Rising to the Moment: Missing the Perfect Riposte

 

Haven't we all had an argument and later thought, "Oh, why didn't I say that? That's what I really should have said!"

Following the Deliberative Session about the Hampton warrant article granting public funds to a religious school, Mad Dog upbraided himself for what he failed to say.

In his defense, he had been so conditioned by the "three minute rule" that he was trying to limit the time he spoke, only to be told by the session moderator (after the session)  that no such limit applies during Deliberative Sessions. 

Here is the youtube of the Deliberative Session. The real business begins at 8 minutes in and continues for an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CClNXNeYBIw&t=23s

But that's what blogs are for--even blogs which are nearly invisible and read by only three people on a regular basis. (Actually, the blog gets a thousand hits weekly, but most of those are from Asia and Europe.)

So here's how Mad Dog would have ended his oration, had he been quick of mind and prepared for his opportunity at the Deliberative Session.

"And finally, tonight, I would like to point out that neither the principal nor the chairperson have used those five words, 'Separation of Church and State' in a sentence, even tonight when they've been directly challenged to do so. We can draw our own conclusions about why that is.

In fact, the only person, aside from me, to use those words was the lawyer, and she did so to say that this warrant article does not violate Church/State because of a court advisory from 1969, which she claims locks into settled law the practice of granting public funds to religious schools, when, in fact, when you look at it, that 1969 advisory said just the opposite. 

So the settled law she claims is no such thing.  

And she cited "Everson," a case she also claimed makes this article permissible, which, again, is wrong. Everson said if you are going to provide a service to all the kids in town, like busing them to school, you cannot say, "well you get a bus to school, unless you go to the Catholic school." A service to all kids must be to all kids, and you cannot deny that service because a kid goes to a religious school.

But, of course, this is not what is happening in Hampton, where we are not talking about providing a simple service to all kids in town, but we are providing a special slush fund, to a special group of kids at one religious school.

There is one aspect of Everson which might apply to Hampton: The town wants to provide for a school nurse for every Hampton child and it funds that nurse using the slush fund of the warrant article. But last year, when a group tried to amend the article to say that nurse's position was the only thing to be funded, that was defeated.

 The attorney did not mention that in the decision was the famous dissent by Justice Robert Jackson, (who represented America at the Nuremberg Trials) who noted you cannot separate a church school from the church, because without the school, the church goes extinct and so they are inseparable, inextricably linked. Jackson noted the Church would give up everything, anything, before it would ever give up its school, because without the school, the church disappears within a generation. Nobody has ever denied that.

And that is why opponents of the article have no problem with state funds for Catholic charities like soup kitchens, because those activities are not inherently religious, whereas a church school has an inherently religious feature, no matter how many non sectarian roles it may fill. 

The attorney did not mention the case in Maine, where the US Supreme Court said if there were no public school in a remote area of a state, the state could fund a religious school--an execrable decision which will surely be reversed once the composition of today's SCOTUS changes.  

But even that case is not as extreme as what we do every year in Hampton. There is no town in America which simply establishes its own town church, in defiance of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. 

Not even in Utah, the one state in the union dominated by a single church: even in Utah, the kids file out of the public schools at lunch, and go next do to the church school, where they do church things before going back to the public school for their secular education.

How do you establish a church for a state? Either you state as much: "The Anglican Church is the church of England," or you simply fund a church. That is route Hampton has taken.

No other town in America, at least of which I am aware, simply sets up a slush fund for a church and writes checks to cover its expenses. 

Hampton is unique.

And yet, those people who have made a living defending the First Amendment and Separation of church and state have refused to join this fight for  church/state separation: The American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans for Separation of Church and State have cowered and wailed: "It's all a losing cause." They have shown themselves to be empty suits. As Martin Luther King once said, "In the end, it is not the voices and arguments of those who oppose you you will remember, but the silence of your friends."

Dudley Dudley Kept Fighting

Mad Dog began by saying he would convince nobody at the meeting, and he was right. Those who came to vote for the article would do so against all argument; had the skies parted and twelve angels with horns arrived, the parishioners would still have done what they came to do, vote for the article.

As Upton Sinclair observed so long ago: 'It is difficult to bring a man to understanding when his income depends on his not understanding.'"

One thing Mad Dog did not say, one thing he edited out, and he is glad he did: When Mad Dog was in college  Martin Luther King delivered a speech on campus, which he likely had given in front of a hundred audiences, and his theme was that it is possible to gain the world and yet lose your soul. He elaborated on all the wealth America had gained, but how despite all these wonderful accomplishments, it might yet lose its soul because it turned a blind eye to injustices within its own lands and injustices it wrought abroad. And Mad Dog thought: This article is about $52,000 and this parish is in the same danger Martin Luther King warned about. 

PS:

Watching the youtube, Mad Dog notes the blonde woman, sitting in the audience, behind  the speakers, who came to support the opposition to the warrant article, and he is reminded even if they are few in number, there are still people who stand up against the prevailing crowd and are counted. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WewRMOImNH4&t=1839s

Who Are These People? It's Not Just Guns and Religion

 

The big question about Donald Trump is not Donald Trump. 

It has always been: who are these people who love him so?

Why did he know what he said from the very beginning? "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue, and it wouldn't matter. They'd still vote for me."

We all know people who love Trump and we know there are many different roads to perdition, but a study from the University of Chicago's Richard Pape has illuminated some surprising things about those who committed insurrection his behalf on January 6, 2021, which may be a distinctive group of Trumpsters.

It turns out those 420 men (nearly all men) who were arrested at the Capitol were not living in their parents' basements, unemployed, isolated, but the were mostly owners of their own businesses or CEO's or professionals with extensive connections in their communities. These men had something to lose; they were not loser, drifters. What they shared was they mostly came from counties where the demographics had shifted, where Biden won, counties which had shifted from deep Red, and these mostly white men saw their power and privileges were being displaced and "handed" to non whites. They were the "we will not be replaced crowd."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xuvdU2flSE&t=140s

They were straight out of Charlottesville.

"I would have thought," said Terrence O'Rourke, running for Congress in New Hampshire, after Charlottesville, "That with all the divisions in our country, all the deep differences of opinion, there would be one thing we could all agree on: There is no such thing as a very fine Nazi." (Which is how Trump described those torch carrying throngs in Charlottesville--"some were very fine people.")

Apparently, not.

This is not Bible thumping Iowa evangelical stuff. 

This is more the Thomas Friedman resentment from "What's the Matter with Kansas?" As Friedman observed, "All claims on the right...advance from victimhood." 

But how could these men, successful in so many ways, feel victimized? In this crowd, apparently, it wasn't resentment of being down, but the fear they were headed down.

For most Trump supporters, who are wage earners or tradesmen, not business owners, Friedman's 2004 book is still true: "Ordinary working class people are right to hate the culture we live in. They are right to feel they have no power over it, and to notice that it makes them feel inadequate and stupid."

But the group at the Capitol was more the "officer class" of the Trump Orcs.

Both groups have a right to be offended. 

I can see it myself, in my own experience, although none of this would ever push me into Trump's camp.

But consider my son, who applied to the same medical school from which my brother and I both graduated. Now this particular college  was for more than half a century a bastion of WASP privilege on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Classes consisted of 90 men and 4 women, all white and no Jews. Sometime in the early 60's they started admitting Jews, but my class had only one Black man and one Black woman. Many of the students had uncles, fathers, grandfathers who graduated from the same school. Then, in the late 1990's, someone decided this was not a good thing and the class shifted to over half women (likely a good thing) and more non whites than whites. So when my white son applies, he never gets an interview. It didn't hurt him, he was promptly accepted at the rival medical school across town, which, truth be told is likely a little better school, so no harm, no foul, right?

Well, maybe not. You can never know about school admissions, but from where I stood, he could not attend the school he deserved, because his spot was reserved for someone else who fit more desirable demographics. 

Then there is the case of the white man who applies for a faculty position at the University of California and asked on his application how hiring him would serve the goal of diversity at the university and what plans he had to foster diversity (and equity and inclusion) on campus. The guy taught engineering. He said, "I felt like I was being asked to take a loyalty oath."

And then there is the topic which causes my female friends to threaten to kill or castrate me or do the one before the other, whenever I talk about it: Campus sexual assault. 

Anyone who has ever gone to college since the 1960's knows that young women, in a variety of settings, are sexually assaulted, or at the very least, have sex forced on them after they have said, "No."  Some of these women have gotten inebriated, gone to the bedroom of the man, got naked and then said "No," but the argument is, "No means no, whenever it is said." 

The problem is, on most campuses if the man is accused he has no due process rights. The university courts do not operate by state court standards. Neither the man, nor his lawyer, are permitted to cross examine the accuser. He has no right to face or challenge his accuser. That cherished Ivy League spot he competed for since age 7 crashes and burns. 

But that is liberal orthodoxy: "No means no! Believe the Woman!"

This, too, is liberal orthdoxy.

And transgender athletes who went through male puberty, only to transition to female, and then win all the glittering prizes in women's swimming or track, that too sets aflame the liberal house of straw.

During the Weimar Republic, Berlin became a cauldron of experimentation, free love, gay love, sexual expression and the non urban population was appalled by this "liberal" revolution, this Sodom and Gomorrah. 

As the republic unraveled, 500 assassinations of political officer holders undid political stability--all but about 20 were assassinations of liberals. 

During the 60's assassinations took the Kennedy brothers, and Martin Luther King: liberals.

"Why aren't these conservative firebrands ever assassinated?" people asked. (Well, eventually someone shot George Wallace, but that was just some crazy, with no political agenda.)

Because, we all knew, the whole idea of conservative authoritarianism is power, control and violence to maintain all that. Liberals do not do violence; they abhor violence.

Which brings us back to the January 6 rioters. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, the man said. 

Archie Bunker is someone few people remember, but from his loins have sprung the Trump crowd today. 

 Archie Bunker : If your spics and your spades want theirrightful share of the American dream, let 'em get out thereand hustle for it like I done. Mike Stivic : So now you're going to tell me the black manhas just as much chance as the white man to get a job? Archie Bunker : More, he has more... I didn't have no million people marchin' and protestin' to get me my job.Edith Bunker : No, his uncle got it for him

Archie Bunker:
If your spics and your spades want their rightful share of the American dream, let 'em get out there and hustle for it like I done.

Mike Stivic:
So now you're going to tell me the black man has just as must chance as the white man to get a job?

Archie Bunker:
More, he has more... I didn't have no million people marchin' and protestin' to get me my job.

Edith Bunker:
No, his uncle got it for him.

Ghost Buses In the Sky! Ode to January 6th

 

(To the tune of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" --Hughie Edward Thomasson)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LtmZM0OWO8

Old Congress folk got talkin' one dark and windy day/

Inside a paneled hearing room Clay Higgins had his say/

When all at once upon the screen he flashed for all to see/

All painted white and bundled tight, white buses numbered three/

Their license plates were painted over, their bumpers burnished steel/

Their tires were black and shiny, their foul exhaust made us squeal/

Yippie-i-oh Yippie-i-ay!

Ghost buses in the sky!

Ghost buses in the sky!

Their windshields all streaked with mud, their windows burning bright/

Their drivers trying to control them, but they careened clear out of sight/

Cause they've got to drive forever on those roads up in the sky/

And we all know, they're loaded with agents and provocateurs from the FBI!

Yippie-i-oh Yippie-i-ay!

Ghost buses in the sky

Ghost buses in the sky. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OvB9kvLR7c

We Can Live Without Democracy: It Won't Be So Bad

 

As we contemplate the ascendancy of the Republican Party, there is some good news.

But first, we ought to consider what losing the Senate, the House and several governorships to Republicans might mean:

1/ Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Mitch McConnell, Gov. Abbott, will be sworn in and will strut and preen and continue doing what they are already doing.

2/ Congress might pass a national ban on abortion, but at least for 2 years, that will be vetoed by the Democratic President. 

Planned Parenthood will shut down, but other organizations will spring up to provide contraception, except where state laws outlaw contraception.  

Deaths from back alley abortions will increase slightly, but most media attention, especially through FOX NEWS will focus on women who got septic after incomplete abortions induced by abortion pills they bought online and once they recover, they will be tried for murder and the coverage of these trials will make FOX even more watched than it is today.

3/ Religious schools will receive state funds and private and charter schools as well.

Public schools in some, but not all  districts will collapse or simply regress into holding pens for the poor, the marginalized kids, who will simply quit and go looking for work or join criminal gangs. 

Laws to fund religious schools will pass in the Red States and some purple states and the Supreme Court will find them legal. 

Any teaching of the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, slavery  will be forbidden in public schools in all Red State as woke "Critical Race Theory."  Discussion in classrooms of anything which might reflect poorly on the American Past will be forbidden. 

This will mean, eventually, schools will teach only reading, writing and 'rithmetic. 

4/ The Supreme Court will strike down Affirmative Action. But that will, for now, affect only colleges, which will do just fine with less diversity, as the University of California system is currently doing.

 The Court will strike down efforts to prevent voter suppression or redistricting which will lock in Republican safe seats in Congress.

5/ Immigrants will continue to cross the Southern Border but much theater will ensue showing how harshly they are dealt with and Democrats will try to embarrass Republicans with images of children being mistreated in border prisons. Nothing will change along the Southern border, although much theater will play out there.

6/ More and more states will encourage open carry gun laws and gun deaths will increase.

7/ All efforts at ameliorating climate change will cease and coal fired power plants and oil drilling will stoke up. Plastic will choke the sea and its creatures.

8/ As resurgences of COVID occur, schools will remain open and the proportion of the population over the age of 70, which has been steadily rising as baby boomers age, will decrease, as high mortality rates cull grandparents across the nation. 

But the overwhelming of hospitals will likely be only brief, during January and then decline as the warm months ensue.

9/ Efforts to defund Medicare and Social Security or to privatize it will be vetoed by a Democratic President.

10/ A new form of entertainment: Congressional Inquisition, starring Jim Jordan and a whole host of Republican stars will bring Tony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff  and Nancy Pelosi before the Committees for a Republican attempt to imitate the January 6th hearings.

All and all, it won't be all that bad.

We've certainly been through worse: Only 100 years ago opposition to the draft, criticism of the government, of the war was outlawed and people went to prison. Eugene Debbs spent years in prison, ran for the Presidency from prison and got millions of votes. His crime was voicing opposition to sending American boys to fight in World War One.

The famous phrase, "You can't falsely shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater," was actually Oliver Wendel Holmes's line in a case about people who published a pamphlet opposing America's draft for World War One.  Holmes sent the men who wrote that pamphlet to prison for 10 years because he considered opposition to the draft "a clear and present danger" to the nation, its government and the war effort. It was not Holmes's best moment. He later recanted and decided people ought to be able to dissent without going to jail but those men who wrote the pamphlet languished in prison, so his change of mind did not help them.

Influenza was far worse than COVID, and the government's response to it was ineffectual and millions died in wave after new wave and the toll was not as high among the elderly as it was among young men and women.

There was no such thing as Social Security or Medicare 100 years ago and people died in poverty and old age was much briefer. In fact, without Medicare and Social Security, the likelihood is the nation, demographically, would be far younger, as the elderly would tend to die shortly after their 65th birthdays.

Gun violence in the South was just as high or higher in the 1920's as it is around the country today. Lynchings were even more common than now and the murderers of Emmet Till were acquitted because in the South it was not accepted that White men killing Black people should be illegal.

Before the 1920's America was open to immigration, but around 1924 a campaign among American elites, who embraced "eugenics" and who included Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and virtually all the faculties of the Ivy League, and they advocated restricted immigration of "subhumans" from Southern Europe and Jews and Africans and Asians. To allow non white immigrants was "racial suicide" according to Teddy Roosevelt, whose image is today carved  into Mount Rushmore.

Elite colleges refused to admit Jews and country clubs refused to admit Catholics. Irish need not apply for jobs and Negroes were controlled by Jim Crow in the South.

So, will the world we are entering be so much worse?

It will be unpalatable, illiberal and it will be Scoundrel Time, but that is no different than for most of our history. 

Making America Great Again, will mean going back 100 years, when life in America was remarkably mean and violent. But we'll be no worse off in 2023 than we were in 1923.

The problem is, really, we thought we were better. When Obama won, we thought we had turned a corner. 

We were fooling ourselves.

Ganging Up On The Women

 

Back in 1973, when men wanted something in New Hampshire, they got more than just a little bit testy when a woman stood in their way.

When Aristotle Onassis faced loss of control of his shipping business because Arabian oil giants controlled 40% of all world shipping and were moving in on his empire, he decided the best way to counter that was to go into the oil business himself and he hit on a plan to ship crude oil to the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire Coast, to convert those islands into a massive fuel dump, to pipe the crude underwater by pipelines to Rye and then up the coast to the Great Bay at Durham point, where he would build the world's most massive oil refinery, bigger by orders of magnitude than anything then in existence.

Sweeps her right off her feet, that cigarette

The governor of New Hampshire, Meldrin Thompson, heard this plan, and not being awfully bright and not inclined to ask too many questions, he said it was a terrific idea: There was an Arab oil embargo and gas lines were snarling America's mobility,  putting a crimp into the free wheeling American way of life  and someone (we can imagine who) said a refinery on the Great Bay would mean:

1. Huge bucks for New Hampshire, somehow; just exactly how was unclear since you could not tax oil refineries with local taxation.

2. An end to worries about where the next tank of gas or heating oil was coming from, which was not clear because gas for automobiles isn't what they pump out of oil refineries. 

3. Money, money, money, at least some of which would find it's way toward his office and perhaps to his own coffers.

Thompson was appalled that anyone, let alone a woman, would stand in the way of this gift from "one of the great men in the world."

The Georgia Peach

Thompson, of course, was just a puppet on the string hand of the editor of the Manchester Union Leader, William Loeb, who had put Thompson in office and who thought of himself as the real power behind the throne. 

Loeb was, by all accounts, an intensely strange human being, although, in his time, his special form of pathology was not thought particularly strange. But let us say, his interactions with women might well have been the inspiration for Hitchcock's famous movie, "Psycho." He lived with his mother a very long time and Mad Dog is not entirely sure if she was found strapped to a rocking chair at the end of his life. One thing we do know is his mother sued him to get back the money she lent him to start his paper and then he sued his mother's estate after she died. So their relationship was, shall we say, fraught. 

He married out of college but later, when he was in his 40's divorced to marry a 28 year old woman but that marriage ended in divorce and he married an heiress. The big question is, what were these women thinking? 

Maybe it was that pistol he carried under his arm in the shoulder holster--women cannot resist an armed man.

Mamma's Best Boy

When Dudley Dudley, a freshman member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, rose to oppose the oil refinery in her town of Durham, at Durham Point, Loeb became apoplectic.  

Here is what Loeb had to say about "Mrs. Dudley" in his newspaper (capital letters are his, not mine.)

Women, 50 years ago

"We are dealing here with arrogant know-nothings, educated beyond the capacity of their intelligence."

[Loeb was acutely aware of his own educational deficiencies and carried a life long grudge against people he who thought considered him their intellectual inferior.]

"Of course, you understand that these people would not do any of this work themselves. They would be the FIRST to scream if their television sets did not work, their electric toothbrushes didn't run, or if they couldn't get warm simply by turning on the thermostat."

Representative Dudley Dudley

[Republicans have long strummed that chord: These overeducated Democrats think they're smart but they can't do what electricians, HVAC, plumbers or carpenters can. Mr. Loeb did real work, mind you, writing stuff for his newspaper. He had men for electrical wiring for his TV and toothbrush.]

"BUT BECAUSE THEY ARE SO STUPID AND SO ARROGANT, THEY DON'T DRAW THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE OIL REFINERY AND THEIR OWN LIVES OF COMFORT. THEY THINK THEY CAN HAVE ALL THE GOODIES OF LIFE WITHOUT THE REFINERY OR ANY OF THE OTHER INDUSTRIAL WONDERS OF THE MODERN WORLD."

Of course, as Ms. Dudley pointed out, her constituents had all those wonders already without a refinery leaking 8,000 gallons of oil a year into the Great Bay.

"What these people fear," Loeb stormed, "Is in actuality a very tastefully designed (italics mine) refinery, which would not injure the atmosphere of the Town of Durham, but which would quietly send forth a live-giving [sic] stream of oil to take care of the needs of all the residents of New Hampshire, as well as a good section of New England, while providing immense tax returns in the town of Durham."

Scares the Hell out of Mr. Loeb

[Each of these claims proved demonstrably false, and were debunked one by one by Ms. Dudley and by Phyllis Bennett of the newspaper "Publick Occurrences" and by Nancy Sandberg, the local activist who started a community resistance organization "Save Our Shores."

Loeb concluded: "ALAS WE HAVE EDUCATED A CERTAIN TYPE OF JACKASS IN THIS COUNTRY TO BE SO ARTICULATE THAT HIS BRAYING OFTEN DROWNS OUT COMMON SENSE AND LOGIC!"

Loeb really did return, time and again, to the idea that university educated people are arrogant, think themselves better than the hardworking tradesmen who built New Hampshire and had no business in government making life difficult for the businessmen who profited from things like oil refineries.

When Aristotle Onassis offered to build an anti-pollution laboratory at the University of New Hampshire located near the refinery, Ms. Dudley noted, "Thanks for the pollution lab, Mr. Onassis, which--by the way--we wouldn't need if there was no refinery in the first place."

The governor and Mr. Loeb agreed to always refer to Dudley Dudley as "Mrs. Thomas Dudley, the housewife," and Loeb's editor a man named Finnegan, wrote in the Union Leader, "It's impossible to satisfy people who are determined to be unreasonable, or--in the case of Mrs. Thomas Dudley--are motivated primarily by a hunger for personal publicity," who, he assured readers was so craven for public attention, "We're sure the Durham housewife would have braved a hurricane to get her picture taken."

Other hostilities leaked out, "Consider the kind of illogic demonstrated earlier this year," Finnegan wrote, "by Mrs. Thomas Dudley, the Durham legislator who is currently the most voluble spokesman--whoops, spokesperson--against the oil refinery."

This is the tenor of the men arrayed against Dudley Dudley, Nancy Sandberg and Phyllis Bennett. 

Were they men at all? 

What sort of men would believe they could bully women simply by calling them names or refusing to refer to them as independent people with names and identities beyond that of being their husband's wives?

In today's world, we can clearly see the traits for what they reveal--men who cannot win by argument, so they resort to the ad hominin attack. They are the little men, who never saw a shot fired in anger at themselves, but who try to bathe in some imagined reflected glory of manhood, of male gender. I may not be smart enough to debate Mrs. Dudley, but I'm a man, which is all I need to be.

On Respecting Pronouns

 

Let us agree: People ought not be denigrated because they are Black or White or homosexual or because they consider themselves "gender fluid." 

Recently, a boy who plays football at Exeter High School was suspended after a conversation he was having with another boy on a school bus was overheard and the girl who confronted him engaged him in a texting exhange with him, which she reported to the high school principal the next day. 

The boy did three things, if online reports are to be believed:

1/ He maintained that there are only two genders: male and female. He posited this as a statement of fact or at least of his belief.

2/ He, or his parents, or some other people, justified his statements as "Christian belief."

        This, of course, muddies the waters. We all would be better off if this never got injected into the argument. It would be cleaner if he simply said, "I'm not convinced there are more than two genders. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. You may disagree but you cannot make me believe differently. It's my right to disagree."

3/ He expressed frustration with the texts from his interlocuter by using an abbreviation for a profanity: STFU.

Some reports have claimed he was suspended for the profanity, but that would violate the most recent Supreme Court ruling on a similar case. 

Significantly, he told the girl to "leave me alone." Since when does a bully say that?

In any event, he was not texting a transgender so he cannot be accused of bullying. 

In fact, a case might be made the girl on the bus was bullying him. 

Report from FOX News:

A female classmate identified as A.G. overheard them and allegedly chimed in, "There are more than two genders!" A.G. is neither transgender nor nonbinary but believes in gender fluidity, the suit says.

A.G. later obtained M.G.'s phone number, and the pair had a contentious exchange, the papers allege. 

"Gender and sex mean the same thing," he wrote her. "There are only two genders and sexes."

She insisted that gender is different from the biological sex one is assigned at birth. "Your [sic] in high school you should know this," she shot back. 

"I also know that ur a bozo," he replied. "Just stfu and leave me alone," he wrote, according to the lawsuit. 

The next day, M.P. was pulled out of his science class by the vice principal and his football coach, William Ball. 

The pair confronted him with the text messages A.G. had turned over and chastised him for "not respecting pronouns."  

Here are some issues raised by this kerfuffle: 

1/ LEGAL/ADMINISTRATIVE:

    There are questions about 

         a/ Why the student was suspended from playing in a football game:

Reports thus far do not show the texts between the football player and the girl who accosted him on the bus, but we are told in some reports he was called into the principal's office with his football coach and told he had violated the rule against disrespecting other students by refusing to use the proper pronouns. 

         b/ Who actually suspended the play, his coach or the principal?

Apparently, the school now says the coach suspended the player for not being a proper "role model" owing to his refusal to use the proper pronoun. This administrative sleight of hand gets the principal off the hook and makes the coach the enforcer. But the same offense is still there, presumably, failure to pronoun properly. (The idea of football players being "role models" for kindly or noble or even civil behavior is a bit beyond the pale, one might think.)

And what gives the principal and faculty of Exeter High School the right to suspend a football player from playing in a game without a trial of that student before his peers or perhaps a panel of parents because he expresses doubts about forcing new rules for pronouns?

         c/ Whether suspending the player from playing in a game is different than suspending him from school

There are lots of cases of students being suspended for violating stated school rules: In Tinker, in 1969, a girl was suspended for wearing an armband to protest the Vietnam war and the Supreme Court said students do not leave their right to free speech at the school house door. Later, in the infamous "Bong Hits for Jesus" case, the Supreme Court reversed this. Later still the Court held for a girl who expressed her rejection of the school cheerleading squad in profane terms.

2/ CULTURAL:

        a/ What is the basis for a legal prohibition of a transgender male to female person who has not had "gender affirming surgery" i.e., still has scrotum and penis stripping naked in a "girls' locker room"?

There are laws against public nudity. A man or a woman walks down the street or into a store completely naked; he or she does not touch anyone, may not even speak to anyone, so how can their very presence cause harm? Well, we do accept this would make people uncomfortable, but what is the harm? If you accept laws on public nudity are appropriate, then why would laws against a male transexual undressing in a girls's locker room be unacceptable?  

        b/ What harm is done to a transgender person if others refuse to refer to that person as "her" or "him" or "they" and what harm is done to those who are asked to use those pronouns as the transgender person requests?

Now, if you say the principle is everyone deserves to be called by the name they wish to be called by, the case of Cassius Clay and Muhammed Ali springs to mind.  As Howard Cosell, ne` Howard Cohen, famously said of Ali, "A man has a right to be called by the name he wants to be called by." And I agreed with that. Is it not a right for a person who was born with a penis and testicles to be referred to as "she" or "her" if he wants to be? No, that is not a name but requires a lot more mental gymnastics in the mind of the average citizen. 

Thus, if Pat wants me to refer to her as "them" and I cannot get my mind around that and say, "Pat will not be at jazz band practice because she has a dental appointment," have I violated Pat, who in fact wants me to say, "Pat will not be at jazz band practice because they have a dental appointment?" Or should it be, "Pat will not be at jazz band practice because they HAS a dental appointment?"

We are not simply changing a name here, we are changing the agreement between singular and plural and that takes a lot more neurons.

By what right does Pat or the principal of Exeter High School force me to wrap my head around a new English language Genderspeak when I, as a high school student have spent 16 years learning a non gender fluid English and am, in fact, likely to face a whole different set of rules when I take my SAT exams?

Why is it "disrespect" to Pat rather than Pat's disrespect to me if I insist on using a set of pronouns I do not even think about now, which are lodged somewhere below my cerebral cortex when I use them? Why are Pat's sensitivities more important than my own?

                

3/ SCIENTIFIC:

       a/ How is "biological sex" different from gender?

One of the things the girl confronting the football player said was that as a high school student, he should know that biological sex is different from gender. Which raises the question: Is there a course which covers this in sufficient detail at Exeter High School?

       b/ What is "gender dysphoria" and what is a transexual?

Whereas we do not know what the prevalence of homosexuality in the nation is--it has been variously estimated between 3% and 10% (Kinsey, now mostly discounted)-- but the prevalence of transgender gender dysphoria is easier to grasp since most of these folks seek medical attention in Transgender Clinics, and this is said to be about 0.3%. So the numbers of transgenders are small and it may well be that most people have never actually met or gotten to know a transgender person.

Can we even begin to discuss the issue of gender dysphoria without first knowing something about normal sexual differentiation and about disorders of sexual differentiation?  I would submit the answer is no. Until you know something about what happens in people whose known biochemistry is askew, it is very hard to imagine what folks with gender dysphoria may be going through. 

Born female, penis at 12

Does Exeter High School even have a course in gender issues which covers the genetics, endocrinology and psychology of sexual differentiation, disorders of sexual differentiation and gender dysphoria? 

Would the faculty or administration of Exeter High School pass a final exam in such a course?

Patients with XY chromosomes

As an endocrinologist, in whose specialty this whole topic traditionally falls, I hereby volunteer to present such a course to the Exeter HS faculty and administration, open to every citizen of the Seacoast, if anyone cares to actually listen.

Gdansk, Poland

Spoiler alert;  If I taught the course, I would make the case that transgender folks should be treated with kindness, as should everyone, but Transgender Clinics have become profit centers and do not serve the best interests of the patients they see or the community at large.