Were you aware that the Daughters of the American Revolution had a big transgender problem?
No? Well, count yourself among pretty much everyone not named Gary Palmer or Robert Aderholt in this state. Because those two Alabama congressmen have announced their support for legislation that would limit membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution organization to only biological females.
What in the what?
Are Republicans trying to lose the midterms? Is this some sort of tricky maneuver you all are pulling because you know Donald Trump is insane and you’re trying to save the country by being bad at the job?
Because otherwise, I don’t get it.
Do you know how great everything in my life would have to be going and how clear my schedule would have to be before I’d check in on how the DAR folks are doing?
And even then, I wouldn’t care if the group’s members passed their own rules that allowed for transgender females to join their ranks. Because that’ what they did – passed a measure a few years ago opening membership to all females, and then reaffirmed that commitment to their rules recently.
But here come the MAGAs in Congress with legislation to put a stop to it.
Y’all know gas is over $4 a gallon, the job market has been shrinking and housing is already considered by some economists to be in a recession, right?
Seriously, how do you skip over the rising costs of everything, the stagnant wages of everyone, the exploding housing costs on every block and the can’t-afford-a-cold cost of health care and start worrying about the genitalia of members of a private group that can trace their lineage back to the Revolution? And why would you possibly care?
Of all the weird things that Republicans have become infatuated with over the last few years, the transgender issue remains the weirdest. I’d bet more than 90 percent of these people have never encountered a transgender individual and can’t articulate to anyone why they have such a problem with them.
But in a world in which we’re allowing Trump and the sycophants he’s installed to run our government cover up organized child rape by rich people, we have a whole bunch of Republicans – and some WNBA player – amazingly pretending that transgender athletes, which make up less than .01 percent of all youth sports participants, are a “threat to little girls.”
The remarkable power of fear marketing.
It’s exactly how we ended up the sorry state we’re in right now – people lapped up the fear like thirsty dogs and were convinced that everyone who didn’t look like them, believe like them or love like them were the root cause of all that ailed the country. They were eating the dogs. They were vermin. They were poisoning the blood of America.
We had to get rid of DEI and fairness initiatives. We had to stop being so hard on those racist white people. We had to pardon the poor insurrectionists who broke into our Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of a legal and fair election.
If we did all of those things – and if we shot people dead in American streets in an effort to terrorize Hispanic people – the country would be back on track in no time.
Right?
Welp, 18 months into that little exercise and we’re worse in every measurable way. Way worse in most of those ways.
Because it was never about the Hispanics. Or transgender people. Or the Black people. Or the Haitians.
In fact, there was only one minority group at fault – the billionaires.
That’s the root problem of everything that ails America right now. Too much wealth is concentrated at the very tip-top of the economic ladder. The top 10 percent of American earners hold nearly 70 percent of the wealth in this country.
There was only one other time in American history in which the gap was that wide.
A Great Depression immediately followed.
That lesson should tell us that the way we’re living right now is unsustainable. Such wealth at the top inflates prices for everything and everyone on down the line. And those folks at the bottom aren’t seeing their wages keep up. Not even close.
Republicans have no answers for this problem. Because all of their fiscal policy ideas revolve around cutting taxes and fees that are paid by rich people and rich corporations.
That’s why their answer to high prices and looming economic disaster is: “Um, did you notice that transgender person trying to get into the Daughters of the American Revolution?”
