With age comes experience, and with experience comes the ability to recognize the exceptional when it flutters through one's life. I see a lot of FJM-worthy material, columns with pedestrian names like "Why Liberals are Stupid" or "Tea Parties: a New American Revolution?" These pieces are fun to dissect but they lack greatness. They are run-of-the-mill conservative boilerplate. This is why alarm bells start ringing when I see something entitled "Discrimination is Necessary: Subjecting kids to weirdos undermines standards of decency" by the editorial board of the Washington Times. This promises to unfasten its fly and piss excellence all over America. Prepare for a golden shower of wisdom and logic. While enjoying the moist, salty waves of truth you should ponder the mystery of why the Times is bankrupt, fired most of its staff in December, and is searching for a buyer. You know, the same Washington Times founded and owned by the Moonies and so far to the right that even most Republicans can't take it seriously. On the plus side, since the paper can no longer afford proper maintenance for its office the remaining staffers must contend with meter-long black snakes in the building as they pretend to work and search desperately for new jobs. So that sounds exciting.
Grab an umbrella, kids, because the Moonie Times is about to go all Pacman Jones on us and make it rain.
First-graders should not be forced into the classrooms of teachers undergoing sex changes.
Whoa. I didn't hear about this. Media: fail.
Religious broadcasters and faith-based summer camps should not be forced to hire cross-dressers.
This neither. Why wasn't this all over the news? Certainly it derails the Levin-Sanders Pre-Op Tranny and Transvestite Fairness in Summer Camp Employment Act currently occupying most of the Senate's time.
Women should not be forced to share bathrooms with people with male body parts who say they want to be females.
Huh. This is getting weird. This all sounds quite controversial. Should be on the news. And for the record, while I understand the logic of separate bathrooms based on one's genitals, how in the hell does anyone know what the person in the next stall is using to urinate? I mean, someone could walk into a women's restroom in a dress, close a stall door, and pull out a penis – or a nice novel, or an otter pelt, or a gold-plated kazoo, or the Shroud of Turin – and you'd be none the wiser. And it really wouldn't make any difference, would it?
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Yet those are some of the likely results if Congress passes H.R. 3017, the so-called Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which is due for a vote this week by the House Education and Labor Committee.
OK, now I see why I haven't heard about any of this: because you just made it up. It's your fevered, juvenile imagination playing the slippery slope game and trying to shock whatever remaining shut-ins and Teabaggers are still reading this rag. And while we're here, what does "so-called" mean in this context? Am I reading the so-called Washington Times? It's the name of the damn bill, not a proposed new state of matter. It's not the shadowy leader of an underground gang of supercriminals. It's not a tip on the whereabouts of Judge Crater.
ENDA purports to "prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity."
Does it "purport" to prohibit those things or does it prohibit those things? I'm really enjoying this alleged column by the purported editors of the so-called Washington Times.
Clever politically correct wording aside, this is a direct attack on common sense.
I don't think you people know that adjectives have actual meanings. They are not simply things inserted in sentences to make them sound prettier. How is this "clever"? Speaking of bathrooms, I have read better things scrawled on the walls of a few in my life. Like the bar in Bloomington that briefly had "FUCK BILLY OCEAN" on its bathroom wall three-foot-high letters. That was way better than this.
On some matters, it is good to be discriminating.
Choice of newspapers? Yes, then you should be discriminating. Equal application of basic rights? Not so much.
It is right to discriminate between honesty and dishonesty, between politeness and impoliteness, between right and wrong. And it assuredly is right to be discriminating in choosing who teaches our children. ENDA would make it impossible for a non-church-based charter school, for instance, to remove from the classroom a "she-male" who insists on exposing her pupils to her unnatural transformation.
Slow down there, Professor Science! I can't keep up with these medical terms like "she-male." I thought the proper term was "Chix with Dixxx."
This is no idle threat.
No one suggested that it was! Who would take lightly the hypothetical prospect of a child at a non-church-based charter school – and who doesn't have a few of those?
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– whose teacher gets a sex change? That has to include, what, like 50% of America's teachers? Maybe 70% in our non-church-based charter schools.
ENDA would supersede the laws of 38 states that do not have laws treating those with an unusual "gender identity" as a legally protected "class" of citizens.
That "sounds" like the segue into an "interesting" "argument" by these "writers."
Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition wrote in the April 20 edition of Roll Call
Well this seems like a good source – the kind of group that should be deciding who gets what legal protections.
about several examples of cross-dressing or sex-changing teachers who claimed protections under state disability laws (in the 12 states that do indeed protect "gender identity") and were able to remain in the classroom despite parents' protests.
Wait, you mean schools don't just bend over and do whatever hysterical and in some cases barely-literate parents demand they do? Well this whole system is just broken.
Perhaps the worst was at California's Foxboro Elementary School, where a music teacher underwent surgery to become a man, but parents originally were not even notified because administrators feared running afoul of medical privacy laws.
You mean their well-grounded fear of violating privacy laws by arbitrarily sending home a letter to let parents know that a teacher had an elective surgery?
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Shocking.
Even if California wants to be so foolish, the residents of the 38 states without such absurd legal strictures shouldn't be forced to do the same. States have a sovereign right to set standards governing behavioral – as opposed to immutable – personal characteristics.
Wooo! Chalk up another noble cause for the States' Rights argument.
ENDA does provide supposed exemptions for churches and church-based schools to refuse to employ sex-changers and cross-dressers. But the exemption is far less than meets the eye.
Look out, St. Michael's Summer Camp for Pale Young Boys! This means you, Camp Hope for Unwed Teenage Mothers! The trannies are a' comin'!
Even religious organizations, under the standards cited, are prohibited from making employment decisions based on the worker's sex. ENDA opponents rightly cite last year's 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals note in Prowel v. Wise Business Forms that "the line between sexual orientation discrimination and discrimination 'because of sex' can be difficult to draw."
Note that this passage has absolutely nothing to do with the previous statement about alleged holes in supposed "exemptions" for purported churches.
In short, courts easily could decide that even parochial schools must hire she-males to teach their kindergartners.
Flawless. Just flawless logic. "Here is an exemption that disproves the weak-ass point we've been making. Here is basically an unrelated case from a low-level Federal court. In conclusion, the exemption is clearly meaningless." It's like Clarence Darrow rose from the grave, which is ironic given that we are reading the modern-day William Jennings Bryan.
Similar problems abound in this bill, which treats a conscious decision to choose a new or different sexual identity as if it were an inherent, unavoidable condition. But it's not. It's actually a psychological disorder, officially listed as such by the current American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Well, gender identity disorders are listed. Sex change operations aren't, which makes sense given that they are a treatment for said disorders. If you believe something is a psychological disorder (which is debatable, but let's run with it) it wouldn't make a lot of sense to oppose someone taking steps to address it.
Our children and our co-workers should not be forced by law to be held hostage to such disorders, nor should employers be forced to have psychologically troubled persons as the public face of their businesses.
I'd actually take my chances with a trans person than one of the thousands of teachers in America – right now – who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. Or one of those teachers who bang 13 year old boys. Yeah, I'd definitely go with the post-op over that.
It seems like there are two larger problems here. One, parents want the state to step in and save them from having to explain things to their children. Yes, this could be very difficult for young kids to grasp. Maybe it would be beneficial for teachers to have these procedures done over the summer or on a medical leave before starting fresh with a new class in the fall. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the underlying argument here – 6 year-olds might not be able to process this. That they should be legally protected from it because it is "wrong" or whatever is an argument undeserving of my sympathy or that of anyone else.
Second, the Moonie Times is clearly in its death throes and pursuing a fairly logical strategy in response to its desperate situation: running as far to the right as humanly possible and hoping to carve out a niche as THE newspaper for people who hand-load their own ammo and homeschool their 11 kids. There's an inherent flaw in this plan to corner the Teabagger/neo-Bircherite audience: they don't read newspapers. Not even a newspaper that spits back what they want to here in the simplest English will find enough subscribers among this demographic to remain solvent. Reverend Moon is rapidly discovering that there is a very small market for a newspaper aimed at people who reflexively hate reading.