Kansas City Star. May 6, 2022.
Editorial: Can a cartoon character turn you LGBT? Kansas’ Sen. Roger Marshall seems to think so
It’s becoming clearer by the day that the Republican Party is betting that animus toward LGBT Americans is a big winner this election year. Now Kansas’ junior senator is taking his culture war fight to Hollywood — and making it about kids.
Roger Marshall led four fellow GOP senators in sending a letter to the board of the TV Parental Guidelines — a congressionally mandated consortium that provides content ratings for television shows — asking it to update its criteria for the warnings it puts on children’s programming. Citing “parents raising legitimate concerns on sexual orientation and gender identity content on children’s TV shows,” the letter evokes “the motivations of hypersexualized entertainment producers striving to push this content on young audiences,” calling the creators “suspect at best and predatory at worst.”
Pretty heavy charges. When a Star reporter asked for a list of this nefarious programming, the examples included Netflix’s cartoon “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power” and Nickelodeon’s “Danger Force.” Also, a Pixar job listing for an actor and the fact that Disney airs a public service ad.
The glue holding all this offensive content together? Transgender people. Some of them young.
The clear point of Marshall’s letter is the ridiculous idea that kids seeing LGBT characters on screen might just turn them. When he warns darkly about “modeling behavior” that influences children, he’s confusing depicting sexual situations with simply featuring people who aren’t heterosexual or gender-conforming.
Nobody is having sex on the shows and TV spot Marshall’s office highlights. The programs simply acknowledge the fact that there exist people outside gender or sexual orientation norms by showing them.
Caitlyn Jenner, likely the most famous out transgender person today, is a highly conservative Republican. In an especially moving part of her coming out on a 2015 Diane Sawyer special, she talked about keeping the secret she’d recognized in early childhood until retirement age. “I would say I’ve always been very confused with my gender identity since I was this big,” she said, holding her hand a couple feet above the floor.
LGBT people learn who they are on their own timetables. Jenner knew she was different at 8 or 9. Some people don’t realize they aren’t so straight after all until they’ve had three kids and hit middle age.
Did the generations of children who watched Bugs Bunny pin back a blond wig and squeeze into a pencil skirt to pull one over on Elmer Fudd all turn into cross-dressers?
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Topeka Capital-Journal. May 6, 2022.
Editorial: Cheryl Helmer isn’t living up to her obligation as an aspirational figure in Kansas politics
The words we choose matter.
They can uplift. They can tear down. The reality is words offer us a glimpse at a person’s heart. What’s on their mind by what they choose to put out into the world.
Recently, the words of Rep. Cheryl Helmer, R-Mulvane, have been making headlines for their inflammatory nature.
Helmer belittled a transgender peer in an email to a Kansas resident.
The Topeka Capital-Journal’s Andrew Bahl reports Helmer wrote she doesn’t “appreciate the huge transgender female who is now in our restrooms in the Capitol,” a reference to Rep. Stephanie Byers, D-Wichita, the state’s first transgender lawmaker.
Helmer went on to say without evidence in an email correspondence with Brenan Riffel, a University of Kansas graduate student who identifies as transfeminine — that “little girls have been raped, sodomized and beaten in the restrooms by these supposedly transgenders who may or may not be for real.”
Riffel had reached out to Helmer expressing their opposition to a bill Helmer co-sponsors that would criminalize performing gender reassignment surgery for minors.
Speaking to reporters, House Speaker Ron Ryckman, R-Olathe, said Helmer’s remarks about Byers were “unfortunate” but declined further comment.
Helmer also has made statements on her Facebook page that the Ramada Inn and Jefferson Street Apartments — both operated by Parrish Hotel Corp. — are filled with undocumented immigrants.
The Capital-Journal’s Tim Hrenchir reports Helmer said the Ramada “is now filled with Biden’s illegal immigrants” in a post made Sunday on her personal Facebook page, where she wrote that she pays $700 a month to rent a small room there. She also said, “They are bussed (sic) to the potato factory daily if they want to work.”
In response, Jim Parrish, president and CEO of Parrish Hotel Corp., told the Capital-Journal the people to whom Helmer refers are here legally as part of a federally sponsored program that brings workers to the U.S. on temporary visas from all over the world “so our factories can operate and our economy can be healthy.”
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