“When it comes to this current legislation where — in most of the world, in most of the religions, the major religions, you have men and you have women, and there are some abnormalities but for heaven’s sake, I was as good a kid as you can have growing up, I never drank alcohol till I was legal, never to, still, use an illegal drug, but in the seventh grade if the law had been that all I had to do was say, ‘I’m a girl,’ and I got to go into the girls’ restroom, I don’t know if I could’ve withstood the temptation just to get educated back in those days,” he said.Huh, really? Gohmert would have announced he was trans and then--asserted different pronouns, or a new first name, or taken a beating or a dozen for being a girl in the wrong skin? No, I guess Louie Gohmert pretty obviously doesn't get that being trans isn't about just alleging to have a given gender identity, but you know what? I'm so old, I remember when Mike Huckabee said the exact same thing:
Huckabee continued saying saying he wished someone told him in high school he “could have felt like a woman” and shower with the girls.Except, of course, that was being a teenager in high school and showering with other teenage girls. Being twelve and watching little girls pee seems a little odder. Girls' rooms don't have open stalls. Girls don't take off our shirts to pee. Sitting down, you can't really see anything, even if you were in an adjacent stall and for some weird reason, got up to look over the stall by standing on the toilet seat or whatever.
“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” said Huckabee. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
And that is just weird as hell. That's not an argument against being trans. It's like saying he has a pee fetish about little girls. And if Louie Gohmert has a pee fetish about little girls, he's a fine one to start shit about anyone else.
So there.
5 comments:
There is a deep seated pathological perversion amongst many Republicans. They are offended they can't say the N-word, it's an affront they can't grope/oogle/cat-call/fondle women. They are shocked soceity won't let them disenfranchise/arrest/beat/tormet the LGBTQ members of soceity.
In fact, the only reason they don't do these things are laws. Which makes their push of Religious Bigotry Laws all the more apparent for what it truly is, an attempt to codify into law the legalization of punching queers, beating women and molesting those who they deem "the Other."
And Louis Gohmert would no doubt have acted like Mitt Romney and physically assaulted any young man who stepped outside the heteronormative paradigm when he was young.
Pardon me, Vixen, if I take a moment out from my vigorous day of punching homosexuals and trying to sneak into the women's bathrooms so that I can peer under the stalls. Pity must also be extended to those of us who practice the perfectly legitimate and respectable psychological disorder of urophilia. Have we no rights!?!
Seriously, though, you must realize that all political and economic systems are ultimately dehumanizing. Everyone gets it right from time to time, but ultimately there is no perfect point of view in relativistic epistemology. Everyone feels abused about something, and there is no rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic that can change that unfortunate situation. Capitalism and communism and everything in between is ultimately dehumanizing. And therefore an ontological discovery needs to be made that secures a reality that is not dependent on the ever-flow of changing events and circumstances.
There is nothing especially virtuous about being a transsexual. And incidentally, some transsexuals are Republicans – look at Jenner. And you have to understand that there are black citizens and gay citizens in Louis Gohmert's district, and frankly his state is a red one, and a lot of southern Democrats would agree with Congressman Gohmert. Oh, I know, it's not fair. But then there we go. What are you gonna do. Mr. Gohmert is representing the majority of opinion in his district which is exactly what he is supposed to do. And he keeps being reelected, so as far as I can tell his district likes him.
For whatever it's worth, I have not met any bigoted Republicans for many years. In the past I have run across characters who had these bigoted points of view, but they were mostly Democrats in the old South. As you know, Vixen, I was part of the civil rights movement, and we had a revolution against those points of view and ultimately, despite our foolishness, we won. However, the revolution is over, and today Republicans are not the World War II generation; they are people who grew up in the post civil rights era. So to assume that they fit some stereotypical category is simply to demean an entire class of people who formed their views out of their experience like everyone else. It is true that we have to care about people. That includes Republicans and people who have a point of view that is not always in concert with one's own.
You know, Vixen, I disagree with you on a great many points, but I do not think less of you because you hold them. That would be dehumanizing. There is nothing virtuous about hating white people, for example. That would mean many people hate themselves and their families and neighbors. There is nothing virtuous about hating Christians, which would include the cousins that one goes to at their christenings, and millions of Sunday school children and people praying for the relief of disease and hardship. Hating people like this is not virtuous and is dehumanizing. It condemns those who send out the hatred.
My view is that we should have local control about these issues: the parents in local high schools should vote on what code of conduct the schools should have relative to sexual orientation. People who do not have children should not be in the game. I don't have kids, so I don't get a vote. Some schools would vote to have their preferred arrangement about bathrooms, and other schools would have a diff arrangement. It should be the parents who make these decisions.
Auditing a person's genitalia or denying them a place to perform a very basic body function like peeing is dehumanizing. I think less of that kind of dehumanizing of other people. I don't hate Christians. I hate bigots who like to call their bigotry a virtue. I don't think there's anything *virtuous* in being trans--I just think that human beings should be treated with dignity and not slandered to hell and back for their being different.
My dear vivacious, I do not actually think that you do a lot of hating; I think you're an online provocateur. And because you favor the Left generally, that is the direction of your provocation. Still, as we are instructed by the play Tea and Sympathy, like a pebble in the pond the ringlets go out, and there are always consequences.
Have you heard of the Enneagram? The CIA sometimes uses it to evaluate the psychology of foreign leaders. It as an interesting history, first showing up in the practices of Gurdjieff (who, incidentally, started group sensitivity practices). It then somehow wound up being used by monastic Catholicism, of all places.
One of the things it confirms is that we human beings actually process reality differently.
I don't mean we come to different conclusions or sometimes see life in a different way.
The very process of digesting reality can be very different. You know, Carl Jung understood this as well. Everyone has heard of introverts and extroverts. This actually meant that the flow of psychic energy (which Jung saw as being more like energy in physics and not simply sublimated sexual energy as did Freud) either flowed inward toward introspection or towards toward perception of physical events and objects. However, this was simply the beginning of an understanding of the different ways people process reality vis a vis thinking, sensations, intuition, emotions. If you read Jung you'll see these are called psychological types.
The point is Jung also confirms we process reality differently and there are a lot of different ways that this dynamic occurs. It's not just that there are two processes. In the Enneagram there are nine.
Here's one of the salient facts. We can be processing our dynamic of gaining a perspective on reality and doing it very well. However, sometimes the way we're doing it does not come up with the correct answer. Sometimes the way a foreign process is digesting reality is the one that most meets the contingency at hand.
So it is not simply that people come to different conclusions. Or that some people are simply backwards and wrong and deserve ridicule. It is that we literally have different dynamics when it comes to the digestion and processing of reality itself. And everyone is right occasionally, but it will seem to be wrongheaded for someone who processes reality in a different way. This makes evaluating people and their ideas more complicated, but at the same time it explains why people are so certain that their views are correct even though they differ from ours.
Trans people aren't invading bathrooms to molest other people.
Trans people are being killed for simply being trans.
I may be a liberal provocateur on some level, but one of the aims of this blog is trying to get a handle on facts.
Gohmert is a theocratic provocateur and doesn't seem to have other levels. His position is one where facts don't bother him. Facts may stubbornly persist outside of his awareness or concern and actively harm other people. This capacity to persist as a creature of one's biases without ever fucking looking up a huge part of What's Wrong with Everything All the Time.
This is why jesters occasionally whap people with a pig bladder. "Look the fuck up. You and he and she and we are mortal. And there is a girl walking in front of a truck because her mother and her mother's church insist she's a boy. There's a boy forced to use a ladies room because he was born with a vagina. Deal with it now."
I don't whap directly. The method is ripples in the pool.
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