Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Is Open Trans Hate Becoming A Political Liability?

Another piece of political news I was gleefully doing the happy dance about was hearing about two trans hating Republican politicians in Colorado and South Carolina losing their reelection bids.

Colorado state Rep. and faux faith based transphobe Gordon Klingenschmitt lost his reelection bid for a third term last night in the GOP primary.   He was blown out by his primary challenger Bob Gardner, a former state representative who won with 62% of vote to represent Colorado Springs in the state Senate.

Gardner is considered more moderate than 'Dr. Chaps', who will not be missed in the state senate, especially by the Colorado TBLG community.

He wasn't alone in tasting electoral defeat last night. South Carolina state senator Lee Bright, who sponsored the failed anti-trans legislation in the Palmetto State, lost his bid for a third term as a South Carolina senator.

He lost his runoff race to former state Rep. Scott Talley, a candidate backed by SC Gov. Nikki Haley (R) who once again, was considered more moderate than Bright..

With Sen. Ted Cruz attempting to deploy transphobia in his last ditch effort to keep Donald Trump from becoming the GOP nominee, spectacularly failing in the Indiana primary and dropping out of the presidential race the next day, are the losses of anti-trans politicians a coincidence or a sign that open hatred of transgender people is a political liability?

Both Klingenschmitt and Bright were unpopular and had committed other unforgivable sins in their party besides being unrepentant transphobes that led to their political demise, but I sure hope so.

As I have pointed out, trans people are at least 1% to 3% of our population, and we are just as diverse as the US population.

Some of those adult trans folks are not only Republican, but some of our trans kids have parents who are members of that party like Debi Jackson, Kimberly Shappley and Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) .

Those parents and their allies are increasingly becoming fed up with the demonization of their children and trans family members and seeing member of the party they support propose legislation and dehumanizing policies to make their kids third class citizens and are retaliating at the polls..

We'll find out if the nascent political hypothesis I'm pondering about transphobia for fun and GOP political gain becoming a liability is valid if North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory (R) falls on November 8 to his Democratic gubernatorial challenger Roy Cooper  

Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Gov. Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton, assuming he isn't convicted or in jail by then we won't find out about until they face the voters in 2018.

Hopefully by that time the Texas voter suppression law will be dead.

But I'm hopeful that the pattern of politicians gleefully and openly hating trans people for political gain goes the way of hanging chads on punchcard ballots.

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