I tried listening to the book as an audio book once, but gave it up. I should either try that again, or read it.
The Association of College Honor Societies was formed by representatives of six organizations, Alpha Omega Alpha; the Order of the Coif; Phi Beta Kappa; Phi Kappa Phi; Sigma Xi; Tau Beta Pi. While nothing compared to the post World War Two boom in college attendance, the 1920s did see an increase in it, including an increase in female attendance.
Adding an item that would have properly been posted yesterday, but we were unaware of it, on December 28, 1925, this patent was granted:
We do not wish to be crude, but we do seek to track various developments on this blog. Indeed, that's one of its main purposes. This is a real development. This is a sanitary belt for menstruation, a very common, indeed the normal, method of addressing sanitary concerns until the tampon became common which wasn't really until the 1970s.
Anyhow, women in their current societal roles necessitated inventions such as this. Kotex, the primary brand, was not introduced until 1920.
President Gerald R. Ford signed into law the Metric Conversion Act. The country should have carried through with it, but abandoned it in 1982 when Ronald Reagan was President, the point at which, in the long history of the evolution of things, the country began its slide into idiocy, although it was hardly evident at the time.
CIA Station Chief in Athens Richard Welch, his identify recently exposed, was gunned down by terrorists in Athens.
Down 6.32% compared to this time last year, which means that less petroleum exploration is going on.
Presidents seem to always want to take the credit for the price of petroleum going down. They also eschew taking the blame, and correctly at that, when the price goes up. But because Americans are economic ignoramuses, this story repeats again and again.
Wyomingites tend to follow the price of petroleum as it directly correlates to jobs in the state. The price must be over $58.00/bbl for Wyoming petroleum oil to break even, and really has to be over $62.00/bbl for it to be profitable.
Today it's at $55.95 for WTI and $59.72 for Brent.
Oh oh.
That doesn't seem to have made the news, but it has started to impact the field.
Part of the reason that it is going down is that investors are worried about the Trump buffoonery in Ukraine, where he's siding with the Russians, and because the US has taken up seizing Venezuelan ships carrying oil. The latter might actually be justified for reasons having nothing to do with the murdering of drug boat crews, and it's interesting to note that the ship that was seized was seized by the Coast Guard, not the Navy which is relying on the Nuremberg defense for its actions in spite of the Government war manual actually referencing the murder of distressed crews as against the laws of war. On the latter, Americans have become so psychologically fragile since the Vietnam War that we can be assured former sailors will be reporting that they have PTSD due to their role as hitmen in a few years, but that's another topic. So, basically, Trump can take some credit for lower prices, but it's basically due to international investors figuring he's a rogue bufador, which he is.
Trump getting out his big box of GI Joes isn't the only reason, however. Lots of refineries completed turnarounds, which are scheduled years in advance, and OPEC has an oil glut, things that would be causing Democrats to claim that Harris had lowered the price of oil, had things worked out differently.
So here's the thing. How long will this slide go, and how low will it go?
Rumors, and that's what they are, are circulating that there's hopes that oil will go down to $30/bbl. I don't see how that can happen, absent an economic depression, and if that did occur, that's exactly what would occur in Wyoming.
For that matter, if oil stays this low, that's what's going to happen here.
I wonder if all the MAGA loyalist here will be cheering in that event?
If oil stays down around $55/bbl for about three months, the oil economy in Wyoming will be very badly damaged. Natural gas will prop some of it up, of course, and we really are more a natural gas explorating state now rather than a crude oil one. Still, crude is the rig count driver.
And if that happens, all the alternative energy projects which existed under the Biden Administration are drying up, the attack on them lead by the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and people like Chuck Gray. Coal prices are up, but not so much that anyone ought to be deluded enough to thinking that there's going to be a second era of King Coal. Meanwhile, the Freedom Caucus is gutting the state's ability to fund anything.
And that is probably where we should close. The Freedom Caucus basically would like the entire US to be a variant of 1930s Appalachia. If this trend continues, we may get to be.
Let me start off by noting that as a rule, I can't stand Cassie' Craven's op eds. They tend to be in your face unthinking populist, and I also resent (I'm not kidding) the co-opting of a cowboy hat that obviously doesn't fit.
And frankly I don't much like people spouting off about protecting Wyoming or what Wyoming is or was, when they aren't from here. She's from Nebraska, so that's not far off, but Nebraska is not Wyoming.
Well, like some other populist things, or NatCon things, I'll confess that as a real conservative, and for htat matter a distributist agrarian, I find myself occasionally disturbed by a one of their members saying something that taps into something I've said myself. This article by Craven does that:
As much as I hate to admit it, and I do hate to admit it, she has a point, although in the typical populist manner, she starts off by saying something cruel to get to the point. Indeed, it basically takes her 40% of her article to quit being an asshole before she gets to the point that 's worth considering, with this paragraph:
Welfare, in the 14th century meant one’s good fortune, health and exemption from evil. This changed in the 19th and early 20th centuries as public assistance became a role the government took over from the private charities, which had historically helped to ensure that people fared well. Welfare was holistic, community-driven and just as much emotional and spiritual as it was physical.
The shift of society away from the church-based and community associations and toward the government was no good for our fellow man. Adding fuel to the fire were the rapid technological advances that made us distant, isolated, and serotonin-addicted.
This has addled people’s ability to engage in real conversation or romance.
Well, she's correct, sort of .
Craven seems to edge up on the point, actually and then wonder off again, being slightly mean spirited once again. She never gets to the bigger point which is that a welfare system that creates semi permanent benefits, run by a bureaucracy, creates dependency, and corrupts. Indeed, that was the huge difference, other than an inability to cover all who really needed help, from modern welfare and pre Great Depression charity.
Support form charitable organizations, and churches, and the like, was always very temporary. And it tended to come with some requirements. State funded welfare tends not to, although the GOP has attempted to insert some. There are work requirements, of course, but it is difficult to tell how much they're winked at as the principles of subsidiarity have not been applied, so there's no real control. In contrast, I know of a situation in which a Church collects directly for the poor and distributes directly to the poor. In doing so, they do ask "are you working?"
And there are more uncomfortable truths as well. Welfare has, ironically, been a major driver in the decline of Western morality, and more particularly, and arguably much more pronounced, American morality.
Prior to the current welfare regime, children were very much the responsibility of both parents, in every fashion. We've discussed this in the context of the Playboy Philosophy and what not, but what was the case, even into the early 1980s, was that people that had children were normally married, and to a large degree, women who became pregnant out of wedlock either married the father or gave the child up for adoption (or after 1973, aborted). Moral decay brought on by the Sexual Revolution, aided by pharmaceuticals, started to erode the two parent family however and in our current age that's pretty pronounced. An African American commentator got in trouble a year or two ago by claiming that some women "married the government", but there's more than a little truth to that. Kids raised in this environment are more subject to abuse by subsequent "boyfriends" of their mother, and are more likely to be raised in poverty and declining morality. It's simply the truth.
That in turn kicks back to society at large. The American lower middle class tends to wade at least knee deep in a sort of moral sewer even while being horrified by those swimming in it. This wasn't the case thirty year or more ago. The trend line isn't good.
So, Cravens has a point.
But how do you end this? She doesn't opine on that, which is the cowardly way out. Indeed nobody, except perhaps for those deep in the Heritage Society, is doing so. What Project 2025 did, apparently, is to suggest an increase in work requirements, which was attempted sort of sub silentio earlier this year. But then, the entire NatCon group in the government right isn't really willing, in general, to admit trying to bring into play any of their policies. They do them all silently while sometimes denying they're doing them at all.
Which is one of the things I really detest about the Trump Administration. It's dishonest. They should simply admit, if they think it, that "welfare is contributing to moral decay and we have to do something about it."
Of course, the problem here is that most Americans really don't want to do anything about the things they claim they do. Bloated Americans who spend Sundays watching the NFL and who are living with their second or third wives or girlfriends might think about going to the megachurch once a month where the pastor is not going to equate their lifestyle with adulterous mortal sin, or preach about the dangers of wealth to their souls, and might bitch about homosexuals and the like even while being just as morally adrift, but they don't really want the responsibility of responsibility.
Of course, save for some, which explains a movement towards cultural conservatism in the young, thereby being proactive in the culture, even if not attempting to be cultural revolutionaries.
The Secretary of Transportation has taken a lot of flak for this, and I'm not fan of the Trump Administration, but you know, I don't think the message here is wrong by any means.
And, fwiw, I hate seeing people in pajamas in public, whether its on an airplane, or Walmart.
China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins.
The Chinese Civil War was the topic of a political cartoon as well.
The murdered Game Wardens were Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson who were killed by ardent Nazi sympathizer and German immigrant Johann Malten. The same Game Wardens had arrested Malten for game violations when investigating, interestingly enough, claims that Malten had been involved in espionage and was relaying weather reports on shortwave, something that was illegal during the war when there was a blackout on weather reporting as the information was useful to submarines. Upon visiting Malten's cabin in the Sierra Madres they found he had committed numerous game violations.
On this occasion they were stopping by to see if Malten had continued to ignore the law. They were shot down out of hand when they arrived.
Malten burned his cabin down and it was officially reported that he'd died within it, although the evidence of that is very poor. There were reported sightings of him for years thereafter.
And a selection of 1945 cartoons.
I knew about this story because former Wyoming Game Warden David Bragonier wrote about it in his book about Wyoming Game Wardens, Wild Journey: On the Trail With a Wyoming Game Warden in Yellowstone Country. It's a good book, and I recommend it.
Bragonier discusses this event, although I clearly don't remember everything I read in his account. That's probably not too surprising as I read the book in 1999. What I recall but didn't see in the accounts on the murder you can find here is that the investigation was associated not only with the killer's German nationality and his strong Nazi sympathies, but also with shortwave radio transmissions that could not be pinned down.
There's a bunch of interesting things that could, and if a person had time, should be explored here as the story raises all sorts of undeveloped oddities.
One of them is that Lakanen and Simpson are two out of the three Wyoming Game Wardens who were murdered by immigrants (to the extent I know why the various ones who lost their lives in the line of duty did). I'm not saying that immigrants murder game wardens, but this is an interesting fact. The other one is John Buxton, who was murdered by a youthful Austrian immigrant in 1919. In that instance he had taken a .30-30 Savage rifle from a 17 year old who drew a revolver and killed him. The reasons that Buxton was checking the boys is unclear. Stories frequently claim they were hunting out of season, but that seems incorrect. They were certainly overarmed for rabbits, however, with a .30-30 being way too large for that pursuit. Buxton might have been checking them as their activities seems suspicious, which frankly they do, or because there was a state law at the time that prohibited aliens from carrying firearms.
The killers handgun, we might note, was concealed.
I only note this as its odd. Hunting is common in Germany and Austria, and indeed there's a strong hunting culture there, but it's highly regulated. As a result, poaching is fairly common as well, even though its highly criminal. Indeed, one of the SS's units during World War Two, the Dirlewanger Brigade, was originally made up of convicted poachers, although it moved on to other criminals over time.
Anyhow, I wonder if these people were just hugely out of sink with any culture at all.
In the earlier murder, it's been noted that the young men had been in run-ins apparently with Italian immigrants in the same location. Austro Hungaria and Italy had been on opposite sides of World War One. Again, I'm not saying that caused the murder, but I do wonder if they conceived of themselves as being very much on the outside of things.
Another interesting thing, although having nothing to do with the focus on this page, is the lingering Nazi sympathies in some quarters amongst German immigrants who chose to continue to live in the country. That carried on, quietly, well after the war, even after the news of the Holocaust became known.
Odd.
If Malten was actually a spy, that may explain the killing in and of itself.
Another thing this story oddly brings up is the extent to which trapping remained economically viable.
Trapping was pretty common in Wyoming up into the 1970s, when there was a fur market price collapse. I had, well still have, traps, although I haven't set them for decades. In the 1970s high school kids like myself supplemented our incomes by trapping or hunting coyotes for their furs. The market was so lucrative at the time that there were people who flew in from out of state and hunted coyotes near Miracle Miles, something we didn't appreciate very much as we didn't have those sorts of resources available to us. The Federal Government was also big into predator control at the time which we also didn't appreciate much for the same reason.
Furs are, fwiw, an actual renewable resource fabric, one of the few.
Fur coats were a big deal for women at this time and would, again, be throughout the 1950s. They were not nearly as much of a luxury item as people like to remember. My mother had a heavy mink coat that she brought down from Montreal that she wore on really cold days. As a kid I loved it when she brought it out, due to the feel of the soft minks.
It was, in spite of Donald Trump and the Sweet Home Alabama crowe dof the GOP may believe, colder then.
I've never looked into it but I suspect that synthetic fabrics had as much to do with the decline in furs as anything else. That started during World War Two and is well evidenced by the Air Force's switch from sheepskin flight altitude flight jackets to synthetic ones. That trend continue into the 1950s and I suspect it just generally caught up with fur coats by the 1980s. Indeed, the association of fur with luxury somewhat increased in that time, with it generally being the case that things are regarded as luxurious not only for their scarcity, but because they really aren't needed.
More on fur clothing some other time.
I guess the final thing I'll note is how dangerous of job being a game warden is. A lot of the crimes you investigate are, by default, armed crimes.
Given that, it's amazing to look back and realize that when I was a kid wardens didn't carry sidearms. They weren't allowed to. I recall when that changed and many did not take up what was then the option to carry them. Now they're required to.
Indeed, I was recently stopped by a warden and frankly he wasn't very nice. That's a new trend as well. I don't like it. But not only was he not nice, he was extremely intimidating carrying a government issued handgun on a government issued gunbelt and wearing a government issued flak jacket.
I've really hated the militarization of the policy and this is all part of it. Everytime I see a policeman anymore, including a game warden, they're dressed like they're going into Hue in 1968. All policemen of every type are civilians. They're simply deputized civilians. They shouldn't look like an occupying army. And if the treat people rudely, and many do, and are standing their armed treating you like you are a detained Vietnamese villager, it's scary.
A little of that comes across, I'd note, in Bragonier's book, in spite of my recommendation of it. It's a good book, but he displayed an element of contempt for the public he served in it.
David Bragonier must be, I'd suspect, gone to his reward by now His biography indicates that he was born in Iowa in 1937 and moved to Wyoming after graduating high school. He became a game warden over twenty years later, in 1958, something that would be extremely difficult to do now due to the education requirements. He briefly worked for the Forest Service before that.
A man becoming a Game Warden at 39, which he did, would be really unusual now. Probably impossible.
I actually have twice tried to plow that field myself, rejecting it once as I just go engaged. I would have been about 30 at the time. It'd be completely impossible for me to become a Game Warden now as I not have a wildlife management degree. I suppose that requiring that specific degree is a good thing, but I do miss the days when a lot of Game Wardens were basically from ranching families. Even when I was that age, many of them fit that category. My cohort was probably about the last one that would meet that description.
I went on, of course, to a successful career in the law, and I was already a lawyer, of course at age 30, and had been for a few years. I took one fork in the road. You aren't supposed to look back. Luke tells us, in a different context, that "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God". I'll confess I've looked back a lot.
Having said all of that, I spoke the same warden (turns out he's very green) as I found a poached elk about two weeks later. I had to guide him in, by phone, to the location. He was very nice on that occasion, and that's how things should be.
Yesterday, November 4,2025, was metaphorically D-Day, June 6, 1944. The forces that will destroy you are now present on all flanks. They're on the ground to your south, to your east, and now to your west, and you cannot stop them.
Those who are not besotted by Der Führer know this. Indeed, they know that the leader is mentally unstable and in irreversible physical decline. He is, quite frankly, mad and getting worse. He's surrounded, of course, by seemingly loyal lieutenants. . . not all of whom are really loyal . . . or seem to be.
You can read the situation. He never had the majority of force, only temporary advantage brought on by shock. You went along as it seemed that he'd bring along constative values with him. Because he seemed to do that, even while leading an immoral life and surrounding himself with immoral men, you tolerated deep immoralities, including extra judicial killings and racist round ups. This seemed to be the price you had to pay, temporarily, in order to restore true conservatism to the country.
But it went too far, and it got too weird, and you were in too deep to do anything about it. You know that. You watched him decline into illegality and insanity, and stood by as it got worse and worse.
But you can still save yourself, and your movement.
He had sworn an oath. He was a Roman Catholic. He knew the leader was immoral. He knew the country was committing deeply immoral acts. He served his country's efforts anyway until the raving madness of Der Führer reached the point where he could not ignore it. The situation isn't the same, except perhaps metaphorically, in that there is a Roman Catholic, who has taken an oath, who is serving his country, and knows that what is occuring deeply wrong and that the Leader is mad. He could use, with help, the 25th Amendment.
That will involve deploying something that you never thought you'd see used, and you have to do it. Some of you on the inside, who are not members of the MAGA SA, have to deploy the 25th Amendment before it's too late. You can't wait until the Red Army is in Berlin . . . or the mushroom cloud is over the Korean Peninsula, or protestors are shot dead in Portland, or mayor and governors arrested simply for being opponents.
If you do it soon, you have a chance, but by this point only a chance, of making peace with the overwhelming force of the electorate. If you do that now, or very soon, you can keep on with a conservative government, but not one that is outright insane. You might be regarded as heroes. You might save many of your members from November 2026. You can still make an impact on the country.
And you might, just might, avoid bloodshed in American streets, or foreign dead from an illegally provoked war, perhaps a nuclear one.
Or, you can decide that Loyalty is Your Honor and go down in complete and utter defeat in November 2026 while your increasingly demented leader rants and decides that you failed, as you weren't sufficiently loyal to him.
Indeed, that's already started, hasn't it? The wild party with barely clad young women, the sycophantic adoration sessions, the purges of the less than loyal.
And, too, the wise are leaving, aren't they?
The 25th Amendment was for the rare and extraordinary. You know the leader is mad. You know that this is going to take conservatism down. You know is madness is resulting in death. You know that you can act.
His madness is unfortunately not out of the ordinarily for the elderly, which he is. But to have somebody in such a state of mental decline in power, and grasping for absolute power, is. He's sick, getting sicker, and seeks complete control.
Will you, to your difficult credit, act to uphold your sworn oaths to the country, and save the nation from a demented autocrat whose decline gets worse every day, or will you abstain and simply try to take the last plane out of Berlin?
Last weekend we ran Catholic Ross Douthat's interview with Doug Wilson. In his interview Douthat kept trying to pin Wilson down on whether there was a place for Catholics in Wilson's vision of a Calvinist theocratic United States. Wilson came down on yes, but he hedged his bets a fair amount.
The real answer to whether members of the New Apostolic Reformation feel that was has been provided by Super Bowl LX.
I don't like football at all. I won't be watching the halftime game which I always find to be much like professional football itself, grossly overblown. But it does provide a weathervane to the culture. The music associated with professional football shows very much who football feels to be the up and coming audience.
The performer chosen was "Bad Bunny".
Bad Bunny is one Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. He was born in Puerto Rico. He sings in Spanish.
Well the late Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA is having none of it. It's going to offer its own “All American Halftime Show”.
Oscasio is an American. Puerto Ricans have been since March 2, 1917. They're fully American, and frankly, Puerto Rico ought to be granted statehood, there being absolutely no good reason for it not being a U.S. State at this point. And, Oscasio is a Christian. He's a Catholic, whose mother is apparently very devout.
Here's the thing. Turning Point USA is exhibiting a populist far right Freudian Slip. Some members of the organization are just too ignorant to know either of these points, but some know them and don't believe that Puerto Ricans are "real" Americans, or that Catholics are Christians.
The last point is particularly ironic. Lots in the Evangelical far right like to say they're "Bible Believing" Christians, by which they mean sola scriptura Christians. Sola Scriptura is itself Biblically indefensible as St. Paul informed the Thessalonians that they should stand firm in the "traditions" that they had been brought, indicating that there were in fact traditions already. We know now what those traditions were, as Christians had been writing many of them down in other texts that didn't end up in the Bible almost from the very beginning. But more ironic yet is this, the Bible is a Catholic book.
This isn't a matter for debate. It just is. We know how the books of the Bible came about, who wrote them, and what they believed. There was, at the time, just one "holy, catholic and apostolic church", and that was the Catholic Church. You can add the Orthodox churches to this list today as they directly descend from it. But in a strict sense, members of various Evangelical churches don't fit into this category. Indeed, fear of not fitting into it by various Protestant groups has lead some of them to claim membership all along, such as various branches of the Lutheran, Anglican and Methodist churches. They don't dispute that the Catholics and Orthodox are direct descendants of the original Catholic Church, and indeed, they agree that the Catholic Church is the uninterrupted Christian church that Christ founded. Evangelical churches that don't hold that view are frankly ignorant on this point.
But they are persistent in their ignorance. So much so, that many of them don't believe that the original Christians, the Catholics, are Christians at all.
We put the Bible together, and the New Testament was written by inspired Catholic authors, but they ignore that.
As I've noted before, and as Wilson conceded, this is a Protestant nation and moreover Wilson was also right that it was founded as a Calvinist one. That's a major reason that for much of this country's history the Irish, Italians, and other Catholics were detested and even regarded as a separate race. It's part of why Hispanics are regarded as a separate race today. Stripped of his fishing tackle piercings, Bad Bunny could look like a Spanish Conquistador. . . not a "Pilgrim".
Something about the election of Barrack Obama really brought out latent racism in this country. The Obergefell decision really unleashed a deep dormant conservatism in the population, but one that followed the American Civil Religion rather than real Christianity. The New Apostolic Reformation took advantage of that and has been advancing its cause under the radar, until recently, when it started doing it more openly, although still not so openly that the fact that we're in the midst of a Christian Nationalist coup right now is appreciated. Quite a few conservative Catholics, not really well schooled in what far right Evangelical Christians believe, or just badly catechized themselves, have joyously gone along with it, as it seems to address, and to some degree if fact addresses, the cultural rot that has set in, in the Western world.
About once a year I go on an unhinged campaign for the restoration of manual transmissions. I absolutely know, right from the onset, that it's totally pointless. Nonetheless, the fact that no manual transmission pickup trucks are made in the US, outside of the Jeep pickups, really angers me.
100% of the reasons stated in support of automatic transmissions are pure unadulterated bullshit. The real, and only, reason they're put in pickup trucks is that most pickup trucks are driven in cities, including ones that have fanciful outdoorsy names and have something like "off road edition" emblazoned on their sides. If it's got an automatic transmission, it's the kawaii thirteen year old girl edition. That's it. It's made for wimps who want to pretend their outdoorsy and don't know how to drive.
The market, of course, is what controls this, and ever since the day guys who never get outside the Denver city limits started dominating the market, this is what we've ended up with.
Now, in defense of engineering, automatic transmissions in trucks have gotten much better than they used to be. Indeed, ever since General Motors began to put Alison transmissions in their diesels, they've been pretty good. None of that changes the fact that all of the disadvantages associated with automatic transmissions fully remain. You are actually using the engine to drive the transmission, which is inherently inefficient, and you are letting hydraulic pressure determine when to shift gears, which is mindless. It can also be dangerous. All of the features that engineers built in to allow automatic transmissions not to be mindless killers are ignored by everyone who drives one.
And the fact that they have a lot of extra parts means they're going to wear out more quickly. I have had in the various vehicles I own two transmissions wear out. . . both of them were automatics.
And, yes, I've owned vehicles with automatic transmissions.
So, anyway, it always goes the same way. I get angry about it, and usually when it dawns on me that I can never, ever, buy a new vehicle now as they all have automatic transmissions. I end up emailing the Dodge dealer asking for a cab and chassis with no transmission, as I can take care of the transmission part.
"Um. . . . we can't do that".
Oh bullshit, you certainly can.
Occasionally I called Dodge, which I did this week. I ended up with some poor (probably Filipino, based on the accent) woman who tried to help.
"I want a cab and chassis with no transmission, or I want you to put in a G56 transmission and I know that you have some around there".
"Um. . . . just a moment sir. . . . I tried to ask somebody but nobody knows the answer to this. . I'm sorry".
The current diesel engine in Dodge's is the the B6.7. I really wonder if there's any new made manual that will mate up to it, although the costs of doing so would likely be insane. I wonder the same about the somewhat bigger Cummis engines, up to the the L9 and B7.2. I'd think there's have to be one for hte 7.2.
People reading my comments on the illegitimate claimant to the Oval Office and the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, and indeed the general drift of Republican politics in this state, all of which are causing the ghosts of Mussolini and Franco to wonder "aren't they a little extreme?", may simply assume I'm a liberal, and that I oppose everything conservatives are doing.
They're wrong, I'm a social conservative, but anyhow. . .
For those holding that view, this post will surprise.
I have my doubts about the constitutionality of this effort, but I think this effort is worth it.
In spite of what people might say, some of these books are absolutely horrific. Without detailing how I know it, two of the books that keep coming up in this discussion, Gender Queer and This Books Is Gay do not belong in the children's section of any library and frankly should only be in a limited adult section at that. I don't overall object to them being in a library, but frankly the common assumption that they are aimed at "young adults" is correct.
Gender Queer is a "graphic" book, i.e., cartoon. It depicts a scene in which a friend instructs another teenage friend how to stick a finger up a vagina, and that's not all. This Book Is Gay is basically a homosexual sex manual for young people, complete with badly done illustrations.
Seriously?
This gets right to the roots of the culture wars. Basically, the authors of these books believe that you are a homosexual from the second you are born, if you become one later, or even really if a person ever ponders such activity. This is to "help" them get past what the authors regard unfortunate mental roadblocks.
The psychological support for such a view is basically nonexistent. Homosexuality itself, while it occurs in all cultures, is particularly prevalent in the cultural West, so much so that in China its regarded as a Western thing. At one time it was so associated with English public (that is to say private) boy's schools that it was called "the English disease". We really don't grasp it all that well.
And frankly what we don't need to do is to push teenagers who might be pondering it, outright into it, which as a society is exactly what we are in fact doing. Books like this help to do that. They're Gender Queer is practically designed to do that.
Libraries have always restricted sexual content to the young. . . until recently. I remember years ago reading an article in the Denver Post about how the Denver Public Library kept Playboy and a Buddhist sex manual in an area where you had to ask for them, with those publications being the two most requested in that section. The point is, they didn't keep bound volumes of Playboy down in the children's sections for teenage boys to peruse, even though a person could argue that it was just as instructive as those struggling with their sexuality as these texts. And, moreover, any teen asking for either one of them would have been told to pound sand.
All this comes, as these articles make plain, against the background of a lawsuit over the topic that was just settled. Not "won", but settled. One ironic element is that the librarian spoke out hoping that her settlement, which is a settlement (i.e., she didn't win, or lose, the suit) would discourage the legislature from passing this bill.
The article is incredibly fair, just interviewing a selection of students. Some liked Kirk, some didn't but were appalled by his violent death, and one indicated that he supported it.
The views, I'd note, that a lot of Americans hold.
The Freedom Caucus has decided to go into a corner and sob big tears of the left wing media is picking on me.
