What if Tennessee Republicans got their way? Democrats just disappeared. All the LGBTQ people moved to California. Immigrants emigrated. Public school teachers all quit. Everyone started going to church. What would happen?
They know where we came from, right? I mean, we came from them. They gave birth to us. Conservative parents can have gay kids. You can tell by the amount of lonely Fox News viewers that conservative parents can have liberal kids. Are they somehow going to come up with enough well-paying jobs that households can survive on one income? Because nothing breeds feminists like having to get a job and still having to carry most of the housework and child-rearing. And gun control is now a bipartisan issue. It turns out that being shot at or having a kid whose classroom is down the hall from a massacre turns people into gun control activists. It's similar to how seeing your wife unable to obtain an abortion — when your wanted pregnancy goes south and you lose the baby and almost lose her — tends to make people pro-choice pretty damn quick.
Republicans have held control of the governorship and the state legislature for a solid decade. And yet, in that time, their political opponents (or the people they see as their political opponents) keep emerging, even from the most conservative families in the state.
A Twitter poll posted by Republican Rep. Jason Zachary
On May 3, Republican state Rep. Jason Zachary posted a poll on Twitter asking, “What do you feel is the core issue driving the evil acts of violence we are seeing in our country?” His choices were "Sin," "Mental Health," "Breakdown of the Family" and "Guns." Guns won by a sizable majority. On the same day, the latest Vanderbilt Poll showed that most Tennesseans, regardless of party, support gun control. Undeterred by his own poll, two days later, Zachary posted, “Mental health, breakdown of the family and man’s sinful heart are the core issues that lead to these acts of violence. Knife, gun, car (parade in Wisconsin) are the instruments people use.”
Never mind that there are troubled people from broken homes with sin in their hearts all over the world, and yet we’re the only country that has this trouble at this magnitude. What I want you to dwell on is the disconnect. Everyone is telling him guns are the problem, and he’s still sticking with the party line.
I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War. I was too young for the drills about what to do during a nuclear bomb strike (I guess by then we were all just assuming what you did during a nuclear bomb strike was die, and it pretty much didn’t matter if you were under your desk when it happened), but I remember being pretty certain that we all would probably die in a war with Russia before I was too old.
Among the things we were taught about Russia is the power of the party line. If party leaders said the sun was shining and you could see it’s raining, you’d better show up outside with your sunglasses and not your umbrella — otherwise, off to the gulag with you. But denying reality and acting as if the word of your superiors was the truth was rewarded. And listen, I don’t know if this is actually true. I just know this is part of the propaganda we were fed about the Russians.
Now we’re actually living through this, where loyalty to the party and the system are more highly valued than commitment to the truth. Everyone can see that the guns are the problem. After all, conservatives have been complaining about and blaming all of society’s ills on sin and the breakdown in the family for as long as I’ve been alive, but divorce rates have been declining for all that time. Crime rates over the past 50 years have declined, which suggests our hearts are becoming less sinful. And yet, the mass shootings continue.
Republican Majority Leader William Lamberth surrounded by protesters at the state Capitol
I guess the idea is that one’s willingness to adhere to the party line is a litmus test of whether we belong in Tennessee. If we’re willing to blame trans people or gay people or broken homes or sinful hearts, then we can all agree that the solution is just to get rid of the people who are to blame and the people who value truth more than party cohesion. And we can identify who values truth over party cohesion by continuing to spout nonsense and see who goes along with it.
But it’s not like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a new story. And one of the lessons of that story is that there’s always going to be someone — some kid — who blurts out the truth and pops holes in the story we’re all buying into. And that someone isn’t an “outside agitator.” It’s someone in your family or community.
You can’t get rid of truth-seeking Tennesseans, because you’re always making more.
