A truly Shocking Scandal has been uncovered by the intrepid journalists over at CNSN, the Brent Bozell news establishment founded, we are informed, in order "to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story and debunk popular, albeit incorrect, myths about cultural and policy issues," which, translated from the original wingnut, means "to shovel a lot of paranoid horseshit that will be greedily spooned up like so much Chubby Hubby by resentful, gullible halfwits who'd gleefully inject frog piss into their eyeballs if they thought that might cause a half-second's annoyance to some imaginary liberal."
Anyway, here is the shocking scandal, which is indeed shockingly shocking in its shocking shockitude.
Shocking! Somehow! I guess! Somehow! For some reason!
The proposed law states that the database can use the Office of Management and Budget “standards for race and ethnicity measures.”
But for the collection of “gender” data, instead of using the categories “male” and “female," the legislation calls for “developing standards for the measurement of gender.”
It may surprise you, or it may not, given the high journalistic standards of a Brent Bozell enterprise, to learn that there is a truncated quotation in that last paragraph (as well as the lede) gasp. The original (pdf) reads:
See, what they wanted you to think was that the US government wants to make it illegal for men not to like shopping, and girls not to like sports. Sibelius would come to your house and make all the guys wear panties, and all the chicks put on Axe Body Spray. At gunpoint! But instead it's just about collecting boring old demographic data in regards to how federal money is being spent on healthcare. Which is too bad, really, because if it were the panties and Axe thing, I would have gladly proposed John Waters be put in charge of the Gender Rectification Enforcement Squads, which would have made the typical COPS episode far more watchable.
Anyway, the bill is using "gender" not in place of the "categories" of "male and female" but rather in place of the word "sex." Apart from grammarians, most people nowadays see the terms as basically interchangeable. So what's the fuss? GAYS. GAYS ARE THE FUSS.
“Gender identity” is routinely used by homosexual groups to define differences in sexual orientation, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and, in some cases, “questioning.”
I'd draw attention to the rather hysterical obsession with policing "socially constructed gender roles" betrayed by "Penny Starr" (the name of the article's author, who presumably grew up on Starr Street and once owned a Pekingese), who decided to read 410 pages into proposed legislation in order to horrify idiots about how homos are taking over the nation based upon a tendentious reading of word choice in the section about demographic data collection. But I assume you already caught on to that.
Instead I will invite you to read through the comments over there and get ready to laugh yourself ill, because they're (a) funnier and (b) spookier than anything I could ever write in a million million years. Oh what the heck, just one:
This one is good because "Wizards of Smart" would be a fun band name, and because it demonstrates that if the bill did use the term "sex," "Penny Starr" would still have been able to gin up a preposterous lunatic freakout of a "scoop."
MORE. I don't think this is likely to turn out to be the exact same Penny Starr, but you can see how the name confusion could have tortured a prissy dimwit unto... madness! Or at least slightly more madness than was there already.