In January 2014, the California GOP made a calculated decision to target trans students in a ballot measure to overturn new protections for California’s transgender students.
The California Referendum on AB 1266, Transgender Student Participation Based on Gender Identity (2014) did not make it to the ballot but that didn’t stop the GOP from scapegoating trans people to win votes in the 2016 election.
The RNC made a strategic decision to start a new culture war over the rights
and humanity of an estimated 700,000 transgender Americans.
The result is Trump’s ban on trans people in the military.
This cynical intrusion of the lives of innocent Americans is already
unacceptable.
But to start by using the children of California is repugnant.
If you agree with me, please call your GOP reps and tell them to stop toying
with the lives of innocent people.
Tell them you want policies, not scapegoats!
(c) Rob Goldstein 2017 All Rights Reserved
Congressional Switchboard Graphic found on Twitter.
People fear the unknown, I’d say.
I fear Trump. And I know exactly what he is!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think some of his followers may genuinely fear those they consider exotic. I also think many of them are intellectually lazy; it’s so much easier to hate. That’s why I fear trump. He is an intellectually lazy man with a mean streak and now he has too much power.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think, and I am working from a distance, that you are flattering him… I worry that he is more than lazy. I worry that he is emotionally and psychologically unstable.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It takes a certain intellectual rigor to control our unruly emotional lives.
However, I do agree with you.
Trump is mentally ill and it’s obvious to everyone.
And we’re treating his mental illness as if it doesn’t exist, just as we do with the people who live in our streets.
It’s almost as if every cruel and stupid policy decision we’ve made since 1981 has decided to bite us in the ass.
If people in the United States treated mental illness like a medical issue, instead a moral failure or an insult Trump wouldn’t still be in office.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is a smart answer – I really worry for us all!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you Mary.
Folks who read my blog know I struggle with mental health issues.
The only way to mitigate damage to my relationships is for me to use intellect to compensate for emotional distortions caused by my illness.
But I can do this because as serious as DID is, it’s not a psychotic disorder or a biochemical illness.
The effects of those illnesses can be treated with medications but most people go untreated.
Trump’s intellectual functioning is impaired by an untreated mental illness that also impairs insight.
He doesn’t know he’s ill.
He needs an intervention and perhaps mandated treatment.
Unfortunately, our laws in the U.S. regarding mandatory treatment institutionalize
the stigma of serious mental illness as choice made out of moral weakness.
In that sense, Trump is not unlike the men and women who rage at us on our streets, many still in emergency room gowns.
LikeLiked by 1 person
He’s just about legitimised I’d say – but he is not well and his off the cuff remarks are dangerous because he has ultimate power… plus he’s released a rage, an uneducated rage that is like as not unable to be contained… I don’t have mental illness – and I’d say we’re doomed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
If by doomed you mean the global warfare–It’s possible.
Either way, we’re in for a rough haul.
I think everyone who can must resist the evil regardless of where it takes us.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Absolutely!
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s where the hope is. We’re only doomed when we let ourselves believe that we can’t be better than those among us who choose to live in bitterness and hate.
LikeLike
Great post, Robert! I hate it when people try to achieve power on the coattails of hate.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I remember how I felt as a child when I listened to anti-Semites spouting their bile. I was also a boy who liked to read and make art in a culture that institutionalized rigid gender roles and homophobia. As a result I was afraid to go to school and uncertain of my worth as a person. The only reason to
institutionalize racism and homophobia is to destroy the lives of these people before they can begin.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m not defending the horrors that were heaped upon you as a child, but humans tend to act poorly in the face of fear or things they don’t understand. I grew up in the 50s and 60s – so I remember the way homosexuality was reviled
I’m so sorry you had to grow up like that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The reason you’re looking for a reason is the civilized mind can’t comprehend sadistic cruelty and unthinking brutality.
That makes you normal 🙂
But this is also why fascism often seems to come out of nowhere.
Normal people can’t comprehend a culture that gives people permission to torture
a group of designated scapegoats.
Those people in my neighborhood had nothing to fear from a five year old.
They knew they had nothing to fear from me.
They just wanted to hurt me.
They wanted to hurt my mind.
They wanted me to hate myself and above all, they wanted me to know that white Southern Baptists were better than any Jew was and it was important to their parents to beat that into me before I even had a chance to think.
When we relieve ourselves of the self-imposed restraints of the rule of law
we behave like savages.
Who can comprehend the daily lives of Germans who lived near the concentration
camps yet pretended they didn’t know the smoke from the chimneys was once
a group of human beings.
Who can comprehend the unbelievable evil of testing marketing the scapegoating
transgendered students to win the votes of extremist crackpots?
Evil exists. I’ve seen it up close.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on The Militant Negro™.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks again! 🙂 Especially this one.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Children are out future and without them we as a human species do not survive.
LikeLiked by 1 person
We wouldn’t survive as a species without children and we won’t survive as a civilized species without teaching our children to think and use reason.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Absolutely.
LikeLiked by 1 person