Looking out of the window

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, about how the best way to defang would-be fascists is to laugh directly into their faces, today we consider a second issue of political importance, to wit: why have the media completely dropped the ball with regards to fact-checking?

As British investigative journalist Nick Davies put it, "Journalists interview a woman in one room who says it's sunny.  Then they interview a man in another room who says it’s raining.  Your job, as a journalist, is not to simply write up what you have been told.  Your job is to look out of the damned window."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roger H. Goun from Brentwood, NH, USA, Reporter's notebook (2330323726), CC BY 2.0]

Instead, the trend has been for journalists to nod sagely as the person makes whatever lunatic pronouncement they're going on about at the moment, giving the impression to observers that it makes perfect sense -- and empowering said lunatic to repeat the claim again later, only louder.

Take, for example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is odious for many reasons but not least because of his staunch resistance to taking measures toward containing COVID-19.  At a rally, DeSantis came out not only against vaccine mandates, but against the vaccine itself.  "Almost every study now has said with these new boosters, you're more likely to get infected with the bivalent booster."  Of course, the truth is that zero studies have said that, but because virtually no one called him on it, he said it again at a recent rally -- "Every booster you take, you’re more likely to get COVID as a result of it."

Not a single reporter raised a hand to question the veracity of that remark, or to ask him to name one single study that has supported the contention.  The scary thing is that this is a lie that could, and probably has, cost lives.

Then we have the time-honored approach of candidates and elected officials realizing they've overstepped, and then saying, basically, "You didn't hear me say what you just now heard me say," and the media letting them get away with it both times.  Take, for example, Tulsa mayoral candidate Brent VanNorman, who stated explicitly that we need to require elected leaders to be Christian:

I think that if you go back and study the history of our nation and our founding, the pulpit was the primary tool [during] the Revolutionary War [for] communicating to people.  But [also], public officials had to be Christians in many areas and we’ve gone so far away from that and we need to get back.

A couple of days later, at least he was asked to clarify his comments by the Tulsa World, and if he really did mean that only Christians should hold office (despite the fact that this is exactly what he said).  VanNorman's response was:

No, no, no, no.  My point would be that I think people that are informed by Christian values make good public servants and they have a servant’s heart.  And so I would hope that, as a result of my value system, in which I care for humanity and … I try to treat people with equality, I try to treat people with love, and there’s a moral foundation that gives me that I hope people would appreciate, and that I hope that my motives are pure in what I’m doing and I’m not doing them for the wrong reason.

I'd like to tell you that he was drowned out by people shouting, "But that isn't what you said!"  But that'd be a lie.

Last, we have the statement by Donald Trump to a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, that should scare the absolute shit out of everyone, left and right and center alike -- in which he says that if he's elected president, it'll be the last time you'll ever get to vote:

I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote.  And again Christians, get out and vote, just this time.  You won’t have to do it anymore.  Four more years you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine.  You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.  I love you, Christians...  I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote.  In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.

Trump's campaign and right-wing members of Congress seemed to realize immediately how this came across -- and what bad timing it was to say the silent part out loud.  Sure, this might be their intent, but stating it to a room full of people was... impolitic, to put it mildly.  The campaign issued a statement to "clarify" it (when to damn near everyone it was plenty clear enough already), saying he was referring to  the "importance of faith," "uniting the country," and "bringing prosperity."

No, what he was referring to was becoming dictator-for-life.  Is there another meaning of "you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians" that I'm unaware of?

Tom Cotton, Republican senator from Arkansas and de facto leader of the Trump Toady Coalition, went even further, saying that of course Trump had been joking.  "I think he’s obviously making a joke about how bad things had been under Joe Biden, and how good they’ll be if we send President Trump back to the White House so we can turn the country around," Cotton said in an interview on CNN's State of the Nation.  "And that’s what the American people know.  For four years, things were good with President Trump.  We had stable prices, a growing economy, peace and stability around the world."

Notwithstanding the obvious lie about Trump's statement being "a joke," Cotton's assessment of the four-year chaos of the Trump presidency comes directly from CloudCuckooLand.  But no one called him on it.

If that wasn't clear enough, Fox News's Laura Ingraham interviewed Trump on Monday -- surely a sympathetic audience if ever there was one -- and gave him multiple opportunities to walk back his statement, or at least moderate it to assuage some of the horrified criticisms.  Trump -- whose motto is "death before admitting an error" -- refused, and merely doubled down on his original statement.  When Ingraham saw that he wasn't going to back off, she did -- irresponsible, but considering Ingraham's track record, unsurprising.

I've recently seen posts on social media lauding people like Walter Cronkite, who was one of the newscasters I remember well from when I was a kid.  He reported the news, and -- astonishingly -- you could not tell what his own political views were.  (To this day, I don't know if he was a conservative or a liberal, or somewhere in between.)  The watershed moment in the change we see from then to today was the repeal of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which opened the doors for the partisan, news-media-as-entertainment circus we have today.  I don't see any hope of its reinstitution, but we could go a long way toward repairing the damage if the people in news media reaffirmed their commitment to truth above politics.

Put more succinctly: it'd be nice if journalists started doing their fucking job.

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Zealotry

Today, we have three stories that are particularly interesting in juxtaposition.

The first one is heartbreaking.  A unique species of cactus, the Key Largo tree cactus (Pilosocereus millspaughii) is now extinct in the Florida Keys.  It's a tall, slender, spiny plant with white, garlic-scented flowers that open at night and are pollinated by bats.

[Image credit: photographer Susan Kolterman]

Once abundant, it has been declining throughout the twentieth century, but took a nosedive at the century's end -- 84% of the surviving plants died between 1994 and 2017.  It still held on with a population of 150 individuals until Hurricane Irma, but the real culprit seems to be saltwater intrusion into the species's habitat.  By 2021 only six remained, and pieces were harvested by botanists for cultivation before the remaining individuals died.

As such, it has become the first species extirpated as the direct result of climate change and rising sea levels.

"We are on the front lines of biodiversity loss," said George Gann, executive director of the Florida Institute for Regional Conservation.

The second story comes out of Copernicus Climate Change Service, the research arm of the European Union's climate monitoring service.  New data released last week showed that for the last twelve months straight, the global average temperature has been 1.5 C higher than the average in pre-industrial times.  Anyone claiming this is some kind of natural warm-up is simply wrong.  There's no other way to say it.  This global temperature spike is orders of magnitude higher than anything we've ever seen before -- to find anything even close, you have to go back to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 54 million years ago, and even that probably happened at a slower rate than what we're seeing today.

Carlo Buontempo, director of the CCCS, was unequivocal.  "Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm," he said.  "This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans."

The last story is where it gets ironic -- because Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who presides over one of the lowest-lying and most vulnerable states in the United States, and the home (well, it was) of the first species to be extirpated because of climate change, just signed a bill that (1) strikes any mention of climate change from state statutes, (2) outlaws offshore wind turbines, and (3) deregulates the use of natural gas.

"We're restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots," DeSantis said.  Probably because that sounds better than "fuck the long-term habitability of the planet, we've got to protect the fossil fuel industry."

We've got an election coming up in November, and the choice couldn't be clearer.  DeSantis (whose term doesn't expire until 2027, unfortunately), and the rest of the GOP, have rejected science, data, and evidence for the sake of short-term expediency and keeping the endorsement of the oil companies.  There's a plethora of other reasons to vote against them; their anti-education stance, the book bans, their targeting of LGBTQ+ people, the horrifying far-right partisanship of the Supreme Court, and their unquestioning support of a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon and sexual abuser, not to mention a compulsive liar.

But this issue affects every single individual on the planet.  If your mind isn't made up yet, then consider that.  Only one party seems to have the slightest concern about addressing the problem of climate change.  Yeah, what they've done thus far hasn't been all that impressive, either, but at least they're not denying it outright and calling the people who care -- and the ones who actually know some science -- "radical green zealots."

I'll choose the ones who are at least making an effort over the science deniers in half a heartbeat.

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Storm of controversy

As I write this, category-3 Hurricane Idalia is currently battering parts of northern Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.  It strengthened with astonishing speed, going from a tropical depression to (briefly) a category-4 hurricane in a little over two days.  Another result of anthropogenic climate change -- warm surface water is the fuel for tropical storms, and this summer, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean is (in the words of one climatologist) "bath water."

This vindication of the facts that (1) Florida, and indeed the entire Gulf Coast, are frequent targets for storms, and (2) climate scientists have been predicting bigger storms for decades, has not had the effect you'd expect if the world was halfway sane, which is for people to say, "Oh, I guess this is what the scientists warned us about."  No, instead it's created bigger and better crackpot theories.  The storm is still howling and already I'm seeing conspiracy theorists posting that:

• Idalia is a "false flag" to get people to buy into the "climate change scam."
• Idalia is manmade, but not in the sense the climate scientists mean.  It was created by sophisticated weather modification devices run by some shadowy government agency.  No one I've seen has mentioned HAARP yet, but it's only a matter of time.
• Evil Joe Biden deliberately steered Idalia toward "Ron DeSantis's Florida" in order to distract DeSantis from campaigning for the Republican nomination.  "Where this storm hit is no coincidence," one guy posted.  "I'm surprised it didn't hit Tallahassee straight on."

Well, you're right about one thing,  you catastrophic clod; where the storm hit is "no coincidence" because it's a typical storm track at this time of year, and the Gulf of Mexico is like a giant hot tub right now.  But no one, including Evil Joe, can "steer a hurricane."

Even using HAARP.

Hurricane Idalia [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

Of course, it may be that everything will be okay, at least if you listen to popular evangelical wingnut "prophetess" Kat Kerr, who went on record as saying that Idalia was not going to cause any problems, because she was gonna pray at it really hard:

Attention all weather warriors, who are taking authority over the storms that are in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Gulf, which are heading toward the East Coast.  Remember to take authority in Jesus's name, because we have the right to stop the storms from coming.  Command the pressure systems (millibars) to rise within them, so they will downgrade until they diminish.  Send the Host to shred every band of the storms and tear them apart.  The sooner we do this for the storm in the Gulf, the better...  When God made the Earth, he set a boundary for the ocean so it cannot come ashore.  We are agreeing with what God says, so speak to the storms and remind them of the boundary.  In Jesus's name, these storms will become nothing!!!  Woo hoo and Zap Bam.

As usual, allow me to state up front that I didn't make any of that up, including the "Zap Bam" part.  

Lest you think this kind of lunacy is the sole provenance of some fringe-y freak element, allow me to remind you that just a week ago, a "reporter" on Fox "News" said in all apparent seriousness that Tropical Storm Hilary, which dumped huge amounts of rain on southern California and Nevada, was (like Idalia) Joe Biden's fault.  Hilary, the reporter said, "made landfall in Mexico several hours ago, but they let it right into the country because it’s Biden’s America."

Although saying Fox isn't a "fringe-y freak element" might not be that accurate, honestly.  And given the storm's name, I'm surprised they didn't bring Hillary Clinton into it somehow.  That has to be significant, right?

Of course right.

It's always been a mystery to me why people gravitate to wild magical thinking and bizarre conspiracy theories rather than applying Ockham's Razor and the principles of scientific induction.  In fact, only a few days ago a study appeared in the journal Research and Politics looking at people's motivations for believing in conspiracies, and the results were fascinating.  Disturbingly, it found that most people who promote conspiracy-based beliefs aren't "Just Asking Questions" (something the site Rational Wiki amusingly calls "JAQing off") or "trying to present both sides" or callously pushing an agenda regardless of their own beliefs (something many Republicans have been accused of, apropos of Trump's "Big Lie") -- they honestly believe the loony ideas they're disseminating.  

So that's not reassuring at all.

But even weirder to me is that they found a correlation between belief in conspiracies and what they call a "need for chaos" -- a fervent desire to disrupt things irrespective of partisanship or beliefs, and without a specific goal in mind (e.g., replacing the system with a better one).

And I truly don't understand this.  You have only to look at the effects of real, honest-to-goodness chaos -- the ongoing mess in Sudan comes to mind -- to see how quickly things can devolve into a Lord of the Flies-style horror show.  I can sympathize with the frustration a lot of us feel about wastefulness and corruption in the government, but tearing it all down and leaving nothing in its place is hardly a solution.

In any case, no, Idalia wasn't created by weaponized weather modification, it's not a false flag, and Joe Biden had nothing to do with any of it.  Praying at it won't do a damn bit of good, something you'd think would be obvious from the last 583,762 times people tried praying at something and it didn't work.  It'd be nice if people would learn some science, but these days expecting that is a losing proposition.

Especially in "Ron De Santis's Florida."

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Discarded genius

Way back in 1952, British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a mathematical model to account for pattern formation that results in (seemingly) random patches -- something observed in as disparate manifestations as leopard spots and the growth patterns of desert plants.

Proving that this model accurately reflected what was going on, however, was more difficult.  It wasn't until three months ago that an elegant experiment using thinly-spread chia seeds on a moisture-poor growth medium showed that Turing's model predicted the patterns perfectly.

"In previous studies,” said study co-author Brendan D’Aquino, who presented the research at the March meeting of the American Physical Society, "people kind of retroactively fit models to observe Turing patterns that they found in the world.  But here we were actually able to show that changing the relevant parameters in the model produces experimental results that we would expect."

Honestly, it shouldn't have been surprising.  Turing's genius was unparalleled; the "Turing pattern" model is hardly the only brainchild of his that is still bearing fruit, almost seventy years after his death.  His research on the halting problem -- figuring out if it is possible to determine ahead of time whether a computer program designed to prove the truth or falsity of mathematical theorems will reach a conclusion in a finite number of steps -- generated an answer of "no" and a paper that mathematician Avi Wigderson called "easily the most influential math paper in history."  Turing's work in cryptography is nothing short of mind-blowing; he led the research that allowed the deciphering of the incredibly complex code produced by Nazi Germany's Enigma machine, a feat that was a major contribution to Germany's defeat in 1945.

A monument to Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, where the cryptographic team worked during World War II [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Antoine Taveneaux, Turing-statue-Bletchley 14, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Turing's colleague, mathematician and cryptographer Peter Hilton, wrote the following about him:

It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius.  Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues.  We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts.  However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement.  Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us.

Hilton's words are all the more darkly ironic when you find out that two years after the research into pattern formation, Turing committed suicide at the age of 41.

His slide into depression started in January 1952, when his house was burgled.  The police, while investigating the burglary, found evidence that Turing was in a relationship with another man, something that was illegal in the United Kingdom at the time.  In short order Turing and his lover were both arrested and charged with gross indecency.  After a short trial in which Turing refused to argue against the charges, he was found guilty, and avoided jail time if he agreed to a hormonal treatment nicknamed "chemical castration" designed to destroy his libido.

It worked.  It also destroyed his spirit.  The "authentic genius" who helped Britain win the Second World War, whose contributions to mathematics and computer science are still the subject of fruitful research today, poisoned himself to death in June of 1954 because of the actions taken against him by his own government.

How little we've progressed in seven decades.

Here in the United States, state after state are passing laws discriminating against queer people, denying gender-affirming care to trans people, legislating what is and is not allowable based not upon any real concrete harm done, but on thinly-veiled biblical moralism.  The result is yet another generation growing up having to hide who they are lest they face the same kind of soul-killing consequences Alan Turing did back in the early 1950s.

People like Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott, who have championed this sort of legislation, seem blind to the consequences.  Or, more likely, they know the consequences and simply don't give a damn how many lives this will cost.  Worse, some of their allies actually embrace the potential death toll.  At the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said, "For the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.  The whole preposterous ideology, at every level."

No, Michael, there is no "ism" here.  It's not an "ideology;" it's not a political belief or a religion.  What you are saying is "eradicate transgender people."  You are advocating genocide, pure and simple.

And so, tacitly, are the other people who are pushing anti-LGBTQ+ laws.  Not as blatantly, perhaps, but that's the underlying message.  They don't want queer people to be quiet; they want us erased.

I can speak first-hand to how devastating it is to be terrified to have anyone discover who you are.  I was in the closet for four decades out of shame, not to mention fear of the consequences of being out.  When I was 54 I finally said "fuck it" and came out to friends and family; I came out publicly -- here at Skeptophilia, in fact -- five years after that.  

I'm one of the lucky ones.  I had nearly uniform positive responses.

But if I lived in Florida or Texas?  Or in my home state of Louisiana?  I doubt very much whether I'd have had the courage to speak my truth.  The possibility of dire consequences would have very likely kept me silent.  In Florida, especially -- I honestly don't know how any queer people or allies are still willing to live there.  I get that upping stakes and moving simply isn't possible for a lot of people, and that even if they could all relocate, that's tantamount to surrender.  But still.  Given the direction things are going, it's a monumental act of courage simply to stay there and continue to fight.

It's sickening that we are still facing these same battles.  Haven't we learned anything from the example of a country that discarded the very genius who helped them to defeat the Nazis, in the name of some warped puritanical moralism? 

This is no time to give up out of exhaustion, however, tempting though it is.  Remember Turing, and others like him who suffered (and are still suffering) simply because of who they are.  Keep speaking up, keep voting, and keep fighting.  And remember the quote -- of uncertain origin, though often misattributed to Edmund Burke -- "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing."

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The avalanche

I always give a grim chuckle whenever someone on the far right calls us liberals "snowflakes," because when it comes to taking offense over absolutely everything, there's nothing like a MAGA Republican.

If you think I'm overstating my case, you have only to look at what's currently happening in the state of Florida to see that if anything, I'm being generous.  The right-wing elected officials in Florida are so pants-wettingly terrified of any viewpoints other than their own Christofascist agenda that they don't even want anyone finding out there are people who think differently.

Take, for example, the school principal in Tallahassee who was forced to resign because she had the temerity to show students in the sixth grade a photograph of Michelangelo's David. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michelangelo artist QS:P170,Q5592 Jörg Bittner Unna, 'David' by Michelangelo Fir JBU005 denoised, CC BY-SA 3.0]

David was originally commissioned to be placed in Florence Cathedral.  In, to make it abundantly clear, a Christian house of worship.  But it was soon considered such a masterpiece of art that it was taken out -- and placed in the public square outside the Palazzo Vecchio, so it could be seen by everyone.

But now?  According to the elected officials of Florida, whose sensibilities haven't even caught up to the sixteenth century, we can't have sixth graders see a world-renowned piece of sculpture, evidently because then they'll find out that people have genitals.

Then there's book bans.  Clay County School District just announced a new list of books that are officially banned from any school in the district, bringing the total up to 355.  Here are the new additions:

It doesn't take a genius to notice a pattern, here.  Anything dealing with LGBTQ+ themes (Heartstopper, Radio Silence, One Man Guy), anything to do with the Black experience (Americanah, Notes from a Young Black Chef, Punching the Air, and Black Brother, Black Brother, among many others), anything criticizing Republicans (Russian Hacking in American Elections), and anything written by an outspoken liberal (The Fault in Our Stars, Slaughterhouse Five).  

Apparently we can't have anyone finding out there's a world out there besides those who are straight, white, Christian conservatives.

You'd think if these people were as confident in the self-evident righteousness of their own beliefs as they claim to be, they wouldn't be so fucking scared of the rest of us.

I think the problem here is that we've allowed the purveyors of this narrow-minded, bigoted bullshit to portray themselves as the valiant defenders of the cause, instead of calling them what they are: craven cowards.  They are constantly, deeply fearful, afraid that any exposure to a view beyond their own tiny, terrified world will cause the entire thing to come crashing down like a house of cards.

It's pathetic, really.  No wonder so many of them carry assault rifles when they go to Walmart.

When it comes down to it, though, isn't all fascism about fear?  Why would you be so desperate to build an autocracy if you weren't afraid of dissent?  Yeah, there's the attraction of power and its perks, I get that; but really, the desperation to crush all opposing views is born from a deep-seated and terrified knowledge that if people find out there are other ways, they'll realize they've been lied to and start demanding scary stuff like free speech and free access to information.

So to Ron DeSantis and his cronies who are so determined to erase those of us who aren't like them: I'm sorry you're so bone-shakingly terrified.  I do feel badly for you, because it must be a horrible way to live.  But just because I pity you doesn't mean that I and the others like me are going to stand silent and let you erase us.  You want to fight?  Well, battle joined.

I think you're about to find out that a bunch of snowflakes together create an avalanche.

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The registry of dissent

I wonder if you've heard about the latest attempt to turn the state of Florida into an autonomous authoritarian oligarchy.

No, I'm not talking about Governor Ron DeSantis's virtual takeover of Disney, although for a party that is supposedly staunchly pro-corporation, it seems like a hypocritical thing to do.  "We're staunchly pro-corporation as long as the corporation toes the far-right line" is nearer the mark.

The particular move I'm thinking of today struck closer to the bone for me, because it's targeted specifically at bloggers.  A bill called "Information Dissemination" proposed by Senator Jason Brodeur would, if passed, require bloggers who post anything critical of Governor DeSantis or other elected officials to sign onto a state registry -- or face fines of up to $2,500.  It's unclear from the wording of the bill if this would apply to bloggers out of state who criticize Florida officials.  This certainly doesn't seem to be overtly excluded, but if so, it raises serious issues of jurisdiction.

The bill tries to dodge First Amendment concerns by limiting itself to bloggers who are financially compensated for their writing -- ostensibly to restrict people from taking money from lobbyists and engaging in criticism-for-pay -- but just about all bloggers get compensated in some way, even if it's just through ad monetization.  So the fact is, this bill is meant to do only one thing: stifle dissent.  

The spirit, and even the wording, of the bill have drawn speculation that it was inspired by a similar law passed by the authoritarian régime of President Viktor Orbán of Hungary in 2010.  This may sound far-fetched, but Orbán is a revered figure amongst the far right, and the elected leaders of Florida have praised him before.  Right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who is currently living in Budapest, described in an interview a conversation with a reporter who had "talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, 'Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.'"  Steve Bannon calls Orbán "one of the great moral leaders of our time."  It's not certain if Brodeur's bill is a case of imitation or just parallel processes from like minds -- but either way, it's horrifying.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Madelgarius, Freedom of speech (3), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Even some GOP members seem to realize Brodeur's bill is a case of serious governmental overreach.  In a statement that would be funny if it weren't so appalling, none other than Newt Gingrich tweeted, "The idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the government is insane.  It is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect.  He should withdraw it immediately."  Which brought to mind the trenchant quote from Stephen King: "Conservatives who for years sowed the dragon's teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon."  Gingrich, perhaps more than any other single individual, is the architect of the far right; the fact that the careening juggernaut he created has lurched into authoritarian neo-fascism should come as no surprise to him, or to anyone else.  The subtext has always been "We're the party of small hands-off government until we want big intrusive government;" bills like Brodeur's, and (even more strikingly) the current tsunami of anti-trans legislation being passed in red states across the country, just pull the mask off the ugly agenda that was there from the very beginning.

The optimists say that even if Brodeur's bill passes, it'll be struck down on First Amendment grounds almost immediately.  Me, I wonder.  DeSantis and his ilk are in ascendency, and I'm perhaps to be excused if I suspect it's not so certain as all that.  Here I sit, in upstate New York, far away from the epicenter; but I hope my writer colleagues in Florida will not be cowed into silence.  Believe me, if I did live in Florida, I'd be criticizing Brodeur, DeSantis, and the proposed legislation for all I'm worth.  I'm not usually a "come at me, bro" type, but we can't keep quiet about it and hope that the First Amendment will shield us.  If this bill passes -- and I think it probably will -- it will act as a template for other state legislatures intent on crushing dissenting voices.

If you think this kind of thing can't spread like a contagion, I have only refer you to the history of Germany in the 1930s for a counterexample.

Whatever the legality of extending this law to apply to out-of-state bloggers criticizing Florida legislators, allow me to go on record as stating that this is me, criticizing the absolute shit out of the whole lot of them.  And as far as my ever signing onto a registry for doing so, I am also going on record as stating that Brodeur can take his blogger registry and stick it up his ass.

Sideways.

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The ideological minefield

A couple of days ago, I received an email through my author website that started out, "Are you by any chance the Gordon Bonnet who taught science at Finn Hill Junior High in 1987?"

It turned out that it was indeed from a former student of mine, from the very first year of my teaching career, who (alarmingly!) just turned fifty years old.  When I confirmed that I was the guy, he sent me a heartwarming response about how he had made a career working for the National Parks Service as a wilderness educator, and that his love of nature had in no small part been due to my being his teacher when he was in ninth grade.

This sort of thing is why teachers do what they do.  I can say from my own experience that three teachers -- my high school biology and creative writing teachers, and my college calculus professor -- changed my life in hugely positive ways.  But the glow of receiving that email from my former student was dimmed somewhat by the knowledge that if I were in college right now, I would never -- not in a million years -- choose teaching as a profession, and that's after a 32-year career that, all in all, was pleasant and successful.  Not only would I not recommend the profession to anyone, I would counsel current teachers to keep their options open about finding other ways to use their talents to make a living.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of Michael Anderson (Photographer), Children in a classroom]

The reason is that public education has been turned into an ideological minefield by self-serving demagogues, through the cold, calculated characterization of schools as supposed "hotbeds of indoctrination."  The far right has taken steps -- thus far, scarily successful ones -- to muzzle teachers, stifle their creativity, and prevent them from doing the job they were hired to do with any degree of autonomy.  

This is not a new trend.  I still remember when the New York State Department of Education launched the infamous "Common Core," twelve years ago or so, with the aim of trying to create a curriculum that guaranteed all students receive a certain standard set of information and skills.  While few would argue with that aim as an ideal, the implementation was not only chaotic, it attempted to solve the "standard curriculum" issue by forcing teachers into lockstep -- handing them scripts, each with a certain number of minutes they were to devote to particular topics.  It never went any further than English and math; fortunately for me, by the time they got to science, a lot of the momentum had fizzled, and what they gave us was nothing more than a weakly-revamped version of what we already had.

It's a good thing.  When I saw what was happening in English and math, I said -- in the middle of a faculty meeting -- "the day New York State hands me a script and expects me not to deviate from it will be my last day on the job."

You go through years of training, then undergo a rigorous vetting process wherein you have to demonstrate how creative and competent and knowledgeable you are, and then the b-b stackers in the Department of Education hand you a script to read.  It's maddening... and deeply insulting.

Since that time, it's only gotten worse.  The obvious example is the state of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has forced teachers to dismantle or make inaccessible their classroom libraries until each book can be approved by a media specialist.  The ostensible reason is to make sure they're classroom-appropriate -- not only at the correct reading level, but that they don't have material unsuitable for the age of the student.  Just as with the Common Core, the stated goal sounds laudable enough.  Nobody's arguing for students having age-inappropriate material.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, however, to figure out that this isn't actually about reading level.  From DeSantis's previous commitment to "anti-wokeness" there's little doubt that the whole thing is a smokescreen for what is largely an ideological move.  What likelihood do you think there is of the state-hired "media specialists" approving a book that displays LGBTQ characters in a positive light?  Or presents a realistic picture of what life was and is like for minorities, especially after his recent (successful) demand that Florida schools drop an AP African American Studies course?

The situation in Florida is that a teacher having copies of Knots on a Counting Rope (about growing up Native American) or The List of Things That Will Not Change (about a child being raised by two dads) available for students would be risking prosecution.  (Yes, both of those have already been banned in Florida schools -- along with 174 others, including the biographies of Rosa Parks, Sonia Sotomayor, Jim Thorpe, Roberto Clemente, Harvey Milk, and Jackie Robinson.  Don't even try to tell me this isn't about ideology.)

Then, a disingenuous CNN story yesterday feigned shock over the fact that in many places in the United States, there's been such a massive exodus of teachers that some schools are finding it hard to keep their doors open.  Gee whiz, I wonder why that could be?  In fact, in Florida they've recently created a "new pathway" for teaching positions to be filled by individuals who don't even have a bachelor's degree in the subject they're teaching.  The Florida Department of Education (speaking of disingenuous) not only claims this has nothing to do with the governor's anti-teacher campaign, but denies there's a teacher shortage at all.   "The purpose of this new pathway," a spokesperson said, "was to value the unique experience military service provides while simply offering additional time for these veterans to obtain a bachelor’s degree and other requirements to receive a full professional educator certification."

I'm calling bullshit on this.  Many candidates with excellent credentials are avoiding going into education, and who can blame them?  What highly-qualified individuals in their right mind would want to step into a position where they're devalued and harassed, robbed of autonomy, paid like crap, subjected to arbitrary decisions by policymakers who have never spent ten seconds in front of a group of students, and then threatened with prosecution for addressing the diversity in their own classrooms and presenting history that isn't blatantly whitewashed?  For me -- and again, I say this as a retired career educator who, by and large, had a great run -- it's a case of, "Turn and run.  Fast."

It's blatantly obvious where this is going; if you hobble educators to the point that teachers resign and public schools close, the only options for parents will be private, for-pay schools (including religious ones) where administrators have free rein to promote whatever kind of worldview they choose.  This, of course, has been the goal of the far right for as long as I can recall.  The idea of an egalitarian, even-handed public school system, where there is a set of brakes on ideologically-biased curricula, has been under fierce attack for decades.  (And it bears mention that far from being the alleged hotbeds of indoctrination the far right claims, in my thirty-plus of teaching, I only met two teachers -- one right-wing, the other left -- who honestly spent time trying to shift their students' political leanings.  Neither one, I might add, was particularly successful.  The rest of us teachers were too busy trying to get our students to reach a level of competence in our subjects to spend our time preaching politics.)

It breaks my heart to write this, but it has to be said, and said loudly.  What Ron DeSantis and others are engaging in is the classic technique of accusing the opposition of what they themselves are doing.  In this case, creating classrooms that promote a specific ideology, that turn what used to be a creative, rewarding profession into something intended to produce lockstep automata -- both the teachers and the students.

And unless things change, fast, my advice to any prospective teachers is to find some other way to help improve the world.  Because right now, the system is set up to destroy the very reasons most of us were drawn to education in the first place.

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An open letter to straight Americans

Dear straight people:

I hope you recognize the path the United States is on, and where it leads.  Because it's easy to blind yourself to problems that don't affect you.  That is, at its heart, what minorities mean when they talk about privilege.  As a Black friend of mine put it, "White privilege doesn't mean White people's lives are easy; it just means that race isn't one of the things making them harder."

Recent developments in Florida (why the fuck is it always Florida?) should bring that into sharp focus.  Because of the state's "Don't Say Gay" law, school administrators in Orange County have now told staff that they can't display rainbow "Safe Space" stickers in their classrooms, they can't assign reading material with any LGBTQ content to their classes, they are required to tell parents if they find out a student is queer, and LGBTQ staff members cannot have photographs of their families displayed anywhere -- including on their own desks.

My first question to my straight readers is: do you have any idea what effect this has, both on staff and on students?

This kind of ugly, bigoted horseshit is why I spent forty years unable to admit that I was bisexual.  During most of that time I couldn't even admit it to myself.  I grew up thinking same-sex attraction was something to be ashamed of, or at the very least, to be fearful about.  Well, fear was justified; I want you to think, really think, about what it'd be like if you were afraid to take your significant other out to dinner because then people would realize you were together.  That you couldn't walk down the street of your own home town holding hands because you'd be jeered at, have hateful epithets thrown at you, and (in all too many places) risk actual physical violence.  That you'd been told over and over that loving who you love made you abnormal, sinful, disgusting, aberrant.

It's that hell that this law is forcing LGBTQ people back into.

We never really left it, honestly, but a lot of us felt like at least we were heading in the right direction.  In the last five years I've become more and more like the iconic character Nick Nelson from Alice Oseman's brilliant graphic novel series Heartstopper:

I'm damn lucky I'm in a situation I can do that.  I live in a pretty tolerant part of the country.  I'm married to a woman, which is fortunate in two respects; not only does it shield me from the stigma that people in same-sex relationships face every single day, my wife is a wonderful human being who accepts me for who I am.

But consider what I, and countless others like me who spent most of their lives hiding, lost in the process.  Think about what it'd be like if there was something about you that you didn't ask for and couldn't change, and now there were laws against it being out in the open.  How about... wearing glasses?  What if at work, you were told you couldn't wear glasses, and had to pretend you could see well?  If anyone asked you about it, you had to say you could see just fine.  Any visits to the optometrist had to be made in secret -- if possible, in another town where you wouldn't be recognized going into the place.  No books in your kids' school could show, or even mention, characters who didn't have 20/20 vision.  And if you did become angry enough to say "fuck it" and wore your glasses in public, you would be ridiculed or beaten up for it.

See how horrifying that sounds?

It's been years that we've known that homophobic ignorance flies in the face of the actual science, but we Americans don't exactly have a stellar record of listening to the scientists about anything.  Back in 2015, Scientific American published an article that goes into the biology of human sexuality, and the details are fascinating; but truthfully, it can be summed up as, "Sexuality is complex, and it isn't binary."  

The homophobes have responded by mischaracterizing how the medical professionals address the issue, because (unfortunately) straw man arguments are all too effective when people don't know, or don't want to know, the facts.  Just last week I saw someone post on social media, "If a five-year-old is old enough to decide what gender they are, an eighteen-year-old is old enough to own a gun."  I'm not going into the last half of it, but the first half is so abjectly ridiculous it's a wonder it generated anything more than derisive laughter.  It makes it sound like an anatomically male five-year-old says, "Hey, I'm a girl now," and the parents immediately whisk them off to get gender-reassignment surgery.  According to a statement by medical professionals who address issues of gender dysphoria, surgeries of this sort are only done if the child is anatomically intersex, and even then doctors almost always wait until the child is the age of puberty before taking any kind of irreversible action.

Unfortunately, no one I saw responded to the person who posted that with, "THAT NEVER HAPPENS."  We've become afraid even to fight the battle, or perhaps just too damn exhausted to argue.

It's understandable.  This is the third time this month (ironically, Pride Month) I've written about these issues here at Skeptophilia.  At some point we feel like, "What more can I say?  And what good is it doing anyhow?"  So that's why I'm going to ask not my queer readers, but my straight ones, to think long and hard about something: what would it take to make you stand up and say, "Hell no, this is wrong," even though it only directly affects a group you don't belong to?  If you were a straight teacher in Orange County, Florida, would you be willing to put up a rainbow flag in your classroom and say to administrators, "Bring it on"?  To say to Ron DeSantis and the hundreds of other elected officials in this country cut from the same cloth, "This is not gonna happen.  Not on my watch."?

"Tired," by the inimitable Langston Hughes

It's easy to support LGBTQ rights in ways that risk nothing.  You vote for candidates who support equal rights for all?  Great, awesome, good for you.  But we are hurtling down a tunnel into a deep, dark place that a lot of us thought we'd left back in the 1980s.  And that downward spiral won't stop until straight people stand up and say, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to halt this, even if it means putting myself in the bullseye."

That is what it means to be an ally.

Thankfully, there are straight people who do just that.  I've laughed with a dear friend of mine, who is straight as they come, because he owns (and wears publicly) more Pride gear than I do.  He's one of the ones who would not hesitate to give a big old middle finger to homophobes, and say, "What are you gonna do about it, asshole?"

But there are too damn few people like him.

So I'm asking my straight readers to stand up and make your voices heard.  It's the only way any of this is going to stop.  And keep in mind that if the bigots win this fight, it isn't going to end there, because queers aren't the only ones these people hate.  Remember the oft-quoted statement by anti-Nazi activist Martin Niemöller that ends, "Finally, they came for me -- and by then, there was no one left to speak for me."

Please, please don't wait until then.

Maybe there's a time that other-sides-ism is appropriate, but that's not now.  I am not obligated to respect your opinion if your opinion denies the rights, and even the humanity, of another group of people.  There is no morally and ethically defensible justification for what is happening in the United States right now.

Pride ends today, but don't expect me to shut up about it.  I was silent for forty years, and it doesn't work.  And maybe -- just maybe -- if enough straight allies will commit to standing in the breach with us, we won't have another generation of queer children growing up going through the hell that I and so many others did.  

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Stepping into Pride

A dear friend of mine sent me a message a couple of weeks ago.  It was a recommendation to watch a recent Netflix series, and read the graphic novel that inspired it.  "Trust me on this," she said.  "This is the story you and I both needed when we were teenagers.  You'll love it... but you might want to have kleenex handy."

The show (and book) are called Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman.  And my friend was right on all counts.

It's the story of two boys in an all-male school in England -- one of them gay (and out), the other bisexual (and, at least at the beginning, closeted).  The story of their deep friendship, mutual attraction, and eventual falling in love is sweet, beautiful, and charming.  I'm not usually someone who picks up young adult fiction, and even less romance fiction; but Heartstopper had me in the palm of its hand right from the beginning.  The "kleenex" part of my friend's comment wasn't because it's in any sense a tragedy; there are (of course) some bumps in the road, and a few of the couple's classmates are bigoted, homophobic assholes, but by and large, it's a heartwarming and upbeat story about overcoming inhibitions, finding happiness, and being open to the world about who you are.

The tears that well up when I even think about the story of Nick Nelson and Charlie Spring are, for me and my friend both, largely because of how long she and I lived in fear and shame.  We were denied the opportunity to explore that part of ourselves; not only to relax and have fun dating, but even to figure out what it meant and get comfortable with who we are.  It was longer for me.  At least she came out publicly as a lesbian fairly young.  It took me until I was fifty-two even to come out to friends.  That's thirty-seven years of being terrified that anyone, even the people who loved me, would find out that I'm attracted equally to men and women.

The first few years, it was not only fear of ridicule or ostracism, it was fear for my safety.  Southern Louisiana in the 1970s was not a safe place for LGTBQ kids.  I know four people in my graduating class (not counting myself) who came out as queer later in life, and none of them even gave a hint of it until after graduation.  If you think it's a significant likelihood that you'll get the shit beaten out of you in the locker room if people find out, why in the hell would you not keep it a secret?

Things are better now.  Thank heaven.  My last year of teaching, three years ago, there were several kids I knew who were out as queer or trans.  But we still have a very long way to go.  A teacher friend of mine in Texas has had to create an Amazon wish list of books that have characters that are queer, non-Christian, or are people of color, because in her state, school district after school district are taking those books off library shelves, denying kids access even to finding out that there are people who aren't straight, white, and Christian.  Apparently, now it's considered "woke" (how I have come to fucking hate that word) to provide a way to say to non-majority kids, "Hey, it's okay.  You are okay.  Be who you are."

Ugly bigotry, while less than what I experienced when I was a teenager, still is all too common.  Just in the last week I saw two posts on social media that made that nauseatingly clear.  One said, "If I ever see a 'trans woman' in the girls' bathroom, I'm going to punch him in the face and tell the judge I identify as the tooth fairy."  The other said, "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and any other genders you pulled out of Uranus."

Hurr-hurr-hurr.  It sure is funny to threaten one of the most marginalized groups of people in the United States with violence, and to deny that anyone other than cis/heterosexual people even exist.

Still and all, we're making progress.  Slow and incremental steps, but progress.  My teacher friend's extensive Amazon wish list was cleared out and is on the way to her as we speak -- it took less than twelve hours for her friends to purchase every damn book she asked for.  I may have been late to the game, but I now can say to anyone, "I'm queer/bisexual" and not give a flying rat's ass what they think about it.  Florida governor Ron DeSantis pushed for sanctions on Disney, the state's premier attraction and biggest money-maker, because they balked against his pet project, the "Don't Say Gay" bill -- and Disney responded by opening a new line of queer-themed merchandise called the "Pride Collection," which is about as close as a corporation can come to a collective raised middle finger.

Tomorrow is the first day of Pride Month, and there's a lot to feel good about.  Even so, in a lot of places, it seems like we're regressing, not progressing.  Irrespective of my own sexual orientation, I don't understand why, exactly, people are so determined to control what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes.  Why it's just fine to have young adult fiction with heterosexual romances and marriages, but even depicting a queer couple is "ramming wokeness down everyone's throats" and "turning kids gay."  Why the GOP, who pride themselves on their "get the government out of the private sector" stance, are A-okay with the government trying to stop businesses from establishing policies ensuring acceptance and equal rights for LGBTQ employees and customers.

Pride lasts for one month, but pride lasts forever.

So, yeah.  I cried hard during the scene when Nick and Charlie kiss for the first time.  I'm not ashamed of that.  It's okay to get all emotional when a scene is sweet and touching, which this surely was; it is not okay that some of my tears were because of the fact that at that age, I would never have had the courage, nor even the opportunity, to experience such a thing.  Hell, there was no queer fiction accessible back then, neither books, nor television, nor movies.  I didn't even know such relationships existed.  Note, by the way, that this lack of positive role modeling didn't make me any less queer; all it did was make me ashamed and terrified of being queer.  (Due to my completely dysfunctional upbringing, I was also terrified of having a relationship with a girl, but that's another story entirely.  Suffice it to say that during much of my life, I have been very, very lonely -- and am fantastically fortunate to be in the warm, nurturing, loving marriage I now have.)

It's kind of summed up in the poignant line from Nick, when he realizes he needs to claim his identity, and his chance for love: "I wish knew you when I was younger, and that I'd known then what I know now."

In conclusion, to the increasing number of straight people in the world who are 100% accepting of us non-straight types, thank you.  To my queer friends, keep being strong, keep being defiant, keep being who you are, and happy Pride Month.

And to the homophobes, you can take your ugly, antiquated bigotry and shove it up your ass.

Sideways.

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