You know you’re in a fascist state when they plan to arrest librarians

Right next door to me is the state of North Dakota. They’re up to no good.

Books containing “sexually explicit” content — including depictions of sexual or gender identity — would be banned from North Dakota public libraries under legislation that state lawmakers began considering Tuesday.

The GOP-dominated state House Judiciary Committee heard arguments but did not take a vote on the measure, which applies to visual depictions of “sexually explicit” content and proposes up to 30 days imprisonment for librarians who refuse to remove the offending books.

You might be wondering what the libraries are peddling. Hard core porn? BDSM? Incest how-tos? Nah. The Republicans are happy to tell you what disturbs them.

House Majority Leader Mike Lefor, of Dickinson, introduced the bill and said public libraries currently contain books that have “disturbing and disgusting” content, including ones that describe virginity as a silly label and assert that gender is fluid.

But…virginity is a silly label! And gender is clearly fluid! He goes on to whine that being exposed to such ideas diminishing conservative myths causes addiction, poor self esteem, devalued intimacy, increasing divorce rates, unprotected sex among young people and poor well-being. I would argue instead that insisting that a person’s worth is measured by the presence of a hymen, or that non-heterosexual desires make you a bad person, is far more damaging to people’s well-being.

Another thing that bugs me is that borders aren’t magic. Minnesota is generally progressive, but that’s largely thanks to the urban population on the east side of the state. I live in far western Minnesota, practically next door to the Dakotas, and I suspect the general sentiment of the rural population here is far more sympathetic to the North Dakota frame of mind. It makes me much less inclined to associate with many of the townies, and deepens the town-gown divide around here. It’s hard to get to know your non-university neighbors when you’re afraid of turning up that Dakota flavor of bigotry and ignorance.

When politicians interfere in health care…

Oh boy, the “partial birth abortion ban” people have moved into the Minnesota legislature, and are trying to ban abortion by inventing fictitious medical procedures and lying about them. Here’s Bill Lieske, a newly installed Republican legislator, trying to make his mark by being a dumbass.

We have born-alive individuals, and we must protect the born-alive. In this case, a partial birth abortion, the child is, in part, born alive.

The women on the committee who spoke out against the nonsensical amendment Lieske proposed were exactly right: politicians should not be practicing health care. They also point out that the amendment is about a non-existent medical procedure — it’s just grandstanding by a baby conservative.

The term “partial birth” is a misnomer.

But “partial-birth” is not a medical term. It’s a political one, and a highly confusing one at that, with both sides disagreeing even on how many procedures take place, at what point in pregnancy, and exactly which procedures the law actually bans.

The confusion is the point. They want you to think all abortions are about murdering babies, when they’re actually about saving the lives of women. All you have to do is look at the source of the term.

The term was first coined by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in 1995 to describe a recently introduced medical procedure to remove fetuses from the womb. Alternately known as “dilation and extraction,” or D&X, and “intact D&E,” it involves removing the fetus intact by dilating a pregnant woman’s cervix, then pulling the entire body out through the birth canal.

There’s a reason for this procedure, and it’s entirely about minimizing harm to the woman. That’s not a factor in Republican thinking.

The further along a pregnancy is, the more complicated — and the more controversial — the procedures are for aborting it. Abortions performed after the 20th week of pregnancy typically require that the fetus be dismembered inside the womb so it can be removed without damaging the pregnant woman’s cervix. Some gynecologists consider such methods, known as “dilation and evacuation,” less than ideal because they can involve substantial blood loss and may increase the risk of lacerating the cervix, potentially undermining the woman’s ability to bear children in the future.

Two abortion physicians, one in Ohio and one in California, independently developed variations on the method by extracting the fetus intact. The Ohio physician, Martin Haskell, called his method “dilation and extraction,” or D&X. It involved dilating the woman’s cervix, then pulling the fetus through it feet first until only the head remained inside. Using scissors or another sharp instrument, the head was then punctured, and the skull compressed, so it, too, could fit through the dilated cervix.

Haskell has said that he devised his D&X procedure because he wanted to find a way to perform second-trimester abortions without an overnight hospital stay, because local hospitals did not permit most abortions after 18 weeks.

Now Lieske is probably going to defend his meddling in women’s health by claiming that he is a doctor. After all, all of his campaign ads announced that he was “Dr. Bill Lieske” over and over. What he doesn’t emphasize is…

He’s a chiropractor.

Also, he has an ugly haircut.

The feminine isn’t an absolute

I’m not going to take advice from anyone with the word “alpha” in their username, a rule that seems to work fairly robustly.

It’s strange that anyone would have such a binary view of how women should be. You know that it’s possible to appreciate spiders without chugging beer and smashing cans on your forehead, right? And that arachnophobia isn’t a parameter on the femininity spectrum? People are more complex than that.

But who am I to talk? My vision of idealized femininity was fixed in the 1960s.

I wonder what she thinks of spiders? I’m pretty sure she would have seen them as one of our fellow creatures, man, you know, like part of nature.

“Scientist” is a gender-neutral term

I’d already known that “scientist” coined by William Whewell in the 19th century, but only today did I learn the context. The first scientist by name was Mary Somerville, and Whewell had to invent the term to describe her!

Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell — then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum — wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word scientist to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point — “man of science” — clearly couldn’t apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn’t call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist — she had written with deep knowledge of all these disciplines and more — Whewell unified them all into scientist. Some scholars have suggested that he coined the term a year earlier in his correspondence with Coleridge, but no clear evidence survives. What does survive is his incontrovertible regard for Somerville, which remains printed in plain sight — in his review, he praises her as a “person of true science.”

He still managed to squeeze in some sexist stereotyping, but that’s cool. Read the whole article to find out what remarkable person Somerville was.

I won’t do that

I am constantly surprised by all the companies that want to pay me money to advertise on my YouTube channel. It’s a tiny channel, infrequently updated, so they must be desperate if they’re reaching out to me. This latest offer, though…guess what I think of it?

Avalanche Software, Inc.
Centrum Sumavska, Sumavska 416/15, 602 00
Brno, Czech Republic
Esteemed Prospective Partner:
Our company has found your YouTube channel interesting as a subject to promote our game “Hogwarts Legacy”.
We have been exploring your channel for some time and we enjoy your creativity so we are sure that we can be useful to each other!
If you are interested in our offer, please reply to this email and we will send you a media kit which includes a promotional video and the terms of the advertising contract!
Kind regards,
John Bahringer

First, I am put off by dishonesty. No, you didn’t find my channel interesting, and you probably never even looked at the content. You’ve got a ranked list by order of the number of subscribers, and you’ve been working through it and found me down near the bottom. That’s it.

But secondly, and more importantly — advertise Hogwarts Legacy? HELL NO. You want me to contribute to the coffers of wicked transphobe and bad writer JK Rowling? Not gonna happen. Never in my lifetime. I’ll go the other way and suggest that everyone should boycott Hogwarts Legacy. I’m going to side with Jessie Gender on that.

In addition to being an obnoxious writer of tedious potboilers, that thread also shows that JK Rowling can’t read.

He’s making a list…

There’s something suspicious about making lists, especially when the list-maker clearly has nefarious intent.

Today it has been reported that Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas attempted to get a record of all transgender people who have legally changed their gender on their drivers license in the state. Although the initial request only asked for the monthly numbers of those who changed gender markers, the request did state that they may need drivers licenses and ID numbers later – some of which were eventually delivered. This comes months after Paxton sent a letter to Governor Greg Abbott that stated the parents of transgender children in Texas should be investigated for child abuse. This policy has been nearly universally decried and led to harsh investigations and suicide attempts among trans youth in Texas. Fears of registries continue to grow in the transgender community as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and other states all consider policies that would create lists of trans people in the state. These lists can ultimately be used for nefarious means, especially if you believe that states will continue to target transgender people with laws designed to further restrict and criminalize their lives.

I wonder why he wants a list of all the trans folk in Texas? Do you think it’s so they can deliver appropriate health care more efficiently?

Good news this morning!

The Senate passed the “Respect for Marriage” Act, which would be a federal law protecting the right of gay marriage and interracial marriage. It’s amazing to me that this could be an issue anymore, but all the Democrats voted for it, and they persuaded 12 whole Republicans to join them. Twelve is looking at the glass as a quarter full, I guess; we could also note that 36 Republicans voted against it. We really have to get rid of those ugly antiques.

Now do the same thing and pass a federal law protecting abortion rights, OK?

Keep talking, Herschel Walker

The man running for the office of dumbest politician in America has put out another ad, this time slamming trans athletes…right after the Club Q shooting. It’s not just the bad timing, but also that he has teamed up with Riley Gaines, the indignant transphobe, which opens the door to sick burns.

Barely a day after a deadly LGBTQ bar shooting killed two transgender people and three other patrons, Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker (R) released a campaign ad slamming trans athletes. Democrats are pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ campaigns like Walker’s as the type of rhetoric that led to the murder of five people at Colorado Springs bar Club Q on Saturday night.

The video featured Riley Gaines, a self-described 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer. In March, Gaines tied for fifth place with trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Gaines has been complaining about it ever since.

Fifth place. She’s complaining about having to share a teeny-tiny footnote in a record book with a trans woman. That’s a photo of two cranky losers up there.

High heels vs AR15, guess who won

It was an epic battle in Club Q: one hateful gunman inflamed with the rhetoric of conservative pundits versus a room full of unarmed dancers and partiers, and one guy who took action, Richard Fierro.

As he looked up from the floor, Fierro spotted the shooter’s body armor and instead of running from the attacker, moved toward him, grasped the body armor, then stripped suspected gunman Anderson Aldrich of his rifle and beat him bloody with it.

“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Fierro told the Times, describing a scuffle in which he found himself atop the 300-something pound gunman, who had momentarily lost his grip on his rifle. “I just know I have to kill this guy before he kills us.”

He said he enlisted the help of another patron, Thomas James, to secure the rifle so it was out of reach of their attacker.

He also enlisted the help of a drag performer from the club, asking them to kick the gunman. The performer, he said, “stuffed a high-heeled shoe in the attacker’s face.”

That was so satisfying to read. That’s what we all need to do, fight back against the gutless cowards.

An important part of the heroism, though, is that Richard Fierro was at that club with his family because he loves the lgbtq community, wants to support their businesses, and enjoyed their company. He’s on the side of light.

His wife also made a statement.

With an incredibly heavy and broken heart we lost Raymond, who had been a part of our lives since our daughter was in high school. Raymond was Kassy’s boyfriend. We are going to miss him and his bright smile so much. We are going through a lot of emotions as a family and as a brewery. The loss of lives and the injured are in our hearts. We are devastated and torn. We love our #lgbtq community and stand with them. This cowardly and despicable act of hate has no room in our lives or business.

I’m proud that this family is on our side. Also disgusted at the Tucker Carlsons and Chaya Raichiks and all the Christian evangelicals who have been encouraging the hate for so long