Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother…
… in the future, it may be that you’re not to be mentioned on the floor of the House.
It’ll be “parent” and “sibling” for us all:
Proposed changes to the rules of the House of Representatives would “honor all gender identities” by eliminating such specific terms as mother and father, son and daughter, and aunt and uncle.
Instead, only gender-neutral terms such as “parent,” “child,” “sibling” and “parent’s sibling” would be allowed in the text of the House rules, according to the proposed changes.
The proposed changes — which also include the establishment of a House “Office of Diversity and Inclusion” — will be voted on after the House convenes Sunday for the new 117th Congress.
In case you don’t know the reference in the title of this post, it’s to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” a 1977 song in which the words are often lost in the driving beat and John Travolta’s movie strut, but which describes urban decay and despair in the late 70s. Have a look:
And now it’s all right. It’s OK.
And you may look the other way.
We can try to understand
The New York Times’ effect on man.Whether you’re a brother
Or whether you’re a mother,
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
Feel the city breakin’
And everybody shakin’,
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive…Life goin’ nowhere. Somebody help me.
Somebody help me, yeah.
Life goin’ nowhere. Somebody help me, yeah.
Stayin’ alive.
That ignorant preacher, Cleaver; who did the Amen and A woman Doesn’t know that men is plural and A is singular.
I am so sick of al this politically correct BS. Send them all back to first grade and teach them about vocal and grammar. Then go on to basic math and history.
expat, it’s nice to know there’s at least one other language geek here.
See also: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/373666/why-is-any-not-classified-as-an-article?noredirect=1&lq=1
Frank Zappa and his band, “The Mothers of Invention,” were all about motherly love.
He’s dead now, but I doubt Frank would sit still for today’s politically correct BS any more than he did when Tipper Gore took on her mission in the 80s to put warnings on rock lyrics. Zappa testified before a Senate Committee to that effect.
Take this, Pelosi! (It’s a fun song.)
______________________________
Motherly love
Motherly love
Forget about
The brotherly and other-ly love
Motherly love
Is just the thing for you
You know your Mothers’ gonna love ya
Till ya don’t know what to do
The Mothers got love
That’ll drive ya mad
They’re ravin’ ’bout the way we do
No need to feel lonely…
No need to feel sad,
If we ever get a hold on you
What you need is…
Motherly love
(Come on get it now)
Motherly love
–Frank Zappa, “Motherly Love”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFQbERB2DAM
I don’t know whether to find this the most alarming and revolutionary thing I have ever heard, or to laugh.
Obviously for a representative to even pretend to obey or to take it seriously such an injunction is to enter into a state of serfdom, and to abandon any notion of constitutional – i.e., structurally limited government.
Is there some proposed punishment for saying, “my father” on the House floor? What, expulsion, maybe?
This is too “brink of war” to be taken seriously. Something is way off here.
Meme/toon floating around…
“Congress shall not use sexist words like…”
“How about ‘Big Brother’?”
How about “Our Father, who art in heaven…”?
Though I imagine prayer on the House floor was outlawed years ago.
huxley:
Are you against the rating system for movies? Wasn’t Tipper’s suggestion akin to that?
Obviously, it may not have stopped there, but that was her proposal – simply to make parents aware of what the kids were immersing themselves in. I don’t really think things like that would have prevented what has happened to the culture in the interim, but what did happen is that we get things like Cardi B’s WAP.
Here was Zappa’s statement of his position, placed on one of his albums:
Really? What’s a “truly free society”? A society with no standards for public behavior and no limits on the exposure of children to certain things? Is it only “religious fanatics and ultra-conservative political organizations” that are against a totally libertarian society such as Zappa seems to be advocating? Was Tipper’s suggestion for a voluntary warning label “censorship”? Does it violate the First Amendment? Is it unconstitutional? Is it un-American?
There are no First Amendment issues here, nor are there any Constitutional ones, any more than there are for the movie rating system. As for “un-American,” it is a long American tradition to have community standards for what is deemed pornographic, even to the point of censorship in the past. And children are still protected – supposedly, anyway – from such things.
DNW,
I doubt if the purpose of Pelosi’s new regulations is to reprimand House Representatives who refuse to go along.
I think it far more likely that it’s to nullify their legislation, by refusing to advance it for consideration by the House. Since use of traditional labels is clearly discriminatory.
neo: Geez, I love being bombarded with questions, rhetorical or otherwise. After two I just ignore them and have my say.
Zappa was an artist (not a lawyer) and hyper-sensitive on free speech, especially since he tended to be testing boundaries in his art. He also had his back up about conservatives and conservative Christians, who were busy in the 20th C trying to stop the publication of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” among other things. Our own FBI was on the case to get to the bottom of just how obscene the song, “Louie, Louie” was.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-fbi-investigated-the-song-louie-louie-for-two-years-78752777/
So I’d say Zappa’s concerns weren’t entirely far-fetched.
Today I can’t read some of Trump’s tweets and quite a lot of other things without Facebook, Twitter or Google horning in to warn me. If such material isn’t outright censored… That’s not unconstitutional either, I understand, but I don’t like it anymore than Frank would, if he were alive today.
So what’s the problem with Pelosi’s changes to the House Rules? Surely that’s just a matter of community standards and protecting people. Children especially need to know their leaders aren’t undermining the well-being of trans citizens.
I was alarmed years ago when “chairman” was replaced with “chairperson” and the ridiculous talk about “manhole” becoming “personhole” which sounds somewhat crude. If we take “amen” make it “awoman” then we must take any word which has the letter combination “m-e-n” and replace it with “w-o-m-e-n”. Same with “m-a-n” and “w-o-m-a-n”. There would soon be man-womany words that could not be men-womentioned without people deciding to not commen-woment on anything. We are becoming men-womentally ill.
expat and AppleBetty, I can’t tell you how many local news stories I have read in which a driver crashed a vehicle and “they” were taken to the hospital, making it impossible for me to tell how many people were actually injured.
Susanamantha, thus making “Emanuel” Cleaver’s name unacceptable. 🙂
Thank God Congress is finally solving the important problems.
What effect will this have on the LPDE and Trans community? Also, it kinda undermines the whole Women’s and Gender Studies idea.
This is actually the first story that has really alarmed me. This mooting of a mechanism to procedurally disenfranchise middle America on the basis of a progressive ideology practice, does constitute an attempted social coup against constitutional government as we have known it for over 200 years.
This is much worse than Antifa showing up on your door step.
If the people of this country are going to allow themselves to be led around by the nose by sexually disordered and mentally ill lunatics, who demand a solidarity and care from others to which they are not morally entitled by nature, or reason or reciprocity, then the people of this country don’t really believe that they deserve to be free.
And I think in many instances, that is the case. The inclusion mongers among us don’t seek economic independence; they seek a niche, a sinecure and a paying audience forced to applaud their defects.
The more I read of what the transLBQRSP whatevers demand, the more outrageous, radically, diabolically, and entropy embracingly alien they seem. They insistently make themselves into a monstrous “other”. How and on what basis then, can they claim to be entitled to forbearance as a like-kind? What kind? In common how? To what end? For whose benefit? Sharing what interests reciprocally?
In a libertarian polity, where they would be free to engage in whatever personal perversions and mutilations and degradation they wanted as long as they were willing to die in the ditch of their own digging, it would be no problem. But somehow, they have become persuaded, and seem to have persuaded much of the female population of the country, that they are entitled to eat at our tables while shitting on our dinner plates and molesting our children.
We have tried to figure out how to figure this out, until we have become blue in the face analyzing and asking.
But as many of those well studied on the matter of post-modern critical theory embracing SJW’s have pointed out, you cannot reason with them. Because they are about you living subjected by any means necessary to the perverse and revolting dream they dream; and not about the investigation, discussion, and negotiation of boundaries and limits to their interpersonal claims.
The strongest weapon they actually have is the reluctance of normal people to ultimately kill, say, an aggressive pink haired mentally ill fat woman or a skinny trans boy who is leveling violence against them. This, because the normal person has been conditioned to believe that ultimately reason can sort the issue out, and that the crazies can be cured and don’t really intend the malice they proclaim.
But no matter how much you seem to back off and make allowances it is not enough.
If things do not take a turn for the better, there are going to be a lot of 60 year old grandmas tearing their hair out because their beloved trans this or that or their little Antifa whelp, has reaped the whirlwind. And they, I do not doubt, will have had something to do with it coming to that pass in the first place.
In order to illustrate what I meant by the nexus between persons who are sexually and mentally disordered and their expansive views as to their claims against others who are not like them, I’m going to drop a link to a Confronting with Crowder rehash video originally from 2018.
I don’t care for Crowder, and this is the first of his vids I have watched in a couple of years. But there is an important screen shot of a comment that reveals the pattern of thinking engaged in by trans and SJW activists. Fits in with the ‘silence is violence’ construct and the idea that just because they exist, you somehow owe them.
See this and quickly pause:
https://youtu.be/xMF5RaovE5A?t=18
“Starve a trans person of all social support …”
Yeah, if you are not the servant of their dysfunctions, then you are a Nazi.
Freedom apparently moves in only one direction: the direction of less personal, social, and economic liberty for you; and more socially underwritten psychotic and degenerate libertinism for them … because, the evolutionary arc of history or something.
As Obama said in a trend setting direction, ” … mere tolerance is not enough”.
Susanamantha,
I commend/comwomend you on your clever comment/comwoment!
DNW, as I put it to myself a few months ago in the context of contemplating D&I training: the new order is that there shall be social rules, but no social norms.
I think the attention being paid to this proposed rule change in the U. S. House is misguided in the sense that the rule change specifically being called out is that the change to all of the normal gender-specific language pertains, as far as I recall, to the rules in Section 23 (XXIII) on conduct of House members’ duties. I don’t recall that it touches the language used in legislation, for example, though it might and I just didn’t read that far. But for now, I’m regarding it as limited to that specific context. Therefore, I find it a bit eyeroll-inducing to see such overblown headlines as “Pelosi Outlawing The Words ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’!!!!”.
I can see an argument, as far as this Rule/Section XXIII goes, in favor of the change the Dems are proposing, though they do so for the wrong reasons. Rather than approve of it because of its Wonderful Rainbow of Awe-Inspiring All-Inclusive Wonderfulness, I would potentially support it simply on the basis of cutting down the huge amount of words in that paragraph of the rules. But I would not take my rationale one millimeter farther than that – I don’t give a murine kidney about their woke claptrap.
These are profoundly unserious people. THIS is what they call doing the people’s business?
“I can see an argument, as far as this Rule/Section XXIII goes, in favor of the change the Dems are proposing, though they do so for the wrong reasons. Rather than approve of it because of its Wonderful Rainbow of Awe-Inspiring All-Inclusive Wonderfulness, I would potentially support it simply on the basis of cutting down the huge amount of words in that paragraph of the rules. But I would not take my rationale one millimeter farther than that ” – Philip
Indeed.
huxley —
I remember hearing about that investigation and thinking, “if the lyrics to ‘Louie, Louie’ were obscene, how could anyone tell?”
huxley, Bryan – if you listen to the original version of “Louie, Louie” by its author Richard Berry you can tell the lyrics are completely innocent. Then if you listen to the Kingsmen’s version they are singing the same lyrics. Though possibly not just a bad break – or lucky break publicity-wise – that they were slurred enough to be misinterpreted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-2CKsaq5r8
Re; “Louie, Louie”…
Bryan Lovely, FOAF:
Yes, it is an innocent song and the lyrics were slurred..
In sixth grade I remember the bad boys pretending they knew the sexy secrets of “Louie, Louie” and doing a big nudge-nudge-wink-wink routine for the rest of us. Turns out they were bluffing. I wonder if they were bluffing themselves as well.
But IMO those bad boys collectively managed to set up an urban legend which ensnared concerned adults and the FBI.
What is ironic about all this is that I have a friend that was actually fired from his teaching job for using gender neutral language. He was teaching in a post graduate medical professional program – physician assistant, nurse anesthetist, perfusion, that sort of thing – and many of the students had young families. Prior to the school year starting, they had a picnic where faculty got to meet incoming students and their families. He was working with several students a day or so before Halloween and knowing that one was a parent, but not remembering the specific makeup of the family, he asked offhandedly if he would be trick or treating with his “offspring”. Nothing was said at that moment, but a week later he found out that the student filed a Title IX complaint for use of the word “offspring”. The student claimed the word “offspring” was an attempt to dehumanize his son because he was the product of a mixed-race marriage. Even though my friend explained in response to the complaint that he specifically chose “offspring” because he didn’t recall how many children of what gender were in the student’s family, and had the support of the other students who overheard the conversation, he was dismissed at the end of the semester. He received zero support from the administration and was repeatedly told that the only thing that mattered was the “student’s perception of the conversation”. This was during the Obama years when the “Dear Colleague” guidance that created all the kangaroo courts on campus was in force. My buddy is a big Lefty and hates everything about Trump, but says rescinding the “Dear Colleague” guidance was the right thing to do, although I assume it will be back within the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The student was struggling academically, particularly with my friend’s class, and eventually did not complete the program.
This is my first comment here. I found the blog back in the early days of the pandemic and have enjoyed reading neo’s thoughts and the subsequent conversations.
Interesting.
I’m assuming “a friend” and “My buddy” are one and the same, and the ” big Lefty” is the one who got fired. [ no friend of a friend being implied by you nor missed by me]
If so, my question then, is: apart from his view on the ” ‘Dear Colleague’ ” matter, has he drawn no more generalized or broader conclusions about the principles of leftism from his experience?
Not that he necessarily would. We all know the stories of Russians condemed to death by Stalin, going to their demise praising his name and that of the Party.
Just wondering though if it had given him pause for further reflection, and if not, why it might have not.
Hello, meandering! That is an interesting if painful story.
Philip Sells, Thanks!
DNW, you are perceptive and I think you already know the answer. This happened prior to the Kavanaugh Hearings. I asked what he thought about the hearings and he immediately said because of Kavanaugh’s angry statement before Congress he was in no way qualified for the SC because he didn’t have the proper judicial temperament. I mentioned I was interested in what he thought because of how he had been treated. I asked him to remind me of some of the details and as he began to recount this experience he became very agitated and began raising his voice almost to the point of yelling, for which he later apologized. It was obvious that he was (and still is) deeply hurt by the experience, but never occurred to him that his response to the unfair treatment was exactly the same as Justice Kavanaugh’s. And it still never occurs to him that it is the policies of the very people he continually votes for that created the situation. As stated, he was happy when the Trump admin rescinded the Obama guidance, which again demonstrates the adage that, no matter how woke they claim to be, people are Conservative about the things that effect them the most.