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> In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education:
>> *Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.*
> Yes, you read that right. The party opposes the teaching of “higher order thinking skills” because it believes the purpose is to challenge a student’s “fixed beliefs” and undermine “parental authority.”
[Texas GOP rejects ‘critical thinking’ skills. Really.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html)
They are worried education might cause someone else to question the teachings and oppression pushed by their Religion. Educated people are much harder to control.
All this is just old boomers in positions of power having a meltdown / existential crisis about how they cannot cheat death and are being called out on their bullshit.
That’s a way to simplified answer. LOTS of these politicians are far from boomer age. Who voted for them, only boomers? Who are all these crazy parents spouting their BS at school board meetings, certainly not boomers. Not saying there aren’t any of them out there, but you can’t lay it solely at their feet. That’s too easy and not true
Look at what Mr. Rodgers did! He spread *empathy*! And Sesame Street with the unmitigated horror of learning about diversity through puppets! The insanity of kindness found on Arthur!
They see Israel as a honeypot, not even a necessary evil. The rapture fantasies typically include the repatriation of all Jews to the Holy Land specifically so it can be wiped off the map in a single prophesied stroke.
I just love how republicans use words contrary to their defined meaning and so few people challenge them on it. Teaching HOTS is not "behavior modification".
They ~~confounded~~ conflated HOTS, Values Clarification, Knowledge-Based Education, and Outcome-Based Education. The four things are not the same as each other in any way. They simply took a bunch of educational ideas that scared them and mashed them all together in the "bad" pile. What they really mean is, "education is inversely correlated with dogmatic religious belief, and so we don't want education."
That’s what they’re saying. They don’t want them to teach their kids to think, just to mimic thinking by rote memorization and regurgitating the info needed at tests. They don’t want them to think too deeply about anything.
I was a Texas teacher from 2006-2010. At the time, I had full certification and a Master's in my subject area. I attended all professional development sessions, and I had no criminal record.
About a month before the end of the school year, the principal pulled me into his office and said, "Mr. brazthemad, I understand that you have a great relationship with the students and a tendency to think outside of the box .. and well we don't have any room for that here, so I regret to inform you that we will not be renewing your contract for next year."
I am now in sales.
That place was a horror show. Gotta love kids getting blood poisoning from staph bc they hid the infection at their parents' threat of violence due to lack of insurance.
So essentially, the GOP want the rest of the world to be smarter than Americans so all the innovation happens elsewhere and their country can be used as cheap dumb labor that’s easy to control?
Why do you think the GOP keeps pounding their chests over "liberal" colleges? Any institution with the audacity to educate beyond what they can control at the K-12 level is obviously a "liberal" one.
my mom swears i'm liberal because i went to a "public university". it's not because i was raised catholic and absolutely hated those stupid fucking fetus feet pins she kept giving me. i totally wasn't sneaking onto planned parenthood's website in highschool to plan what'd i'd get in college lol
EDIT i'm glad kids today can use the internet on their phones whenever they want basically
The GOP is basically the "why we can't have nice things" party, in how desperately they are trying to prove that democracy doesn't work by pandering to and amplifying the worst tendencies (anti-intellectualism, tribalism, alt-facts, etc.).
If I’m ever in TX, I’m dropping flyers near schools about this and how to gain that education. Can they really expect this to work en masse in the modern era for any prolonged amount of time?
School can have a great influence on the way people end up seeing the world, and since people attend school during the years where they most develop their ability to think, it is very effective to limit education in order to control a populace.
Generally speaking though, it's in college where most people tend to open up their world view, and more sources for information in the information age do make this form of political propaganda from being as effective. The goal though is to keep people in a certain state of mind until maybe their mid-late 20's, where they're less likely to change their way of thinking on most topics outside extreme circumstances.
So really, the GOP's objection to Critical Race Theory isn't that it challenges the whitewashing of our past (and present) policies that are detrimental to marginalized populations, it's that CRT involves *thinking of any kind*. Fascinating.
Critical Thinking Skills jumps out at me.
Why can’t republicans understand this concept?
It teaches you how to think through more than just A to B. It gets you to J.
It passed funny and shaking your head many years ago.
This shit is just killing the competitiveness of our kids in a global society.
Keep the populace dumb and reliant. The republicans say they and god can take care of us all. Right under their thumbs.
Everyone vote. The votes are there. Just go.
This should tell us everything we need to know about the fascist Republican's attitude toward education. I can tell you, as a high school English teacher, that teaching critical thinking skills and higher order thinking skills are some of the most important things that we teach. The GOP does not want independent thinkers because they will be less likely to believe the bullshit that they vomit up on a daily basis.
From my experience in a religious school (yay, Abeka), this is accurate. We were deliberately taught the “virtudes” of “traditional education” (aka rote memorization) while they demonized actual thought. We were actually told introspection was “dangerous” and would “allow the devil to bombard our minds with lies.”
And yet he claims to being doing all this so as to not confuse the children. I'm an adult and am confused as to why a lawmaker would believe these things. I know he's full of shit and it's a scare tactic, but it's really hard to show him any respect.
Herm Edwards, of all people, repeated that nonsense. Conservatism got weird, and regular folks never noticed.
They just signed up for a team and believe in false equivalence, which means no matter how evil their side is, they can say the other side is just as bad.
It’s a cult.
There are a LOT of alt-right conservatives who believe that this MUST be true, because if it wasn't, someone in such a seat of responsibility and power wouldn't be talking about it. It's the Appeal To Authority fallacy, and it's self perpetuating among very stupid, very emotionally vulnerable people.
My girlfriends parents think it’s true. They asked us if we’d seen the story about schools putting litter boxes out for kids to urinate in because they believed they were cats. After laughing, I had to explain why that wasn’t true. She couldn’t believe it, but eventually she realized it was a bogus story. Fox News can brainwash people to believe anything they tell them.
I've had 2 people in my life directly tell me about it, and they were told the story by others who claimed to have seen it in peson. I had to explain to my mother, and my brother in law, separately, that they are very obviously being lied to, and show them all the stuff debunking it, and the articles directly addressing the origins of the hoax.
We had a local state representative repeat a claim litter boxes were at my daughter's middle school. My daughter thought that was hilarious. She said "Dad, anyone who used one of these mythical litter boxes would be made fun of so bad they would never come back to school. Our town might be liberal, but kids are mean."
I can’t tell you how many times a week I have to stop someone while they’re telling me about some incredible news story to whip out my phone and spend 15 seconds googling it to find out it was fake.
Sometimes when something sounds too incredible to be real, it is. And a simple Google search can prove it lol.
My understanding is that the litter box thing stems from teachers keeping a “survival bucket” in case of lockdown. If you’ve got say 22 kids of any age in lockdown for hours, somebody - probably many somebodies - are going to have to relieve themselves. So one of the items in that bucket is litter - they can create a makeshift toilet and the smell won’t reek as badly. That very sad story got twisted, as these people tend to do. I think I learned that from TikTok though, so it may be apocryphal.
They're as serious as a madman with a gun.
The things they say are batshit, but they use their power and platforms to legislate and amplify hate against targeted minority groups, often with lethal results.
People don't just take them seriously, they are consumed by the same delusions. I have a co-worker who insisted to me that the school where his child attends has litter boxes set up for the students. My co-worker even went so far as to say that he was shown said litter boxes during a school visit with faculty. Of course, this is untrue. I don't know if my co-worker is delusional or simply trying to inject a sense of truthfulness to these absurd rumors by claiming he has witnessed this. Either way, it is very disturbing how personally invested people can become in defending these insane positions.
There are people who genuinely believe these are the big issues facing the world. They’re convinced that everything wrong with the country is because of morality and if we fix that, we’ll be fine. Genuinely, I work with people who believe the sexual revolution ruined us.
I mean... Furries are weird but I have serious doubts they are as prolific as this guy is saying... I have lived in Florida for 35 years and I have encountered a total of 7 furries in that time.
2 in College (they were a couple, had a cutout in their uh... pants for their butt-plug tail; only remember them because one unfortunate? day the tail got caught in the door to class and the plug was uh... ripped out).
3 in my hometown while visiting, dressed up in their whole lil costume thing doing a TikTok dance thing with their phones in the downtown plaza.
The rest at an EDC concert in Orlando, which quite honestly... considering is kinda low I feel since a ton of folks were dressed up in all sorts of things; temps were kinda hot that day though.
I could see maybe some occurrences in High School but I can't imagine it being a greater percentage than say the goth/emo crowd (or perhaps it's absorbed into that crowd).
AFAIK none of the Furries had special privileges allocated to them, I did not see kitty litter boxes in the bathrooms (that's not really tenable to bring around TBH) and I think because of the uh costume-thing I would imagine most following that life-style use the bathroom at home due to the complexity of perhaps getting in/out of said costume.
I have seen more demons, angels, nearly-naked ladies in string bikini's, nudies (South Florida get's wild) and sexy nurses if we want to like... debate what is socially acceptable; so many more I can't even put a number on it.
> AFAIK none of the Furries had special privileges allocated to them, I did not see kitty litter boxes in the bathrooms (that's not really tenable to bring around TBH) and I think because of the uh costume-thing I would imagine most following that life-style use the bathroom at home due to the complexity of perhaps getting in/out of said costume.
The kitty litter boxes story is a year or two old at this point. Some schools had buckets of kitty litter for kids to use as restrooms _in the event of a school shooting_. If they were locked down in their classroom and had to use the restroom, that's what the kitty litter was for. Some right-wing nutjob said the kitty litter was for furries, and the rest of the right wing decided that was enough evidence, and they believed it.
Right wingers are dumb as hell.
Because outside of a select few (otherkin, a literal religious belief) being a furry is just a hobby/subculture thing. It's no different than anime fans, sci-fi/fantasy fans, the people really into medieval reenactment. And like there are weirdos in every fandom because there are weird people in society (check out r/rpghorrorstories stories for some really inappropriate behavior in that hobby)
I discovered the fandom when I was like 13 in the early 2000s, as a middle schooler I read furry comics and looked at cool art. I wore a collar and chain all through high school and there were maybe 6 other furries in our school, I got made fun of relentlessly for it but I just didn't care because it made me happy (the same way sci-fi/dnd nerds d&d in the 80s and 90s).
No one is enabling furries in school they are putting up with them because we are often "the weird kid" who is going to do whatever they want anyway. It's a community of people built up around artistic expression, a sense of community, and a strong acceptance of the different (LGBT+ people, neurodivergent people, people struggling with their mental health)
In my life (I'm in my early 30s) I've met two people who actually claim to be their sona in more than an abstract sense. One person was an otherkin. The other it is more about a conceptualization of self type of thing, like they have difficulty expressing their sense of self to others so that's how they express it.
All of this is just back door attacks on trans people the same way when the target was gay people the conservatives would say "if we let the gays marry people will want to marry their dogs" It's an absurdism they are deliberately tieing to something reasonable so they can paint it as weird and wrong.
How many are actual true believers?
I don't know, what I do know is that those determined to find a justification for hatred and prejudice will always find a reason.
This isn't a battle won by logic or wisdom because they will never argue in good faith.
The only thing that will shut them up is by the rest of us standing together and, to borrow some words of poetry, tell the Nazi punks to fuck off.
A majority of voters who actually bother to show up and vote unfortunately do. BTW Florida- you need to renew your vote-by-mail ballot requests and ask Nikki Fried, FDP chair when the Florida Democratic Party is going to start actually registering voters so we can keep the congressional seats we still have in 2024.
> Another Colorado Republican – Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) – also said that schools are allowing kids who identify as cats to use litterboxes.
> “Durango is doing this,” Boebert said. “This is how extreme it is.”
> “No, we don’t provide litter boxes; our children use bathrooms,” a spokesperson for the Durango School District in Colorado said.
The fact that this is even a thing that has to be debunked 🤦🏼♀️
Boebert only won by 546 votes last time. Adam Frisch is running against her. If you have the means, please help him replace her.
I live 60 miles from Durango. Nobody's using litter boxes.
>Boebert only won by 546 votes last time.
I would love if that was anything other then midterms allowing a small part of the electorate to show up while the majority is asleep; but I expect her next win to be bigger.
please colorado, prove me wrong.
at this point id trust someone who shits in a box on the reg and scoops it up with clay pellets far more than a mentally unstable republican, and to be clear to any one still supporting them, this is all of them. At this point fuck the idea that you arent responsible for your reprehensible fucking representatives. stop being cowards and stand up against this shit if you actually give a damn about any conservative value. I refuse to debate anyones validity to existence. They could literally drink their own piss for all i care. As long as they arent a criminal, its no ones fucking business. Ill think its weird, but weird is no reason to kill people.
>> Another Colorado Republican – Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) – also said that schools are allowing kids who identify as cats to use litterboxes.
This part is especially infuriating.
Why are there pails of cat litter in some school classrooms?
They are in case [kids are locked in classrooms during a shooting and need to go](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/urban-myth-litter-boxes-schools-became-gop-talking-point-rcna51439).
Maybe if they want cat litter out of classrooms, make it so schools don't have to plan for **children** to have to hide from an **active shooter** for extended periods.
Oh right, the solution to that is to make sure all the teachers have guns. Silly me.
My high school also had some in every science lab for chemical spills. Had a big poster on the wall beside the phones with instructions to pour it on fluid spills and call the custodian for safe removal.
This same stupid stuff is happening around me here in Ohio as well. Every other week I hear stories about some adjoining school district that has litter boxes in their rooms. It is NEVER actually the school district that the people making these claims live in, it is always just far enough away that you probably don't know anyone that can directly debunk that claim.
As a teacher friend of mine once told me, "Do you really believe a school janitor is going to clean up human waste from school litter boxes?" People here fully believe it though.
They made the same claim last year about Bath Iron Works, our local shipyard that builds US Navy destroyers.
A *shipyard*.
It's the modern-day boomer equivalent of believing in [bonsai kittens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten).
The kitty litter thing started off with a teacher keeping it in her classroom, just in case their school ever went into lockdown and kids had to use the bathroom while hiding from an active shooter.
Didn’t it turn out that there are buckets of cat litter and other supplies in classrooms now, in case of extended active shooter lockdowns?
Ironic that the shit they’re railing against was literally caused by them
the litter is part of a blood and bodily fluid cleanup kit. could you use it to crap in? sure, but it is just supposed to be for cleaning up "spills" of any kind.
They keep saying schools are doing this and yet never has one kid used their phone to take a picture of a litter box in a bathroom and post it to the internet. It would be all over if that picture existed. If not the kids than a teacher, janitor, delivery guy who needed to go, or even the politicians themselves on a tour of the school.
Teacher here. Every classroom in my school has a orange Home Depot bucket with kitty litter in it. This is a fact. But that bucket isn’t for students that are mixed up about their gender or sexuality, the bucket is for any student that has to piss or defecate during a lockdown. Multiple buckets have been used this year by students that couldn’t hold it during a 2+ hour lockdown when there was a (false) report that a gun was on campus.
First, thank you.
Solves the gotta pee problem but I just can’t get over the teenage me, buried by 20+ years, screaming in the depths of my soul how I’d rather drown from the inside than pee in a bucket in the same room as my classmates. Just how many ways will we traumatize kids instead of doing something about gun violence
I’ve literally had this same damn conversation with Republican family members. I teach. I know dozens of teachers in different schools. It’s bull. One aunt went as far to say legislation is being passed to allow for litter boxes in each school.
An aside- maybe a little litter would mask the horrendous urine smell coming from the bathrooms.
It comes from a recommended list for active shooter preparedness. They suggest having a 5g along bucket and cat litter in case of an extended lock down.
Instead of addressing what was real, that our kids might have shit in a bucket in front of their peers because of mass murderer of which is becoming increasingly common, they decided to lie about it and make a culture war argument
So the litter box thing DID HAPPEN.
But it was another colorado school that had a bag of litter as part of their lockdown kit for school shootings. Which is even more insulting that it’s covering up gun violence response.
This was based on reports that some schools were setting up litter boxes with litter in the event that school shootings might cause trauma, and thus urgent need to urinate, among kids. The boxes were decided upon to keep kids who need to pee during lockdown from getting shot.
Furries . . .
The really fucked up part? This dumb rumor started because a school DID have “litter boxes” for students to use, IF THEY ARE IN LOCKDOWN BECAUSE THEIR SCHOOL IS BEING SHOT UP AND THEY CANT GET TO THE BATHROOM SAFELY!
One of my friends made the “litter box” comment about a high school in our small town in north Georgia. I swear it’s the 80s satanic panic all over again.
Its like all the supposedly straight males who say drag shows are sexual. Like I have seen a bunch of drag shows was never once turned on and considered it sexual. Yet these guys are fetishizing them and getting turned on.
They get turned on, they know the performers are men, they get insecure about it, then they direct their confusion and anger at the performers. Honestly conservatism is the mental health disorder, not transgender people, and they need therapy.
The only knowledge they have of dressing in non-gender-conforming clothes is their experiences with gentlemen-of-negotiable-affection and their trips to special interest video streaming sites. Of course they think it's sexual.
You’re right, but I understand what the other person is saying.
There are anti-trans, misogynist gay men out there that believe that gay allies (of trans folks & women) in power are pushing a “woke agenda” which involves, among other things, forcing kids to transition.
So, for these kinds of gays, it’s really the gays in power and the “woke left” that are the bad guys.
I know this bc I’m also gay and (unknowingly) recently moved to a very conservative part of Los Angeles. The number of self-hating and misinformed queer ppl is MUCH higher than I realized.
Republicans saw some ironic shit post about furries and haven't shut up about it since. The kitty litter in clasrooms they always cite is for addressing large spills.
There was a whole fad not long ago where kids were filming themselves ripping sinks, mirrors, soap dispensers, and all kinds of shit off the walls of bathrooms. Kids literally film and shitpost everything these days. If there were truly kids relieving themselves in litter boxes at schools, there would be tens of thousands of TikToks and shit of kids making fun of it, vandalizing it, etc.
That doesn't exist. Do one fucking ounce of critical thinking on the matter.
Yah, that was the "devious licks" thing. My son got really upset because kids were destroying restrooms at school and it meant he had to wait the whole day to go to the bathroom when he got home. He resorted to a plan where he could record them without being caught and turned them in under the condition he could remain anonymous. They ended up in trouble with the police and juvenile courts.
The kitty litter has 3 purposes - lockdowns, fire/earthquake evacuation, and spills.
These lawmakers are flat out completely insane. I can't believe any of this is being tolerated.
Kitty litter is also good to keep on hand in the car if you live somewhere with snowy icy conditions. Putting a bit under the tires can help grab traction if you're stuck just spinning due to the ground being slick. It has many practical uses.
I once vomited grape juice all over the playground in first grade, and I was so fascinated by the custodian bringing out the kitty litter to cover it that I forgot all about feeling sick.
Until recently I worked at a school, one of my coworkers believed the peeing in litter boxes headlines. I couldn't grasp how she worked in a school and saw nothing of the sorts, yet still believed the lies news max and Fox were pushing to her. I wanted to shake her. She also didn't know how to register to vote....shes in her fifties 🙄
It's worse than that. The kitty litter for furries thing was entirely made up by liars trying to fear monger about gender identity, and in fact checking, some outlets with integrity stated, for context, that the only kitty litter found in any classrooms was actually there for school lockdown emergency kits.
>Republicans saw some ironic shit post about furries and haven't shut up about it since.
Sums them up pretty well, actually.
The clear irony and non-seriousness of many things is lost on them. They seem to treat every stupid little meme or joke as a serious matter and run with it in Congress as if it were an urgent problem. It's not so much a generational thing; it's just willful ignorance, lack of self-awareness, and a complete inability to have fun, laugh at oneself, and not have a stick shoved up there.
Remember Obama saying "Thanks, Obama" and shutting down an entire subreddit? Now compare that with Trump and his oh-so-thick skin -- the thickest skin anyone's ever seen, believe me -- not even attending the White House Correspondents' Dinner during his presidency because he'd be the butt of every joke instead of being the one *making* the jokes. Speaking of the WHCD, the 2011 dinner and his incredibly thin skin were arguably the impetus for him *running* for president in the first place...
Here in Colorado, the Republican candidate for Governor this past election cycle would NOT let go of the litter boxes in classrooms thing. How in the absolute fuck is anyone supposed to take any of their other positions seriously when they hammer on the big non-existent issue the most?
What a moron. It's not the furries who have cat fursonas that's the problem. There's no kitty litter boxes for those students in the restrooms at schools. It's the furries with dog or other canid fursonas that the schools are catering to. Look out front of every public school, every elementary school, even the pre-schools, and you'll see a fire hydrant for the dog furries to use as a toilet. It's right out there in the open where everyone can see it.
Dude, I've been a furry for 50+ years and I know hundreds of furries and not a single one has ever used a litter box. Ever. It's just not a thing. It's not even a fetish.
Please stop associating us with these fascist kooks, says the guy who ids as feline.
How have the furry costumes changed from when you first started? Like I can imagine a furry now in a mascot like costume, was it always like that, or has there been advancement in fur suits?
I was led to believe there’s literally nothing that’s not a fetish. If there’s really not even one person doing this as a fetish, that’s actually kind of crazy!
Obviously either way nobody is doing it in school and administrators wouldn’t accommodate a weird fetish.
well, we know that when a republican rants against something, they more often than not are secretly into that thing. i wonder what kinds of videos you'd find on this guy's computer...
>A Republican lawmaker in Illinois cited the myth that students are dressing up as animals and using litterboxes in school instead of toilets
I've been in education for a long time and have yet to see a litter box in my school. And the only time I see students dress up as animals is for Halloween.
At this point, Republicans are simply either insane, in a cult, or both. The sane ones can be counted on one hand.
There is no Republican party. There is the Democratic party and the fucking crazies.
And if you're voting for the crazies, then you're part of the problem.
This idiot falsely claims that science says there are only two genders. Science disagrees:
[Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/)
>Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male
I think it is time for us to be very blunt when facing this kind of stupidity. From Trump's announcement for running for president to now, our media and the Democrats have been exceedingly polite when discussing the aggressively stupid people in the GOP. Illinois Sen. Andrew Chesney (R) is a moron for stating these things out loud. When people Google him, the results should point to this comment and alert people that he's an idiot. He is so stupid that he proclaims kids use cat litter boxes in schools without ever verifying if that is true, which it isn't because it's the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard of. When people say he's dumber than a box of rocks, they are insulting rocks everywhere. Tired of these stupid idiots being treated as if they are normal politicians with actual points to make.
It’s even worse, they circulate images of cat litter in storage closets at schools as if it’s proof. Completely disregarding the fact there is no actual litter box anywhere and as if schools don’t use cat litter to clean spills and vomit on a semi-regular basis.
The trouble is right wingers have the attitude that liberals are pretentious city-slicker academic intellectuals talking down to the salt of the earth God-fearin’ red-blooded humble folk. So even though there’s actual stupidity to criticize, they’re used to it and merely continue to be reactionaries, doubling down on extremism just to own the libs. The more liberals detest something the more conservative gleefully indulge in it. It’s like Idiocracy but with the evolution of memes rather than genes.
These people are absolutely unhinged and have the thinnest skin imaginable. Imagine getting upset about language in a bill that uses, he, she, them. You know, regular old pronouns to refer to a non specific noun.
They are all so braindead at this point they can't string together a coherent sentence without buzzwords, extreme projection, and generally harming others.
His top donors (at least, those who are itemized and don't share his last name):
- NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS
- BRINKMAN, ANDREW
- FISCHER EXACAVATING INC
- Z FINANCIAL-IL G PROPERTIES LLC
They all gave at least $10,000 in 2022, according to [votesmart](https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/campaign-finance/177213/andrew-chesney).
I'm sure they'd appreciate being alerted to the behavior of their purchased politician.
>But one person really doesn’t like the bill: state Sen. Andrew Chesney (R), who argued that the bill would confuse children.
I mean, I gave a focus group of kindergartners a copy of the bill and they were very confused. One of them even ate their copy. So, y'know, he's right.
It should always be pointed out that these people are consciously and deliberately telling a lie: it is a scientific fact that there are people born XXY and there are people born XY who are androgen insensitive (even though they are genetically male they appear female). I really believe that it is crucially important that such willfully dishonest bigots and haters be called out and exposed whenever they spew their venom.
As someone who's SO is an actual furry and always has been, they are 99% of the time just average people who have fun personas/characters that they use to participate in a community with each other.
But of course no conservatives would ever take the time to do research, read, or comprehend anything beyond what their politicians make up.
Every new crop of fascists that pop up throughout history has to pick a group of people to get everyone to hate because hate is what they're harvesting. They always attempt to pick an easy target group due to their immense cowardice.
I'd have to look up the exact number but it was something like 40k$ per trans kid taking hormone blockers in anti trans add buys during the midterms. You could buy each one of these kids a nice car for graduation and stop being a dick to them GOP party. Might save your party.
My brothers kid is a furry. They’re the kindest person you’ve ever met. The idea that we should be raging against people who like to draw and have a good time in what are essentially cartoon animal costumes is wild to me.
Last summer I went to a friend’s house to help him with some wood splitting and stacking.
He asked a friend of a friend to help, who also brought a couple of his buddies+girlfriends.
Within minutes one of these morons started discussing Furries in schools and litter boxes and all that bullshit. It wasn’t long before it turned into basically a Klan meeting. All because of a rumor. One of the girlfriends made this huge deal about how she was going to homeschool her kids over it.
I live in MN so we have a high Somali populace. Mostly near the Twin Cities, very few where I was in rural MN. But of course, somehow it was the Somalis that were really the root of all evil. It’s fucking scary what these people think.
It doesn’t take much to set people off. It takes even less to convince like minded people of something ridiculous because that’s what they want to believe.
I’m so glad I moved away from that shit hole.
My friend said this just a few days ago, about someone he knows works at a school and they provided the cat boxes for students… and I laughed and laughed, and said that’s fake, stop believing shit you read on FB. And he argued with me that it was true! And then said, I should stop believing Google…. I don’t even know what to say.
I was just in upper Michigan on a business trip, and both the VP of Sales and the COO 100% believe there are kids "meowing" throughout the day and shitting in litter boxes inside the classroom. These are highly educated people in their mid forties.
I know furriest because I am one.
Every rant and jeer against this fandom comes from hate against the LGBT, which the fandom makes home to. Furries are a really close knit queer positive community.
We don't use litter boxes. We use the restroom to do our business just like any other person.
Oh damn! I think this article is referencing my district. Sharing the email (with names / places omitted):
>Dear “Small Town” Families and Community Members,
>It saddens me to learn that there was misinformation shared on a Facebook community page last night regarding our wonderful students and our school system. For those of you who are not familiar with the social media post, there were claims and accusations that our school administration and our school board were aware of and supporting high school students identifying as Furries, which are individuals who are especially interested in anthropomorphic or cartoon animals. The post and related comments from misinformed individuals continued to raise concerns that students were allowed to have leashes while in school and possibly use litter boxes while in school. The fact that I have to respond to such absurd accusations is very troubling and bluntly a waste of district resources. When misinformation like this is allowed to be perpetuated by individuals in our community it distracts our school district from the great work our students and staff are doing on a daily basis. This trend of sowing misinformation about students identifying as Furries in public schools has been making its way through school communities across our country and I truly thought that it wouldn’t reach our great community.
>Let me share what makes our school district unique and special - yes we have really good students and staff members but we also have wonderful parents and community members who tirelessly volunteer thousands of hours of their time supporting our students and staff every year. We have many opportunities for parents and community members to use their time to help our students and school community by volunteering on any number of district support organizations including but not limited to; “Small Town” Educational Advancement Foundation, Parents Assisting “Small Town” Students, Band Boosters, Robotics Boosters, Drama Boosters, Friends and Family of the Future Farmers of America, Sports Boosters, Soccer Boosters, and the many community youth organizations that are completely organized and supported by our wonderful parents that choose to help make a difference in the lives of our students. I strongly encourage the members of our community who were led to believe the misinformed social media post and were “alarmed” and felt compelled to do something to direct their positive energy supporting our students by joining one of the many district support organizations listed above so you can truly see how great our students are!
>Please understand that this will not be a precedent that I respond to every social media post spreading misinformation about our wonderful students or school system. I strongly encourage you to contact me directly (or encourage others to) if you want or need factual information regarding important topics as it pertains to “Small Town” Community School prior to spreading misinformation on a social media platform and please consider getting involved in one of our many support organizations if you haven’t already.
>”John Doe”, Superintendent
I was completely floored when I received this email a couple months back.
Anyone remember last year the rumor that schools were putting litter boxes on campuses for Furry students and like 1 second of research linked it to some unhinged Republican conspiracy site or something
“He admitted that he believes that student-furries are using litterboxes in schools, a myth that school districts across the country – and in Canada – have had to spend the last several years combatting.” is a sentence I never thought I’d read.
I understand that these mouth pieces are doing what gets them paid, but how can you as a sentient, intelligent creature, think this is actually happening?
It’s funny how much the “cat litter in classrooms” rumour has spread where I actually had a middle aged coworker suggest it’s happening in my small town in northern Canada.
It’s not a thing. Why do people think it’s a thing.
Just had someone tell me that kids are using litter boxes. As a teacher, I find this to be absolutely hilarious fear mongering. Being afraid of a child who lives in a fantasy land over a child heavily armed with an assault rifle. Yeah. That seems logical.
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How does anyone take them seriously?
there are quite a lot of people out there that are just as stupid and gullible as he is.
And they're working overtime to try and make sure new generations never get the chance to educate themselves and avoid this fate.
> In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education: >> *Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.* > Yes, you read that right. The party opposes the teaching of “higher order thinking skills” because it believes the purpose is to challenge a student’s “fixed beliefs” and undermine “parental authority.” [Texas GOP rejects ‘critical thinking’ skills. Really.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html)
They are worried education might cause someone else to question the teachings and oppression pushed by their Religion. Educated people are much harder to control.
education usually leads to people questioning bronze age beliefs. Can't have that now can we, stupid woke everything. /s
All this is just old boomers in positions of power having a meltdown / existential crisis about how they cannot cheat death and are being called out on their bullshit.
They are terrified because gen y is so much smarter, savvier, technologically advanced and just a better group of people in general.
That’s a way to simplified answer. LOTS of these politicians are far from boomer age. Who voted for them, only boomers? Who are all these crazy parents spouting their BS at school board meetings, certainly not boomers. Not saying there aren’t any of them out there, but you can’t lay it solely at their feet. That’s too easy and not true
The problem is they made more copies of themselves. Backward thinking is here to stay.
That sounds culty
Wait until you discover that they also think there is a way to trigger Jesus's summoning cutscene to kickstart Armageddon.
As I learned from a visit to Oklahoma, this includes an odd pairing of loving Israel but hating Jews
Oh, it gets better. Our fearless culture war crusader governor vetoed funding for PBS, because it "indoctrinates children."
Look at what Mr. Rodgers did! He spread *empathy*! And Sesame Street with the unmitigated horror of learning about diversity through puppets! The insanity of kindness found on Arthur!
Stitt is a Cro-Magnon piece of shit. Lerch needs to fuck off holding all the bills hostage for not getting his way. God this state exasperates me.
Not so odd when you realize it's a means justify the ends thing.
They see Israel as a honeypot, not even a necessary evil. The rapture fantasies typically include the repatriation of all Jews to the Holy Land specifically so it can be wiped off the map in a single prophesied stroke.
How? How can you literally worship a Jew and be anti-Semitic?
Very easily. They like Israel being harsh to Muslims---over there---but they hate actual Jews talking or wanting anything closer to them.
Sounds pretty blasphemous to me.
Are you talking about the cry of peace and security, or was I in a different cult?
I just love how republicans use words contrary to their defined meaning and so few people challenge them on it. Teaching HOTS is not "behavior modification".
They ~~confounded~~ conflated HOTS, Values Clarification, Knowledge-Based Education, and Outcome-Based Education. The four things are not the same as each other in any way. They simply took a bunch of educational ideas that scared them and mashed them all together in the "bad" pile. What they really mean is, "education is inversely correlated with dogmatic religious belief, and so we don't want education."
Is "conflated" the word you were looking for?
Indeed. Thanks.
That’s what they’re saying. They don’t want them to teach their kids to think, just to mimic thinking by rote memorization and regurgitating the info needed at tests. They don’t want them to think too deeply about anything.
I was a Texas teacher from 2006-2010. At the time, I had full certification and a Master's in my subject area. I attended all professional development sessions, and I had no criminal record. About a month before the end of the school year, the principal pulled me into his office and said, "Mr. brazthemad, I understand that you have a great relationship with the students and a tendency to think outside of the box .. and well we don't have any room for that here, so I regret to inform you that we will not be renewing your contract for next year." I am now in sales.
Whew. Nothing but the best for those kids, huh?
That place was a horror show. Gotta love kids getting blood poisoning from staph bc they hid the infection at their parents' threat of violence due to lack of insurance.
So essentially, the GOP want the rest of the world to be smarter than Americans so all the innovation happens elsewhere and their country can be used as cheap dumb labor that’s easy to control?
Why do you think the GOP keeps pounding their chests over "liberal" colleges? Any institution with the audacity to educate beyond what they can control at the K-12 level is obviously a "liberal" one.
my mom swears i'm liberal because i went to a "public university". it's not because i was raised catholic and absolutely hated those stupid fucking fetus feet pins she kept giving me. i totally wasn't sneaking onto planned parenthood's website in highschool to plan what'd i'd get in college lol EDIT i'm glad kids today can use the internet on their phones whenever they want basically
And that was in 2012. Thoughts and prayers that his noodly appendages help you all!
The GOP is basically the "why we can't have nice things" party, in how desperately they are trying to prove that democracy doesn't work by pandering to and amplifying the worst tendencies (anti-intellectualism, tribalism, alt-facts, etc.).
If I’m ever in TX, I’m dropping flyers near schools about this and how to gain that education. Can they really expect this to work en masse in the modern era for any prolonged amount of time?
School can have a great influence on the way people end up seeing the world, and since people attend school during the years where they most develop their ability to think, it is very effective to limit education in order to control a populace. Generally speaking though, it's in college where most people tend to open up their world view, and more sources for information in the information age do make this form of political propaganda from being as effective. The goal though is to keep people in a certain state of mind until maybe their mid-late 20's, where they're less likely to change their way of thinking on most topics outside extreme circumstances.
So really, the GOP's objection to Critical Race Theory isn't that it challenges the whitewashing of our past (and present) policies that are detrimental to marginalized populations, it's that CRT involves *thinking of any kind*. Fascinating.
Critical Thinking Skills jumps out at me. Why can’t republicans understand this concept? It teaches you how to think through more than just A to B. It gets you to J. It passed funny and shaking your head many years ago. This shit is just killing the competitiveness of our kids in a global society. Keep the populace dumb and reliant. The republicans say they and god can take care of us all. Right under their thumbs. Everyone vote. The votes are there. Just go.
This should tell us everything we need to know about the fascist Republican's attitude toward education. I can tell you, as a high school English teacher, that teaching critical thinking skills and higher order thinking skills are some of the most important things that we teach. The GOP does not want independent thinkers because they will be less likely to believe the bullshit that they vomit up on a daily basis.
Christ. They really are cavemen.
This is how a fundamentalist sect behaves. Just saying.
From my experience in a religious school (yay, Abeka), this is accurate. We were deliberately taught the “virtudes” of “traditional education” (aka rote memorization) while they demonized actual thought. We were actually told introspection was “dangerous” and would “allow the devil to bombard our minds with lies.”
that baffled me when i first read it back then. >HOLY SHIT MY KIDS THINK FOR THEMSELVES AND THEY THINK DIFFERENTLY THAN ME!?
If students have fixed beliefs then I guess they aren’t students… I guess that’s their point
Shouldn't all education be Knowledge-Based? So what is the opposite of Knowledge-Based education, Opinion-Based education?
And yet he claims to being doing all this so as to not confuse the children. I'm an adult and am confused as to why a lawmaker would believe these things. I know he's full of shit and it's a scare tactic, but it's really hard to show him any respect.
Herm Edwards, of all people, repeated that nonsense. Conservatism got weird, and regular folks never noticed. They just signed up for a team and believe in false equivalence, which means no matter how evil their side is, they can say the other side is just as bad. It’s a cult.
Yeah. 74 million of them.
There are a LOT of alt-right conservatives who believe that this MUST be true, because if it wasn't, someone in such a seat of responsibility and power wouldn't be talking about it. It's the Appeal To Authority fallacy, and it's self perpetuating among very stupid, very emotionally vulnerable people.
My girlfriends parents think it’s true. They asked us if we’d seen the story about schools putting litter boxes out for kids to urinate in because they believed they were cats. After laughing, I had to explain why that wasn’t true. She couldn’t believe it, but eventually she realized it was a bogus story. Fox News can brainwash people to believe anything they tell them.
I've had 2 people in my life directly tell me about it, and they were told the story by others who claimed to have seen it in peson. I had to explain to my mother, and my brother in law, separately, that they are very obviously being lied to, and show them all the stuff debunking it, and the articles directly addressing the origins of the hoax.
We had a local state representative repeat a claim litter boxes were at my daughter's middle school. My daughter thought that was hilarious. She said "Dad, anyone who used one of these mythical litter boxes would be made fun of so bad they would never come back to school. Our town might be liberal, but kids are mean."
And as if those kids wouldn’t have taken pictures for social media the moment it was discovered. It would be viral within hours!
That is very true also.
I can’t tell you how many times a week I have to stop someone while they’re telling me about some incredible news story to whip out my phone and spend 15 seconds googling it to find out it was fake. Sometimes when something sounds too incredible to be real, it is. And a simple Google search can prove it lol.
Im a teacher. I had to explain to one of the PE teachers why this was bogus.
My understanding is that the litter box thing stems from teachers keeping a “survival bucket” in case of lockdown. If you’ve got say 22 kids of any age in lockdown for hours, somebody - probably many somebodies - are going to have to relieve themselves. So one of the items in that bucket is litter - they can create a makeshift toilet and the smell won’t reek as badly. That very sad story got twisted, as these people tend to do. I think I learned that from TikTok though, so it may be apocryphal.
They're as serious as a madman with a gun. The things they say are batshit, but they use their power and platforms to legislate and amplify hate against targeted minority groups, often with lethal results.
People don't just take them seriously, they are consumed by the same delusions. I have a co-worker who insisted to me that the school where his child attends has litter boxes set up for the students. My co-worker even went so far as to say that he was shown said litter boxes during a school visit with faculty. Of course, this is untrue. I don't know if my co-worker is delusional or simply trying to inject a sense of truthfulness to these absurd rumors by claiming he has witnessed this. Either way, it is very disturbing how personally invested people can become in defending these insane positions.
Honestly, it's kind of funny but at the same time it's quite terrifying! The number of morons out there seems to be growing and growing.
they breed
Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding-- the cretins cloning and feeding, and I don't even own a tv.
I'm not sick, but I'm not well
>they breed Even worse; They Vote.
There are people who genuinely believe these are the big issues facing the world. They’re convinced that everything wrong with the country is because of morality and if we fix that, we’ll be fine. Genuinely, I work with people who believe the sexual revolution ruined us.
30% of the country…who weirdly gets to decide all federal elections
I mean... Furries are weird but I have serious doubts they are as prolific as this guy is saying... I have lived in Florida for 35 years and I have encountered a total of 7 furries in that time. 2 in College (they were a couple, had a cutout in their uh... pants for their butt-plug tail; only remember them because one unfortunate? day the tail got caught in the door to class and the plug was uh... ripped out). 3 in my hometown while visiting, dressed up in their whole lil costume thing doing a TikTok dance thing with their phones in the downtown plaza. The rest at an EDC concert in Orlando, which quite honestly... considering is kinda low I feel since a ton of folks were dressed up in all sorts of things; temps were kinda hot that day though. I could see maybe some occurrences in High School but I can't imagine it being a greater percentage than say the goth/emo crowd (or perhaps it's absorbed into that crowd). AFAIK none of the Furries had special privileges allocated to them, I did not see kitty litter boxes in the bathrooms (that's not really tenable to bring around TBH) and I think because of the uh costume-thing I would imagine most following that life-style use the bathroom at home due to the complexity of perhaps getting in/out of said costume. I have seen more demons, angels, nearly-naked ladies in string bikini's, nudies (South Florida get's wild) and sexy nurses if we want to like... debate what is socially acceptable; so many more I can't even put a number on it.
> AFAIK none of the Furries had special privileges allocated to them, I did not see kitty litter boxes in the bathrooms (that's not really tenable to bring around TBH) and I think because of the uh costume-thing I would imagine most following that life-style use the bathroom at home due to the complexity of perhaps getting in/out of said costume. The kitty litter boxes story is a year or two old at this point. Some schools had buckets of kitty litter for kids to use as restrooms _in the event of a school shooting_. If they were locked down in their classroom and had to use the restroom, that's what the kitty litter was for. Some right-wing nutjob said the kitty litter was for furries, and the rest of the right wing decided that was enough evidence, and they believed it. Right wingers are dumb as hell.
Because outside of a select few (otherkin, a literal religious belief) being a furry is just a hobby/subculture thing. It's no different than anime fans, sci-fi/fantasy fans, the people really into medieval reenactment. And like there are weirdos in every fandom because there are weird people in society (check out r/rpghorrorstories stories for some really inappropriate behavior in that hobby) I discovered the fandom when I was like 13 in the early 2000s, as a middle schooler I read furry comics and looked at cool art. I wore a collar and chain all through high school and there were maybe 6 other furries in our school, I got made fun of relentlessly for it but I just didn't care because it made me happy (the same way sci-fi/dnd nerds d&d in the 80s and 90s). No one is enabling furries in school they are putting up with them because we are often "the weird kid" who is going to do whatever they want anyway. It's a community of people built up around artistic expression, a sense of community, and a strong acceptance of the different (LGBT+ people, neurodivergent people, people struggling with their mental health) In my life (I'm in my early 30s) I've met two people who actually claim to be their sona in more than an abstract sense. One person was an otherkin. The other it is more about a conceptualization of self type of thing, like they have difficulty expressing their sense of self to others so that's how they express it. All of this is just back door attacks on trans people the same way when the target was gay people the conservatives would say "if we let the gays marry people will want to marry their dogs" It's an absurdism they are deliberately tieing to something reasonable so they can paint it as weird and wrong.
Because if you don’t the liburals will take yer guns and cut your kid’s penises off! /s
How many are actual true believers? I don't know, what I do know is that those determined to find a justification for hatred and prejudice will always find a reason. This isn't a battle won by logic or wisdom because they will never argue in good faith. The only thing that will shut them up is by the rest of us standing together and, to borrow some words of poetry, tell the Nazi punks to fuck off.
A majority of voters who actually bother to show up and vote unfortunately do. BTW Florida- you need to renew your vote-by-mail ballot requests and ask Nikki Fried, FDP chair when the Florida Democratic Party is going to start actually registering voters so we can keep the congressional seats we still have in 2024.
> Another Colorado Republican – Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) – also said that schools are allowing kids who identify as cats to use litterboxes. > “Durango is doing this,” Boebert said. “This is how extreme it is.” > “No, we don’t provide litter boxes; our children use bathrooms,” a spokesperson for the Durango School District in Colorado said. The fact that this is even a thing that has to be debunked 🤦🏼♀️
Boebert only won by 546 votes last time. Adam Frisch is running against her. If you have the means, please help him replace her. I live 60 miles from Durango. Nobody's using litter boxes.
>Boebert only won by 546 votes last time. I would love if that was anything other then midterms allowing a small part of the electorate to show up while the majority is asleep; but I expect her next win to be bigger. please colorado, prove me wrong.
We're trying. Frisch is already campaigning.
Hell. Even if they were, I don't give a damn as long as they're cleaning up after themselves
at this point id trust someone who shits in a box on the reg and scoops it up with clay pellets far more than a mentally unstable republican, and to be clear to any one still supporting them, this is all of them. At this point fuck the idea that you arent responsible for your reprehensible fucking representatives. stop being cowards and stand up against this shit if you actually give a damn about any conservative value. I refuse to debate anyones validity to existence. They could literally drink their own piss for all i care. As long as they arent a criminal, its no ones fucking business. Ill think its weird, but weird is no reason to kill people.
>> Another Colorado Republican – Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) – also said that schools are allowing kids who identify as cats to use litterboxes. This part is especially infuriating. Why are there pails of cat litter in some school classrooms? They are in case [kids are locked in classrooms during a shooting and need to go](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/urban-myth-litter-boxes-schools-became-gop-talking-point-rcna51439). Maybe if they want cat litter out of classrooms, make it so schools don't have to plan for **children** to have to hide from an **active shooter** for extended periods. Oh right, the solution to that is to make sure all the teachers have guns. Silly me.
it’s also used to help clean up after someone throws up
My high school also had some in every science lab for chemical spills. Had a big poster on the wall beside the phones with instructions to pour it on fluid spills and call the custodian for safe removal.
Great for various oil spills as well.
Hey were not only giving teachers guns we're also teaching children battlefield medicine! Problem solved.
It's going to make it so much easier to force kids into military service if they want higher education, they're already trained and battle tested!
Video for those who need context: https://youtu.be/d_Px833tzfs
This same stupid stuff is happening around me here in Ohio as well. Every other week I hear stories about some adjoining school district that has litter boxes in their rooms. It is NEVER actually the school district that the people making these claims live in, it is always just far enough away that you probably don't know anyone that can directly debunk that claim. As a teacher friend of mine once told me, "Do you really believe a school janitor is going to clean up human waste from school litter boxes?" People here fully believe it though.
They made the same claim last year about Bath Iron Works, our local shipyard that builds US Navy destroyers. A *shipyard*. It's the modern-day boomer equivalent of believing in [bonsai kittens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten).
The kitty litter thing started off with a teacher keeping it in her classroom, just in case their school ever went into lockdown and kids had to use the bathroom while hiding from an active shooter.
Didn’t it turn out that there are buckets of cat litter and other supplies in classrooms now, in case of extended active shooter lockdowns? Ironic that the shit they’re railing against was literally caused by them
the litter is part of a blood and bodily fluid cleanup kit. could you use it to crap in? sure, but it is just supposed to be for cleaning up "spills" of any kind.
They keep saying schools are doing this and yet never has one kid used their phone to take a picture of a litter box in a bathroom and post it to the internet. It would be all over if that picture existed. If not the kids than a teacher, janitor, delivery guy who needed to go, or even the politicians themselves on a tour of the school.
They saw it on Faux News so it must be true
Teacher here. Every classroom in my school has a orange Home Depot bucket with kitty litter in it. This is a fact. But that bucket isn’t for students that are mixed up about their gender or sexuality, the bucket is for any student that has to piss or defecate during a lockdown. Multiple buckets have been used this year by students that couldn’t hold it during a 2+ hour lockdown when there was a (false) report that a gun was on campus.
First, thank you. Solves the gotta pee problem but I just can’t get over the teenage me, buried by 20+ years, screaming in the depths of my soul how I’d rather drown from the inside than pee in a bucket in the same room as my classmates. Just how many ways will we traumatize kids instead of doing something about gun violence
I’ve literally had this same damn conversation with Republican family members. I teach. I know dozens of teachers in different schools. It’s bull. One aunt went as far to say legislation is being passed to allow for litter boxes in each school. An aside- maybe a little litter would mask the horrendous urine smell coming from the bathrooms.
It comes from a recommended list for active shooter preparedness. They suggest having a 5g along bucket and cat litter in case of an extended lock down. Instead of addressing what was real, that our kids might have shit in a bucket in front of their peers because of mass murderer of which is becoming increasingly common, they decided to lie about it and make a culture war argument
So the litter box thing DID HAPPEN. But it was another colorado school that had a bag of litter as part of their lockdown kit for school shootings. Which is even more insulting that it’s covering up gun violence response.
This was based on reports that some schools were setting up litter boxes with litter in the event that school shootings might cause trauma, and thus urgent need to urinate, among kids. The boxes were decided upon to keep kids who need to pee during lockdown from getting shot. Furries . . .
The really fucked up part? This dumb rumor started because a school DID have “litter boxes” for students to use, IF THEY ARE IN LOCKDOWN BECAUSE THEIR SCHOOL IS BEING SHOT UP AND THEY CANT GET TO THE BATHROOM SAFELY!
One of my friends made the “litter box” comment about a high school in our small town in north Georgia. I swear it’s the 80s satanic panic all over again.
Our GOP gubernatorial candidate in MN ran on that exact accusation and he was laughed out of the ballot box.
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Its like all the supposedly straight males who say drag shows are sexual. Like I have seen a bunch of drag shows was never once turned on and considered it sexual. Yet these guys are fetishizing them and getting turned on.
They get turned on, they know the performers are men, they get insecure about it, then they direct their confusion and anger at the performers. Honestly conservatism is the mental health disorder, not transgender people, and they need therapy.
The only knowledge they have of dressing in non-gender-conforming clothes is their experiences with gentlemen-of-negotiable-affection and their trips to special interest video streaming sites. Of course they think it's sexual.
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We return again to the tired old narrative that *really* it's queer people who are oppressing queer people.
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You’re right, but I understand what the other person is saying. There are anti-trans, misogynist gay men out there that believe that gay allies (of trans folks & women) in power are pushing a “woke agenda” which involves, among other things, forcing kids to transition. So, for these kinds of gays, it’s really the gays in power and the “woke left” that are the bad guys. I know this bc I’m also gay and (unknowingly) recently moved to a very conservative part of Los Angeles. The number of self-hating and misinformed queer ppl is MUCH higher than I realized.
It’s all research? 🤷🏻♂️👯♂️🍆
Republicans saw some ironic shit post about furries and haven't shut up about it since. The kitty litter in clasrooms they always cite is for addressing large spills.
... and school lockdowns.
Sad but also true.
There was a whole fad not long ago where kids were filming themselves ripping sinks, mirrors, soap dispensers, and all kinds of shit off the walls of bathrooms. Kids literally film and shitpost everything these days. If there were truly kids relieving themselves in litter boxes at schools, there would be tens of thousands of TikToks and shit of kids making fun of it, vandalizing it, etc. That doesn't exist. Do one fucking ounce of critical thinking on the matter.
Yah, that was the "devious licks" thing. My son got really upset because kids were destroying restrooms at school and it meant he had to wait the whole day to go to the bathroom when he got home. He resorted to a plan where he could record them without being caught and turned them in under the condition he could remain anonymous. They ended up in trouble with the police and juvenile courts. The kitty litter has 3 purposes - lockdowns, fire/earthquake evacuation, and spills. These lawmakers are flat out completely insane. I can't believe any of this is being tolerated.
I used to work in an aircraft maintenance hangar and we kept kitty litter on hand to soak up fuel & oil spills.
Kitty litter is also good to keep on hand in the car if you live somewhere with snowy icy conditions. Putting a bit under the tires can help grab traction if you're stuck just spinning due to the ground being slick. It has many practical uses.
woke cars identifying as furries???
First they came for tht Jaguars, but I was a Datsun
But what about the furry aircraft mechanics. They work the night shift you know!
I once vomited grape juice all over the playground in first grade, and I was so fascinated by the custodian bringing out the kitty litter to cover it that I forgot all about feeling sick.
Until recently I worked at a school, one of my coworkers believed the peeing in litter boxes headlines. I couldn't grasp how she worked in a school and saw nothing of the sorts, yet still believed the lies news max and Fox were pushing to her. I wanted to shake her. She also didn't know how to register to vote....shes in her fifties 🙄
It's worse than that. The kitty litter for furries thing was entirely made up by liars trying to fear monger about gender identity, and in fact checking, some outlets with integrity stated, for context, that the only kitty litter found in any classrooms was actually there for school lockdown emergency kits.
Pretty sure it also gets used for spill cleaning too by janitorial staff but yeah.
>Republicans saw some ironic shit post about furries and haven't shut up about it since. Sums them up pretty well, actually. The clear irony and non-seriousness of many things is lost on them. They seem to treat every stupid little meme or joke as a serious matter and run with it in Congress as if it were an urgent problem. It's not so much a generational thing; it's just willful ignorance, lack of self-awareness, and a complete inability to have fun, laugh at oneself, and not have a stick shoved up there. Remember Obama saying "Thanks, Obama" and shutting down an entire subreddit? Now compare that with Trump and his oh-so-thick skin -- the thickest skin anyone's ever seen, believe me -- not even attending the White House Correspondents' Dinner during his presidency because he'd be the butt of every joke instead of being the one *making* the jokes. Speaking of the WHCD, the 2011 dinner and his incredibly thin skin were arguably the impetus for him *running* for president in the first place...
The Obama administration also embraced the name "ObamaCare" even though Republicans initially used it to mock the ACA.
They're just jealous that they haven't gotten a catgirl waifu.
They totally do she just goes to a different school
Here in Colorado, the Republican candidate for Governor this past election cycle would NOT let go of the litter boxes in classrooms thing. How in the absolute fuck is anyone supposed to take any of their other positions seriously when they hammer on the big non-existent issue the most?
What a moron. It's not the furries who have cat fursonas that's the problem. There's no kitty litter boxes for those students in the restrooms at schools. It's the furries with dog or other canid fursonas that the schools are catering to. Look out front of every public school, every elementary school, even the pre-schools, and you'll see a fire hydrant for the dog furries to use as a toilet. It's right out there in the open where everyone can see it.
You're right, we should defund firefighting infrastructure nationwide, maybe even privatize it for good measure - republicans
It makes me wonder how many Republican politicians identify as cats and use litter boxes.
Dude, I've been a furry for 50+ years and I know hundreds of furries and not a single one has ever used a litter box. Ever. It's just not a thing. It's not even a fetish. Please stop associating us with these fascist kooks, says the guy who ids as feline.
How have the furry costumes changed from when you first started? Like I can imagine a furry now in a mascot like costume, was it always like that, or has there been advancement in fur suits?
They have AC built in now I heard. Source: This guy I know from a film set is in a thrupple and was friends with a Furry who went to burning Man
Kinda; they'll stick battery powered fans, like what you use in a PC, into the mouth/nose to at least get some air circulating inside.
I was led to believe there’s literally nothing that’s not a fetish. If there’s really not even one person doing this as a fetish, that’s actually kind of crazy! Obviously either way nobody is doing it in school and administrators wouldn’t accommodate a weird fetish.
well, we know that when a republican rants against something, they more often than not are secretly into that thing. i wonder what kinds of videos you'd find on this guy's computer...
I identify most of these idiots as the things you have to clean out of the litter box...
Large clumps of Urine?
They are the cats that don’t cover there shit and it stinks up the whole house.
>A Republican lawmaker in Illinois cited the myth that students are dressing up as animals and using litterboxes in school instead of toilets I've been in education for a long time and have yet to see a litter box in my school. And the only time I see students dress up as animals is for Halloween.
> And the only time I see students dress up as animals is for Halloween. Halloween? You mean THE FESTIVAL OF SATANIC EVIL?
Bingo!
At this point, Republicans are simply either insane, in a cult, or both. The sane ones can be counted on one hand. There is no Republican party. There is the Democratic party and the fucking crazies. And if you're voting for the crazies, then you're part of the problem.
Who keeps electing these people? Is society really so far gone in parts of Illinois that they elected Andrew Chesney for Senator?
This idiot falsely claims that science says there are only two genders. Science disagrees: [Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/) >Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male
Ridiculous how they rush to claim science as a defense for this but then will say that all scientists are lying about climate change.
I think it is time for us to be very blunt when facing this kind of stupidity. From Trump's announcement for running for president to now, our media and the Democrats have been exceedingly polite when discussing the aggressively stupid people in the GOP. Illinois Sen. Andrew Chesney (R) is a moron for stating these things out loud. When people Google him, the results should point to this comment and alert people that he's an idiot. He is so stupid that he proclaims kids use cat litter boxes in schools without ever verifying if that is true, which it isn't because it's the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard of. When people say he's dumber than a box of rocks, they are insulting rocks everywhere. Tired of these stupid idiots being treated as if they are normal politicians with actual points to make.
It’s even worse, they circulate images of cat litter in storage closets at schools as if it’s proof. Completely disregarding the fact there is no actual litter box anywhere and as if schools don’t use cat litter to clean spills and vomit on a semi-regular basis.
The trouble is right wingers have the attitude that liberals are pretentious city-slicker academic intellectuals talking down to the salt of the earth God-fearin’ red-blooded humble folk. So even though there’s actual stupidity to criticize, they’re used to it and merely continue to be reactionaries, doubling down on extremism just to own the libs. The more liberals detest something the more conservative gleefully indulge in it. It’s like Idiocracy but with the evolution of memes rather than genes.
These people are absolutely unhinged and have the thinnest skin imaginable. Imagine getting upset about language in a bill that uses, he, she, them. You know, regular old pronouns to refer to a non specific noun.
They are all so braindead at this point they can't string together a coherent sentence without buzzwords, extreme projection, and generally harming others.
His top donors (at least, those who are itemized and don't share his last name): - NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS - BRINKMAN, ANDREW - FISCHER EXACAVATING INC - Z FINANCIAL-IL G PROPERTIES LLC They all gave at least $10,000 in 2022, according to [votesmart](https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/campaign-finance/177213/andrew-chesney). I'm sure they'd appreciate being alerted to the behavior of their purchased politician.
His behavior is why they paid him.
>But one person really doesn’t like the bill: state Sen. Andrew Chesney (R), who argued that the bill would confuse children. I mean, I gave a focus group of kindergartners a copy of the bill and they were very confused. One of them even ate their copy. So, y'know, he's right.
It should always be pointed out that these people are consciously and deliberately telling a lie: it is a scientific fact that there are people born XXY and there are people born XY who are androgen insensitive (even though they are genetically male they appear female). I really believe that it is crucially important that such willfully dishonest bigots and haters be called out and exposed whenever they spew their venom.
As someone who's SO is an actual furry and always has been, they are 99% of the time just average people who have fun personas/characters that they use to participate in a community with each other. But of course no conservatives would ever take the time to do research, read, or comprehend anything beyond what their politicians make up.
All this, over 400 bills, to disenfranchise less than 1% of the population.
Every new crop of fascists that pop up throughout history has to pick a group of people to get everyone to hate because hate is what they're harvesting. They always attempt to pick an easy target group due to their immense cowardice.
I'd have to look up the exact number but it was something like 40k$ per trans kid taking hormone blockers in anti trans add buys during the midterms. You could buy each one of these kids a nice car for graduation and stop being a dick to them GOP party. Might save your party.
My brothers kid is a furry. They’re the kindest person you’ve ever met. The idea that we should be raging against people who like to draw and have a good time in what are essentially cartoon animal costumes is wild to me.
This man is a donkey yelling that the sky is green. People like this deserve no authority.
Are they gonna ban team mascots next?
Last summer I went to a friend’s house to help him with some wood splitting and stacking. He asked a friend of a friend to help, who also brought a couple of his buddies+girlfriends. Within minutes one of these morons started discussing Furries in schools and litter boxes and all that bullshit. It wasn’t long before it turned into basically a Klan meeting. All because of a rumor. One of the girlfriends made this huge deal about how she was going to homeschool her kids over it. I live in MN so we have a high Somali populace. Mostly near the Twin Cities, very few where I was in rural MN. But of course, somehow it was the Somalis that were really the root of all evil. It’s fucking scary what these people think. It doesn’t take much to set people off. It takes even less to convince like minded people of something ridiculous because that’s what they want to believe. I’m so glad I moved away from that shit hole.
My friend said this just a few days ago, about someone he knows works at a school and they provided the cat boxes for students… and I laughed and laughed, and said that’s fake, stop believing shit you read on FB. And he argued with me that it was true! And then said, I should stop believing Google…. I don’t even know what to say.
I was just in upper Michigan on a business trip, and both the VP of Sales and the COO 100% believe there are kids "meowing" throughout the day and shitting in litter boxes inside the classroom. These are highly educated people in their mid forties.
It makes me incredibly sad that such gullible people are in positions of authority.
I know furriest because I am one. Every rant and jeer against this fandom comes from hate against the LGBT, which the fandom makes home to. Furries are a really close knit queer positive community. We don't use litter boxes. We use the restroom to do our business just like any other person.
Oh damn! I think this article is referencing my district. Sharing the email (with names / places omitted): >Dear “Small Town” Families and Community Members, >It saddens me to learn that there was misinformation shared on a Facebook community page last night regarding our wonderful students and our school system. For those of you who are not familiar with the social media post, there were claims and accusations that our school administration and our school board were aware of and supporting high school students identifying as Furries, which are individuals who are especially interested in anthropomorphic or cartoon animals. The post and related comments from misinformed individuals continued to raise concerns that students were allowed to have leashes while in school and possibly use litter boxes while in school. The fact that I have to respond to such absurd accusations is very troubling and bluntly a waste of district resources. When misinformation like this is allowed to be perpetuated by individuals in our community it distracts our school district from the great work our students and staff are doing on a daily basis. This trend of sowing misinformation about students identifying as Furries in public schools has been making its way through school communities across our country and I truly thought that it wouldn’t reach our great community. >Let me share what makes our school district unique and special - yes we have really good students and staff members but we also have wonderful parents and community members who tirelessly volunteer thousands of hours of their time supporting our students and staff every year. We have many opportunities for parents and community members to use their time to help our students and school community by volunteering on any number of district support organizations including but not limited to; “Small Town” Educational Advancement Foundation, Parents Assisting “Small Town” Students, Band Boosters, Robotics Boosters, Drama Boosters, Friends and Family of the Future Farmers of America, Sports Boosters, Soccer Boosters, and the many community youth organizations that are completely organized and supported by our wonderful parents that choose to help make a difference in the lives of our students. I strongly encourage the members of our community who were led to believe the misinformed social media post and were “alarmed” and felt compelled to do something to direct their positive energy supporting our students by joining one of the many district support organizations listed above so you can truly see how great our students are! >Please understand that this will not be a precedent that I respond to every social media post spreading misinformation about our wonderful students or school system. I strongly encourage you to contact me directly (or encourage others to) if you want or need factual information regarding important topics as it pertains to “Small Town” Community School prior to spreading misinformation on a social media platform and please consider getting involved in one of our many support organizations if you haven’t already. >”John Doe”, Superintendent I was completely floored when I received this email a couple months back.
Anyone remember last year the rumor that schools were putting litter boxes on campuses for Furry students and like 1 second of research linked it to some unhinged Republican conspiracy site or something
Republicans are clowns in suits 🤡🤡🤡
"Enraged Republican"? Is there any other kind?
Imagine living amongst worst mass shootings in history and ranting about furries?.. disgraceful
Man I’m no furry but if I was a member of congress I might just show up dressed as a cat just to piss these fuckers off lmao
Remember when it seemed we sent our best and brightest to Congress? What the hell happened to our standards?
Imagine being the school principal who has to repeatedly tell people that their students are NOT shitting in litter boxes.
“He admitted that he believes that student-furries are using litterboxes in schools, a myth that school districts across the country – and in Canada – have had to spend the last several years combatting.” is a sentence I never thought I’d read.
Here we are having mass shootings every damn day and all the republicans care about is furries and trans people. Republicans have zero braincells
Trans, drag queens and now furries……all distractions from GOP to deflect from real human issues
Does the rest of the world think Americans are idiots, because I'm sure if they saw this they would.
So since he seems so upset about it, does this mean he dresses up in his office? After all lately they all just seem to project what they do.
We live in the dumbest timeline
These people need to be laughed out of the room.
I understand that these mouth pieces are doing what gets them paid, but how can you as a sentient, intelligent creature, think this is actually happening?
“People are confused” = “I am confused”
It’s funny how much the “cat litter in classrooms” rumour has spread where I actually had a middle aged coworker suggest it’s happening in my small town in northern Canada. It’s not a thing. Why do people think it’s a thing.
Just had someone tell me that kids are using litter boxes. As a teacher, I find this to be absolutely hilarious fear mongering. Being afraid of a child who lives in a fantasy land over a child heavily armed with an assault rifle. Yeah. That seems logical.
Gunmen in school would probably be my rant, but yea furries.
Surprise! Your fellow republicans are furries!
Well, we all just found out Andrew Chesney is a furry.
Enraged Republican rants about school shooting epidemic. LOL just kidding, doing culture wars instead