Trans exploitation in Texas: The right’s flimsy panic sure is conveniently timed for the election

[applegrove]

Trans exploitation in Texas: The right’s flimsy panic sure is conveniently timed for the election

by Amanda Marcotte at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/27/trans_exploitation_in_texas_the_rights_flimsy_panic_sure_is_conveniently_timed_for_the_election/

"SNIP...........


The lawsuit is strange and flimsy, but that might be beside the point. Transgender people have been around since forever and plenty of state and local governments have been practicing non-discrimination with nary a peep of a problem. And yet, seemingly overnight, all of a sudden every Christian conservative in the nation decided, out of the blue, that the threat of trans people in the bathrooms was our country’s greatest crisis.

The likeliest explanation for what’s going on, then, is that this panic about transgender students is a transparent election year stunt designed to rile up evangelical voters and get them to the polls in November.

With Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, fears that many conservative voters might not even bother to get to the polls this year are sky high. Already some polls are showing that Trump could have a negative impact on down ticket races for Republicans. Desperate conservative bloggers are begging their people to suck up their distaste for Trump and vote anyway, to preserve the power of congressional, state, and local Republicans.

Under the circumstances, a little sex-and-gender panic starts to feel like just the ticket to get Christian conservatives to hold their nose and vote this year. The whole implication of this panic is that Barack Obama, and therefore Hillary Clinton, are going to turn your kids into a bunch of queers and weirdoes and the only way to stop them is voting Republican. The fact that the Democratic candidate has a shot at being the first female president only makes the issue of people supposedly doing the “wrong” thing for their gender all the more salient to conservatives.



............SNIP"

[Odin2005]

1. I've assumed this from the start.