So, this is going to be a mix

[conuly]

The Texas House approved a budget provision late Friday requiring state colleges and universities, if they use state funds to support "a gender and sexuality center," to spend an equal amount on a center promoting "family and traditional values."

Never mind that, you know, society promotes "traditional family values", to say nothing of the tax laws. How about MY traditional family values - educate yourself, accept others the way they are, and pay attention to your own family instead of other people's? Is that what they're talking about, the sort of family values that go "I don't care how they do it in Sarah's family, in THIS family we don't use that sort of language"? Or are they talking about the sort that cares very much how other people run their families?

However, at the same time, the California Senate approved a bill requiring that schools teach gay history.

Apparently, there's this big thing also about pink nail polish and a boy and an ad...? I only heard about it through a single post telling folks to stop talking about it already, so... yeah, there we go.

And marginally related is this article on when girls started wearing pink (and boys never never never)

Here's an inaccurate comic about "literally", which is funny because of the gayroller at the end. Hee! But seriously, the word "literally", let's look it up, is not any more tied to its origins than really or very. See, look, literally can basically be an intensifier. And it's been used like that for a really long time. (Really in the literal sense.) Of course, you might ask why we need more than one intensifier, but that's beside the point.

Also, gayroller!

Brazil Stadium Turns Pink After Homophobic Chants Shock Community

I edited that title slightly, and the article basically is what you expect. : )

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

I have a picture of my father in which he totally looks like a blonde girl. I love that picture and find it hilarious. He turned into a dark haired person for a good portion of his adulthood and then grey haired/little haired. So, it's particularly funny to me seeing him when he is very little and looks like a blonde girl. I pull it out now and then and say, "Guess which of the people I am descended from this is?" and people generally guess things like my grandmother (since it's so clearly a photo from long ago, but then my father was about to turn 48 when I was born). On a side note, I've been told that long, long ago, I think it was the Victorian period that people routinely called all babies and very young children by the pronoun "it" unless they happened to know a gender, but it wasn't viewed as offensive. Since that was simply what was done, "it" wasn't viewed as overly dehumanizing. Nowadays people get insulted if you refer to a baby as an it.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

I keep unthinkingly correcting my boyfriend when he calls our nephew "it" instead of "he". In German babies are, linguistically, gender-neutral thus they're just it, not he or she. And he struggles in English to remember that "it" is considered totally inappropriate for a baby.