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crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
Aesop once wrote a fable about a hungry wolf who saw a lamb by a river bank. The wolf wanted “justification” to eat the lamb. He threw all sorts of charges of impropriety at the innocent creature but the lamb refuted them all.
Finally the wolf says, “You claim to be innocent, but I know you are lying so to hell with it.” And then proceeded to devour the lamb, proving that when people want to do evil, they will use any excuse to justify their behavior.
In the case of President's Obama's speech to children on Sept. 8, it seems that the excuse is to “protect the children.”
This recent controversy over President Obama's speech is nonsense. We all know it and we should say it loudly and often.
And not only that, it demonstrates just how some on the right, especially the religious right, operate.
Those who are making all of this noise about the President's speech claim that they have no arguments with it per se but with the “lesson plans” that accompany it, especially the part about advising children to write on how they can help the President.
The whine about the lesson plan is a big con. And it's an old one.
We all have seen this “I don't mind the big idea but the little details scare me” con before.
Remember when certain areas of the country (i.e. counties in Maine, Florida, etc.) were trying to pass transgender-inclusive gay rights bills?
The people opposing the bills claimed that they didn't have a problem with the “spirit of the bills,” but that they left a huge opening for “sexual predators” to invade women's bathrooms and locker rooms.
That, of course was an evasive tactic.
What someone on their side of the argument did was look through the bills until they found a loophole that they could exploit. And they did this because they were too cowardly to publicly say that they didn't want transgender-inclusive gay rights bills to pass because they don't like homosexuality.
To say this would have left them open for the charge of bigotry.
But saying that they didn't support transgender-inclusive gay rights bills (or as they termed them – “bathroom bills,”) because they would cause harm to children was a more advantageous tallking point.
So now in the case of President Obama's speech to children, we are seeing a foul case of deja vu.
These folks (Michelle Malkin, the conservative radio show hosts and bloggers, the religious right, elected officials in Florida) who started the nonsense about Obama's speech to children don't like the President, period. No matter what he does or says, he will remain on the very top of their crap list and they are going to do their best to undermine his efforts at all turns.
If he were Moses and parted the Red Sea for them to cross, they would be complaining about how the soles of their feet got wet.
But they don't want to openly say “we don't want the President to give this speech because we just don't like Obama.”
Therefore we are saddled with this “I'm scared that President Obama will be indoctrinating children because the 'lesson plans' of his speech give me pause” talking point that will be repeated continuously without a good challenge by the liars on Fox News and other television programs with anchors too cowardly to challenge it for fear of looking “liberally biased.”
Just like the case of the alleged “bathroom bills,” someone looked through the plans of the President speech and found a loophole in which they can hang their lies on.
Evasive loopholes will continue to exist until someone has the courage to plug them up.
But unfortunately very few want to do this.
18 Comments
Plugging a hole…The hole to plug in the bathroom bill issue is a difficult one to close because to do so you have to violate some of the hard and fast rules of the trans community.
It quite literally pits those who’s gender expression is medicalized against those who gender expression is not so.
The reason for this is that the basis of their argument is that self identification is all that’s needed under such laws. And they win because they get not merely their own evil chunk of the population motivated, they get the rest of the population that is not so evil to do the same thing since they do not find self identification as causation enough.
That’s not an exaggeration, either — the majority of the population wouldn’t really have an issue if there was an established medical reasoning behind it, but they still have a great deal of trouble and prejudice dealing with the non medicalized portion of the trans community.
So the way, at present, to plug such is to exclude those who are “part time” basically, by adding some aspect of additional requirements into it and allowing for a greater control via some authoritative presence in society (ie. a carry letter).
This is the issue I ran into time and time again in discussions on the subject of accomodations in law, and while the “It’s the right thing to do” argument is correct, it is not an argument that works.
At all.
If gender expression — one’s social sex role — is a social construction, then the gender of an individual is determined by those around them, first and foremost.
If it is an essentialist aspect — (Gender expression, again, not identity) — then we’re screwed in ways I don’t want to think about right now as I’ve done too much of that of late.
So we need to find a solution to the bathroom bill argument that relies on the same basic side step. We need to take away their excuses.
Because the bathroom bill crap is about to become the main focus of news, and we will see it every where.
And we must solve that problem now.
It’s a typical move from their play book. The right has done well whipping people into a frenzy over these ridiculous and far-fetched hypotheticals they create regarding proposed legislation, constitutional amendments, and now speeches. When the ERA was up, Phyllis Schlafly moaned about it creating unisex bathrooms, requiring women to serve on the front lines, etc., etc., etc. Nothing but a fear tactic (that worked). Look at the health care debate we are having now. Death panels? Any reasonable person with an ounce of sense can see the ridiculousness of that assertion. Look at the “debate” regarding the President’s citizenship. No matter how often the truth is told, they pound on the same tabloid-like assertions – with no proof whatsoever.
They whine about the lack of personal responsibility in the culture, but when the (Democratic) President addresses school children on the responsibilities they have to themselves, their families, and communities, the right calls it socialism. When Reagan addressed school children in 1988, they certainly did not complain then. This is nothing but a total lack of principle, but it is par for the course when dealing with the right.
They have no ideas to improve the welfare of the country and its citizenry. No ideas on the economy. No ideas on Afghanistan or Iraq. No ideas on greater foreign policy. No ideas on health care reform. No ideas on energy reform. So they resort to their same dirty tricks: name calling and lies, for they know that every battle they have ever won was based on fear and prejudice. They play to ignorance.
The Bathroom thingI don’t get the bathroom thing. Just make building code so that urinals and toilets are all in private stalls and make the bathrooms unisex. Problem solved.
That’s how it is at Brown University at least the office I worked in back in 1993. There is no mens room or womens room. It’s a shared bathroom.
Takes MoneyAnd when you spend other people’s money for them, they sit up and bitch.
Sorta static, in other wordslike “things are fine the way there were”.
That is conservatism, after all, in the U.S. Keep things the way they were as much as possible.
Ya know…If Congress would just pass a nice universal health care bill these nice folks would be able to afford their medication.
Interesting point, but…do you think those proposed laws/ordinances/etc. were written vague on purpose? It’s another old trick, writing a bill that appears to appease yet is easily defeated due to the way it was written. I was a little surprised when I read the text of one of them and it essentially based non-discrimination solely on self-identification at the moment. That’s a hole big enough to drive a truck through, given that non-acceptance of transgender and transsexual people (don’t start on the terms, please) is built into the physical infrastructure of our daily lives.
I cannot and will not ever write that I think that the current gate-keeping is a great idea; frankly I abhor and mistrust the APA. However, it’s fairly clear that someone under medical treatment can show that they are transsexual and need those protections to survive. But what of those not so…”fortunate”?
Another example you could’ve cited… is the fight for marriage equality in Maine — once again, children are being exploited by the religious right in the Yes on 1 campaign.
Good griefI appreciate the discussion and I’m certainly not trying to dissaude it but maybe one of the main reasons why the right can beat us on some levels is because they can stay on point while we go off on some type of intellectual tangent.
The point of my piece was not to delve into the transgender community or the alleged bathroom bills. The point is how the some members of the right digs loopholes out of things to create evasive talking points.
Things like reducing the rights of lgbts to talks of “sexual predators in bathrooms” and mischaracterizing a sentence in a lesson plan associated with President Obama’s speech is how they distract us and keep us off point. To delve into side tangents merely give their lies credibility.
True, howeverNow that we know they do such, how do we combat it?
What do we do to challenge them, in ways that actually work with those stuck in the middle between our opponents and ourselves.
Whatever we use it must be directed at the fears and the concerns of that vast chunk of the population, or we won’t gain the victory over these tactics.
So now hat we know what the problem is, what is the solution? If we don’t come up with one, they will keep being able to use such tactics. Successfully.
SooooAlvin, what do you propose, please? ”Plugging the loopholes” in a practical sense means…what?
Calling them on their arguments? That would require exactly the dialog you see above. Throwing brains at it until an effective argument is found. Problem is, we have no way of delivering that argument.
Not writing the laws/speaches/whatever to have said loopholes? The loopholes can be conjured up from the slightest of misrepresentations.
How about having the writers of the bills & speaches stand up for them? Not going to happen, especially in an era when changes to bills can be made anonymously.
So, what can be done to either as a counter measure or preventative measure?
Solution oriented versus problem oriented thinkingAlthough it adds more orientations, lol, it underlies a lot of stuff I’ve run into.
There’s not a lot of solution oriented thinking.
In victimization studies (the study of institutional victimization and the mentality that accompanies it), one of the hallmarks is a problem oriented approach to things.
First rule of empowerment, though, is to be solution oriented.
Downside — these are kinda capitalistic concepts and a lot of folks on the left aren’t real fond of capitalism, lol.
Um…. let me see….OK, let me channel my inner red-neck simple minded bigot (I can do that seeing as how I’m from the south and my own cousin like 16 times…dont blame me, accident of birth)
um… Ever see the Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles? Everytime the networks zoom in on someone who’s white, southern, conservative and most likely named ‘Johnson’ (sorry, I couldn’t resist). They don’t care about the subject, they care that they have a President thats a Ni…. um.. ‘African American’ (yeah, he’s really multi-racial I know). Thats all they see, if you got stuck growing up down south around bigots like I did…(be glad you didn’t) you’d realize that if he started pulling gold bricks out of his butt in an endless supply and shot gas and oil out his fingers Those People would still be complaining about it.
Can you imagine if we operated like thislike with the Maine marriage thing, imagine if we picked one religious group that wasn’t the main religious group up in Maine that has donated any amount of money to the Yes on 1 cause. I don’t know the religious breakdown, but for the sake of my example, lets say they are as Catholic as Massachusetts is.
In a dark brooding voice a spokes person comes on and says the Southern Baptists or the Mormons or the some other group is trying to force their values into your schools & they’ve already helped contribute to X amount of money (give an over exaggeration of the total money all the different anti-gay groups have spent in Maine + their national operating budget combined, regardless of whether it is connected directly to Southern Baptists) towards trying to force their values on your kids. Did you know a lot of Southern Baptists don’t even consider Catholics to be Christians? Show some anecdotal evidence video clip of some pastor looking type person (Doesn’t matter if they are or not) saying something bad about Catholics In Maine we decide on the values we want to teach little Johnny & Susie, not outsiders. Vote No on Southern Baptists trying to put their views into our schools, Vote No on 1. The whole time you could be showing video of innocent kids in schools, and playing dangerous scary music.
I am in no way endorsing this idea, but just pointing out how hard it is to imagine our side stooping to their tactics.
Yeah,a lot of people aren’t into the “the first step towards solving any problem is to buy into hierarchical authoritarian capitalist newspeak” approach. I wonder why.
THey aren’t capitalistsId suspect
Men.
I’ve never heard of a woman who thought that would be a good idea.
Unless you’re talking about bathrooms serving professional offices with limited building access, or single-toilet bathrooms that lock from inside, such as you’d find at small restaurants–it would be a rare woman indeed who would feel comfortable using facilities that any man off the street would be sharing with her.
Or at leastnot doctrinaire-capitalist worshippers of wealth…which means they/we are outside the acceptable political discourse in the U.S. right now.