Shit that Pissed me off – 1/6
Boy Scouts Bar Transgender Boy
Due to a lot of factors, my boys aren’t really involved in scouting any longer. I am supportive of scouting and even though I’m aware of the larger issues that surround the Scout’s continued public disapproval of LGBTQ kids (and atheist kids for that matter), I’ve seen some attempts by the organization to soften their stance.
The people my kids have worked with are good people and whatever the national chapter of the Scouts may choose to do, our troop is a good troop that, I think, would not engage in this kind of discrimination. If my kids were still engaged in Scouts, I don’t think I’d pull them over this because I’d be punishing my kids by taking away something they enjoy.
And that makes me kind of crazy. Because on the one hand, I wouldn’t want to punish my kids for being who they are. On the other hand, the Boy Scouts just punished a kid for being who they are.
As we move (slowly) towards acceptance of homosexuality in our society (even as some fight to be able to discriminate free from consequence), transgender rights has now become a new arena and I fear this fight will be harder because people don’t get it.
I do not understand why people are transgender and therefore I will hate them for it.
If you’ve spent your entire life being totally comfortable with your gender, you have no way of understanding someone who is identified as a boy because they were born with a penis but has spent their entire life playing the role of a boy.
As an actor, I get to stop being a character I don’t like when I’m done with the performance. Someone who is pretending to be a gender with which they do not identify never gets the chance to step off stage. They are constantly pretending. And it is exhausting.
Giving them the freedom to stop pretending ought to be something we all celebrate. It ought to be something that makes us happy because we ought to want other people to be happy.
I mean, aside from pedophile priests. You gotta draw the line somewhere.
But we don’t give a fuck about that because we are more concerned with who is peeing in the stall next to our kid. Our kid doesn’t care because they just want to get back to the playground. They probably didn’t even notice the person in the stall next to them.
Our own discomfort with the idea of gender identity is the problem. If we are cool with the gender identity we were assigned at birth, we can’t understand why anyone else isn’t.
The Boy Scouts should be a place where young men (and by that I mean people who identify as young men) can learn how to be responsible adult men. Part of that responsibility should be learning to accept that we aren’t all the same. Their rigidity is disheartening to say the least.
Shit that Pissed me off – 10/25
Man Claims his Wife is an Unfit Mother Because She’s Had an Abortion
I don’t know what bugs me more – that this dude believes that an abortion proves someone is not a fit parent or the fact that his lawyers convinced a judge he was right.
Probably the judge. Especially considering the same judge who agreed to allow evidence of the woman’s abortion also refused to allow evidence of the husband’s infidelity.
Um…what?
You see, your honor, marriage is a contract. And in this contract, he got to bang whoever he wanted and she got to be OK with that!
If having an abortion means you are an unfit mother, doesn’t it logically follow that it was a really good idea to have gotten the abortion? Therefore, since you knew enough to have the abortion, you are actually a fit parent because you recognized your own capacity to care for a child.
But this fucked up logic aside, we should note that this asshole is a CEO of a major corporation and his lawyers are really expensive. That explains why they managed to convince a judge that evidence of an abortion should be introduced into divorce proceedings but not evidence of infidelity.
Shit That Pissed me Off This Week – 6/7
Baptist Church Plans to Dump the Boy Scouts because They Don’t Hate Gay People
The Boy Scouts expected that they would get some pushback from members of the faith community when they chose to accept openly gay scouts. Good thing, too. Because they are getting it.
Baptist ministers are saying that they have no choice. It is not a hate thing. It’s a morality thing. They just can’t support the Boy Scouts now that the organization has embraced a morally improper lifestyle by accepting openly gay scouts.
Look at how immoral this possibly gay boy scout looks!
That isn’t hate. They feel really badly about the whole thing. It isn’t their fault. It’s god’s fault!
I mean, sure, Jesus preached forgiveness and all that bullshit but not if you aren’t willing to deny your own sexuality because god doesn’t love you just the way you are.
Yeah. Fuck those guys.
Shit that Pissed Me off This Week – 5/24
Florida Teenager Faces Felony Charges for Being a Lesbian
Actually, she isn’t facing felony charges for being a lesbian. She’s facing felony charges for statutory rape because she was having a consensual relationship with a girl who was 14. When she was 17, that was (at least according to the articles I’ve read), legal.
But she turned 18. And her girlfriends’ parents immediately had her arrested.
Update: Apparently it wasn’t legal when she was 17 because if you are under 16, you can’t have consensual sex with anyone in the State of Florida. It would seem they waited until she was 18 so she could be charged as an adult. Classy.
And the county prosecutor is going for it. Because the law is all about protecting the innocent and that fourteen year old was clearly being corrupted by her girlfriend the second she turned 18. There is, apparently, no nuance in statutory rape laws that takes the age of the offender into account. ‘Cuz an eighteen year old may be older than a fourteen year old but she is just as much of a child.
Oh sure, you can hold her hand now. But you’d better let it go before you turn eighteen!
If she had been a boy, I’ll bet this would not have happened.
Hey, you folks who are against same-sex marriage and who still think that you aren’t bigots – don’t you think getting an eighteen year old girl expelled from school and possibly putting her in prison because she’s a lesbian seems just a little bit bigoted?
Update: There is a lot more nuance to this case. I checked my sources before I posted it but bias is always a risk. I’m still annoyed by any situation that could have a child (and yes – an eighteen year old is still a child) sent to jail for fifteen years because of sexual curiousity. If there is one thing that scares the piss out of us in this country, it is human sexuality.
Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 2/8
Catholic Girls Take a no Profanity pledge but Catholic Boys Don’t
Apparently use of profanity is “unladylike” but it is totally “manlike.”
I can actually support the idea of using more civil language in school but not because a civil tongue is a function of gender identity. I’m (obviously) not opposed to swearing but keeping foul language out of discourse in school can, I think, make it easier to learn.
In this case, though, what the young ladies are learning is that they are expected to be proper young ladies while the boys can be vulgar and nasty and, basically, act like assholes. That’s OK, you see, because they are boys.
Can the girls do this or is it also unladylike?
Well I cry bullshit (I can say that because I’m a guy). If you want civil discourse in school, you can’t exclude the boys from the conversation. When you do, you are making it very clear that the young men at that school are simultaneously better than the young women because they can say whatever they want and worse because they can’t be counted on to control themselves.
In other words, swear up a fucking storm, guys! God says it’s OK!!!!
Shit that Pissed Me off This Week 7/20
I note that yes, the shooting in Colorado pissed me off. But I’m not going to write about it because fuck that guy. This is all the 1’s and 0’s I’m going to commit to him.
What pisses me off is that there is no there there. I’m a liberal. I don’t like Romney.
Yet if you read the article linked above that quotes both anonymous and public sources who are Democrats that Support Obama, this whole thing appears to be much ado about nothing.
The Bain issue appears to be the Democratic equivalent of a swiftboat campaign. There are a lot of good reasons why Romney shouldn’t be our next President. If there is an honest belief he can’t be beaten on those grounds, the problem is with our campaign.
Just look at the guy! I’m telling you, he’s an Auton!
I don’t like it when Republicans lie and obscure facts because I don’t agree with the majority of their agenda and if people really understood it, I don’t think a lot of others would either.
What I really hate, though, is when Democrats do the same thing. I know – they do it all the time.
But I agree with them most of the time and I wish they would figure out how to get people to understand their point of view without resorting to misdirection.
Grail Diary 