Texas sucks.* Or at least, their House does. 135 to SIX! Unbelievable.
You know who hurt children? Bad people hurt children. Mean people hurt children. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with it. A fucked-up person hurts a child, and the vast majority of child molesters are straight white men. Perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to foster children.
Ooooh. The anger. There are no words.
* To my Dear Readers from Texas (Lisa! Susan! for example), this obviously doesn’t mean you. I love y’all. And the music is good out there. But you can take your House and shove their ignorant, bigoted selves right out a very high, very pink, very feathery boa’d window. That’s what I think.
It’s okay, I was born and pretty much raised in Texas, and I hate it too. Abstinence-only education, banning gay marriage, banning gay foster parents, ABSTINENCE-ONLY, the list goes on.
I think that having such closed-minded and intolerant views of gays is a very self-centered idea. I mean it’s a “there are bigger fish to fry” situation. Instead of worrying about who loves whom, let’s worry about who KILLS whom (in George “Ahm a heeeick” W. Bush’s war).
Or better yet, let’s try to open our eyes that America is advancing WAY less rapidly in technology than some other countries are, and that our days of being a “super-power” are numbered.
But no. Instead, let us fret over, and make laws against, innocent people who pretty much have nothing to do with the bigger picture. I understand why people from the North come here and think that Texans are “so nice and pleasant.” Yeah we ARE nice. We ARE pleasant. As long as at first glance, you APPEAR “NORMAL.” (White, conservative, and a possible Bush-supporter.)
My friend (a Texan) once told me “I am against gay marriage, but I mean I’m not closed-minded, I just think about it from a scientific viewpoint. If you think about it, the absolute, most basic reason that two people get together, instinctively, is to reproduce. And gays can’t even HAVE kids.”
I almost busted him in the mouth. But I didn’t. I remained calm, albeit a bit twitchy. I mean, wow. Oh, duh, because all it takes to love and raise properly a child is a penis and a vagina. Wow.
I hate people sometimes.
Okay, whew, I didn’t think I’d write this much… Heh. Anyhoo, uh, love you, love your blog, it’s the only knitting blog that I subscribe to on Bloglines that doesn’t really have that much knitting content, and lastly but not leastly, we have the same name, only spelled differently (I’ve got the superfluous “e” thing working). Cool.
de·fen·es·tra·tion
Pronunciation Key (d-fn-strshn)
n.
An act of throwing someone or something out of a window.
Wow. I wonder how long we have to be an alleged civilization before people learn that “homosexual” and “pedophile” are not synonyms?
There are Swedish words for idiocy as well. I thought you might need some more than what the English language has just to cover all the angles of this particular idiocy, because there’s no idiotic word big enough for these idiots! Try these: idiot! (In Swedish too, yes) Kukskallar! (cockheads) trångsynta jävla fanskap (lots of badness in three words there) Bajs! (poo). Just let me know if you need more. It takes a lot of cursing to push Texas State House far enough down the dung heep!
I try really hard to control my hatred for people who hate, because that would make me a person who hates, wouldn’t it? But every time something like this happens, it reminds me how much I fucking hate those haters. (and I’m about to move to Georgia. I’m sure I’ll have my fill of haters there). Ugh.
Having worked in the field of child abuse…what are these dopes thinking? Give a child a home with people who love him or her. Sigh.
Being a teacher and having met MANY good parents and MANY bad parents…this is the stupidest thing I’ve heard of for a while. Jane
And just wait–if the anti-filibuster rules get passed, we’re in for Federal laws of the same type.
And they just OK’d drilling in the Arctic refuge.
WTF indeed.
My fantasy is that, for one day, every lawmaker who has had a gay “encounter” (naturally, few elected people would admit to a real human ongoing lengthy RELATIONSHIP) of any length would have a G written on their foreheads; any lawmaker who has had an abortion or has had a relationship that resulted in a pregnancy that was aborted would have a giant A on their foreheads; ditto adultery (lets use an X for this one); P for pornography addict; D for drug user, chronic or casual. This is my anti-hypocrisy plan. Feel free to add categories.
Thanks for excluding me from the Texas ickiness. The thing is, I don’t hate Texas. The state legislature, on the other hand–bleah. Texas as a whole seems to have more than its share of lame-os compared to some other states. But I think the particularly scary bent that the state legislature has been taking is not an accurate reflection of the wishes of the average Texan. Remember, Karl Rove and George W. got their starts here (basically, they’ve been trying to do to the entire country what they largely succeeded in doing here) and Tom DeLay is still a huge presence, including being behind the recent shamelessly partisan redistricting scheme. Basically, some really creepy characters have been working really hard for decades to get us to the point where this kind of law is being passed. That is not to say that homophobia is not a big problem in Texas as a whole (Austin being pretty exceptional in its queer-friendliness). But I don’t think it’s significantly worse than most parts of the country (though that’s a sad commentary). I think the difference between Texas and other “red states” that causes us to lead the pack when it comes to hate-spawned legislation is the systematic, organized, long-term efforts of Rove and DeLay and their ilk. So watch out, people, because they learned a lot from what they did here and they’re applying it elsewhere.
I wonder if the courts of Texas are intelligent enough to reach out and smack those lawmakers for their unintelligence. I have pretty much lost all faith in lawmakers and pray that the courts will continue to remind them what the CONSTITUTION says. They don’t have a legal leg to stand on. Thank goodness for checks and balances. Cheers for the six who stood up and said, “This is not right!”
oh my god, so SAD. how awful. people are..just…there are no words. I really hope the bigots in GA don’t catch wind of this.
at the church where I play the piano, there is a lesbian couple who are fostering a high school boy – he totally rocks – and there was a debate one night where some preacher dude was saying that kind of crap, gay parents are bad, blah blah. he totally went up to him and was like, hey, do you think I’d be better off with my abusive biological father, or my loving, awesome, lesbian foster mom???? um, hell,yeah!! let’s hope his attitude can change some minds in this country. and SOON.
We hates them forever and can’t seem to get rid of them – all the voting in the world doesn’t seem to improve ‘the ledge’ –
I live entirely too close to Sugarland TX, which is DeLay territory, although the folks there are starting to have second thoughts –
I really like Janine’s categories idea – we might make something of that –
Like Susan, I appreciate the distinction you’ve made in excluding me. I’ve been here for school about 18 months now and am appalled on virtually a daily basis. This latest action by the wealthy ignoramuses who control the House here is abominable, but only one more abomination in a long chain of abominable-ness. What can you expect from a place where a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has a security/police video camera attached to it and the statue STILL has been defaced more than five times in the past year? People seem proud to be racist and stupid and homophobic here. There is a tremendous amount of ugliness, yet *Austin* is the liberal part of the state.
Susan is correct in her statement that everyone else in the country should be on guard; Tom Delay and GWB *are* trying to do to the rest of the country what they have done here. I’m not as generous as Susan in thinking that most Texans are not like GWB and Delay; my observations during my stay here pretty much indicate that, except for the small island of liberality in Austin, Texans are very supportive of policies like this latest ludicrous and expensive grandstanding.
But. Don’t get depressed! And don’t bottle up your rage and just blog about it. Get angry! Stay angry! make those calls, write those letters. Find action groups that support your point of view. Do what you can to make your voice heard, because we all know that this House action isn’t right.
UGH. What is wrong with people? I just don’t even know where to start with this. The gay people I know are generally the most loving, kind, generous, wonderful people. As for the people who argue that people get married to reproduce…does that mean we shouldn’t allow people who don’t want to have kids to get married? Or what if one or both of the couple is infertile? Should they get divorced? Certainly, we can’t allow post-menopausal women to get married, because surely that goes against the whole idea of marriage. Wait, I got a little off-track.
Seriously, what about the crazy people who were in the news recently, where they’d fostered a bunch of kids, but basically had them locked up (literally, in chains!)? Those types are okay, since they were a straight couple? WTF????
I’m with you – mad as hell, and I can’t take it anymore. I’ve got to call some people there – my mom was born in Texas, so I feel like that gives me some sort of voice. Idiots.
Well, the Texans have to keep the Sheeple’s minds off of political shenanigans and so throwing some Val-yews to the Wal-Mart crowd just might take the heat offn the real evil. Can you say Tom Delay and that crowd? I scratch my head, wondering how I could be so out of touch with middle america but then I say to myself, self, the term Silent Majority may have changed since you were young. The silent majority did not vote. :o(
I feel like I should write a big, long diatribe – delurking as I am – but honesty, it’s just SO sad, isn’t it?
susan and lisa have already represented frustrated texas residents (i’m not quite a texan though i’ve lived here longer than anywhere else) but i wanted to add my voice to theirs as well.
it’s one of those things that you don’t even have to explain in order to show why it’s ridiculous.
You know who hurts children?
The 135 members of the Texas House who voted to keep children out of loving, nurturing, homes.
I may not hate them, but I surely despise their viciousness.
Ok, maybe I do hate them.
It’s not much better in Florida, where gays can’t adopt. Even if the children affected are the biological offspring of one of the partners, the other partner can’t adopt them. How stupid. And sad. And stupid. (Oh, I already said that. Still, it IS stupid.)
Rachael……there are no words strong enough to address the stupidity of this vote. (On many levels.) I have decided to start calling them the Texas “Out” House ’cause this stinks like shit.
Not everyone in Texas is so narrow minded. Not by a long shot. And it doesn’t have a thing to do with sexual orientation. It’s just basic common sense. As my 9yr old says…….”This just sucks”. Big Time.
Idiots. That’s all I have to say. Idiots.
(to be clear – Texas’s House consists of 135 idiots – not anyone associated with Yarn-a-go-go)
it’s a crying shame.
I thought this was 2005, not 1205. Why the hell do we have uncivilized ignoramuses in office still? Shouldn’t those people have been bred out of existence by now? For the love of Mike, how long have humans been living on this planet? And how long more before we learn that just because you’re gay doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you? I vote for Janine’s categories to be implemented.
Remember we’re in the Bible Belt here. Sadly, people seem to pick and choose what they seem to learn from it. Let’s skip over the compassion and kindness to your fellow man parts in favor of the firey pit of hell for all those not like us, shall we?
This kinda ties into why I would never wear a rainbow or a pink triangle symbol if I were gay… it reminds me too, too much of wearing Stars of David during the Holocaust. Also, I was discussing this with a classmate and saying that in 50 or 100 years we will look back with shame, similar to the way we feel about segregation (which is in my mother’s lifetime. SCARY) Yet she said there is no relation because gay people get all the same rights as us. HELLO?? Any gay person that has suffered the derision and hate on a daily basis, and then be denied rights when they have committed no crime – that sounds very similar to me.
Yep, some of us Texans are pretty damn ignorant, but the red state of Texas has a thoroughly blue heart. Austin is very liberal and very uncharactheristic of the rest of the state. I dont’ know what it’s gonna take to bring the rest of the state, hell, the rest of the nation, back to their senses. I suspect a revolution might do it but they are so messy. Keep speaking out – as long as we are allowed to.
Sure, this is great, because there are so many surplus families out there willing to foster needy children that we don’t need every single person who is willing to do it. Not!!
The welfare of children, it’ll be great if they actually started thinking about that instead of political grandstanding for the Religious Right.
Sigh
I’m late here, but I had to tell you how much I agree. In fact, I’ve never heard *anything* good about Texas (“good” defined as making me want to ever go within 3 states of it). From huge issues like this (child welfare) and the death penalty, to seemingly silly things like what grade a child should go into if they move in from out of state (long story, but they f’d that up, too), I’ve just never heard anything good about that state. (Well, okay, they did elect Ann Richards governor, but that was a really long time ago, and they seem to think it was a mistake in hindsight.) Can’t we just give it back to Mexico?