Tennessee Current Events: Back to the Future

Tennessee welcomes you. Indeed it does. Unless you're gay, poor, have special needs, or discriminate against Christians.

I'm at the point that when someone asks me where I'm from, I can lie like a dog without batting an eyelid. Boston, Seattle, New York City, San Francisco, Denver. Take your pick. Anywhere but Anytown, Tennessee.

Don't get me wrong. I love my state. The scenery is stunningly beautiful, but I swan you-all, something besides manure must be getting mixed in with the fertilizer because our legislators seem to be going bat shit crazy and the populace either approves or is in la-la land after sippin' too much moonshine.

Old Still

Not satisfied with pushing legislation prohibiting saying "gay" in public schools, and requiring teachers to inform parents when their kids are gay, and another bill proposing that food be snatched away from kids on welfare if their grades are unsatisfactory, Republican State Senator Stacey "Don't Say Gay" Campfield is now backing a bill that would allow graduate students in psychology to opt out of "having to counsel LGBT patients."

Tennessee Homophobe-In-Chief Campfield and his Aide-de-Camp Joey Hensley also argue that gay students should be offered so-called reparative therapy, despite the fact that the Human Rights Campaign, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the American Psychological Association consider it dangerous, harmful and unethical.

Hensley - center

Campfield

Of course this august body of homophobes gets plenty of ideas and support from the Christian Right in it's drive to keep the state's citizenry straight and narrow. A bill now working its way through chambers would take away the right for Vanderbilt University police to make arrests. According to The Tennessee Family Action Council, an Evangelical Christian group led by David Fowler, "the university's nondiscrimination policy discriminates against religious Christians." How so? "Because the policy forces campus sanctioned Christian organizations to allow gay people to join them."

David Fowler

Is it any wonder that Tennessee ranks in the bottom ten for the number of high-school graduates? But wait, other geniuses in the state assembly have a solution. Let the private sector take over the running of the schools by offering vouchers. So what if the poor and special needs students get left behind?

No wonder teachers are so unhappy.

At the rate this state is moving forward - or backward - it's just a matter of time before the legislature bans teaching in classrooms altogether.

Back to the future - one room schoolhouse

ADDITION: This pending piece of legislation has nothing to do with gays or education but the impact on attracting new businesses to our state and perhaps encouraging the ones already operating to move on could prove disastrous to our already struggling economy. According to the 2010 census Tennessee ranks 8th from the bottom of the barrel among the 50 states in poverty.

The Bloggy-Wobbly Blues

The Bloggy-Wobbly Blues have had me by the throat for the past few weeks. Since I blame everything else on the right-wing, why stop now?

We've had some ugly times in this country of ours - during the hay days of the KKK, the McCarthy era, the horrid House Un-American Activities Committee, the John Birch Society - but they looked like tea parties compared to the current well financed movement that is hell-bent on destroying this country of ours. My country. The country for which I have a profound love, dammit.

In the early days of the Tea Party I thought they were just a silly bunch of fools running around with tea bags dangling from their silly hats and looking, well, silly - but essentially pretty harmless. I didn't agree with them, but could see where they might attract a small following of disgruntled Independents and Republicans, and even a few misguided Democrats. In the end, like so many such political movements, they'd probably fade into the sunset and become nothing more than a footnote in the nation's history books.

Had they stuck to their original narrow platform this wishful thinking on my part might have become reality. Instead the Tea Party, aided and abetted by Big Money, the Main Stream Media, the shamefully dishonorable Republican Party of today, and their own propaganda arm, Fox News, branched out and became the tree of, not life, but of destruction. Their silliness turned into an ugly tidal wave of anger, hate, racism, and astoundingly ignorant anti-government, anti-worker, anti-middle class, anti-woman, anti-education, anti-science, and anti-everything and anything that contributes to this country's unique place in the world.

And what the hell was John McCain thinking when he unleashed that vapid, illiterate, intellectually debased, narcissistic and fanatical woman on the American people? With her ascendancy to the MSM throne, every nut in America's woodwork has come out to play and they don't play by the rules.

I figured decent Americans would eventually come to their senses and reject these noisy, classless, selfish, narrow-minded, paranoid, twisted "morans" on the far-right and within the current Republican Party, a party that Abe Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller and William Buckley would most assuredly dismiss out of hand today.

Richard Freeman sums up the insanity that is the right in an article entitled, oddly enough, When the Country Goes Insane, which I highly recommend in its entirety.

Hate is stronger than logic and more than anything else, Republicans love their hate. It’s the only thing that gives them power. The more vicious, the more loony they are, the more they are treated like savants, like prophets channeling some higher wisdom, come though it may from the self-loathing gutter of political prostitution. They pull stuff out of their ass and brazenly pass it off as stone tablets. And people swoon.

Of course, you can understand why. The media genuflect before gibberish and idolize idiocy. They are the media-tors of a Gresham’s Law of public discourse where bad information drives out good. For their own slick whoring they become “players,” while everybody else is left with a debauched civic currency, a crushed economy, and a collective impotence that makes true democracy and true prosperity impossible.

And now we're seeing further hate as King Peter launches his investigation into the "radicalism of American Muslims." "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Muslim Religion?" Odd, isn't it, how the party of less spending is wasting tax-payer money for the benefit of one tyrant's ego?

America may not be broke but it is certainly morally and emotionally bankrupt. It will take far more than my puny little blog to stem this tidal wave of anger, hate, ignorance, inequality, paranoia, racism, and selfishness. And that, my friends, depresses the hell out of me.



UPDATE: RandomThoughts and I must be on the same wavelength. He just says it a lot better.