October 15, 2008
I’m no legal whiz. So when it comes to the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of 303 Creative LLC v. the State of Colorado Civil Rights Division Of All That Should Be Holy, I’m still confused. If I have this right, a woman—a blond white one who was assigned female at birth, and for whom said feminine designation totally took, who in general terms never experienced any negative repercussions for being who she was, and who fit comfortably into an approved slot in modern society, with respect to her identity and her desires—felt the need to go all the way to the Supreme Court over her horror at the possibility that she would some day be required to design a wedding website for a gay couple, if she ever decided to create wedding websites. Lawsy! The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends right over for a nice girl with the vapors.
Well, I’ll be go to hell, as it were. That there is one frigid snowflake.
I have some sympathy for the plaintiff, Lorie Smith. I myself have long been terrified I would some day be required to tattoo grammatically awkward Nazi slogans in an aggressive font on an unattractive person, if I ever learned how to tattoo, and got a license, and a little parlor, and needed the dough. Up until now I did not think I had standing to sue, but imaginary horror is real.
June 30, 2011
Heck, half the country might be on fire from imaginary climate change, but it’s snowing hard out there. The most benign things are a source of serious discomfiture and alarm in many quarters. They say no two snowflakes are alike, but some of these right-wingers are mighty similar and they’re piling up in drifts. They’re scared of all kinds of people and in a constant state of aggrieved arousal because they think about sex all the time. It’s as though the fate of democracy hangs in the balance somewhere between the legs. For instance, a number of these people are quite frightened by drag queens, which is like being scared of Big Bird.
Being skeeved out by drag queens is like being afraid of being forcibly gummed by a newt. Enraged newts are vanishingly rare in the real world, but fear is real, which is why people are allowed to let their emotional support Schnauzers piddle in the grocery store. And why not? If you’re afraid of a grocery-store poodle piddle puddle you are always free to bring in your support wolverine and let them duke it out. If that doesn’t settle things, there’s always open-carry.
The fact is, even totally manufactured fears are a good way to suck votes from gullible people, but that doesn’t make those people any less scared.
Take the Moms for Liberty. The Moms for Liberty are afraid of things they don’t understand, so preventing the education of others is second-nature to them. The books have to go. A lot of the books that have to go are designed to allow all sorts of children to see themselves in their pages. The Moms for Liberty are fine with that, as long as the children are like the Moms for Liberty. Black children should be featured in books, preferably as the sidekicks; their troubles should be universal. They do not experience the sting of racism in their lives, because racism no longer exists. Little Jamaal loses his new puppy and gets no help from the mean librarian but ultimately is reunited with his beloved pet after learning a hard lesson about leaving the gate open, and the whole family celebrates with tortes and gelato.
What if a child feels confused about his gender identity or sexual orientation? The puppy story still applies. Keep that doggone gate locked, Skipper.
Brilliant.
And shared
Thanks for sharing.
I’m torn between two favorite bits, Murr. One is, “…grocery-store poodle piddle puddle”, and the other is, “imaginary horror is real”. And aren’t those Moms for Liberty sumpthin’?
Orwellian. They all are.
I adore you! And thank you for featuring these lovely people who could teach heterosexuals a thing or two about marriage.
I’ve got great friends.
Totally unbelievable – but I really do like your take on it all!
You can’t make this stuff up. And I can make almost anything up.
yup. amen to all of it.
Amen, indeed!
They can all be as whacko as they like, but emotional support animals of any kind should not be allowed to piddle in the grocery store. Or any other store. Do you all have to shop wearing gumboots in case there is a puddle in aisle three?
I’m beginning to think dogs are mandatory in Portland.
Jeezus Christ on a multi-tiered gay wedding cake…the pandemic and politics of the past few years have revealed who the REAL snowflakes are. I have always had anxiety (known today as General Anxiety Disorder or GAD, because everything needs an acronym), and I am scared of far less than pretty much every right-winger I know. To go through life carrying that much fearful baggage must be totally exhausting. Bless their little terrified, hard hearts.
If I felt that way I’d probably arm myself too, but I don’t.
Exactly. They are afraid of things that are harmless, yet fearless in the face of things that are harmful. More children are killed with guns than anything else (not motor vehicles — guns.) And yet they think MORE people should have guns. Without permits or background checks. AND assault weapons are A-OK, even though it tells you right there in their name what they are used for. They are NOT used for hunting, as they literally blow apart whatever they shoot at.
So what DO they think has the most negative impact on children? Drag queens reading them stories. FFS! No drag queen has ever killed a child with a book, and I doubt there are a lot of them out there reading to children in the first place. And, of course, the books themselves are detrimental to the children. Why, they might find a character who feels exactly as they do, but they never knew how to express it. They no longer have to feel alone! Oh, wait… that’s a bad thing in their minds. Heaven forbid that children should have their own ideas, and that those ideas should be different than their parents.
I don’t know whether to laugh cynically or howl in anger. So I pretty much do both.
I think we have all the proof we need at this point that more guns aren’t making us safer. I’ll never understand how people can look at all the mass shootings and school shootings and think drag queens and books are the problem. Like Wanda Sykes so eloquently said in her latest standup special, “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit”.
I love Wanda Sykes.
God save us from the self-righteous.
A neighbor complained about the pride flag out with,
“It’s what they do to little children.” They believe all are
pedophiles. As Nancy Pelosi says, “Don’t agonize, Organize!”
There is such a thing as just plain evil, with no need for an explanation in terms of fear. Or to put it another way, bigotry is heritable; bigotry is contagious; bigotry is addictive. I can’t recall right now which writer, who, writing on the subject of the Holocaust, said he didn’t want to understand it, and quoted another writer who had written that understanding leads to forgiving, and he definitely did not want to forgive. (I went chasing that understand/forgive quote, and found it attributed to Pascal, but that was on Goodreads, which is so unreliable when it comes to quotes as to be nearly useless. I did not find it on Quote Investigator. In Quora I found it attributed to Spinoza, but when I searched the work mentioned, “Ethics,” it was not there. Then I noticed that the attribution came from a beta release of “Sage, an AI bot writing helpful answers.” The quote was also listed on the Fake Buddha Quotes website.
I appreciate all your comments. Rather than yelling HELL YEAH I will just state for the record that I wanted to add, as an illustration, a fake wedding website in a fancy font in which you could check off:
Vegetarian.
Chicken.
Fishes.
Loaves.
Although I am, of course, horrified by the decision of the Supreme Court, I first commented to my lovely wife about the lack of standing. No one has been harmed in this case! There pretty much IS no one in this case. How could the Supreme Court, which is supposed to selectively take on a few of the most important real legal conflicts in the country, suddenly decide to take on a case about a non-existent situation? It is totally unjustified. And their decision is so vague as to permit all kinds of discrimination, all in the name of freedom of speech. Don’t they understand that “Your freedom ends where my nose begins!”