Ian Mackey, a Democratic state representative whose district includes St. Louis, gave a blistering speech in the Missouri legislature that scorched a Republican colleague who proposed a bill to ban trans athletes from all school sports. Mackey knew the bill would pass easily in the overwhelmingly Republican legislature. And it did. But as a matter of conscience, he spoke out against it.
Mackey’s impassioned speech has been viewed more than 2 million times on social media. He knows that the Republicans are acting not to solve a problem, but to express hatred for a tiny, powerless, frightened minority.
Republicans assume that if they ignite culture wars against gays, blacks, immigrants, and women who seek an abortion, they won’t need to come up with any policies that address actual problems, like an unfair tax system that benefits billionaires, climate change, or helping public schools. They can keep yammering about ”socialism” and ”the radical left” while doing their best to strangle any meaningful policy changes that improve people’s lives, other than their donors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“if they ignite culture wars against gays, blacks, immigrants, and women who seek an abortion, they won’t need to come up with any policies that address actual problems, like an unfair tax system that benefits billionaires, climate change, or helping public schools. They can keep yammering about ”socialism” and ”the radical left” while doing their best to strangle any meaningful policy changes that improve people’s lives, other than their donors.”
Nailed it. It’s like a magician or pickpocket…… get them to look the other way and we can steal their wallets.
You just have to look at the education piece to see it. No practical or useful or positive assistance or support of any public school anywhere.
Can anyone point to one thing any of them have actually accomplished that is even relevant to public school students and families?
We got- a huge political push for vouchers/charters and privatization of systems and relentless attacks on public schools. That’s the sum total contribution of “ed reform” in the last two years. Thousands of full time, paid ed reformers who are supposedly employed in “public education policy” and they contribute absolutely nothing of value to the schools 90% of students and families attend.
Ohip public school students went back to school after the pandemic this year. What did they get from the huge and lavishly funded ed reform echo chamber? An expansion of charters and vouchers and yet another new testing scheme.
Go to any ed reform site and look for anything that applies to public school students that is positive. There is nothing. We’re employing thousands of professional public school critics who lobby for charters and vouchers and they absolutely dominate education policy to the exclusion of all other voices. It’s a shame. No one works for students who attend public schools and yet ed reform employment grows every year.
Public school students are REALLY poor served by this “movement”. It’s all downside for them. There’s no upside.
The GOP/radical right/Trumpers have even accused Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden of being socialists, communists, etc., (a reductio ad absurdum argumentation). It’s zombie McCarthyism, it never dies and the GOP always resorts to red baiting when they have nothing better to do. If they get in power again, it will be tax cuts for the rich which will increase the deficits and then trigger screams for cuts to or elimination of the social programs that so many Americans depend on.
Perhaps recognizing that they do no actual productive work on behalf of public schools or public school students, ed reformers now insist that their full time employment promoting charter and private schools and bashing public schools actually helps public school students INDIRECTLY, with the “rising tide lifts all boats” ideological slogan.
See? They don’t have to produce any benefits for public schools. Their ideological committment to privatization is ITSELF “work on public schools”.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/biden-administration-fails-follow-science-charter-schools
We should definitely hire more echo chamber members and continue to exclude all other voices. Just ask them. They’re wildly successful. The grades are in and ed reform got an A again. That they grade themselves and adjust the metrics to fit the agenda is not a concern.
One of the easiest ways to tell the difference between the right and left is the right punches DOWN at the weak and powerless while the left punches UP at those who have real power.
well observed!
Make no mistake. The right is waging a war on people of color, women, immigrants, public institutions, particularly public schools and the LGBTQ community. Like typical bullies they pounce on those with less agency. As beachteach mentions, it is a distraction from the real issues. The best form of retaliation is to vote in the midterms, no matter how long the lines are.
Clarification, this bill wouldn’t “ban trans athletes from all school sports.” It would ban transgender women (i.e. biological males who identify as female) from participating in school sports that are exclusively for women.
Stop it, Flerp! You’re refuting their preferred narrative here. No facts allowed contrary to the narrative.
This blog and its creator are remarkable for the nuanced and careful conversations engendered, as the discussions here demonstrate time and again.
Once again, the nuance is glossed over for an all out Dem vs Rep/ Good vs Evil culture war scenario. The truth always lies in the details….but that wouldn’t get as much attention or click bait. Thanks for highlighting the truth.
Specific language of the bill, below.
Thank you, Ian Mackey!!!
From the article: “The Republicans may win many of these battles today, but they will lose the war. One in five Gen Z Adults identify as LGBTQ+, and this new generation sees diversity and inclusion as a good thing. It’s just a matter of time, which is why the GOP is flooding the state legislatures with this kind of hateful nonsense. In the very end, they will fail.”
Hilariously (if you have a very dark sense of humor), the right-wing is blaming the explosion of expression of varying sexual orientations and gender identities among teens on TEACHERS, SCHOOLS, AND CURRICULA when, ofc, this is primarily a GENERAL CULTURE PHENOMENON that takes place in mass media, in young people’s texts and conversations with one another before and after school, in the hallways, in the cafeteria, etc.
And IRONICALLY, this wave of repression will have among teenagers PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE OF ITS INTENDED EFFECT, as anyone who has worked with and knows teenagers would be able to tell you. This is a war that the right will not and cannot win.
News flash, right wingers: that ship has sailed, that train has left the station, that cat is out of the bag, you can’t unscramble that egg, we’ve crossed that Rubicon, you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube, it’s no use closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, you can’t unpick a pepper (this one I came up with—sorry, I couldn’t resist telling you that because I’m quite proud of it), you can’t unknow what you know or unlearn what you’ve learned. Or, as Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done is done; it cannot be undone.”
20% of Gen Z may claim they are LGBTQ+, but no expert in sexual preference/orientation believes that number is even close to the reality. It’s social contagion, what is currently trendy, that is the operative principle at work. Gen Z may vote heavily Democratic going forward, but not because of this issue, which in the long run will be far less important than other issues where almost all votes are actually decided.
Are you a teacher? I recently taught high school in a very red portion of a very red state. I can tell you that my students cared DEEPLY about this issue and related issues and were overwhelmingly and strongly committed to expansion of social and political freedoms for persons with varied gender identities and sexual orientations. The right is losing kids GENERALLY, and not just on this issue:
Calling a cultural shift a “contagion” is an interesting choice of language. It’s saying that this is a disease and implying that it needs to be treated or eliminated. Some people might call this a contagion. Others might call it an awakening to the fact that people have a lot more options than they traditionally thought they had because they can choose adult partners of either sex and flout traditional gender expressions.
This reminds me of what happened when Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Before these works, millions of Americans were secretly engaging in oral sex and feeling enormous shame about doing so. Then, they read or heard about these reports and how common the practice was and felt greatly relieved.
And there was at the time the same sort of moral panic among some on the right that there is now on these LGBTQX issues.
Calling a cultural shift a “contagion” is an interesting and revealing choice of words. BTW, it is well established now that cultural shifts have a tendency to build slowly and quietly and then to seemingly occur in an avalanche after having reached a tipping point.
https://phys.org/news/2011-07-minority-scientists-ideas.html
So, yeah, it happens suddenly, but not for the reasons given in such shrill, polemical, non-fact-based/vaguely anecdotal screeds as Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which I recently ordered and read on a pact by someone one his blog. In accordance with that deal, he was supposed to order and read Joan Roughgarden’s brilliant Evolution’s Rainbow. I don’t know whether he did.
I would make, here, a list of current pop music stars who have nontraditional gender identities or sexual orientations and of pop films and television series that deal with these subjects, but the list would extraordinarily long. It would probably be easier to list the completely straight/cis ones. LOL.
There’s where the social contagion begins – in popular culture. That segment of society is hardly representative of the U.S. population as a whole. And be careful about relying on Kinsey data; Alfred Kinsey popularized the statistic that 10% of the American population was gay, but later social scientists found that figure to be very inflated. The 10% figure was trumpeted for many years by political activists, even long after it had been refuted.
I did not rely on Kinsey data. I simply made the point about how people responded to Kinsey’s report, that many did so with enormous relief, thinking, thank God, I am not abnormal. LOL.
If you reread what I wrote carefully, you will find that nowhere did I make any claim about the accuracy of the Kinsey data. I was making a point about the effects of its popularization.
There’s that “contagion” word again. As though this were a disease.
instead of a cultural shift
I must differ with you about popular culture being representative of the society as a whole. Popular culture is all about what sells. If there’s an audience for x, there will be more of x.
It is true that a small, determined group of influencers can tip the scales. That’s the finding of the Rensselaer studies. However, in this case, we are well into the post-tipping-point phase, and in that one, pop culture is very much a reflection of what there is a market for. If there’s no market for x, people no longer make, distribute, sell x.
Often, pop culture is as good or better a barometer of social values, beliefs, tendencies, etc., as any scientific studies. Why? Because it’s really large scale (lots of data points) and finely grained. It wasn’t surprising that Japanese people, a couple decades after World War II, rushed out to see films about radiation-induced monsters. And it isn’t surprising right now that popular culture film, YA novels, adult novels, music, etc., are awash with dystopian futures featuring a powerful, elite, wealthy minority and an extremely oppressed, poor majority.
Popular media hold a mirror up to nature. Some don’t like what they see. Understood. But that doesn’t mean that the mirror isn’t accurate.
These provisions were tucked into a bill about the conduct of elections, Missouri House Bill 2140(2022). It replaces 167.177 of the state’s election law with, in part, the following:
Any school district in the state may adopt the provisions of subsections 2 and 3 of this section if approved by vote of residents of the school district.
As used in this section, the following terms mean: (1) “Public school”, the same definition as in section 160.011; (2) “Sex”, an individual’s biological sex based solely on an individual’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.
No public school shall knowingly allow a student of the male sex who is enrolled in such public school to participate on a school-sponsored athletic team that is exclusively for students of the female sex. 4. Beginning July 1, 2023, the joint committee on education shall study student athletic events that are exclusively for males or exclusively for females and the impact of a policy that prohibits participation in those events by individuals who are of the opposite sex. Before January 1, 2024, the joint committee shall report its findings and recommendations, with any legislation required to implement the recommendations, to the general assembly.
Context of this legislation, from Transathlete.com: The Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA) allows transgender males using hormone therapy (testosterone) to participate on a men’s team, and allows transgender women to play on men’s teams for the first year of documented testosterone suppression, after which she would be eligible to play on a women’s team.
A transgender student will be defined as a student whose gender identity does not match the sex assigned to him or her at birth as reflected on the student’s birth certificate or school records. A transgender student must meet the following in order to participate in sex-separated interscholastic sports so long as the
athlete’s use of hormone therapy is consistent with current medical standards:
• A trans male (female to male) student-athlete who has undergone treatment with testosterone for gender transition may compete on a boys team but is no longer eligible to compete on a girls team without changing the team status to a mixed team. A mixed team is eligible only for boys championships.
• A trans female (male to female) student-athlete being treated with testosterone suppression medication for gender transition may continue to compete on a boys team but may not compete on a girls team without changing it to a mixed team status until completing one calendar year of documented testosterone-suppression treatment.
This policy was taken from the approved NCAA Transgender Policy, approved September 13, 2011. (June 2012, updated 2019)
State-by-state summaries and links, from Transathlete.com: TRANSATHLETE High school transgender athlete policies
“Rick Scott pushes own GOP agenda as McConnell holds off. The first-term senator’s plan includes a mix of longtime Republican positions as well as culture war politics that define many GOP voters in Trump’s wing of the party”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/22/rick-scott-gop-agenda-00010431
But the GOP’s leadership isn’t happy. “They” plan to stick to the hate agenda for issues that don’t really exist, and avoid mention of The GOP’s hidden political agenda that really exists. The one Sen. Rick Scott is showcasing.
Apparently, the Republican Party’s leadership is doing all they can to ignore Rick Scott’s GOP 2022 agenda for the Republican party, hoping it will be forgotten by the election.
Dear Missouri legislators. It has come to my attention that people are widely using COPULATIVE VERBS. Time to remove this filth from our language!!! We need some legislation, and FAST!
Please don’t give the rethugs anything else to distract their cult-like followers.
First time in a long time I have applauded a speech by an elected official (UK and USA included)