O.K., I’ll admit it: I enjoy talking about poop. For one thing, poop is one of the funniest words in the English language. It’s right up there with booger, kittywampus, and gubernatorial.
For another, as I learned during my tenure on the Lake Herman Sanitary District, talking about poop is important for understanding how we keep our rural and urban communities livable. Just ask the kids I subbed for in high school biology the other day, where I lucked into a lecture on sustainable development and talked about the heaping mounds of poop amidst which Aberdonians would live if it weren’t for an effective centralized sewer and waste treatment system.
But some people’s obsession with poop isn’t healthy. Take Republican Senators Phil Jensen and Stace Nelson. It was bad enough they had to float a bill (SB 160) last week hinting of the anti-trans potty panic that we thought the family-values crowd (translate: toilet inspectors) had sworn off until 2019. But now they stick their noses into other people’s pooping with two explicit bathroom bills.
Senate Bill 202 addresses Senator Jensen’s and Senator Nelson’s worst fear after running out of toilet paper: being handed emergency TP by someone of the opposite sex. SB 202 would require whoever’s in charge of a public “multi-person or unisex restroom” to “post a sign on the door to give notice to a user of the restroom that a person of the opposite sex may be in the restroom the user is about to enter.”
A warning label? On public bathrooms? Please, someone call John Stossel.
How about a bathroom warning about real potential horrors in the bathroom, like a sign on every stall at the rest-stops: “WARNING: The lunkhead before you may have neglected to flush.” Or maybe outside the bathrooms on rodeo day at the Brown County Fair: “WARNING: That brown stuff in the urinals is probably chewing tobacco.”
Not quite as overtly dumb but still spoiling for a pissing match is House Bill 1296, which Jensen and Nelson got their little wingnut buddy Tim Goodwin to sponsor in the House. HB 1296 would require every public school district to establish and publish “a policy regarding the use of the bathrooms and locker rooms located in schools within the school district by any transgender person.”
How about this policy: “If you need to poop, go poop. No questions asked.”
Like monkeys throwing feces, some legislators just can’t resist making a mess. There is no epidemic or even rare media splash of transgender people scaring the poop out of unsuspecting bathroom users. No schools are crumbling or closing because kids, parents, and teachers can’t figure out where to poop or to change for P.E.
Let’s wipe the Legislative agenda clean of these stinky bills and get back to fixing the budget shortfall.
Call the CDC.
It started out back in the mid-1980s with the sewage ash issue. Republicans had to actually import sh*t from the Twin Cities to feed their need. People speculated that Republicans had a sh*t fetish. There was soon to be more. Let’s explore further up this hole.
Next came the corporate hog farm proposal, with mountains of pig poop promised for Republicans to wallow in. Scientists hypothesized there must have been something in feces, some pheromone, perhaps, mixed in with all the checks from corporate hog farms that made Republicans roll around in #2. The thought was it was a passing phase that would end when the checks ended. But that hypothesis was disproved by subsequent Republican behavior: they can’t go one session without some bill dealing with one or another form of sh*t. They are addicted, just as the song says:
“You can’t sleep, you can’t eat
There’s no doubt, you’re in deep
Your throat is tight, you can’t breathe
Another dump is all you need
Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get too much of it
You know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to sh*t
Am I reading this wrong; doesn’t 202 allow a sign to be put on ALL doors and CREATE non-gender bathrooms everywhere?
I know more-and-more, public gender-neutral bathroom design is becoming a focus for remodeling and new construction in public buildings. Maybe 202 is an attempt to push SD ahead of the curve?
Oh, Donald! Get some girls and guitars and make that video!
O, you may have flipped my vote! I was reading “may” as an expression of possibility; you read it in the more legal sense of granting permission:
“…a person of the opposite sex may be in the restroom…”
Why yes, that person of the opposite sex may enter. Anybody of any sex may enter.
Should we tell Phil and Stace or let them discover it for themselves? :-D
Jensen and Nelson obviously must have a bathroom fetish.
To my knowledge, unlike Mr. Nelson, Mr. Jensen has never hid in a bathroom to avoid a tough vote. But he does sport a poop colored leather jacket more than any grown man should.
Do you like John Stossel, Cory?
Stossel had one brief shining moment when he called a professional rassler a fake and got decked a couple of times.
That was so kewl.
Send them all the Europe and let them encounter gender neutral bathrooms that have doors that close and (!) lock. All that is required is that people have their pants back on when they come out of them. Of course, pulling their pants back on may be beyond these two legislator’s comprehension…
Not really, Timoteo, but I know the conservatives do, so he seems appropriate to link here. What would Stossel think of warning labels on our bathrooms?
Heads Up, Right to Life organizers are planning to push strict anti-abortion bills in every wingnut run state lege this year.
Where do they think transgendered people pooped before all this focus on transgendered poop? Do they think this is a recent event – that transgender people poop? Isn’t time government kept it’d nose out of people’s pants?