Notes from Evil Bender

I’m lying, of course: as anyone who takes a peek at the Constitutional violations and skyrocketing federal spending of Republican Administrations knows, Republicans only claim to want to minimize controls over individual lives and local issues. In practice, they behave like this:

Upset House Republicans are mounting a campaign to purge Georgia’s higher education system of professors with an expertise in racy sexuality topics as the state grapples with a $2.2 billion shortfall.

State Rep. Charlice Byrd, R-Woodstock, took the House well on Friday to announce a “grassroots” effort to oust professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex and “queer theory.”

“This is not considered higher education,” Byrd said. “If legislators are going to dole out the dollars, we should have a say-so in where they go.”

Byrd and her supporters, including state Rep. Calvin Hill, R-Canton, said they will team with the Christian Coalition and other religious groups to pressure fellow lawmakers and the University System Board of Regents to eliminate the jobs.

“Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math,” said Hill, a vice chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. He said professors aren’t going to meet those needs “by teaching a class in queer theory.”

Naturally, who knows more about what should be taught at a University than idiotic Republicans urged on by Bible-thumping anti-knowledge bigots?

I’m particularly impressed to see Hill and Byrd be so confident that they know better what is worth teaching than those who have spent years developing expertise in their subjects , and that Byrd and Hill are so eager to bypass and/or pressure those who make decisions about University classes to teach only what they think is worthwhile. I’m predicting that soon we’ll see these elected idiots making a stink about how biology classes teach Evilution, comparative religion classes don’t assume the absolute truth of the Bible,  and how TEH SHAKESPEARE ISN’T BEING TAUGHT NO MORES!!!1!!eleventy!

And yet I’ll be accused of hyperbole is I point out that politicians dictating what can and cannot be taught in a University is what happens in under Tyrannical governments, not democracies. So instead I’ll stick with an observation: since Georgia’s Republicans clearly think that being knowledgeable on a subject means one has engaged in it and endorses it, and since Rep. Byrd obviously thinks she’s an expert on abortion, I can only assume she’s running down once a month to her local “Abortion Industry Practitioner” to have a fetus removed.

Either that or these people are just batshit insane hypocrites who get their jollies by trying to control the lives of other people. Take your pick.

(To be fair I should point out that wingnuts have good reason to be afraid of higher education: once wingnuts start to critically examine their assumptions, they either convert from wingnuttery, engage in massive cognitive dissonance for the rest of their lives (by far the most common choice), or incinerate due to Spontaneous Worldview Collapse.)