Much ado about very little

An article in today's Washington Post focused on one 13-year-old transgender athlete banned from playing field hockey.. a sport she started at her middle school. 

It turns out that she is the ONLY transgender athlete in Kentucky and that the team never won a game... though they were spirited and enjoyed the activity.

Thanks goodness moral gatekeepers from the, you guessed it, Angry White People Party were on the case and got a law banning any transgender athletes from playing on school teams after three years of trying. The law trumps the school district's equity policy, which allowed her to play briefly.

The state will be OK now, thanks to Republicans who are deeply entrenched in culture wars and posturing, all while the state seems to be drowning, literally. The unrelenting series of recent downpours have killed dozens, upended the lives of thousands, and prompted an avalanche of giving to help people recover.

I don't know precisely how I feel about male to female transgender athletes (I do note that female to male transgender athletes don't seem to cause much of a to do). I can certainly see how there might be situations that end up unfair to "females from birth" athletes, and those should certainly be considered on a case-by-case basis.

But I would love to see state and national legislators focus on bigger issues, on how to help people who are suffering, often due to unkind fate or neglected families/communities. The fact that both parties, but mostly the Angry Party, focus on culture wars and emotional issues that get people fired up and angry (angry people hate it when other people are NOT angry), that is appalling.

Nearly 20 percent of Kentucky is in poverty, ranking it as 47th in the country. Poverty likely connects with where the worst flooding has been and where the most deaths have occurred. The state is the 6th LEAST educated state in the nation and is ranked 44th in health care overall. In other words, Kentucky is not in good shape and hasn't been in, well, forever.

Is the Republican-dominated legislature doing anything to change that dynamic? You know the answer, of course.

The state that keeps sending McConnell back to plague the rest of the country and the world term after term is safe from that dangerous 5'6" middle school field hockey player.

So there's that.