
6. Make it somehow harder for brown people to vote.
7. – 13. He’s campaigning for re-election. 

We all know that Abbott called this session to rile up his base. In his list of thirteen priorities, there is not one single mention of the energy grid or ERCOT. Notably, there is no mention of vaccines or COVID-19, either, because his base is still pissed off at him for being somewhat responsible and making some businesses reduce capacity or close during a pandemic that killed 52,715 Texans as of today.

Texas Republicans don’t care if you fail at legislating so bad that thousands die unnecessarily from disease or freezing to death, they just want to make sure you can be really mean.

Abbott is doing his damnedest, isn’t he?