If you’ve never listened to Caffeinated Thoughts Radio, let me get you up to speed. It sounds a lot like one of those drive-time morning shows with the chattering hosts who think they are hilarious and laugh at themselves a lot. Except Caffeinated Thoughts is a right-wing Christian show dressed up to seem a little hipper than most (and there are so many) right-wing radio shows.
On May 14, hosts Shane Vander Hart and Brian Myers interviewed Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) about President Obama’s directive that public schools must let transgender students use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity.
The directive comes on the heels of Obama’s Justice Department suing the state of North Carolina over its anti-LGBT law. In fact, if you haven’t seen Attorney General Loretta Lynch affirming her support for trans people and her blistering takedown of the law, you need to find it on the Interwebs. You can probably find the video by doing a Google search for “Loretta Lynch punches N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory in the dick.”
Anywho, not everyone is happy about the directive and one of those unhappies is King. Never a friend to LGBT people, he has some very inspired thoughts about providing trans students basic decency.
“[Obama has] issued a federal decree that they’re going to come after any school that doesn’t allow boys in the girls’ room, girls in the boys’ room, anybody to go into any room that they happen to feel at the moment,” laments King, “and genders can switch on the way to the bathroom.”
Granted, Obama did not just call for a bathroom free for all. But considering King’s masterful understanding of gender identity, the president might as well have.
In King’s mind, not only is the girls’ room fair game for boys now but, like Mike Huckabee before him, King has a weird idea about what presumably cis gender boys with Senioritis are going to do now.
“All over America, they’ve got to be lined up right now, the pranksters, going, ‘I’m going to go into the girls’ room,’” King says. “There’s a lineup in some school right now and no school can discipline them because the federal government will come in with the Justice Department and jerk their No Child Left Behind funding and, who knows, they might even decide that they’re going to cut the calories and the protein back in the school lunch program.”
Um, yeah. Somehow I doubt this lineup of “pranksters” exists at all, let alone “all over America.” Besides, the directive isn’t about protecting students who are just being little shits and trying to cause trouble. But thank you for sharing what you would do if you were in high school right now, Rep. King.
But wait, what’s he saying about the school lunch program? King jokes that Obama wants to make students vegan. “Transgendered (sic) vegans would satisfy them,” King says, cracking up the hosts.
Ha. Get it? Transgender vegans. Because both vegans and transgender people might as well be space aliens to King.
Lest his hosts think that he’s just kidding, King adds, “It’s the unhumorous humorous reality of how perverse our society has gotten under Barack Obama.”
The cure for what ails the U.S.? Prayer in schools, which, according to King, the Supreme Court had no business eliminating back in 1963.
I suspect, however, that if anyone has kept prayer in school alive, it has been transgender students who hopefully will no longer have to spend valuable class time praying that they can manage to either pee in peace or hold it until they make it home.
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock and roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister and teaches writing at the University of Michigan.