Thoughts on a Play Curmie Hasn't Seen

Henry Drummond (Billy Eugene Jones) interrogates
Matthew Harrison Brady (Dakin Matthews)
in the Arena Stage production of Inherit the Wind.

The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee classic Inherit the Wind has played an important role in Curmie’s life more than once.  He first encountered the play when he was in high school, at a time when he began having real doubts about organized religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Of course, this was in the early ‘70s, a time of turbulence in American society in general—the Vietnam War, civil rights, what was then called “women’s liberation,” campus protests, drug culture…  Not all of those things had much of a direct effect on Curmie, but what had always been taken for granted was increasingly being questioned.

The play, of course, was based on the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925.  The irreverence of Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character, shows towards Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) really caught Curmie’s attention.  He was particularly fond of the bit about where Cain’s wife came from: “Figure somebody pulled off another creation, over in the next county?”  That’s the kind of snark that appealed a lot to an adolescent who wanted desperately to be rebellious but couldn’t quite handle the social discomfort.  Fifty-something years later, Curmie still approves.

Above all, though, Curmie was introduced to the idea that drama can be about something, not just pretty words or an engaging story.  He hadn’t put all the pieces together yet, but this play was indeed destined to play a role in Curmie’s career choices, especially the willingness to explore the more academic side of the business after it became clear that he had more intellect than acting talent.

Speaking of which…  A few years later, in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years of college, Curmie auditioned for a production of Inherit the Wind in the summer season of the local college, whose theatre building was literally across the street from his house.  He was cast, not in the role he wanted, but cast.  His role may be the most difficult he’s ever played: not because it was a lead (Curmie has had a couple, though not many), but precisely because it wasn’t.  Part of the difficulty was, no doubt, to Curmie’s inexperience; things would certainly have been easier had he had a few more shows behind him before essaying the part. 

But a good deal of the struggle came from the role itself.  Curmie played Harry Y. Esterbrook, the announcer for WGN radio in Chicago.  In the trial scenes, which are at the center of the play, Esterbrook is on stage, facing the audience, every moment.  All those clichés about how “acting is reacting” were certainly true for that part.  Curmie had very few lines to hide behind or build a character around, and it was one of those roles that can’t really help the show, but sure can hurt it.

But what Curmie really got out of that production was something different.  He had no choice but to watch the other actors, and indeed really to pay attention to them.  While Esterbrook was watching Drummond or Brady or Hornbeck (the H. L. Mencken character), Curmie was watching actors more skilled—whether by experience, talent, or both—than himself.  He noticed the difference between standing on the line and before it, the subtle but noticeable turn of the head that set up a moment, the pause that made the audience listen more intently to what followed.  He also listened to the director, who was excellent in some ways but given to rants… and he saw the veteran actors pretty much ignore these outbursts.  If you’re screaming all the time, it doesn’t matter that you’re screaming now.  That applies to life in general, of course, but especially to the stage.

Curmie got better as an actor, in large part because of that show: not good enough to make a living at it, but he did play a few featured roles in student productions as an undergrad and even a couple of leads in amateur productions after graduation.  But without even contemplating the possibility that he might someday be a director, he learned a great deal from the experience of Inherit the Wind about how to do that job, too.

It is ironic, to be sure, that whereas Curmie did indeed end up acting in a couple dozen more plays and directing 60 or so over the course of his career, his job was as a theatre scholar, and it wasn’t until years after being in that production of Inherit the Wind that he realized that the play is about the Scopes trial in very much the same way that The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century: in other words, as a stand-in for something else.  In both cases, that “something else” was the anti-communist fervor exemplified by investigations by Joseph McCarthy et al. in the Senate and HUAC in the House.  Whereas Arthur Miller concentrated on the false accusations, Lawrence and Lee were more about the suppression of ideas, but the two plays end up in pretty much the same place, and do so in similar fashion, by creating a fictive world that approximates but does not reproduce historical events.

Cates, of course, is found guilty.  His fine has been paid, but he has no future in this small Tennessee town.  Drummond recognizes this, but provides a bit of context: “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?  Tomorrow it’ll be something else—and another fella will have to stand up.  And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!”  We are left with the confidence that Cates, probably more than the IRL person on whom he is based, will be fine.

While it is a little embarrassing that Curmie took literally years to figure out that a play written in the immediate aftermath of the McCarthy era might be about something more than just a 30-year-old trial in Tennessee, at least he’s perceptive enough to notice that there’s a reason for theatre companies in 2026 to choose this particular chestnut.  Being that “next fella” matters, especially as attempts by the right to suppress any expression they don’t like are springing up faster than zits on prom night.  

Curmie started to list the cases he’s written about just in this academic year, but that list got really long.  A couple of highlights, then: the cancellation of a student-directed play because there are… you know… <whispers> gay people in it; the professor who was fired and the retired cop who was charged with a felony (!) for posting memes insufficiently hagiographic about Charlie Kirk (certainly far less celebratory than Dear Leader’s recent outburst about the passing of Robert Mueller); the Texas A&M philosophy prof who was forbidden to assign a passage from Plato, and his colleague from a different department whose class was cancelled after it had already met because he couldn’t predict which specific days class discussion might veer into territory the censorial regime didn’t like.  And on and on. 

Plus, of course, we should mention the various felonies committed by ICE/DHS/whoever against citizens exercising their 1st Amendment rights, including but by no means limited to the murder of Alex Pretti.  Plus, of course, all of those incidents that Curmie posted about on his Facebook page but never wrote about… and the hundreds (no doubt) that Curmie never even heard about.  Yeah, it’s time for a production of Inherit the Wind, which, of course, also highlights the dangers of cherry-picking which sections of the Bible should form the foundation of a weltanschauung and which can be readily ignored.

So… anyway… there is such a production at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, presented in cooperation with Seattle-based The Feast company (director Ryan Guzzo Purcell is the founder of The Feast).  It is a trimmed-down version: there must have been a couple dozen actors in the production Curmie was in; this one has only ten, with a lot of doubling and only a sprinkling of jurors on stage at any given moment, for example.  As might be expected, this is a show created by Woke Folk: Drummond is black; Hornbeck is female (one presumes that the company got approval from the rights-holders for this change); the cast is listed alphabetically in the program, which also includes a land acknowledgment.  <Sigh.>

Curmie’s dear friend Paul Webb reviewed the production on his blog, which, Gentle Reader, if you’re a theatre-goer in the DC area, you should bookmark.  Paul touches on some curious choices in terms of time period: both in terms of costumes and, for example, the presence of a 50-star American flag, which strikes Curmie as more likely intentional than lazy (but he doesn’t totally reject the latter as a possibility).  A couple of other choices were curious: giving Brady, a Nebraskan, a southern drawl and even putting him in a white suit that make him look like a refugee from a KFC commercial for at least one scene, for instance.  (Bryan was from Illinois,)

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall declares the production “stupid,” a “travesty,” and “absurd,” among similar endearments.  Is he right?  Up to a point, yes.  Part of the play’s appeal stems from the audience’s recognition of the historical reference: at some level, Bert Cates is John Scopes, Henry Drummond is Clarence Darrow, etc., and there’s no way some of what happens in this production could have occurred in the real world: no rational defendant would hire a black lawyer in Tennessee in 1925, for instance… not to mention the fact that the author of the textbook in question used evolution as a means of supporting eugenics and the alleged superiority of the white race, and it’s rather unlikely that a black man would be much interested in taking up that cause.

But this is a fictionalized version of events, not a literal re-telling with the “names changed to protect the innocent,” à la “Dragnet.”  For example, Bert Cates may be dating the preacher’s daughter, but John Scopes wasn’t; the locals may have been hoping Scopes would be convicted, but they weren’t hostile towards the outsiders (they welcomed the visitors who were spending money in their town); Bryan didn’t die until several days after the trial, in his sleep, not mere moments after the verdict was announced.  

Lawrence and Lee altered the story to make it more theatrical, in the same way that Shakespeare played fast and loose with his history plays.  (Curmie spent a very long time indeed re-learning the actual events of the Plantagenet and Tudor eras after first reading about them in plays like Henry V and Richard III.)  The changes wrought in Inherit the Wind tend mostly to increase the tension, making things more difficult for Cates: he has become more of a pariah in the community, and his personal and professional lives are more in conflict with each other.

What appears to have happened in the Arena production is to exaggerate these departures from history per se and their effects even more.  Without having seen the play in production, Curmie is loath to proclaim these changes successful or otherwise, but he suspects he’d have felt preached at and/or condescended to.  It’s important to note here that changing the time period, or the race and/or sex of a character aren’t inherently problematic: Curmie has indeed done all of the above, usually because there just wasn’t a good enough male actor or white singer or whatever.  Such problems are unlikely to present themselves in a professional production in Washington, DC.

In all probability, the squishiness of the time frame is intended to make the audience think about how this play, written over 70 years ago and referencing events of 30 years before that, is relevant to today’s world.  Curmie doesn’t think that’s necessary; rather, he’s going to trust the audience’s perspicacity (and his own story-telling ability) to make those connections without artificial assistance.  One of the essential elements of theatre is audience superiority: not just “I see what you did there,” but “and I saw it before the people in the row in front of me did.”  Whether a 50-star flag helps or hurts this process probably varies by spectator as well as by production choices.  (It would be interesting to know which came first: the decision to cast a black Drummond, necessitating the time change, or the time change, allowing a black Drummond.)

But all of this dances around the central issue: there’s a professional production of Inherit the Wind out there!  Curmie would definitely go if he was in the area, but there are four screen versions, including three that seem to be available on Tubi: the original 1960 film with a host of recognizable actors led by Spencer Tracy as Drummond and Fredric March as Brady (this is the only one Curmie has seen; it’s really good); a 1988 TV version with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards; and another TV version, this one from 1999, with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott.  Curmie might just have to check one of these out before long…

Musings on the Afroman Defamation Case

Afroman dressed up for his court date.

Curmie has one piece about 80% written and two or three others pretty much blocked out in his head, but let’s go with the Saga of Afroman, who successfully defended a lawsuit for defamation this week.  If ever there was a definition by example of the Streisand Effect, this is it.  Curmie admits he’d never heard of Afroman (Joseph Foreman), or of “Lemon Pound Cake,” (the best-known of his responses to a botched raid on his property) or indeed his Grammy-nominated single “Because I Got High.”  But now, even the hopelessly uncool Curmie knows who he is, and, perhaps more relevantly, about that raid in August of 2022.

That raid, conducted by the sheriff’s office in Adams County, Ohio (that’s southeast of Cincinnati, along the Kentucky border), happened when our hero was out of town.  Yes, they did indeed kick the door in, cause considerable damage to the gate, cut the cords to his home security video system, and seize a significant amount of cash.  The warrant was for drug trafficking and kidnapping, and there was no evidence that could lead to a prosecution.  Oh, and the cops apparently refused to pay for the financial damage they caused, let alone the trauma inflicted by waving assault weapons in at least the general direction of Foreman’s kids, both tweens at the time.

That said, the warrant existed, and it wasn’t issued by the cops themselves.  If there was indeed a reasonable suspicion that there was kidnapping involved, then the whole weapons-drawn, kicking-down-the-door business is at least understandable.  And we have only Afroman’s testimony that the amount of cash returned was less than what was seized.  Indeed, we have only his word about the destruction to the property, although there doesn’t seem to be any denial forthcoming from the sheriff’s office.  More troubling are the lyrics to the newly released “Randy Walters Is a Son of Bitch,” which includes the line “that’s why I fucked his wife and got filthy rich.”  Completely apart from the language issue, there’s the suggestion of impropriety by Walters’s wife, and he’s got no legitimate beef with her, even if he does with her husband.  It appears to be the case that the officers in question were, at least at the raid itself, simply doing their jobs and executing a warrant; it is certainly true that some of the stuff in those videos was vicious and vengeful.

Anyway, the cops (seven of them!) sued for defamation to the tune of $3.5 million.  There were all kinds of courtroom histrionics, including Sgt. Walters testifying that he doesn’t know whether the allegations about his wife are true or not and Officer Lisa Phillips crying on the stand when viewing one of Afroman’s taunts (proving either that she doesn’t have the stuff to be a cop or that she got some really bad advice from her attorney).  Afroman himself, of course, completely controlled the narrative during his own testimony, remaining steadfastly on the offensive.

And that’s certainly one of the messages here: don’t sue someone who is smarter than you, funnier than you, accustomed to being a performer, and rich enough to hire a top-notch legal team... certainly not for a jury trial.  But should those be legitimate criteria?  Everyday folks have rights, too, and the cops were initially highlighted not because they did anything wrong, per se, but because they were easily identifiable.  There seems to have been little if any attempt to place blame on whoever provided the presumably false testimony that led to the warrant, or on the judge who signed off on it.  And surely the majority of the cops on the scene shouldn’t be expected to pay for repairs to the premises with their own money.  Moreover, we can reasonably assume that the money Afroman raised directly or indirectly from a viral video far exceeded the cost of the repairs to his residence.

It’s also true that the notion of being a public figure is, or at least ought to be, on a continuum.  At one end of the spectrum are celebrities of whatever description; at the other end are the overwhelming majority of us, people unknown except to their friends and associates.  The county sheriff would be between those extremes, but closer to the latter than to the former.  Is he a sufficiently “public individual” to allow greater latitude to someone ridiculing him, even up to the point of saying things that are gross exaggerations or even untruths?  Are his subordinates?

Is it relevant, therefore, that some of the things Afroman sings about never happened?  He wasn’t there to hear the glass break, for example.  He also says in his court testimony that his kids saw him being threatened.  They didn’t, and there’s a difference between what he puts in a song and what he says on the witness stand. 

Curmie’s initial response to the verdict in the Afroman case was a combination of celebration and laughter.  That’s in large part because the overwhelming majority of cops Curmie has encountered—whether he was reporting a crime, getting stopped for speeding, or anything in-between—have been self-important jackasses, and the small-town version is particularly obnoxious, because they’re also, generally, rather stupid.  Curmie shouldn’t assume that the small-town cops in question here fit that description, but that hypothesis has so far not been disproven.  And the fact that the ACLU and a host of other civil liberties organizations applauded the verdict tells us something.

It’s unsettling, though, that Afroman is also pretty much a jerk.  He’s clever and charismatic, but that doesn’t make him other than cruel and vindictive.  It’s also true that, as someone said in a comment on one of those YouTube videos, this episode has extended his career by 15 years.  Yes, his legal victory brought a refreshing break from whatever other stories appeared in the daily doomscrolling, but there’s something disquieting, too.

Afroman is the hero we need.  Whether he is the hero we deserve is up for debate.

There Are Illegalities and Illegalities

The recent attacks on Iran raise multiple concerns: strategic, political, and legal.  Curmie thinks the raids were stupid and sincerely hopes they’ll prove as disastrous for the Trump regime as they already have for the nation’s standing as a promoter of peace.  But what he really wants to talk about is that last item: were they legal?

There are two independent facets to that question.  The first is the one that’s been noised about by a good share of the left-leaning press: that Trump lacked Congressional approval and that the assault was therefore illegal.  Curmie thinks so, but there’s a little wiggle room.  It all boils down to what the War Powers Act actually was intended to do… and to what it says, which may be different things.  Neither Congress nor SCOTUS has seen fit to clarify the terms.

The obvious intent was to allow the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to respond to exigencies: imminent threats, that sort of thing.  The Trump administration can’t seem to get its story straight about what prompted this particular action, which is why Curmie is more than a little suspicious that these shenanigans aren’t entirely on the up-and-up.  Did we go along with this because Israel was going to do it, anyway, as Marco Rubio first argued?  Or was it something else, since he subsequently denied saying what he’s on tape saying?  Was it to stop Iran’s nuclear program, the one that was supposedly “obliterated” last year?  Or to respond to an Iranian threat that’s presumably been imminent for <checks notes> 47 years?  Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow.

Whatever squishiness there might be in the wording of the War Powers Act, Curmie is pretty much convinced that yes, this was illegal.  The response from Trumpian apologists has been to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy because they were perfectly willing to allow President Obama to bomb Libya back in 2011, casually omitting the fact the two incidents are pretty much parallel: a POTUS of one party uses what may or may not be legitimate authority to execute a military mission, and the other party starts screaming about illegality, even unconstitutionality.  Are the Democrats being two-faced?  Of course they are!  Are the Republicans just as bad?  Yep.

But Curmie hears the GOP sycophants wondering “where was all this liberal concern for restricting the power of the presidency in such cases when Obama was in office?”  Right here, is where.  Here’s the central paragraph of what Curmie wrote 15 years ago:

The administration’s case, one which ignored the objections of Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and of Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is founded on three independent premises, none of which stand up to much scrutiny. The first is that an offensive mission involving drone attacks, sustained bombing, and occasional casualties doesn’t really constitute “hostilities.” The second is that, despite the fact that participation in a NATO-run, UN-sanctioned, mission to protect civilians has morphed into an aggressive attack on Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, the military and geo-political missions have not merged. The third is the apparent assertion that since the mission has taken longer than expected (and that’s never happened before, right?), we should really only be looking at how long the campaign was supposed to last. Add to that the extreme rarity of any White House over-riding the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the Obama administration has a mess on its hands… or perhaps on its shoes, because they’ve really stepped in something.

Moving on to the second part of the critique of present-day hostilities.  Let’s talk about bombing that elementary school in Minab, killing scores of little girls aged 7-12, which according to the best information we have, was perpetrated by American forces.  This is about as clear a violation of international law, not to mention common decency, as it’s possible to imagine.  It is unmistakably a war crime.  Yes, Gentle Reader, mistakes happen: “fog of war” and all that.  Bullshit.  At best, this was a manifestation of breathtaking recklessness and incompetence.  At worst, it was such an intentional infliction of pain and suffering on young girls that you’d think it was ordered by one of those pervs whose name keeps appearing in the Epstein files.  Oh… wait…

What’s the excuse?  Why aren’t the so-called journalists asking how such an atrocity can happen?  Were we just lobbing bombs into populated areas with no regard for what or who might be on the receiving end?  Was the reported death of Ayatollah Khameini therefore just blind luck?  After all, if you can target a particular area to attack, you can similarly identify a different area not to attack.  Or did some idiot like Pete Hegseth decide to demonstrate his manliness by asserting his absolute authority over a bunch of elementary schoolers.  They might have been in math class, learning about Arabic numerals, after all.  Another explanation is that this was a “precise targeting”: the school building used to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base, you see.  Ya might wanna check that shit out next time...

When the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by American forces in 1999, President Clinton apologized to the Chinese President Jiang Zemin promptly and profusely, claiming that the incident was accidental.  Given that there was no rational reason to attack the embassy, Clinton was probably telling the truth, even if the Chinese tried to spin the story to their geopolitical advantage.  There’s no reason to bomb an elementary school in Iran in 2026, either.  The difference between the events is two-fold.  First, Clinton, unlike Trump, was willing to admit to a mistake, and even to take responsibility for something that is extremely unlikely to have been under his direct control.  Secondly, whereas Bill Clinton is hardly an exemplar of truth-telling, his sanity has never been in question.

There are reports that Iran was negotiating with the US when the attacks occurred.  Perhaps that’s true; perhaps it’s leftie spin (or worse).  But there is no question that the logistics of the mission, from choosing targets to strategies for removing Americans from sites likely to be struck by the inevitable retaliation (“get on a commercial plane at your own expense at an airport that’s closed” isn’t terribly helpful advice), were an absolute disaster.  That’s what happens when you choose cabinet members based on sycophancy rather than relevant experience, intelligence, or… you know… competence.

We can hope that the Iranian people will soon be better off, that the military exercise will achieve its purported goal.  It’s not likely, given the history of other attempts at regime change, but it’s not impossible.  It is also possible that new evidence will emerge that will exonerate the US military, but there is something of the boy who cried “wolf” at play here.  What reasonably intelligent person would believe anything this administration says after its serial prevarications about ICE operations?  

Indeed, the two things that will linger in Curmie’s mind for a very long time indeed are the loss of any remaining remnant of American honor or integrity in international relations… and the nagging feeling that de facto Commander-in-Chief of the US military is Bibi Netanyahu.

“First, They Came for…”

Two facts about Curmie:

1. He lived in Kansas for seven years, working on his doctorate and staying on for another year when a full-time teaching gig didn’t materialize.  At the time, the state legislature was more conservative than Curmie would have preferred, but it wasn’t controlled by wackadoodles. 

2. He’s friends with (at least) six trans people, one of whom is also his nephew.  None of them, thankfully, live in Kansas.

Yes, it’s true that the lead story of the past few days is yet another reckless act by the Sociopath-in-Chief.  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that killing little girls is a rather bizarre (and ineffective) means of trying to divert attention away from credible evidence that one has raped little girls.  But that was an act of desperation perpetrated by a single person (well, and his sycophantic minions) and whose victims committed the grievous ethical failing of being born in a different country.  What happened this week in Kansas was, in its own way, even worse.

No, there won’t be any Kansans buried under the rubble of their elementary school, but the level of bigotry disguised as piety and of quite intentional cruelty perpetrated for its own sake by the Kansas legislature is startling, even when compared to other examples of GOP malevolence towards their own constituents.  If you haven’t been following the story, Gentle Reader, Kansas Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto and essentially disenfranchised trans voters, while causing the maximum amount of disruption in their lives in other ways, as well.  This was made easier for the bigots by circumventing the standard opportunity for the public to weigh in on an issue: a tactic called “gut and go,” by which the contents of a bill are “replaced” by, well, whatever the hell some jackass wants, thereby bypassing the public.  It’s now the “House Substitute for Senate Bill 244.”

A letter dated February 23 informed trans people that as of February 26, their state-issued driver’s licenses would no longer be valid because such identification, according to K.S.A. 77-207, must show the sex of the individual at birth.  Moreover, “the Legislature did not provide a grace period for updating credentials.  This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.”  Oh, bloody hell.

But wait!  That’s not all!  Recipients of that letter are “directed to surrender [their] current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles.”  A “new credential reflecting the gender identification consistent with statutory requirements” would then be issued.  OK, all this is annoying enough simply at face value.  But the real devil, and here Curmie really does mean the physical manifestation of evil, is in the details.

Where to begin?  First off, who cares whether that one letter on a license is an M or an F, since both are acceptable?  The best argument is that it helps identify the driver.  More than a photo does?  Anyway, the more important thing is that things change over time.  Curmie used to have a Kansas driver’s license.  It listed his hair color as brown and his weight at 155 pounds.  Both of those descriptions were accurate 30-something years ago when Curmie moved to Kansas.  Today, however, while there are still a few brown strands in there, the hair is grey (well, maybe “silver” if someone wanted to get on my good side) and the weight was about three inches of waist size ago.  More to the point, those things can change over just the duration of the license.  Other folks change their names: they get married or divorced, for example.  The world changes, except in what passes for a brain in a Republican pol, and we ought to try to keep up as best we can.

There are some areas in which reasonable people can disagree.  There are legitimate fairness arguments that trans women ought not to be playing women’s sports, for example.  Perhaps, although Curmie knows of not a single case in which a trans woman, or even someone pretending to be a trans woman, harassed cis women in a rest room, there’s a scintilla of honest, paranoia-free, argumentation in favor of bathroom bills.  (Needless to say, Curmie disagrees with that perspective, but at least there’s the potential for a rationale.)

But what the hell has “sex at birth” to do with ability to operate a car?  Men can drive; women can drive.  So can murderers, rapists, thieves… even (gasp!) “illegal aliens,” all legally.  Oh, and pedophiles, too; mustn’t forget them.  So even if being trans were to be regarded as unlawful (alas, there have been attempts, including in Curmie’s adopted state of Texas, to make it so), that shouldn’t prevent someone from having a driver’s license.  And there’s certainly nothing about being trans that translates (Curmie apologizes; he couldn’t resist) into being a danger on the road.  People who are, like those with multiple DUI convictions, can still have a driver’s license.  But trans folks who legally had their “M” changed to an “F” or vice versa: nope.

Oh, and if you’re trans, you need a new ID, even if your old one does show your sex at birth.  Andrea Ellis legally changed her name in December, then updated her driver’s license in January.  But, she “saw the writing on the wall after listening to [Attorney General] Kobach’s testimony for H.B. 2426” (the bill that would eventually morph into SB 244 and its demon spawn).  She therefore didn’t change the gender marker on her license, but got the same letter as other transgendered folks.  Yes, she had to change out her old license for one that was literally identical.  She’s trans, after all.

Then we add on the timing.  Apparently these letters were sent by mail no sooner than a Monday, and recipients had only until Wednesday to follow the dictates, as the law would go into effect on Thursday.  Of course, the morons on SCOTUS have decided that it’s OK for the postal service to intentionally not deliver mail, so that potentially complicates things even more.  Chances are very good that some people didn’t even know about what they were required to do until it was literally too late.  What if they were on vacation, for example?  

And then they were expected to turn in their old “credential.”  In person, of course, and you know damned well there will be no extended hours.  So that means taking time off work on short notice, finding a way to the office because you aren’t allowed to drive there, waiting in line, paying $46 (according to one source) for a new ID (poll tax, anyone?), and apparently waiting up to 45 days for a new license (N.B., Curmie isn’t completely convinced about the legitimacy of this claim), without which you’re not allowed to drive: not to work, not to the grocery store, not to visit a friend or relative in the hospital (or hospice), nowhere.

It is, of course, self-evident that new licenses could be created with considerably more alacrity than that—the technology exists to do so in no more than a few minutes—but the powers-that-be will slow-walk the process as much as they can, for no other reason than that, for them, cruelty is fun.  There is no rationality for this law, just bigotry and hatred.  Oh, and they’re handing out $1000 bounties for today’s variation on narcs, i.e., those who report folks they decide are peeing in the wrong restroom.  For a group that thinks “communists” (anyone to the left of Jesse Helms, in other words) are worse than, say, pedophiles, these asswipes sure do like to emulate the Stasi.

Well, actually, the disenfranchisement might be the rationale, as it obviously is for the SAVE Act: identify a group likely to oppose the Reich-wing zealots, and make it harder for them to vote.  That’s the argument raised by real-life Friend of Curmie Will Averill, in a Substack post that also suggests that GOP pols are particularly interested in “Bein’ Hicks and Checkin’ Dicks.”  Will doesn’t say this outright, but Curmie will: this obsession with examining specific body parts is perilously close to the prurient if not the perverse.  But that’s OK, you see, because they’re “protecting our women and children.”  <Sigh.>

There is no lack of posturing on this issue.  Lyft, for example hastened to the rescue, promising half-price rides… which are limited to $10 and expire early next week, long before there’s any reasonable solution.  That’s not help; that’s a scammy marketing campaign. 

The ACLU is filing suit on behalf of two transgendered Kansans, and it appears that there might be some other litigants, as well.  That’s a start, but the suit names only folks like the state Attorney General and Director of Vehicles, not the legislators who are directly responsible for this travesty.  Curmie’s no lawyer, so maybe that’s the appropriate tack, but it still seems insufficient.

Curmie is not, as a rule, given to “thin edge of the wedge” arguments, but with various federal agencies not merely admitting, but bragging about, compiling files on, say, people photographing ICE abuses with the goal of labeling such folks as domestic terrorists, the thought that one violation of Constitutional rights might lead to another becomes foregrounded.  And that famous passage by Martin Niemöller referenced in the title of this piece floats to the surface.

One thing is clear.  Even if we were to buy the spurious argument that trans women in particular are just pretending to be something they’re not, such a subterfuge would pale in qualitative significance in comparison to these… erm… individuals of Oedipal predilections masquerading as Christians.  Curmie has pondered whether every single pol who voted for this heinous bill should, in a just universe, be horse-whipped or sent to the stocks for a week to be pelted with rotten vegetables. 

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?