For those who had not taken much notice at the time, those who did at the time but may now have put it in the recesses of their minds, and as younger people may need to be told, over the last 20 years when things like climate change, alternative energy, new understanding of humans were discussed, the GOP stood in opposition beginning each speech, large or small, big crowd or congressional chamber with opening words in some form of “I am not a scientists but….” and then launching into supporting or opposing a bill because it went contrary to what they think the science is when they had just let it be known that they had no knowledge of it, so their arguments based on it actually had no foundation.
A classic example was Senator Inhoff of Oklahoma announcing he was not a scientist before holding up a snowball he had made on the way into the capitol building from the snow on the ground outside and, while attempting to be serious and using the snowball as physical proof, threw the snowball to the president of the senate asserting that if global warming was real, he would not have that snowball. Assuming this proved him right very dramatically, he actually proved that because he was not a scientist his statement was incorrect as he had a woefully poor grasp of the difference between climate and weather.
If he had listened to the people telling him things instead of arguing with them, he might not have looked so blatantly stupid without realizing how blatant it was.
By the way, bringing a projectile into the senate chamber with the intention of throwing it at a member is not Kosher.
I do not know how to play Yahtzee. How stupid would I be if while someone was showing me how to play so I can join the other players, I kept interrupting with my opinion of the rules instead of just learning them and then deciding at the end of the explanation that the game was too stupid to play, not because of its actual rules, but because of my irrelevant opinion of the rules based on my irrelevant questions and my not hearing how the game was actually played.
You do not follow asking for someone to explain something to you with forcing them to wade through the rip current of arguments, interruptions and unnecessary opining.
Just a week or two ago, when anxiety was being expressed about Clarence Thomas’s dissent reference to rescinding Marriage Equality, rather that ask his Gay constituents about their fears, even if it was just to look like he cared but while being told things was thinking of other things in his head like his shopping list and only heard “blah blah blah”, with the possibility to learn things if he couldn’t think of a way to distract himself, he decided that not only was the issue of protecting Marriage Equality simply a “stupid waste of time,” but that as a Senator in DC, whereas he focuses on “federal problems that matter to real people,” like the price of food, inflation, employment which those in Same Sex Marriages, not being real, apparently, are not affected without mentioning he had voted against their solutions. no one cares about Marriage Equality except “a bunch of affluent elite liberals” and a “bunch of Marxist misfits, who sadly today control the agenda of the modern Democratic Party.”
He jumped in the pool again when in attempting to sidetrack a bill being debated by introducing an irrelevant amendment which he formulated ignoring the information that is out there but, rather than look at it, he chooses to continue to base his reason on what he has always thought while everyone around him sees him falling behind.
I am not a Gender expert and, like most people of my age group, as I grew up you were either a Straight man, a Straight woman, you better be one of those, a Gay man, or a Gay woman. There were other categories, but they were so far in the shadows that even those in those categories did not always know why or if they should even be there. For Gay activists the community was simple. Two letters, G and L.
Then the little known became more known and I, as we all should, had to begin learning the subgroups within “my people’. I will admit the simple division was easier to handle because the easiest way to explain things to the willing was just pointing out who you had sex with, all else being the same.
Now, there are so may legitimate nuances to gender that I have arrived at the age and accompanying realization that I am too old to learn everything new, but I can learn what I can and not judge people by what I don’t know or just haven’t learned yet.
Although familiar with Two Spirit people, special thanks to Sue in OKC, I cannot grasp the concept fully and have to understand it according to my ability to do because of cultural differences. My knowledge is limited so my opinion is worthless and any treatment based on that is immoral.
Little Marco thinks otherwise.
During debate on the Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday, Rubio offered an amendment related to Transgender people.
I am sad to have to admit there is a part of me that has some nostalgia for the days when that would have been “The Gays”, but time moves on. I must accept the dethronement.
Displaying his total lack of information and lack of a basic understanding of what “Transgender” is about, something by this time is deliberately chosen ignorance, Rubes, offered an amendment to a bill dealing with climate change, inflation, and prescription drug prices to ban people who aren’t “biological females” from accessing pregnancy care programs.
Doctor and long-time professor of gender studies Marco Rubio explained,
“The only people who are capable of being pregnant are biological females, and, therefore, I think federal biolo- federal pregnancy programs should be limited to biological females, and that’s what this would do.”
It would also seem there is a huge number of Trans Women “the likes of which the world has never seen before”, of Trans women faking pregnancies to get benefits and prenatal care and scamming the government.
Not to wax nostalgic, but Gays were once told that if we got our rights especially as applicable to Gay school students, there would be Gay people popping up everywhere filing lawsuits and bankrupting Straight people, the real people, with our greed, having been created in those great numbers in the moment.
At least with the migrant caravans you can see them coming. With the Gays then and the Trans people now, it’s like the reverse Rapture.
Whoop. There it is.
In reality, this amendment was just a ploy.
Rubio needed a hot button issue that he could form into an amendment and by offering it and getting senators all riled about an irrelevant issue, slow the progress of the debate and ultimately help in killing the bill.
The GOP senators are obsessed with Transgender people in a negative way, like they are with everyone else’s sex and private lives, so this was like chicken thrown to the Gators at a Florida attraction.
Rather odd too that a man who had stated with certainty that he focuses on “federal problems that matter to real people” like the price of food, inflation, employment, attempted to introduce the opportunity to exercise bigotry into a debate on a national bill dealing with climate change, inflation, and prescription drug prices .
It would seem under the circumstances that this amendment was a “stupid waste of time“, but he had an airtight, historically based, rationale for the amendment and explained it without hyperbole,
“I looked back across 5,500 years of human history, so far, every single pregnancy has been a biological female, and so, therefore, the only thing I’m trying to do is make sure that federal law is clear, since every pregnancy that’s ever has been in a biological female, that our federal laws reflect that.”
And he knows this to be true after having consulted the extant record of every human birth for the last 5,500 years and all the details of the circumstances around each as well.
When his amendment failed he spun the loss by claiming,
“Senate Democrats insist men can get pregnant.”
Does he know that while there are only cisgender people in his world, in the real one we also have Trans women and Trans men in various stages of transition and other existing gender variants?
The world is not as black and white as Marco needs it to be. His world is his safe space.
Although claiming he is all about national issues that affect real people, Marco is up for reelection in a state obsessed with all things GLBT and all the letters I skipped.
DeSantis doesn’t want anyone in Florida, most especially himself, to know there are Gay people there. It was hard enough hiding the alligators in the swamp property for sale, but no one can know the Gays are here.
State Republicans passed the Don’t Say Gay bill that bans discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in younger grades, restricts such discussions in older grades, and ignores there are Gay students, some students with same gender parents although they themselves are straight, some students with Gay friends, and some whose friends have same sex parents are in the room too.
Florida’s Board of Medicine voted to begin the process of banning gender affirming medical care for both adults and minors in the state.
There’s money to be made in Abortion and Gender affirming treatment carpools and Uber vans.
Marco must feel that his position as candidate in Florida may have been weakened by his failure to clinch the anti-Transgender amendment or have it destroy the bill then somehow blaming Transgender people for the failure of the entire bill that would have been good for everyone.
This year a former city of residence reinstituted its Human Rights Ordinance and the Human Rights Commission after they had been done away with some 26 years ago when the city council avoided having to add Sexual Orientation to the city’s ordinance by rescinding the ordinance and removing human rights protections for all citizens and then blaming it on the greedy Gay’s whose demand for inclusion cost everyone.
So, yeah, it is a Republican thing reapplied.
But he still has time to try again to get some anti-Trans thing attached in the most irrelevant of places.
He needs redemption.
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