Ever get a creepy feeling that lifts the hairs on the back of your neck?
You are minding your business, spending time with family, or reading a library book, or maybe you’re in your own bedroom doing absolutely nothing that is any of your neighbors’ business and a chill runs down your spine. You whip around to stare at the window. No one is there. But, you can’t shake that CREEPY feeling of being watched.
The good news is that you aren’t paranoid. The bad news is that Republican elected officials in your state government have their noses pressed against your windows.
They’re watching you.
They’re judging you.
They don’t approve of you.
These government folks think that being elected to office is a license to inflict indecent ideas of decency upon us. Just this week far-right lawmakers endorsed a proposal for a “traditional family values” month. Sounds innocuous enough. But this bill is not fighting for the civil rights of a persecuted minority. It’s the opposite of that.
Think about it. Whose “traditional” family values are we talking about here?
If you look at the track record of the far-right Legislature and the timid Republican governor who they push around, the tradition they like is what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about in the Scarlet Letter. (If you haven’t checked out a copy from your local library, do it quick before it gets banned because it criticizes “traditional family values.”)
Meanwhile, the “traditional family values” folks want to expand their freedom to make bad choices for their children—such as refusing to vaccinate them—into their freedom to make bad choices for your kids too. (Welcome back, measles.) The bad medical decision du jour is a ban on gender-affirming care for state employees, public hospitals, and Medicaid plans.
Put another way, the far-right legislators are working to outlaw what transgender people describe as life-saving care because they feel like transgender people threaten “traditional family values.” (Basically, it’s witch-burning without any of the fire and smoke.)
You know, the Idaho House of Representatives (or the senate, or the governor’s office) doesn’t look remotely like “The People’s House” these days. The way they lurk around our windows and creep into our private lives, I think of them more as “The Peepers’ House.”
It’s past time for them to go home.