Amongst all of the semiquincentennial bashes in June, the big beautiful Algae Deflecting Pool hoopla in D.C., the U.S./Israel vs. Iran matchup in the Persian Gulf, and big FIFA goings-on
across the norteamericano continent, I missed an important announcement.
June was Nuclear Family Month. So
said the Tennessee Legislature, the GOP part. Irked by all the nonsense about Pride Month,
the LGBTQ+ Pride Parades and the colorful Pride crosswalks (the ones that goon squads paint
over in the dead of night), I neglected to celebrate my nuclear family.
According to the Tennessee Lege,
lawmakers of a certain stripe signed off on a resolution that says “one
husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children” are “God’s
design.”
According to a June 6 article by
Anita Wadhwani I just read in the Tennessee Lookout, Tenn. Gov. Bill Lee
signed the bill in April and it carries no punch to ban anything with rainbows
or men wearing eye shadow. It carries the “symbolic weight” of a “government endorsement
of only one type of family unit despite a wide diversity of families living in
Tennessee including single-parent, grandparent, and LGBTQ+ families,” wrote Wadhwani.
Should Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
decide on something similar, he will have a big problem. Not with me but with
thousands of others. I know DeSantis works overtime to please Bubba and
Bubbette voters. Mr. Harvard Grad posits himself as one of them. But right now
he’s busy executing a backlog of criminals in the state prison system. His
Alligator Alcatraz did not go over well and he’s mightily pissed. Rumor has it
that he plans to make every Floridian walk around with the “Welcome to the Free
State of Florida” banner tattooed on their foreheads. Might look nice on some
people.
But GOP state governors have
nothing to fear from me. I happen to have a nuclear family right here in the
wildlands of Tomoka Station, Fla. One husband (me), one wife (my wife), one son
(son) and one daughter (daughter). We can check those boxes. I also come from a
nuclear family with the appropriate credentials. My grandparents were all Nuke
Family types and so were my descendants going back a century or two possibly
all the way back to Adam and Eve if there were such a nuclear pair that
parented sons Cain and Abel. Cain slew Abel, becoming the first murderer
featured in The Good Book that the Christian Right demands students read
instead of Fahrenheit 451.
It’s now early July and I haven’t
seen any statistics what the Tennessee bill has wrought. Not much, I suspect.
Christian Nationalist blowhards are just that, their efforts filled with much sound
and fury, signifying nothing. They hurt people, the ones they hate, with a
furor that brought us Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem.
Haters.
BTW, “nuclear family” is an odd
term. My father built silos for nuclear missiles in the West. I lived 33 years
next to the biggest nuke base in the U.S. I have strontium-90 from 1950s
nuclear tests in my bones. There are lunatics out there with nuclear
capability. There have been nuke plant meltdowns in Ukraine and Japan and the
U.S. to contemplate.
Nuclear is nothing to imitate.
