KY: Candidate Promises to Eliminate “Transgenders” From School System
At a telephone town hall, gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft twice stated that if she is elected there will be no more trans people in Kentucky schools.
by Evan Urquhart
Moderation, proportionality, and common decency are in vanishingly short supply these days, at least in the Republican party. As every candidate vies to be the most hateful, the rhetoric is spiralling out of control and trans people are the number one enemy for a party consumed by anger at those that do not share their worldview. There can be no other takeaway for a dynamic which caused Kelly Craft, in a tight Republican primary campaign to challenge the sitting Democratic governor of Kentucky, stated not once but twice that if elected “we will not have transgenders in our school system.”
screenshot from WPSD’s website
Promising to usher in the elimination of a natural variation of humanity from the public school system of a whole entire state seems like it would be the schtick of a cartoonish villain in an apocalyptic movie, but earlier this week a Vox story on the Kentucky primary quoted Republican strategist Scott Jennings as describing both Craft and her two closest competitors as “mainstream conservative Republicans.”
In the current GOP, naked threats to eliminate “transgenders” from public schools can’t truly be considered an outlier as every Republican politician is in a competition to show the violence-obsessed Republican base (a base best known for mass shootings and bomb threats) that they’re more rabid, hate-filled, and extreme than the other guy. Meanwhile, the mainstream media uses carefully neutral language and quotes Republican strategists on whether such moves are politically savvy. Here’s one quoted in local media saying that the issue of eliminating trans people from existence polls well with Republican primary voters.
If eliminating trans people does poll well with Republican primary voters it seems like that should be a bigger news story, not a throway line to provide balance for an article about a GOP cndidate calling for the elimination of trans people. The violence, anger, and hate raging out of control in conservative America continues to be treated with kid-gloves in the media as trans people flee their home states in fear of legislation targeting them everywhere from the doctor’s office to school hallways to live entertainment to public bathrooms.