There’s 3 weeks left until the beginning of baseball season. I don’t think I’m gonna make it. I have no other good distractions available.
If American culture survives another 100 years, I would love to know how historians of the future judge the overt use of the word “woke” in our politics. I suspect it would be something like how the word “communist” or “socialist” was and still is used to describe anything that a politician doesn’t like, despite having nothing to do with the working class’ struggle to topple the bourgeoisie oppressors in order to achieve an economic utopia. Seriously, conservatives, I do not think that Lenin had wet dreams about eliminating hamburgers because cow emissions cause ozone depletion. I don’t even know what the fuck that last sentence was supposed to mean, but you made that argument during the debate about the Green New Deal, so you sleep with it.
I firmly believe that now is a great time for entertainers to start boycotting states that have anti-LGBTQIA+ laws put into place, given how nonchalant conservative states have been about anti-trans youth laws lately. WWE, don’t have SummerSlam in Tennessee. Please. There are plenty of other football and baseball stadiums in the country, and I’m sure you can sell out the building.
It is my interpretation that we, as a people, accept migrants and refugees dying in capsized boats as an inevitable and acceptable loss of life. “Oopsy. Oh well. I didn’t know any of them and they took a risky form of transportation.” This is thousands of people a year just going into the water and not coming back up. Furthermore, I cannot say that I personally care. There’s too many people already. Honestly, I think I would’ve been happier if Elian Gonzales didn’t survive. It’s just interesting to me that society as kind of given up on them.
It blows my mind that Finland and Sweden want to join NATO. These are historically neutral countries, but they were finally pushed over the edge by Russia being a bag of dicks and invading Ukraine. Good move, comrade.
I am a New York transplant living in South Carolina. Among the things to come out of the infinite wisdom of the South Carolina state government lately is the “Defense of Children’s Innocence Act”. Wow, that’s a broad title. That’s the kind of title that is engineered to give the reader a good feeling in their tum-tum while at the same time say absolutely nothing about what it does. Might as well be called the “Happy Cupcake Snuggie Act”. In this “act”, it says that “Any business where drag shows are held is deemed to be a sexually oriented business for all local government ordinances relating to a sexually oriented business.” The text justifies the tie between drag and sex by providing its own definition of a drag show. My biggest problem with the definition given is the following statement: “and is intended to provide sexual stimulation or sexual gratification”. They made that statement up. I know that because I have been to drag story time with my kids. All you typically see at drag story time is someone dressed like Lady Gaga or Britney Spears dancing, lip-syncing (like Britney Spears), and reading a book. I also know they made that statement up because I have been watching professional wrestling since 1997. So when the then-World Wrestling Federation was having bra and panty matches in the late 1990s, they would comfortably have qualified as a sexually oriented business from my 13 to 15 year old perspective.
Here’s a piece of nuance that is intentionally overlooked by the wording of this “act”: drag performers do not do the adult-related entertainment part of their job at a children’s function. To an intelligent person that should come as no surprise, otherwise they would not be invited back. While professional wrestler John Cena grants more Make a Wish appearances than anyone else on the planet, you never hear of WWE having Hell in a Cell matches for the Make a Wish Foundation. Why don’t they do that? Because they don’t do the fighting part of their performance in front of Make a Wish kids!
I’m surprised that this is the topic that conservatives are making such an uproar about in South Carolina. I guess all the other major problems are fixed now. People with substance abuse problems are getting the help they need, right? They don’t need to resort to spending the night in jail or in the Emergency Roomjust so they don’t have to spend the night outside, right? Everyone outside the halls of the State House has a bed and 4 walls to sleep in tonight, right? And if they do, those building are up to code, right? No fire hazards? And I trust all the teachers are getting paid well. Because, you know, “children’s innocence” and all that. Don’t want to lose all those good teachers if their pay stinks. We want to incentivize them to stay and get more people to join teaching as a profession. We’re doing everything to make sure that happens, right? And DSS isn’t having a hard time doing their job, right? I certainly hope not, because it would be really weird if all those things were still major problems before you decided that drag shows were the higher priority. Personally, my hierarchy of priorities has worrying about my kids’ exposure to drag shows fitting in on page 598 between giving 2 shits what my wife says about putting too much basil in the tomato sauce and wondering if Tiffany blue and turquoise are the same color.
Just say what it actually is. This isn’t about children. They hate drag performers. This is not defending children’s innocence, because no drag performer has ever walked into a school or a library or a church and started shooting up the place. This is codifying discrimination. PROVE TO ME that drag shows are a threat to children’s innocence. Police report or doctor’s note, or it didn’t happen. If you cannot do that, THEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT?!
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