Pip-Squeak Politicians
Gayle Robbins
"As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time." — E. B. White
What is it with these pip-squeak politicians and their need to try to build themselves up by preying on vulnerable kids?
It’s the way of the bully to zero in on targets who in most cases would find it difficult to defend themselves, and that’s just what these wannabe tough-guy governors in Florida, Texas, Georgia and other Republican-led states have been doing with their attacks on LGBTQ+ students.
Let them show no hesitation in putting more guns on the streets — or any remorse when some of those guns ultimately end up being used to kill kids in school shootings — but they’re all-in in making darn sure no trans girl ever gets to score a goal on the high school soccer team … or to ever feel good about herself.
These politicians, all puffed-up with pride about how they’re preserving the sanctity of “family,” have such a twisted sense of priorities. Let them show no hesitation in putting more guns on the streets — or any remorse when some of those guns ultimately end up being used to kill kids in school shootings — but they’re all-in in making darn sure no trans girl ever gets to score a goal on the high school soccer team … or to ever feel good about herself.
Really, can this be the most-urgent issue facing their states?
All this devilry in the cause of feathering their own personal-ego nests, this appealing to the worst in our natures, this purposefully harming vulnerable kids for their own benefit, this political pedophilia — do they not care, do they truly know no shame?
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And often they act in the name of religion — at least their version of religion, with its careful editing of Matthew 5-7.
To borrow a phrase used by the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., about another time of bullying demagogues, this current crop of cheap-jack cowards has also “presented hatred itself as a gospel.”
And the prejudices these chickenhearted lightweights seek to write into law are not new. They were full-on displayed by an earlier generation of browbeating blockheads who sought to keep Black kids out of the same public schools as white kids, to keep them out of the same public swimming pools, to keep them out of the same public playgrounds — to keep them out, period.
Watching their exaggerated theatrics, their shrill rhetoric, you get the feeling that only their lack of courage keeps these modern-day Bilbos from attempting to turn back the calendar and reintroduce segregation and Plessy-style separate-but-equal status throughout America.
Or, as Indiana’s Braun let slip, to try and upend the 14th Amendment and use the state courts to reimpose anti-miscegenation statutes, and introduce a new, greatly expanded Jim Crow.