My father taught me to search closely at the ground around my feet, to listen carefully, not merely at the louder sounds from a distance, but more intently to the sounds that whisper from nearby shadows, to wonder what is beyond the next mesa, to be aware and curious. Together we walked Thieves Hollow where his parents farmed near Dumont, Texas. We explored rock formations and the dry canyons of eastern New Mexico, searching for fossils and old stone tools, reminders of life before our own memories began. Often, he would tell me to watch for the storm on the horizon or cautiously step around the rattle from under a scrub. One important lesson from these shared experiences with my father was that we must be vigilant to the potential dangers even when something nearby grabs our attention.
Today, the Republican Party and its conservative six in the Supreme Court ask us to look and listen in one direction while leading us into another. The distractions, (mis)directions, misinformation, manipulation, and White Mansplaining tell me…Pay attention, question what you see and hear.
The Supreme’s Courts decision on June 30 (yesterday) was not about athletics, protecting athletic integrity, fairness, or sports. The decision was about human rights. They hit first at the LGBTQ community by declaring that states and schools can legally forbid a trans individual’s participation in athletic teams and events. This was America’s right wing saying Look Here Not There to all of us who do not pay attention. How many trans individuals across our nation are trying to prove their athletic abilities and compete in approved sports events? Ten? Fifty? One thousand? The answer does not matter. Because the right wing’s decision from the SCOTUS was not about how few or many would benefit from the ruling; it was not about ensuring states’ rights or athletic integrity…it was about white Christian male supremacy.
Every SCOTUS ruling that limits individual and group freedoms, every Congressional action or state legislation or school policy that does the same is a declaration of We have the power to take your freedoms and others have the right to make you less American and less human.
Though one transwoman out there will back down from participating in a woman’s competitive swim program and find another way to swim for sport and pleasure, another transwoman will slip by because she bears every imaginable resemblance to a lovely female, another transwoman will loudly protest the discrimination, another will be targeted and beaten, another will die.
More…the discrimination will not end with programs eliminating trans individuals’ participation in sports. The Christian Right began with abortion bans and trans-athlete bans. But Christian Nationalism is insatiable. Bigotry and intolerance rely on people’s irrational fears and willful ignorance. Unchecked and unopposed, it will grow in size and strength, approaching all of us like a storm on the horizon.
The Dobbs decision was not about protecting the fetus. Criminalizing abortion access is about limiting women’s decisions and controlling their lives. If abortion bans are about protecting fetuses, then the Republican party would be spending billions on women’s healthcare, free and low-cost reproductive and gynecological care, easy access to women’s clinics…building more hospitals, providing free birth control to every female of reproductive age, and supporting families.
School vouchers and defunding public education are not about freedom and open thought. Programs that divert public dollars from public schools to private schools are about legal discrimination, right wing indoctrination, and an uneducated populace who will yield their lives to authoritarian policies and despotic leaders.
State and district policies that require teachers to lead their students in prayers and Bible readings are not about teaching goodness and eschewing evil. They are about Christian Nationalism…the authoritarian demand for government control of religious thought and practice. No one with a basic level of logical and critical thinking believes that Christians own the moral, ethical, respectable, virtuous, and noble corner market…unless they have eliminated all competition in their neighborhood. Fuckers.
The tradwife movement among right wing political and religious women is not about what is best for children and society. It is about serving and servicing white Christian male supremacy…which is only best for children and society when white Christians have beaten down or killed every competitive thought, group, and action. If the tradwife movement (including the female leaders of Turning Point) intends to improve children’s lives and society, they would back left wing initiatives…such as building the women’s healthcare system and providing universal healthcare, improving public education K-16, lowering housing and education costs, free college and vocational programs, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, helping refugees and immigrants, cleaning up neighborhoods, free birth control, bringing the criminals who participated in the Epstein-Maxwell sexual predator network to justice, instituting wealth taxes, helping women achieve in their chosen jobs and careers.
We could write these common sense, reasonable, promising, effective initiatives onto multiple pages of text but it is not necessary. The right wing is determined to control all women and minorities because white Christian straight men are the stupidest, least competent, weakest, most untrustworthy, least sexy, and most insecure of all groups in these United States. They cannot get it up without their tradwives’ help…or without the assistance of trans-porn, so I’ve heard.
I don’t write to make myself or my audience angry, though anger is a useful emotion. I write to expose ideas and actions and the people who carry them forth. When I am angry or hurt, offended or sad, I want to understand why. The triggers are not always immediately apparent.
When I was out hiking with my father, I sometimes thought I was afraid because we seemed lost. But he taught me that I was afraid because I had not identified the sound or odor. Today, I want my audience to identify the sounds and odors. We’re lost when we’re willingly distracted or misinformed or afraid. We’re able to help ourselves and others when we understand how we got here and where we’re going.