They’re up to their usual tricks, pushing more hate bills.
Six Republican members of the North Dakota Legislature introduced a bill Wednesday that would send a clear message to nonhuman-identified students: You’re not wanted in the Roughrider State.
The two-page bill, which is primarily a measure seeking to prohibit schools in the state from accommodating transgender youths,
Wait. Stop there. The bill is mainly about discriminating against trans kids, but that isn’t newsworthy enough anymore, so the news article is focusing on…furries. It turns out the sponsors of the bill have been listening to propaganda about litter boxes. To resume…
includes a subsection aimed at a different — and theoretical — category of students.
“A board of a school district, a public or private school, or a teacher in a public or private school may not … Adopt a policy establishing or providing a place, facility, school program, or accommodation that caters to a student’s perception of being any animal species other than human,” the bill, labeled an “emergency measure” by its authors, states.
This section of the bill appears to be connected to an urban myth about litter boxes in U.S. schools that spread among conservative Republicans ahead of the November election. An NBC News report published in October found this myth — about schools providing accommodations, like litter boxes, for children who identify as cats — to be untrue.
Do you think this is stupid? Wait until you hear directly from the ditz behind it all. She’s posing in front of some sort of Christian slogan, which is totally unsurprising.
The interviewer asks exactly the right questions: “Do we have any confirmed sightings of furries in North Dakota schools?” I don’t specifically have a confirmed number on that.
She doesn’t know any. And she repeats the litter box myth. This is all a purely hypothetical exercise. Then she says it is happening in Minnesota! No, it’s not. You don’t get to use my state as a shield for your stupidity, lady.
But let’s not forget that she’s using this nonsense about furries as a stalking horse for her real agenda: she’s a transphobe elected to state congress who wants to implement her hate and religious dogma in North Dakota law.
When asking a Repub politician about an obvious urban myth, it used to be they lied to manipulate the rubes (see “death panels”).
Today, it is a 50% chance the Republican in question believes in the crap himself/herself. This category may overlap with people who find Qanon “too highbrow”.
There is some truth to the litter box myth, but it has nothing to do with furries:
https://www.newsweek.com/colorado-schools-issuing-buckets-kitty-litter-students-go-bathroom-during-lockdowns-school-1455261
In other words, this is how students can GO TO THE EFFING BATHROOM DURING AN ACTIVE SHOOTER LOCKDOWN AND NOT GET KILLED.
Sorry. But no: there is nothing to do with furries in this. Nothing. It’s trying to keep students alive and not shot during a mass shooting. JFC.
I think congresspeople who use stalking horses should be provided with stalls to sleep in and nice bales of hay to eat.
Oh, and have their shoes nailed to their feet. I mean, let’s be accommodating.
Yes, “people identifying as non-humans” is a myth, and these North Dakota Republican spent a lot of time fishing in the toilet bowl for something to float their boat.
But consider: if furry-identifiers actually did exist, this bill is about being explicitly cruel to them.
Who are they to abrogate the Patriot’s 2nd amendment rights?
I’ve been questioning the necessity of TWO Dakotas for a long time. Someone told me recently that the reason we have two is because the Republican party wanted two more senate seats. Not sure if that’s true or not, but it sounds legit.
Ray Ceeya @6: I can’t confirm it, but that is the reported reason for why the Dakota territory was split into two states despite its extremely small population.
@Reginald Selkirk 4
They do exist. Otherkin. I’m the basic furry. Otherkin are not interested passing waste like our tens of millions of years ago ancestors. I’m curious about looking for vestigial tail and other associated brain territory with respect to otherkin, I have odd bits of vestigial muscle activity myself (auricular muscles, vestigial eat movement), but I put this in childhood psychosocial development. And I hear you can catch furry as an adult.
Here’s how bad it is. Banning things “anthropomorphic”.
https://www.flayrah.com/8857/oklahoma-state-senate-bill-calls-anthropomorphic-behavior-allow-parents-pull-kids-public
Just think about what the word is actually describing. Human-like characteristics.
Paranoia without substance grabs at lots of things. Consider how the election security paranoia doesn’t end with the last investigation.
Most historians agree that the real reason for Congress’s eagerness to accept the separate Dakotas was a Republican ploy to bolster numbers in Congress. Former Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison, a Republican (and noted man with a beard), became president in 1889. Congress had been predominantly Democratic until Harrison took office, and the admission of the two Dakotas gifted the House with a Republican majority.
That’s taken from Mental Floss, but I remember reading this a long time ago. Being lazy because I’ve been up for over 24 hours and just finished a 12 hour graveyard shift (I’m in CA).
I “drew” a line between the first paragraph and my comments, but this platform doesn’t allow that to show, apparently.
To state what should be obvious: I cut and pasted the first para, used a (non existent “line” in this forum, to separate it from my brief commentary.
Test
A_____________________________B
HTML works also.
Maybe I have a pre-ape urge to move my ears in disgust of something.
not millions of pandemic deaths
not ecological collapse
not mass shootings
not domestic murders
not white supremacist terrorism
…but this is an emergency
“The Click” has been curious about furries in a general way and some of his videos has people who caught furry and it’s not like much changes. You find out anthropomorphic characters can be attractive. They’re ignorant of sex and development in general so any odd thing sets them off.
https://youtube.com/@TheClick
It’s a big cultural attempt to assert dominance over sexual behavior in a general way, but they have no idea what they want to control, and “they” are unified in a very unstable way that has to do with culture and not any actual real biology.
@4–
Dittoing Brony. Furries/otherkin most definitely exist. I’ve met a few, and no doubt there are others I have met without knowing (it is, after all, stigmatised and I am not myself part of the community). There seems to be a bit of overlap with SF/fantasy fandom.
I’d barely heard of Furries and don’t know much about them.
Not all of them have sexualized being a furry.
“But they also reported that most of their involvement in the fandom was non-sexual. Men reported spending 34 percent of their online roleplaying time on sexual content, and women reported spending only 21.4 percent. Nearly half of male furries, and a large majority of women, reported that sexual content played little or no role in their introduction to the fandom: ”
It is basically a hobby or lifestyle for a small number of people.
9 questions about furries you were too embarrassed to ask
I have to say that my interest in Furries which was low, and now even lower.
Who cares anyway and why?
.1. What is the harm here? Who is this woman protecting and from which group.
.2. Last I heard, the USA was (supposedly) a free country.
If people want to identify as Furries and wear a fur suit, who is going to stop them and why?
If anyone needs to have a bill targeting them, it is mindless haters like these 6 GOP legislators. In fact, hate speech can be illegal and hate crimes are a form of terrorism.
The bill’s sponsor is a delusional, god-soaked high school graduate who ran on a “god platform” to return the country to biblical roots. A heady combination of stupidity, ignorance, multiple phobias and paranoia that defines the GOPQ today.
There’s definitely a sexual component in my case, but that’s in addition to sexual bonding to “regular anthros”. And there were bronies who weren’t furries first, and that’s it’s own weird thing.
I think it started with a squirrel on Disney’s “the sword in the stone”.
This obsessive insanity about furries demonstrates how imbecilic and criminally negligent these xtian terrorist gop aholes are. They are ignoring so many important topics that could improve society just to satisfy their bigotry. I would think that many people, of all ages, like to escape to their furry identity to try to avoid that kind of xtian terrorist insanity.
Of course, if PZ became a furry, he would be a spider with no need for litter boxes in his classroom.
@22 Brony, Social Justice Cenobite — I think you have a point: These north dakota imbeciles, like all of the rtwingnut xtian terrorists that are trying to drag us back into the dark ages, are all ‘disney squirrels’.
I can even predict how the furry moral panic might advance. Furries are a microcosm with respect to social problems. So of course there is a problem with furry art involving sexual underage characters. A perfect thing to cherry-pick and pretend to be concerned about the children with.
To add some perspective to this topic, regarding america’s favorite sport, how many mass shootings have furries caused?
When Fox News is clearly making fun of it, I don’t think it’s a right wing threat.
@shermanj
I meant the furry imprinting. That’s the earliest thing I can remember anyway.
https://youtu.be/5UXkLzlWmk8
Remember, we now have a congress run by rabid squirrels carrying guns.
One of our org. members just reminded me there are SERIOUS sexual connotations to their stupid state motto ‘the Roughrider State’. LOL WTF
As someone who has known a few furries, I have to say they are generally more rational and kinder than christians. If anyone should be legislated against, its the dangerous googoobrained christians and their scammyscammy preachers.
Jeebus, drew, I look forward to the day you contribute to a thread rather than post patently transparent conservative deflections.
[1] Laws are being enacted. That makes it a threat.
[2] They are being enacted by the christofascist faction of the Republican Party. That makes it right-wing.
[3] FOX will literally pivot 180° in a day if it suits their agenda and then flip 180° back again, as they have on the importance of classified document management — criminal in 2016 when Hilary Clinton used a private email server, to “defund the FBI” (seriously!) in August for raiding Trump properties, to suddenly it’s a hanging offence again now that Biden’s on the hook for it. Same with Trump’s sudden presidential suitability when it became clear he was going to win the GOP nomination. Same with protesting on Supreme Court judges’ lawns, which they decided was unforgivable when abortion rights activists did this in November after literally years of defending anti-abortion protestors for doing the same thing. You can’t use FOX as a diagnostic test of what counts as right-wing, only what FOX deems will play to its mind-numbed audience on any given day.
So now furries “identifying” as nonhuman are a “theoretical” category of students? I guess that’s as close as we’ll ever get to an overt admission that they never existed in the first place.
I have told maga hand-wringers that with prudes like them we’ll never figure out how sexual imprinting works.
I wore a dog collar* in high school (and college, and beyond), though it had nothing (well, very little) to do with being a furry. I was/am a furry, but the real reason I wore a collar is the sense that I’ve lived my entire life leashed to the expectations of others,** rather than being able to live my own life. The collar was my acknowledgement of the understanding that I lived for others not entirely of my own will, as well as a very minor act of rebellion. In other words, it was my way of saying I felt like a whipped dog.
I wasn’t alone in wearing a collar, though- a lot of my goth friends (yes, I’m also a goth, though I was never brave/invested enough to go all-out) also wore collars. Some simply because that was the fashion, and some for more personal reasons like me.
The reason I bring this up is that a lot of people have assumed I’m a furry because I used to*** wear a dog collar, and some of them definitely treated me as less-than because of it. While some of those who treated me poorly because they thought I was a furry might not have done so if they’d understood the real reason I do it, I doubt it would have changed most such people’s minds. They hated me because I was different, period. Whether I was different because I was a member of despised and misunderstood fandom or because I of a quirk in my psychology doesn’t really matter. I’m different, and to the kind of person who crafts or supports a bill like the one in the OP difference is to be rubbed out by any means necessary.
*A literal leather dog collar from a pet store, not a fashion or BDSM collar.
**Rejection sensitive dysphoria sucks.
***I still would if it didn’t aggravate my eczema. I really wish I could still wear it- my progress rainbow heart “Queer AF” keychain would look good on the tag loop.
At the start of this winter, Finland was facing the possibility of rolling electricity outages for the first time ever, due to restricted production capacity. Thus far, the winter has been mild and the threat hasn’t materialized, but at one point an official, controversial instruction was published for schoolteachers on how to prepare for long outages during the schoolday. Obviously, children need to be kept safe an under supervision, but it was somewhat unrealistically suggesting that some sort of teaching could resume during an outage (in winter, when it’s usually quite dark and too cold to be outdoors).
Anyway, the instruction suggested, controversially that emergency dry toilet solutions might be needed during an outage because toilets might not function. Teachers objected to being made responsible for this problem, on top of everything else. I don’t know if this same thing is a common consideration in US schools – I’ve heard rolling outages are a common threat in some areas.
(It was somewhat surreal to see a “school kitty litter debate” on Finnish social media when another, unrelated school kitty litter debate was going on in the US).
Which is worse? Furries? Or swag bellied, bearded bozos wearing body armor, tactical vests and carrying AR-15s?
So every time she’s challenged and asked for evidence she “can’t say anything about that”. She also complains that the mythical problem has progressed from students identifying as animals to ones identifying as rocks. Well rocks can’t speak so she must be one. There’s her proof. I’ll vote for a bill to shut her up.
vucodlak — if you or a trusted friend have the skills, you can make one yourself out of something that doesn’t trigger your eczema. Cotton is a good choice although obviously very different in texture. If you’re not sure, get some swatches and tuck them somewhere that will have several hours skin contact as a test. Just make sure any studs/buckles are not nickel or plated nickel as this is a major cause of contact dermatitis and the plating will wear off.
Eh, Therians are a thing.
But I’m reasonably certain no Therian is using a litter box.
Oh god, it’s “Litterbox-Gate” all over again. No schools are not putting litter boxes in schools for children who identify as cats. That’s just not a thing.
@ ^ Ray Ceeya : Truth. Not here :
https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/cats/13816064
Not in Oz as Australia’s Murdoch propaganda rags have also claimed – back in March last year – & not anywhere else either.
From that link :
As for the Dakota state split in twain as a political trick, well,. how were they allowed to get away with that at the time & also can’t two play at that game?
Maybe California should be split into three or five separate states all voting and sending Democratic congresscritters into Congress? Maybe if the Democratic side does this and takes it to the absurd extremes – well, reveals again the absurd extreme – reason might prevail and everyone might agree that the system needs to change so that can’t be done and perhaps the Dakotas should be reunited and Peurto Rico given statehood and some sort of reasonable set up established.
Also, you guys states-side seem to really need the equivalent of our Independent Electoral Commission in my view. FWIW, Wiki the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).. Or some form of independnent non-partisan umpire if there can now be any such thing?
All I can say to this whole thing is that I have to just laugh that people rag on Furries for thinking the female (or male) fox from Disney’s Robin Hood are kind of hot, but they utterly fail to comprehend that this is literally the same thing as thinking the same thing about game characters, like the Asari, or worse, the Quarions (who are literally described as “bird like”, even if we never see them without a suit on, but do have backward facing legs). I just have to bloody shake my head in incomprehension at it all. Also.. Not seeing them trying to pass laws on theoretical students that might paint themselves blue, and style their hair to look like aliens (which also don’t f-ing exist).
@ ^ Kagehi : & then there’s the reichwing complaining about fictional M & M characters female M&Ms (Colbert) and mythical mermaids being (gasp, shock horreur but. but. but ..bleck!)
The bill does not go far enough. We have seen numerous films depicting how blood-drinking people infiltrate the student body, yet these six Republicans completely ignore this issue. And anyone growing up in the eighties know satanism is a big issue.
These six RINOs need to be called out in media for their disregard of the main threats facing American youths.
What is this obsession Republicans have with trans people?
It is because Trans are a very small minority without a lot of popular support.
The christofascists are simply bullies and they always pick on groups a lot smaller than themselves.
If it wasn’t Trans, it would be some other group.
They just skip from hate target to hate target. Blacks, women, gays, Trans, Muslims, migrants, scientists, health care providers (pandemic and vaccines), and the next group up will be…Ukrainians.
Nothing says jesus loves you like helping the Russians genocide the Ukrainians.
Here is another one.
Indiana. All the right wingnut states just copy each other.
Once again, they are prohibiting something that doesn’t even exist.
It is all rather stupid.
In point of fact, they can’t prohibit children from identifying as animals. All they can do is prohibit them from wearing fur suits to school. And who wants to do that anyway?
Everything I’ve seen says it must be miserable to grow up in Red states these days.
The right wingnuts like to attack children because they don’t have the Civil Rights protection of the law, they are smaller, and they don’t have enough money to hire lawyers.
Indiana lawmaker targets furries in schools. Schools say there’s no problem
@48. raven : Next group? Aren’t they already hating on them – and everyone else still as well? Have they ever stopped hating?
Funny way to worship their ancient dead Judaean hero and supposed role model who explictly said “Love thy neighbour” – including even those damn heretic Samaritans that were really disliked and pariahs back then.. Plus help the poor, pay your taxes, and pray in private among other things they totally ignore.
We’ve come to the point where people like this aren’t laughed out of the legislature and public life. Instead, their nonsense is taken seriously and becomes law.