Good Lord

Orange County has a reputation for Xtreme Political Conservativism; everybody joked about how we'd have to scrub our left-leaning political beliefs and register as Republicans now that we were moving 'behind the Orange Curtain' (hyuk-yuk; that 'joke' gets old, folks). As one who'd already grown up behind the curtain, though, I'd usually regarded Orange County's loony far-right as more to be pitied than feared, given some of its colorful representatives:

• ex-Congressman "B-1" Bob Dornan!
• now-deceased local talkshow host Wally George!
• Jim Silva, my vacuous high-school 'Economics' teacher turned County Supervisor. The only thing I remember about Mr. Silva's class -- besides the fact that every single female in the class had an instinctive, visceral dislike of the man -- is that he had us read Iacocca and Trump, deathless classics of ghostwritten business autobiography, apparently working on the theory that hacking through the bloated work of egomaniacs once known for making some amount of money would instill their same entreprenurial spirit in us. I guess that we were supposed to ignore the fact that Trump was in the process of losing it all, with a net worth of near-zero, or that Iacocca had left Chrysler and moved on to hawking olive-oil spreads. Now Silva has left all that behind to become the Supervisor that the OC Weekly most loves to hate.

Recently, though, it gave me a pause to realize that the Traditional Values Coalition, prime source of retrograde ideas and an organization with some actual power here in George Bush's now-more-moral America, is headquartered less than a block away from our house! They're in an office building just across the street from our usual grocery store -- so now after I pick up a little something for dinner, I can cross the street and pick up a petition for a ballot measure to STOP THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA FROM BEING TAUGHT IN CALIFORNIA'S SCHOOLS!!!1!!!

Hopefully the donations that we've made this year to the ACLU of Southern California and Lambda Legal will do a little bit to counterbalance the giant sucking force coming from down the street.

(Regarding the homosexual agenda being taught in California's schools: is there anyone whose junior high/high school sex-ed experience wasn't taught by an uptight biology teacher/football coach/school nurse type? The Traditional Values people make it sound as if every public school has a Resource Lesbian on call, ready for when sex ed time rolls around -- but every teacher whose job it was to talk to us about sex had a difficult enough time approaching discussion of plain-vanilla heterosexual sex that even thinking about making a passing mention of transsexual orgies in class would have made their heads explode ...)

Posted by Kevin at April 13, 2005 09:41 AM