Republicans aren’t very smart. They don’t exercise critical thinking skills. And because of that, they wedge themselves into exceptionally ridiculous and embarrassing predicaments. Take, for example, the case of Colorado Republican gubernatorial nominee Heidi Ganahl and her crusade against “furry” kids.
As some of you may be aware, some people get their kicks from wearing costumes of cartoon characters, mascots or animals. In certain situations (usually sexual), they’ll claim they *are* that creature. Hey, it’s their kink and good on them, so long as they’re not harming anyone.
Now, though, Republicans have got it into their one functioning brain cell that hordes of children are identifying as cats in schools–going so far as to require schools to put litter boxes in bathrooms– a situation Ganahl declares she will not tolerate even though schools throughout Colorado have explicitly stated they do not have any students making such demands, the Denver Post reports.
“As a candidate for governor, but more than anything as a parent, my concern is that distractions like children dressing up in costumes at school detract from the reality that 60% of our kids are not performing at grade level,” Ganahl, who sits on the board of regents for the University of Colorado, said. “It’s tragic that we are failing our children. We need to make them our priority.”.
“Denver Public Schools has not had an issue with students identifying as cats or any other animals,” district spokesman Scott Pribble said in an email, “and we do not provide any accommodations for anyone identifying as cats or other animals.”
“The concerns being generated by the Republican gubernatorial candidate are baseless,” Randy Barber, spokesman for Boulder Valley School District, said. Boulder was on a list of districts Ganahl circulated claiming them to have made accommodations for students claiming to be cats.
According to Kyle Clark of KUSA NBC-9 in Denver Ganahl was back at it, making the fabulist claims on a Denver morning radio show Wednesday, saying that she is distributing photos of children (with their faces blurred out so they couldn’t be identified) showing up at schools in cat costumes. Hundreds of parents have called her, Ganahl claims, to discuss the issue in their local schools.
Of course, Ganahl doesn’t provide context to the photos. A photo of a grade school student who showed up for a school play as a tiger or dressed as a Siamese for Halloween is just as useful to her to illustrate her point, even though those students were obviously playing make-believe, something that passes for reality in conservative circles nowadays because THEY can’t tell the difference. Heaven help the kid who plays the Cowardly Lion in his elementary school’s version of The Wizard of Oz; he’ll be labeled a furry by Ganahl, and Tucker Carlson will declare him an unmasculine pansy low on testosterone because he doesn’t tan his testicles.
Other photos will undoubtedly show students on Spirit Days at their schools–where they dress up to show school spirit–and those schools happen to have feline mascots: lions, tigers, leopards, cougars, pumas and various other cats. Are these kids dressed like cats? Well, yeah. Are they demanding that they pee in a litter box? Oh, hell no.
Demonstrating how badly Republicans have vetted the issue: One of the photos Ganahl is reportedly distributing shows as evidence of the Furry invasion is an adult in a costume standing in front of a school. The problem? The photo comes from a protest hypergullible parents held at a school where they were told a student had demanded to be treated like a cat; the adult was part of the group protesting the non-existent request. The photo was taken from the Facebook page the parents set up; it doesn’t depict a student.