Call it what you want to make it sound harmless, but a government, national, state, or local, making lists of members of certain groups of people is rather reminiscent of historical examples of genocide whose initial actions were justified by the fear instilled in the minds of the public. Clearly, those who support the collecting of names would be the ones who object most strenuously to the existence of ANTIFA because it was this movement that ended the Holocaust.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to compile a list of anyone who had changed their gender marker on their driver’s licenses and other government documents over the last two years. Presently, Texas courts seal or restrict access to gender changes for privacy reasons and to help Trans people avoid harassment and violence, so going to the DMV was convenient and less complicated.
The list includes 16,466 individuals who had requested such a change between June 1, 2020 and June 30, 2022, but the DPS couldn’t provide a full and accurate list without doing additional research that would call for a manual review of all supporting document.
The AG’s request for the list came a month after the state supreme court ruled that he couldn’t investigate families for “child abuse” for providing gender-affirming healthcare to their Trans children and skipped the normal channels to get such information, going directly to the driver licenses which obviously would only supply a partial list as some people do not get drivers’ licenses.
In spite of Department of Public Safety emails that repeatedly mention the request as having come from Paxton’s office, his office said no such records existed and Assistant Attorney General June Harden questioned why the Office of the Attorney General would have gathered this information.
One simple explanation is that both the AG and the governor of Texas have declared war on the state’s Transgender population and their families.
Last spring Governor Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate any parents who allow their trans children to access gender-affirming medical care prescribed by their doctors as cases of child because Attorney General pronounced gender-affirming health care as a form of child abuse.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association consider gender-affirming medical care as necessary in many cases, especially as it reduces mental anguish and suicide risk among Trans youth.
In reaction to this request, several DFPS employees quit while some state attorneys refused to enforce it, and the Texas Supreme Court ruled that neither Abbott nor Paxton had the authority to issue the order.
Meanwhile, because several families with trans children also filed a lawsuit against Abbott, the presiding district judge in the lawsuit issued a temporary restraining order to stop the assembling of a List while the court considers the order’s legality.
DFPS employees were told to investigate any trans-related cases, whether or not there was a reason to, just the existence of a Trans child was enough, and they were not to discuss these cases in emails, text messages, or any other form of writing since that could provide a record of the investigation and the media might get wind of it.
The DPS was to leave no paper trail which could reveal the persecution of trans-supportive families in order to prevent other curious government agencies, the press, and even the families being investigated from finding out and then examining documents and the department’s work.
Collecting names secretly. How could that be a bad thing?
To get the list compiled and to by-pass the court decision the governor issued his order without following the requirements for creating new departmental rules, as required in the state’s Administrative Procedure Act, 16 DFPS.
To prove there is a Transgender threat, the state of Texas is willing to ignore laws, courts, and established procedures to prove someone they do not like is doing imagined illegal things.
When I was a kid, it was the rage to collect baseball cards that came five to a pack along with what passed as bubblegum, and each approximately 2”x3” card had a player’s picture and all the player’s stats . Some, because they were limited edition or were of the more noted players, were worth more than the cards of some generic guys who were on the teams just to have all positions covered. The latter were the ones everyone had more than enough of.
To be honest, I did collect baseball cards and did appreciate their value, but not because of all the what I had assumed were important stats for some reason without knowing any. My appreciation was based more on the cartoon mascot, the known value of the player without having to know why, and cards gave me entre into the world of tossing baseball cards and, as to me cards being cards if lost could be easily replaced, win cards or lose cards, I played without stress.
There were three ways to obtain desired cards beyond the luck of picking the right package of cards and gum.
One could offer money in an amount that sounded good to a small kid, trade a certain number of second string cards for the one desired card, or tossing the owner for it, tossing being the name of the game involving the throwing of baseball cards and not a verb with the owner as its object.
Unless it is a one-on-one attempt to obtain or retain a card, more than two combatants will choose a wall, mark a line a certain distance from the wall, and one at a time flip a card like a small frisbee toward the wall hoping that card lands the closest to the wall winning all the other cards. A leaner is a good result as nothing is closer to the wall than a card leaning on it. If, however, there are any competitors left who have yet to toss their cards, they can dethrone the leaner by deftly knocking it from its position, and if luck will have it, end up a leaner itself.
Care was taken of all cards, even the less important ones because bends and creases could negatively affect the trajectory of the card and could cost in the long run. Even the minor cards are good if they knock over a leaner or cover another card. Bent or torn cards were relegated to be attached by clothespins to the rear frame of your bike so the card made an engine sound of sorts as it was brushed by the spokes.
By the end of the game some kids had more cards, some less than the number they started with and each card, having some measure of importance was picked up so that when the game was over and the players had left, all that remained behind was the wall that had been there before the game.
Things have changed and baseball cards do not seem to be as popular as they once were, becoming more of collectors’ items than things you casually throw against the wall.
They have been replaced by other trading cards perhaps traded in different ways.
Recently a newsworthy event, although not necessarily for the reason intended, brought NFTs to people’s attention again after most thought that was a waning thing, when a series of digital cards were released as collectables, tradables, and re-sellables.
No bulky decks of cards to carry in a wallet or pocket, just all those same cards viewable on your phone, laptop, or desk top computer.
Although you may receive a digital copy of the card, you do not receive a tangible card like a baseball card that you can place into the deck you have been assembling, or the album where you keep such items against the day they will be worth enough to buy that car you have had your eye on.
In order to toss your NFT collectable cards, instead of excited conversation broken first by silence during the toss and then vocal reaction upon the card’s landing with very little noise and very little cleanup, tossing NFT trading cards is accompanied by grunts of the competitors tossing the laptops, smart phones, android tablets, and the occasional desktop computer with monitor, the smashing of these objects as they reach the wall, leaving a large pile of plastic, glass, and whatever is inside a computer.
We used to collect soda bottles to get the 2 cents refund for a small bottle or 5 cents for the quart sized ones, something that is not so widely done these days, and, as trash was money, there was less lying around.
We used paper shopping bags to cover school books so they would last longer and as kitchen trash bags as they were biodegradable as opposed the plastic ones introduced later, and when we tossed our collectable cards, we would pick them all up and not leave a mess as would be happening now if tossing collectable NFT cards takes over the space of baseball cards.
You can blame Boomers all you want for whatever, even those national and international things we apparently were able to influence from the womb, but you do have to credit us for the more practical form of our trading cards.
Less heavy, much easier to carry and toss, and leaves no electronic parts behind piled up against a wall for someone else to clean up.
I first became a resident of New Bedford MA on August 1, 2015.
Beyond knowing it existed, having a high school and college friend from there, and having read and taught Moby Dick, I had only been to the city twice in my 65 years at that time, in the 1970s when I was teaching Moby Dick and thought things like whale bone and ambergris, both still legally sold at the time, would make good “show and tell” things along with model whales, ships, and harpoons I bought, and the second time when, after moving to Cape Cod from Oklahoma, I was given a list of museums for that summer’s Free Fun Fridays, a rotating roster of museums of all sorts that each open for one Friday a season free of admission.
When it was time to vacate the home I was sitting on the Cape, a fixed income dictated low rent and the internet introduced me to the city and the apartment into which I moved.
It was an historic three-story, three-winged brick building that was constructed in 1910 by the owner of the Dawson Ale brewery for his employees, somewhat reminiscent of the housing built by the various mills for their employees and the opening of company store, except when it was originally built it had amenities like foyer to apartment intercoms, Murphy Beds for extra space, the phones on little shelves that rotated into the wall when not in use, some of which are still around in whole or part depending on the apartment.
It stood on a plot of land that had been the property of the Ricketsons, an important family in the history of New Bedford and the second to last owners before Mr. Dawson, and being where Elm meets County, was surrounded by historical buildings of which it was one.
The convenience of its location for me was that, having become a volunteer at the Whaling Museum as a way to get involved in my new community, I simply walked five blocks down Elm and took a right.
If I were to go to anything downtown it would start with walking two blocks south of my place and then a left turn that would bring me there. However, as most of my walking would involve going down Elm with a rare turn to go downtown, my basics route and slice of downtown involved a VA and federal building with parking lots, a bus terminal, a post office, a sketchy bar and empty lot, a glimpse off my shoulder of downtown as I walk on with a two block long wall of brick beside me until I am free to take the right turn.
As politically active as I was and as involved as I tried to be in my community, if you were to divide the city into four squares, the bulk of my activity, because of meeting locations, the best rally locations, where people lived, the best elected officials to work with, where the Gay bar is, seem to have favored the upper left square with a bit of seepage to the others.
I also had a car, so going to the locations to which I did, I saw much of the city, generally by way of passing it as I headed to my destination and, although familiar with something I had passed, I was only familiar with it for that reason. I could tell someone where some place was, but I could, more often than not, tell you nothing more.
Then two things happened.
Gentrification rousted me from that building.
There was drama and extreme inconvenience exacerbated by a “series of unfortunate events.”
I found a place on the other side of the downtown area, but, unlike the previous location with the first floor windows facing out looking at the big yellow M of the Mcdonalds nextdoor and with the walk down Elm being as previously described, now, from the third floor windows of my attic apartment in a two-family home built in 1881 that is now, like so many of the stately homes in the Bedford Village section of the city, divided into apartments, some grander than houses, I see the downtown area before me. Most notably I can see the facades of the buildings, the only parts of which my previous location made mostly visible being their plain, flat, unadorned rears.
From my window I look down two main streets whose buildings have historical facades like I am looking down Main Street at Disney, whereas before, in retrospect, I was seeing Main Street but from the maintenance garage viewpoint.
Both are looking at Main Street in Disney but one view is obviously the better.
Although previously a walk down Elm got me to the harbor after a turn or two, now I just walk out my front door and look to my right. The neighborhood is the original area of what would become the city, has a multi-ethnic community, and the downtown and theater district is within a one block walk, and the waterfront three blocks away.
All in all, I may have lucked out.
Now, when I had to move, I had made financial arrangements where I was paying rent at both the old and new place which afforded me the time to move without panic or added expense, and without having to ask people to inconvenience themselves to help, something I eventually had to do because of my previous use of the plural in the phrase “unfortunate events”.
Each day, beginning when I was still in the old apartment moving to the new and later being in the new and removing from the old, I would make three round trips in the morning and three in the afternoon, intending to do so until done, carrying the contents of each trip up the three flights to my “atelier”. It may have been equal to carrying 18 overweight toddlers up three flights of stairs each day for almost two weeks, but with rests and other non-moving activities, it was working.
I was down to the final heavy objects that would call for the last four trips, when during the first of the final trips, I managed to find a pothole, the encounter with which was increased by the weight of what was in the back of the VW, and apparently the clunky sound that followed me the last block home was part of the brake trying to hang on.
So, having to rely on friends in the end, I was fully rehomed in the new place with a clear view of my now useless car illuminated across the street by the historically accurate street light below my window.
Along with what was a simple two apartment rental plan that would be covered by certain funds promised by the new owners of the old building to aid in moving, another ongoing situation in the process of being resolved made the convenient repair of the car out of the question for the moment, but, with the downtown right there in front of me and the view of it so welcoming, the one block walk to be downtown is like being in a whole new city as my approach to it is so different now.
I can walk right into the missing end of the shoe box without having to walk on the outside of it to get to the opening.
Trips requiring more than just a short walk are taken care of by the bus system.
With the car you go where you want, when you want, and how you want. On a bus, you will get where you are going, but you have no control over how you get there. As a result, after having lived in the city and traveling everywhere by car, in the last few weeks I have been driven down streets I did know existed and have seen some interesting sights I may never have seen otherwise.
At the mercy of the system, getting the original bus may be a certainty only if starting at the terminal, but as the route maps only list major stops with intended departure times, all the minor stops not listed call for good timing and luck to catch the intended number bus or, if on the inbound trip, get whatever bus besides the one you intended that comes by..
A number of times I have found myself getting on an inbound bus after waiting for my bus at the stop, assuming the arriving bus was the one I was waiting for and have arrived at the terminal having been driven through a whole new neighborhood.
Because of having to get to a particular stop after taking care of business or needing to kill time if there is a lot of it before the next anticipated bus arrives, I have done a lot of walking in places I have up to this point just zoomed by in my car. Sometimes I will attempt to kill that time by walking to the next bus stop covering a surprising distance in that time,
In Boston I used public transportation, in Los Angeles I had to go for a while without a car as was also the case in Oklahoma, and in each place I saw parts of the city I was glad I saw, but otherwise would not have if I had not had to make all the connecting busses and trains to get to what a short ride in a car would have taken.
During the time I lived on Cape Cod, like the other locals in the dead of winter I could plan my week’s worth of chores and appointments according to my mood, all on one day, a few each day or. Maybe tomorrow, but in tourist season that choice is removed and you must pick the one chore traffic will allow you on any given day.
Knowing I cannot accomplish a number of things all over as quickly as possible in the shortest time possible because realistically I must time everything according to bus schedules, the panic of a surprise delay, or having to postpone one thing to do another rather than being able to do both, no longer comes with that panicky fear of failing to succeed somehow if things aren’t done in a manic way.
The next bus is coming.
I might have missed the bus I intended to get because on the walk to the station something caught my attention along the way in an artistic sense like a window display, not a distraction like a dog and a squirrel thing.
If I am going shopping, I take the bus to the large grocery store and come back. Mission accomplished, done for the day, the rest of the time is my own. Sometimes a second thing happens because there was time and it made sense, like leaving the Ziterion Theater after watching Miracle on 34th Street as part of the 100th anniversary of the theater’s existence and needing coffee creamer and eggs. Without having to rush off to something, I strolled to the closest grocery store in my end of town, made my purchases, and sauntered home in a very Zen like state of not caring about anything but that with which I was engaged, getting it all home.
And along with the unexpected adventures, wandering around killing time between busses is a lottery as to whether the trip, in whole or in part, is a good or bad one. I found a great place for GuatemalanTamales.
On a recent day with blustery winds and heavy rain, the only reason I left my apartment to walk to the bus station and catch the bus to a bar I frequent was because I had come in possession of a 12 pound frozen turkey that was useless to me and I was delivering said turkey to the person who two days before at the bar, when it was warm and sunny, volunteered to take it off my hands and as she said she would be there on that Friday as she and I often are, the delivery was to be so simple.
The rain was heavy and the winds strong, so I threw on my western duster coat, a wide brimmed water-proof, faux leather hat, grabbed my umbrella, and headed for the bus toting a 12 pound turkey in an old plastic, heavy duty shopping bag. By the time I got onto the bus and took a seat, I saw my reflection in the opposite window and saw I had become that strangely dressed older gentleman on the bus hugging something the size of a baby in a plastic shopping bag from whom young mothers keep their children from getting too close.
At the correct stop I went into the downpour, walked the two blocks to the bar only to find it was not open yet because, as it would turn out, a scheduling snafu. Uncertain why the place was not open and hoping it was not a death related thing, an inquiry on social media brought the situation to the attention of someone who could do something while I stood in the driving rain with it pouring off my umbrella and water-proof duster as I stood outside the locked door waiting in case the person pulled up and I could pass on the turkey and, perhaps, get a ride home since the bar was not open.
Eventually someone came and opened the bar and I went inside as they set the bar up for business and I had a beer. The bartender took the phone call from the turkey’s intended recipient saying she would be arriving much later. This had me check the bus schedule and calculate the best time for me to leave in order to be at the nearest minor bus stop with enough time to not miss the last bus home. I left the turkey in the care of the bartender, braved the storm, and got to the bus stop just as, surprisingly, the bus I intended to catch arrived way early and me just in time. However, when it turned at what for the intended bus would have been a mistake, I realized that I had gotten on an inbound bus that shared that stop with the other bus only because their routes crossed there.
My bus would have come from Fairhaven by way of the major supermarket at which all northbound buses seemed obligated to stop like a Nun with the Vatican if she ever got to Rome, and that would have favored a ridership of suburbanites and those whose lineages were from various lands connected to Portugal. This bus had come through a particular section of the North End, and that meant a more Portuguese and Guatemalan ridership as we were heading toward where a large number of Guatemalans worked at the fish plants along the waterfront.
The four other passengers and I sat quietly as a middle aged man stood near the bus driver after having pulled the cord for his stop and moving up near the front door to wait, doing his best to suavely come on to the driver in Portuguese while she remained calm. Although I do not speak the language I can recognize it, and the gestures were obvious enough to be understood in any language.
When he reached his stop, he made one last attempt at making a connection before exiting the bus with as much swagger as anyone can muster getting off a bus and was swallowed by the wind, rain, and night.
When the door closed and the bus moved on, although I cannot speak it but can recognize K’ichi spoken by many in the city’s Guatemalan Community, it was obvious that those quietly sitting riders had listened to it all and all became comedians throwing jokes about in near competition with each other, complete with gestures and body movements while the driver joked back in the same language.
It was like the teacher had left the room and even the good kids cut up.
At the next stop as people got on, the insult comics assumed their expected roles as quiet Guatemalans who always seem so shy.
Having nothing scheduled I had to rush off to, upon arrival at the terminal I walked over to a bar whose prices are not for elders on fixed incomes, joked with the stranger on the bar stool next to mine, and then took the leisurely walk out of the shoebox of downtown and into my apartment thoroughly soaked, but relaxed and 12 pounds lighter than at the beginning of the trip.
From now on, if you need me for something, I will get there in the length of time it takes to walk, or according to the bus schedule.
I found two interesting facts when I looked up statistics on child molestation.
First, as of June 30, 2020, according to a report conducted for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops done by StoneBridge Business Partners of Rochester, New York, there were more than 4,200 allegations of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy and others. The report was released in compliance with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ own “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People”.
When the final report was released in November of that year, it stated that 3,924 child sexual abuse survivors filed 4,228 allegations.
Before people do all kinds of math to figure out the average yearly amount of such activity over a few decades, the report only covers those allegations reported during the year from July 1, 2019, through June 30, 2020, not years or decades. Although some of the offenses filed that year covered events from the previous years and decades, 22 allegations involve current cases.
22 is not an acceptable number.
Of those 22 current allegations filed, 6 were substantiated as having occurred in five dioceses.
At the time of the report’s release, of the remainder, seven were still being investigated, two had been found to be unsubstantiated, 3 could not be supported either way, and so, were determined to be “unable to be proven,” and four were labelled simply “other.”
The report listed the sources and categories of its sources for its conclusions as 66% being based on allegations to lawsuits, compensation programs established by dioceses and other entities, and bankruptcies, with 1% of allegations emerging after a review of clergy personnel files.
2,458 priests, 31 deacons, and 282 miscellaneous clerics were among the accused.
Second, with all the horror stories favored by the people who would have crucified their own Messiah and then chase Galileo down, I looked up instances of Drag Queens involved in allegations or convictions for acts of child molestation.
Looking at the first category, I simply typed “clergy child molestation” into three search engines and found page upon page of reports. In this second case I typed “drag queen child molestation” into those same search engines and found these two results repeated by a number of conservative and evangelical sites mostly just reprinting the same two stories under their individual masthead.
A 32-year-old in Texas who had been convicted at age 18 of attacking a child and is a registered sex offender had been involved in a Drag Queen Story Hour 14 years later, something that a vetting by the library could have prevented.
Objections to a sex offender of any profession reading to children such as at Firefighter Story Hour, Clown Story Hour, Santa Story Hour, are correct, but claiming after the fact that someone might have done something they obviously had not and using that as the basis of an allegation of child molestation is not.
A county children’s court judge in Milwaukee was arrested and charged with seven counts of child pornography possession involving uploading 27 videos and pictures of child sexual abuse to a messaging app, and was sentenced in December 2021to 9 years in federal prison because, as a U.S. District Court Judge stated, his
“sitting as a judge was an aggravating factor that supported a significant term of imprisonment.”
Posting child porn was his offense, and although this is bad enough in itself, it is not equivalent to physically molesting children, a crime of which he was not accused.
However, he was the former president of Cream City Foundation, a Gay organization that helps sponsor Drag Queen Story Hour among other things and, so, of course he molests children at story hours his organization helps sponsor but he himself does not actually attend.
So, we have two cases, one a Drag Queen and one a person in charge of an organization that supports Drag Queens while not being a story Hour reader himself, that justifies the banning of all such story hours because someone at some time at some place might or might not do something.
Thus it is that when bishops like the one in Providence, Rhode Island, who said about the last Pride event prior to the pandemic,
“A reminder that Catholics should not support or attend LGBTQ ‘Pride Month’ events held in June. They promote a culture and encourage activities that are contrary to Catholic faith and morals. They are especially harmful for children,”
also admits as a conservative bishop he was aware of incidents of sexual abuse reported to church officials while working in Pennsylvania as auxiliary bishop of Pittsburgh from 1992 until 1996, but after a Grand Jury report came out detailing decades of abuse and cover up in six diocese, his included, he defended his inaction by claiming it wasn’t his job to deal with them, I get a little suspicious when a person like this wants the little children to come onto him in light of the Conference of Bishops’ report, the Grand Jury report, and his own admission.
Same with Lauren Boebert who warns against things like Drag Queen Story Hour advising parents in a tweet to
“Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars”,
something I am sure she does while she marries a good Christian man who went to another safe place for children, a bowling ally and, after overhearing some women, two of whom were 16, discussing tattoos, approached them and proceeded to pull down his pants to reveal his tatted genitalia and was then arrested for refusing to leave.
Among the names listed on the arrest warrant as witnesses to the event was his future wife, Lauren Boebert, who was 18 at the time of the incident. They married the following year.
Ironically, while omitting where and how they actually met, biographies say the meeting took place at a “drilling company”.
I see what was done there.
In this age when people are being called groomers for no other reason than the word is generic and, therefor, as conveniently usefulness the word “woke” merely because no definition is ever attached, looking at the facts, one wonders why organizations that have thousands of documented allegations of child molestation are not called out when they distract us by presenting the non-existent as the threat.
It is almost like the best place to seek sanctuary from a grooming church is at a Drag Queen Story Hour at the closest library having one.
A pronoun, one of the eight parts of speech in the English language, is a word that takes the place of a person, place, or thing (a noun) while a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. They make sentences a lot less tedious than they would be if a speaker or writer keeps repeating the noun.
Rather than
“Bob went to the store and Bob bought some veggies after which Bob went next door where Bob bought some other things that Bob did not find in the first store that Bob had been in”,
it is much easier and less repetitive to say,
“Bob went to the store and bought some veggies after which he went next door where he bought some other things that he did not find in the first store that he had been in”.
However, since a pronoun takes the place of a noun, we need to know the antecedent, the noun being replaced.
In the second sentence we have to know it is Bob doing the shopping so we know who he is because without knowing his name, “he” could be anyone.
In English with three Grammatical genders, male, female, and neuter, as our nouns name persons who are living beings and hence, by tradition, male and female, while objects that do not have gender, things and places, are neuter. Unlike other Romance languages who assign male and female gender to things as well as living creatures, in English nouns are usually preceded by the neutral article THE.
If the noun is plural, the pronoun also is.
As English is a living language, unlike Latin that is considered a dead language because, although still used, its structure has not changed since the fall of the Roman Empire, English is a living language that borrows words from other languages, often applying the rule of grammar related to that word in the original language, so some traditional Grammar rules are actually irrelevant to English and are just rules by osmosis.
For example, the rule of not splitting an infinitive, “to run” as opposed “to swiftly run”, is based on the introduction of infinitives from Latin into the changing English language as it grew from Anglo/Saxon to Olde English, and ignores that in Latin infinitives are a single word so it cannot be split.
Purists cringe when someone splits an infinitive but really cannot explain this other than just reciting the rule.
Basically, you don’t because you don’t.
People often assume English Grammar rules are what they have always been, but, in reality Grammar adapts with usage as the written and spoken language becomes more effective with adaptation.
Although “every teacher” refers to all the individual teachers, it has become easier and less befuddling to say “Every teacher should bring their books”, than the purist “Every teacher should bring HIS or HER books.”
The use of “their” in such singular application has been around for centuries but many people assume from what little of Grammar they learned in school because it wasn’t festive that they have a full understanding of the subtleties of language and this is wrong.
An example of this adaptation or morphing is the word “where” that implies location, so location references are not necessary. It is enough to ask, “where are you?” because “at” is implied in the word. However, it is becoming a common but annoying practice for me at this time to add the unnecessary word “at” as in “Where are you at?” but as it is being added in broadcast media it clearly has become acceptable in common parlance to add the “at”.
And so, the living language adapts to live.
Although there is quite a bit of Latin in English, somewhere around 85-90+%, unlike other Latin influenced languages, we do not have male and female things which means that from its beginning modern English had already had its pronoun use modifications.
So it is annoying enough when people, presenting themselves as experts, actually show their ignorance of the ever developing nature of Grammar, but it gets beyond annoying when, in order to oppose the development of a living language they use their own ignorance to oppose natural change.
Jim Jordan thinks that preferred pronouns ban the proper use of pronouns as he learned in school to whatever degree of success, like wishing someone a Happy Holiday will kill Baby Jesus. What Jim Jordan is actually doing is trying to halt the natural growth of a living language for a political agenda.
Ted Cruz claims his pronouns are “Kiss, My, Ass”.
Only one of the three is a pronoun
Marjory Taylor Green announced that hers are “Ban/Drag/Queen/Story-Time”, all nouns, as well as “Impeach/Biden”, “Fire/Fauci”, and others that are, like these, all nouns.
These and the others who object to preferred pronouns seem not to know what pronouns actually are which makes the foundation of their objections and demand that pronouns stay as they are used as of a few years ago seem uninformed and weak.
Worse, these are the same people who condemn teachers and public education while demanding more parental control of what is taught in the classroom, yet, they constantly expose themselves as the worst advocates for and examples of that for which they scream.
Conservatives, if they are going to oppose what they consider the betrayal of pronoun usage, need to learn what pronouns are.
They are the worst advocates for traditional pronoun usage as they cannot tell their pronouns from their nouns like a hole in the ground and a spot on their personal anatomy.
And, if they are examples of what will be taught in the classroom not according to what teachers know students should learn, but what they as parents want taught, the future looks rather sad.
