Nancy Mace in a Brace

 

Rep. Mancy Mace of South Carolina apparently experienced the "Handshake from Hell" at the hands of a foster care advocate who was (checks notes) concerned about trans children. The man was arrested, and our fearless Potty Protector is now seen wearing a brace. Some people who were present at the alleged arm-spraining fracas claim they observed nothing unusual about the vigorous handshake. Other observers suggest Mace might avoid injuries by eating something containing calcium (like food). 

(Me. I am a concerned bystander who thinks ravioli and chicken cutlets might make at least some of her problems less so.)

Am I claiming bullshit on her claims of assault? No, I was not there and there is no video that I know of, so I am only saying, based on eyewitness testimony, it might not have happened. And she may very well have received death threats, last month, too. And of course her house was once grafitti'd by antifa:

Hey remember that time that Nancy Mace claimed "Antifa" graffitied her home & then people pointed out the graffiti was all in *HER* handwriting....and then she just never mentioned it again?

Seems like there's a pattern to ol' Nance's behavior. https://t.co/HpuaPByReT pic.twitter.com/J4CDGh8ZCq

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) December 11, 2024

If Fascism is Baked in, Why Choose Fascism?

 

Q. Hearing John Kelly's disturbing revelation about Trump's admiration of Adolph H!tler, does it change how you feel about Trump?

Chris Sununu: No. We've heard a lot of extreme things from Trump. With a guy like that, it's kind of baked into the votepic.twitter.com/sMTbZicUrJ

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 24, 2024

So, I wanted to get this off my chest--fascism being "baked in" is the reason you REJECT a candidate, not the reason you support him. 

I might charitably presume Chris Sununu thinks this is Trump saying "extreme things" that he does not mean, and that he can differentiate the extreme things Trump says from what he intends to do, and from what those who surround him want to do. If this is how he is looking at it, he is deeply stupid, because people who support extreme words do so because they like them and want them to be so. Trump says them because he gets away with saying them and presumes that he can do what he likes later on, because he has persuaded enough people that the previously unthinkable is permissible. 

Sununu tells himself this is the direction that he believes people are going. So--he is following a multitude to do evil?  He is being a go-along-to-get along, imagining someone else will fix the problem of fascism? Or is he willing to get his hands dirty, too?

Did You Raise Your Kids Not to Kill?

 

I wanted to talk about the deaths of two children, but for a while I wasn't sure how. 

Brianna Ghey was murdered by teenagers because she was a trans girl. Nex Benedict died after an assault after a year (at least) of bullying because he was trans masc/binary. There are people who would claim that these children somehow died because of something called "gender ideology".  If some "force" didn't make them think they were trans--wouldn't they have just not stuck out and then been killed for that? 

The so-called "gender ideology" people are pissed off about is the idea that you are okay to be yourself. The gender ideology that they say is so fucking stringent and dogmatic is--let people live being what they feel they are, and don't fuck with them for it. They can express femininity or masculinity or not really identify with either. They can dress how they will and express their feelings about who they are and what they like without oppression.  How they dress, and whether they are gay or straight or ace or what they want from their one, great beautiful precious life is up to them.  

That life is theirs, and they should be able to live it to the fullest. 

And all society has to do in return is not punish them for existing as themselves. Call them by their names.  Let them live. Let them tend to their bodies as their own vehicles for living in. Just don't oppress. The same rights you would extend to anyone else and not one different thing. 

The Freedom Mommies are Being Weird Again

 

So, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, Bridget Ziegler and her husband, who happens to be the chair of the Florida GOP, were in a relationship with a third party, a woman who claims she had been sexually assaulted by the husband, Christian Ziegler. If there was a book about this, no one in Florida would be allowed to read it. 

I don't find it hard to believe a GOP official is capable of sexual assault: my word! I'm not the one who will pretend for a minute Republicans are actually moral exemplars--actually, they are kind of fucked up. Just a little bit ago, it was revealed that a spokesperson for the Freedom Mommies in Philadelphia (my home!)  was a registered offender. 

Look, the sexual morality thing is just a grift. Take poolside threesome aficionado Jerry Falwell Jr. as an example. "We're saving kids from being sexually tempted and confused--like we are! So ban books!' 

It's just anti-intellectualism with a spicy homophobic and sex-negative twist, It's not new, and it's dumb. But just so I can sort it out in my mind--is it not queer for the same-sex business to be happening so long 2/3rds of the people are openly Christian and straight-married? Is it less than two mommies queer? Is it more than two daddy penguins raising a baby penguin queer? 

Or is it Anne Frank wants to compare breasts with another adolescent female queer? Because teenagers are curious, but banning Anne Frank's diary has farther reaching concerns. Anti-Semitic ones. Because despite their vehement protestations, The Freedom Mommies are associated with Proud Boys. Though they want to sink that connection. But they stay "Klanned Karenhood" in my mind and so many others.

She Sounds Like I Thought She Might

 

Mike Johnson’s wife Kelly just responded after it was revealed her “Christian Counseling Services” compare gay people to bestiality and say sex out of wedlock “offends God.”

She said she “felt burdened for so many people” & says “God” made Mike Johnson Speaker. “It’s Biblical.” pic.twitter.com/Ar00R7F50R

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) November 3, 2023

It's the Michelle Dugger sort of little girl voice that first catches my ear. Out where I work in the world, I had to develop my "Big Girl Voice" to make people hear me. I don't keep sweet. Her voice is like pancake syrup. She says she stopped teaching (a worthwhile profession) to start minding other people's sexual business because she felt "burdened for them". 

Wasn't her load to carry. Not her cross. Not her battlefield. Not her mission. Not her business. And why in the world did why think she had a calling to practice authority over people's misery that was solely caused by not being accepted, but reinforceing their feelings of the conditionality of their worth? 

And as for her husband's "win" by being a guy no one knew was kind of a bizarrely radical character? Yeaaaahhh, God didn't do that. Unless Matt Gaetz and an exhausted GOP House is God now. (Not that I want to give them ideas.) It isn't Biblical that her husband became Speaker, unless she means God ran out of locusts and frogs.  

The Haunting of the House on the Hill

 

The thing that alarms me about the new Speaker of the House is he's explicitly against the separation of church and state in a way that a lot of Republicans just aren't that outspoken about. They very well might well be theocrats to some degree: they just aren't that obviously so. Ted Cruz's dad is Seven Mountains dominionist. We don't talk about it that much. Josh Hawley has some Christian nationalist vibes. 

But Mike Johnson is just a flat-out a denier of the separation of church and state, to the extent that he credits supernaturalism (God's providence, or anointing) for the raising up of leaders (including an embrace of the historical revisionism of David Barton regarding the subject). It's a problem: the halls of Congress really should not be haunted by assorted head spooks like the various religious notions of its members. We elect leaders by popular choice: that means that the people vote for them, not that they are picked by someone's idea of the cosmic creator of all the things. I could suggest an empirical experiment of the success of God doing the things by inviting all the Bible-believers to stay home on election day, and I would probably find myself shocked! by their lack of faith that works aren't actually getting electoral things done IRL. 

Johnson is like the Forrest Gump of theocracy: he took down his podcasts so we wouldn't know how fringe he is. His wife, who is all about the LGBT conversion, took down her website, too.  Almost as if people might be horrified at what their actual beliefs are. But he's been associated with crisis pregnancy centers. His "adoption" of his 14 year old son at age 25 while still unmarried via the troubled Young Life Ministries is suspect as hell. 

PSA: You Are Not a Cat

 

There is a phenomenon that has been well-documented on the internet, the place where people document things happening to cats: when you place a cucumber behind an unsuspecting cat, it will lose its ever-loving little furry shit. Multiple gifs and YouTube videos of this phenomenon exist. Cat + cucumber= YIPES!

For most people (not Mike Johnson or Ken Hamm or assorted creationists) this can be explained by evolution. Cats only have so much bandwidth in their little brains and some snakes are DANGEROUS. They aren't hardwired to leisurely inspect long green things to figure out whether they are snakes or inoffensive vegetables. They are hardwired to get away from the weird thing sort of shaped like a snake that seems to have just slithered up to them. 

That's cats. They don't do a whole lot of thinking. If you've ever pulled one out of blinds, or a Christmas tree, or unhooked their claws from your pants leg, you are aware that despite their occasional grace and agility, they can be weird little clowny guys. They literally bite the hand that feeds them. They try to fit their whole behinds in a Kleenex box. They evolved to be a better mousetrap, not to build one. 

There is a phenomenon that has been documented on the internet, and all of recorded history, of human beings making a categorical error of confusing identities with morality. Individual humans make decisions and take actions that may be morally sound or not. Whole groups of people do not become suspect because of the individual behaviors of other people based on their identities: not their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion, their gender-identification, their sexuality, their political affiliation (for the most part) or what hand they use to eat with. (Is that last thing still a thing?) 

The House GOP Found Their Johnson

 

You know, usually I like to make link-heavy blog posts that substantiate all the facts I drop in one of my screeds, but I will leave the research on this one to my readers because I had limited connectivity to the internet this week and have a whole carton of huevos to fry. But here's the funny thing to me: 

Look at the happy-ass motherfuckers in the picture above.  They think they just got their shit together and ended a long national nightmare. They just picked the most problematic of dudes to unify themselves around. He doesn't look like a whole lot, but whoo, this dude right here. 

This is a Christian nationalist of the kind it's been my whole life's business to want to take down. He's anti-science: a young earth creationist who doesn't believe in climate change. That right there is an air raid siren for me: he does not care about facts and doesn't care whether facts are even useful to the betterment of life for other people. He talks in terms of "belief" because empirical knowledge is inconvenient to his worldview. He is a 2020 election denier: that right there--he cares about power, and GOD DAMN the facts. 

He says he finds his proofs in Scripture: people write books all the time, but if you "believe in" God--who do you think put facts in the world? It feels very much to me like people who deny empirical knowledge are the ones really denying a revelation that can be understood and made accessible, and instead support a kind of false-witness bearing of twisting Scripture to one's own ends. 

Makes You Wonder (UPDATED)

 

Although the video with the above fascist symbolism with Ron DeSantis superimposed was posted by, and then deleted by, a fan account, the troubling specter of That Gay Ad having been produced by a staffer with DeSantis' campaign does make me wonder. 

See, we've seen this before. Fascist imagery just showing up at random starts to show a pattern that doesn't really feel all that random at all, but more like a test-balloon. The atmosphere in Florida is a bit cozy for the Nazi-lovers, and the GOP in Florida seems kind of okay with their existence (and assistance). 

It's how I feel about the history curriculum in Florida whitewashing slavery. If it can be called ignorance, it's ignorance of a very deliberate kind (a kind Ron DeSantis himself is very much in step with.) Radicalization is a choice. (I don't even know where to begin with the idea of the Chiclet-heads of Prager U having anything to do with school curriculums.)

It's not just DeSantis, it's the party. It's just not usually as ham-fisted as the above, and of course, it was posted by a fan. (My gut says "Plausible deniability" after the Pride month ad.)  But whatever it is DeSantis seems to be doing, it looks like telegraphing to the white supremacists and Christian nationalists to get onboard with him. And that test-balloons like these are flying is a four-alarm fire.

UPDATE: And it was apparently right to wonder- the person (now fired) who made the video was...an aide with the campaign.

UPDATE: This piece by Tim Miller describes just who this Nate Hochman is--a Generation Z edge-lord who considered Nick Fuentes "based" and was going to be putting the words literally in DeSantis' very large (I think his jaw unhinges like a boa constrictor!) mouth.  But here's the part that sort of reveals what the game is:

He went on to discuss the merits and demerits of one of America’s most vile humans, saying the fact that he has said “super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can actually accomplish in politics.”

“Edgy” is definitely one way to describe Holocaust denial!

When the Dispatch asked him about his Fuentes remarks, Hochman acknowledged that he said some “really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe”—but did not apologize.

"Edgy" is like "ironic" or "just kidding" or "sorry, not sorry". Walk-backs and obfuscation are tactics.  In the meanwhile, while we're just shitposting on the good old socials and all, just making our memes, some of the message gets through, and some more people are just a little radicalized. It's incremental and excremental. 

It's why I'm not putting all my hope on the youth--some of them are already on a pretty shitty path and after all, there were Boomers who were radical liberals and "didn't trust anyone over thirty" and my generation X had its share of folks who were about to "sell out" and some but not all millennials count as "woke". Grown people are supposed to demonstrate leadership and set examples. Just like we've got a lot of Gen Z young folks who are fed up with the system that put them through shooter drills and told them to expect less bodily autonomy than previous generations, we've also got some racist incels who legit think Elliot Rogers had a point. And that current is what deeply concerns me, because the pose of irony and the dismissal of actual empathy as "virtue-signaling" and "shitlibs" and being "snowflakes" is all a way of keeping the baby Nazis from wandering off and trying to be human.

But to bring it back to Meatball Ron--back when he was a teacher, in addition to getting history wrong, he was fraternizing with the kids and trying to be cool.  That's him also in this campaign--extremely online and led by callow youth instead of being capable of "leadership" until forced to fire an alt-right dickhead in the midst of also firing 1/3 of his campaign staff. (Which is still not leadership.)

What I'm saying is--I really don't wonder. The GOP invited the alt-right in and that's what they are going to be. 

DeSantis' Campaign is Not Queer Friendly (UPDATED)

 

To wrap up “Pride Month,” let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it…

pic.twitter.com/FT7LdW4vls

— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023

They are trying to tell the heteros something, but I feel like the message is for queers everywhere--Ron is not our friend. His ad plays club music and he wants to project so much butchness, but his actual history in Florida is killing our stories by not letting queer people be out loud, and he wants to eliminate trans people everywhere. Imagine just being the kind of douchebag who wants to determine that people who go to the potty whenever one is in public is an occasion to have everybody play pin the gender on the donkey? 

Pete Buttigeig is the exact respondent this bullshit requires: he points out that De Santis is running some people down, but who is he ever uplifting? Who does he want to serve? Who does DeSantis think he is doing all this for? It is obviously for very few people. Or wait:

No one but Desantis. And I don't even think Trump wants to compete with DeSantis in this homophobia. Because Desantis seems to want to be eliminationist, but pretend someone will still vote for him. For non-eliminationist reasons. Like what he's done for Florida, like their insurance and disaster protection and how they are still at or near the bottom for student performance or...

SCOTUS and the Ghosts

 

The Colorado web designer who wanted to refuse LGBTQ customers and just won her case at the Supreme Court had claimed in court filings that a man inquired about her services for his same-sex wedding. But the man says he didn’t – and he’s straight. https://t.co/idy1Jy1VI7

— CNN (@CNN) July 1, 2023

I wonder about SCOTUS mostly because I'm a non-lawyer, but I do watch the odd law-related television and follow a bunch of lawyers on Twitter, and it really feels to me like one doesn't have standing over imaginary shit?  Like, it's bad enough that student loan forgiveness seems to have been struck down because of political beef because not even the banks were mad about it, and I'm still not sure who affirmative action hurts. (Because AA only gets someone in the door, but they have to do the coursework. Save your money. Do excellent at your B or C school and transfer in if the big ol' name brand of the school means that much to you. Or whatever. I went to the school that was only one bus route away, myself. And I am definitely a white privilege kid. I'm an English major. I lack vision and purpose. Or so I've been told.)

Anyway--this woman's case was picked up by the ADF--that is, the Alliance Defending Freedom, because of course it was. I don't know whose freedom the Alliance is about--it just looks like Christian supremacy to me.  (And homophobia, transphobia, and the denial of reproductive health freedom. They descend from Dobson and Wildmon--that's all I need to know, fam.) Deep down, I don't love the idea of people discriminating against real people because of what they want to believe their imaginary friends have to say. (I have seen gay folks. I have never seen your god. Sorry if this offends.)

But anyway, this woman was just thinking about going into web design when the horrible thought hit her--what if she was FORCED to support a gay wedding? By making a website about a "happy" same sex couple! The idea! The scary idea! Of having compelled speech in her mouth! 

Faith With Only Signifying Indignant BS Works is Dead

 

The LA Dodgers decided to recognize the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for Pride, and then they didn't, and then they belatedly did. The decision to support the Sisters is the right one, even if it's getting stupid flack, and here's why, from me, the erstwhile Catholic-adjacent agnostic.

The ministry of the Sisters has gone among the people and held them up and comforted them and tried to teach them to be considerate and do no harm to one another, It has used satire of organized religion, but that's because those memes are accessible and subject to very real conversations about the actual harms that bigotry in religion causes, and that the failure to be real and upfront about sexuality in education perpetuates. 

Marco Rubio can pretend that the Sisters are anti-Catholic because of their criticism of a faith that hasn't delivered for the downtrodden--he can pretend LGBT sexuality is a choice and a sin for whatever deflection from his lived reality floats his boat, but in the real world, you either serve one another or you will be marked by the master you actually serve. And Marco serves himself. For all I can tell. And the people who wanted to protest the Pride celebration the LA team held are so dumb. 

I Never Will Forget.

 I see the folks who are having a little problem with seeing a Gay Pride flag at the White House, and I am so sorry, but--

Protesters have breached the Capitol. They’re outside the Senate chamber pic.twitter.com/I021tKliUD

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) January 6, 2021

The Trump fans brought Confederate flags into the Capitol and tried to run up a Trump flag. The pride flag is about honoring the human rights of some of our citizens and the Trump fans were literally carrying flags of treason. Every Trump flag is about denying a legitimate election in favor of the seditious, lying punk who tried to hoard state secrets for reasons as yet unknown. I will never forget that desecration. The Pride flag is not that. 

Why don't they focus on stuff that's way more hurtful, like the Nazi flags outside of Disneyland? 

Or do we already have the answer to that? 

Pride is a Riot

 

There have been some pieces of good news to report this month, like the court's rejection of the Tennessee drag ban, and the utter rebuke of the Florida denial of trans treatment. But this year has faced extraordinary challenges to the trans community, and often using the same tired tropes as have always been used against the gay community--recruitment because "they"* can't reproduce, focused on the youth, etc. The bigots still insist on their supposed right to bigotry to deny the actual rights of marginalized people to be and feel free in public. 

That's why Pride as a riot and a protest is still ongoing. Because contention over whether gay rights and human dignity can be publicly admitted results in scenes like this:

Anti-LGBT protestors attack Pro-LGBT demonstrators outside of a Glendale, CA schoolboard meeting.

The schoolboard is voting on recognizing June as Pride month. pic.twitter.com/T1zqZMTn7D

— Brennan Murphy (@brenonade) June 7, 2023

It doesn't hurt anyone for kids to know LGBTQ people exist, that they have rights, that they are not, despite radical right-wing ideology, weirdo sex fiends but are just people. And it serves the dual purpose of ensuring that marginalized and targeted gay and trans children are understood and not victimized in their schools. We've been telling these kids since a dozen years ago "it gets better" and the trolling haters kept hating. The fight doesn't end. (And the LGB without the T jackasses in the sainted names of Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Brandon Teena can fuck off the planet. Or better yet, learn history.) 

Be allies not shall-I's.  Bonds, bunks, mutual aid and speaking up accepted everywhere anti-LGBTQ lies are being pushed,

* Right handed people give birth to left handed babies. I never understand the "LGBT people don't reproduce" thing. Of course, the bits work. The glowing and enormous pictures of transmen enjoying their pregnancies exist. IVF exists. How can this dumb trope still exist? And don't get me started on the "rounded up and put on a deserted island" thing. Um, everyone would be too busy looking for a way off Stunad Island to worry about making a new generation of coconut eaters, thanks...

We Don't Need Your Culture War

 

Target kicked out an Info Wars fan who relocated all the pride items to the back of the store. The man harassed employees and customers and yelled, “your kids can’t be gay” while exiting the store. pic.twitter.com/pixyVT2Unp

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) May 29, 2023

It feeds the rich while it buries the poor--does this feel to you like a wholly grassroots deal?  It doesn't to me. This whole thing is viral in a kind of "ice-bucket challenge for shitheads" kind of way, but the thing of randos vandalizing or taking "direct action" against department stores--including bomb threats? That has a lot of LibofTikTok kind of energy. That kind of ecosystem echochambering nonsense is anything but organic. 

It feels like we're in the midst of an escalation from rabid parents being told that drag and trans-awareness was a "contagion" for their kids, to hating the whole rainbow. Nothing new happened. 

Other than Trump lost an election. See, in one cynical. shitty sense, attacks on the LGBT community are about reigniting a wedge issue of marginalizing people like the 2004 attempt at gay marriage bans or the rear-guard protection of DADT in the military (probably why social conservatives are being stupid about "wokeness" in the military right now, when radicalization is the real danger, not admirably serving queers). If they can just give local bigots the high sign to deny pumping gas for suspected gays or making them cakes or whatever, they feel like that little bit of sanctioned bigotry is a "win".

The Un-Woke Mind Virus

 

Consider if you will, unwoke Ron De Santis--the bland Florida man at war with Disney and Dylan Mulvaney. (Do I need to tap the scoreboard on old Ron?) making his pitch to the American people and the world he's ready to fight for them because...he's mad at Disney and mad at Bud Light, and mad transgender people exist and also still mad about CRT which has never been taught at K-12 and probably mad that Gitmo prisoners both threw up on him and remember his face. He's cautioning against the "woke mind virus."

Who knows if he actually gives a fuck about any of that--the bandwagon exists and the man has feet. I didn't know who Dylan was myself until the Bud Light kerfuffle and now want to protect her like she was my own daughter. If someone thinks it's okay to demonize someone just trying to live their life and be enthused by stuff, surprise--you are the weirdo. Hating someone for their gender expression makes you the hater. That's how it works. Supporting Dylan, or supporting so-called "wokeness" isn't a virus, it's basic decency. I share a planet with other people and we need to coexist. It costs me exactly nothing to respect someone else's pronouns, and it actually enriches me to know that human experience is diverse. 

Just the other evening, Elon Musk sat down with Bill Maher and they talked about the "woke mind virus."

Genocidal Peas and Carrots

 

VIDEO THREAD: Tonight, fans of Nick Fuentes (who was kicked out of #CPAC for anti-semitism such as praising Hitler and Holocaust denial) gathered at the Residence Inn by Marriott National Harbor to see him speak across from CPAC.

The men yelled "Groyper! Groyper!" inside the… https://t.co/Mn0BpQxLma pic.twitter.com/6KzOe3DnTx

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) March 5, 2023

 I noticed a year ago that there was nothing coincidental about Nick Fuentes and his America First/Groyper thing turning up near to hand with CPAC. It's all the more evident after Fuentes was Trump's supposedly surprise dinner guest last year. 

I've been paying attention to the Michael Knowles conversation about whether eliminating "transgenderism" from public life means eliminating transgender people from existing. And a lot of people asked the obvious questions--what happened when they decided to eliminate Jews from public life in the Third Reich, as Hitler did by legislating their freedoms away? They were made terribly visible, at first, as their lives were circumscribed. And then they were made invisible because to be seen was death. 

How Small, Is All

 

The fact that this guy thinks that two loving parents is some slam dunk against Pete and Chasten says a lot about just how broken and unloved these “family values conservatives” are. pic.twitter.com/N1Q65Xze6a

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) March 2, 2023

This Tweet encapsulates for me so much of what is damaged and wrong with the conservatives. Tell me an American veteran became a small-town mayor, married a schoolteacher, rose to a White House cabinet-level position, and adopted beautiful twin babies, and it is absolutely a family that shows what the American dream can be. And conservatives come along, and somehow, this is bad because it is two men? 

Why? What specific thing about them being two men fucks this up for them? The haters can say religion, but why? Buttigieg is more Christian than me. What if there was a God who said "Judge not, lest ye be judged?" What if love wasn't a problem at all?  What if queer people took inspiration for their faith through love for the longest time? What if Biblical gender wasn't as clear-cut as people suppose? 

The Paper of Record Must Side with the Truth

 

There is no way to "both sides" whether someone should exist or to negotiate their existence in a way that doesn't offend others. The New York Times has tried to appease the transphobes by featuring articles that ask "questions": they question the reality of trans experience and the necessity of treating trans people medically and socially, like people who should be recognized and given space to be themselves.

What good ever came from a question of whether people should exist, or leaving the determination of how they should to random others who don't know their lives? 

It is not just activists saying this, but other people who have written for the New York Times and don't dismiss the value of the journalism it otherwise provides. In a moment when trans experience is under incredible threat by state legislatures all over the country, when trans youth are threatened in their schools, when we still every year mark a Trans Remembrance Day to memorialize human beings who have fallen to anti-trans violence, how dare word games be played with the actual safety of marginalized people? 

The truth is, trans people have been documented as existing throughout time. Many cultures respected their existence, and we have long understood that there is no harm in letting people present as their preferred and validated selves. And giving medical care to people who would otherwise be in psychological distress, even experiencing suicidality, is simply logical. 

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

 

 I have explained the terrible compulsion behind some of my posts--unless I post about whatever stupid thing is gnawing at me, I don't get to move on to other business--and here this weird thing is, still nibbling at my neocortex:

A queer music artist did a dance performance in a devil Hallowe'en costume and right-wingers decided Hollyweird was shoving Satanism down their throats. 

There's a long history of regarding Satan and music, especially popular music, as connected and it's certainly been written about before, so I don't need to hash out the secular and profane aspects of modern music. But this isn't really about that, or not quite.

In a climate that has tried to start a "satanic panic" over Drag Time Story Hour that has since boiled its way down to getting books banned and even removed from schools--it isn't Satan that's the problem. Sam Smith isn't a satanist, they are queer. And it isn't Devil's Advocacy on my part to point out what I think is the real problem folks like Matt Walsh or Ali Alexander have: The real problem is they are homophobic, transphobic grifters--the hate dollar keeps them going.

It's the funniest part of the culture war--on our side, we talk about Poe's Law, where outrage among the religious right is so daft you can't tell parody from their actual genuine product. But I always suspect it's because the genuine product itself is so adulterated with self-conscious schtick. 

On their end, they think we are feeding babies to Satan (allegedly) when most of us cultural left folks really don't believe literally in the biblical bogeyman. The saying that the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing people he didn't exist isn't quite right. The greatest trick ever pulled was telling people there was supernaturalism behind their actions, and therefore they had to listen to priests and other jumped-up demagogues instead of thinking for themselves. 

Our sin is scoffing at their "deeply held beliefs"--which is their only basis for anyone going along with them. And I also scoff at them for getting all exercised over a singer in a shiny little top-hat with  horns.

Give me a break!