Tag / human rights

by Edward Champion

Ryan Walters: Oklahoma Czar of Hate, Intolerance, and Transphobia

A bright and precocious 16-year-old nonbinary girl died in Ossawo, Oklahoma. This didn’t need to happen. And this would not have happened if bigots like State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters had never held office.

Nex Benedict was sixteen years old. Like many smart and ferociously curious kids, Nex enjoyed reading and drawing. They were into Minecraft and The Walking Dead. Nex was part Choctaw and had a loving cat named Zeus. They earned straight As.

In any sane and tolerant world, Nex would have blossomed into adulthood. In all likelihood, they would have lived a rich and meaningful life.

But that didn’t happen. Nex Benedict is now dead.

Nex Benedict is dead — needlessly dead, unpardonably dead, heartbreakingly dead — because they were nonbinary and lived in Ossawo, Oklahoma — a hotbed of hate and intolerance in which cruel, unrepentant, and opportunistic sociopaths like Ryan Walters (of which more anon) gleefully cranked up the temperature and brought out the most savage and hotheaded elements in its otherwise law-abiding population.

While the precise cause of death is still being investigated (according to a Facebook statement from the police department), what is indisputable is this: (1) There was a violent altercation in the Ossawo High School girl’s bathroom. (2) Nex Benedict suffered significant injuries from other girls as a result of this incident. (3) Despite Nex’s injuries, the school did not call an ambulance service for Nex. (4) It was recommended by the school nurse that Nex visit a medical facility. (5) The next day — February 8, 2024 — the Ossawo Fire Department were dispatched for a medical emergency, which resulted in Nex being conveyed to the St. Francis Pediatric emergency room, where Nex then died.

Ossawo, Oklahoma is a community of 38,732 people in which someone erected a “Let’s Go Brandon” billboard on US 169 near the 76th Street North exit and in which Alee McLain — a right-wing fanatic who is the admin of the Owasso Area Republican Women’s Club Facebook page — falsely accused Oklahoma Labor Commissioner Leslie Osborn of encouraging an environment in which children were sexually groomed. (Osborn is a Republican who had been on the board of directors of Honestly, which focused in part on “youth sexual health.” Like many histrionic Republicans fond of using their deranged imagination to invent mythical dens of iniquity from pizza parlors, McLain bought into a conspiracy conjured up by the Oklahoma City Republican Women’s Club without question. It didn’t take long for the hateful froth to foam from the dank corners of her mottled mouth on cue.)

Oklahoma is a state in which cruel, hateful, and unremarkable bigots like Ryan Walters inexplicably become the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and enact callous policies that create intolerant impressions that kids pick up on.

Adults — particularly those who are far enough removed from childhood to forget how impressionable they once were — often ignore the reality that kids (and these kids, much like McLain, can sometimes be as old as fifty-five years old) pay close attention to what they say.

Walters undoubtedly knew this when he fomented hate and transphobic sentiment in his capacity as a public official last year. On June 29, 2023, Walters released a bigoted video on the Oklahoma State Department of Education YouTube account in which he declared:

And there’s dangerous consequences [sic] when common sense is vacated. And we’ve seen, we see a district here in the state where a boy was allowed to go into the girl’s restroom and assaulted two young girls there.

There was just one problem. Aside from misgendering a girl with his insufferably pompous illiteracy, Walters got the facts wrong.

Walters was referring to an October 26, 2022 incident at Edmond Public Schools in which a trans girl got into a physical dispute with a cisgender girl in a girls bathroom. But, as Assigned Media has reported, the details from the two girls are contradictory and murky. The right-wing “news” outlets that covered this incident made no effort to get the details from the trans girl’s perspective. The most neutral news story that Assigned ferreted out was, improbably, the conservative Washington Examiner — where the injuries in question were reported as “minor.” (It is also important to note that Edmond Public Superintendent Angela Grunewald — targeted by Walters in his unhinged state-sanctioned hate speech — was careful to observe, “We don’t want a student hurt at all, whether minor or serious.”)

Unlike this embellished Edmond case, the Ossawo, Oklahoma bathroom incident involved a trans girl who was victimized for being gender-fluid and who is now dead. And because Ryan Walters cannot perceive any LGBTQIA person as a human being — whether adult or child — a glimpse at Ryan Walters’s X/Twitter account reveals no statement expressing even a pro forma “thoughts and prayers” for Nex’s death. In other words, Walters is such an indecent monster, one so riddled with fury and intolerance, that he cannot even engage in the standard cosplay concern one sees from indifferent right-wingers after the latest mass shooting. He has, however, offered more lies, including the risible suggestion that Edmond Public Schools “embraces porn” (the books in question were The Kite Runner and The Glass Castle, which are both no more pornographic than someone wearing shorts on a hot summer day, as well as a baffling intolerance for drag queens. (Here are some interesting statistics from the squeaky-clean data wranglers at Gitnux: There are an estimated 6,100 drag queens in the United States. Approximately 72% of drag queens encountered some form of prejudice or discrimination in 2019. Walters then is clearly more of a force promoting intolerance rather than fighting it.)

Walters was motivated in large part by noted gubernatorial hatemonger Kevin Stitt — a 51-year-old man whose pitch-black hair and permanent scowl bears an uncanny resemblance to the inert and incinerated cilia in a lifelong smoker’s lungs.

On May 25, 2022, Governor Stitt signed one of the most transphobic laws on the books, requiring students at schools to produce their birth certificates for inspection and use the gender listed on that as the basis for what restrooms and locker rooms to use. (This followed a move by Stitt to ban a nonbinary gender marker on all birth certificates issued in Oklahoma.)

Walters naturally followed in these baleful footsteps like an eager bottom.

And because of this, Nex Benedict — a promising student — is now dead.

In all likelihood, Nex would not be dead if Stitt had not signed this bill into law and if Walters had not published his vile video on YouTube. It is almost certain that if these bigots had not pushed so hard and callously with their demagoguery, the people of Oklahoma would have eventually learned greater LGBTQIA tolerance, perhaps codified by state law.

But it seems that Walters and Stitt are more interested in being on the wrong side of history, much as Tulsa was on the wrong side of history in 1921. Keep in mind that Oklahoma is a state in which, just last year, the Sheriff of McCurtain County and several officials expressed a desire to string up Blacks and murder journalists. And while hundred of valiant and principled Oklahomans protested outside the Sheriff’s Office, the racist Sheriff still kept his job.

Now that blood is on Ryan Walters’s hands, the question is whether Ryan Walters will keep his job. His term ends in 2027 and, with xenophobia happening so fast, that seems too far away. There is a movement to impeach him. There have been floods of comments. But Walters will still continue to spout forth piss like some Speer-inspired fountain installed in 1930s Berlin. How many kids have to be brutalized before the people of Oklahoma decide that there is no place in their state for hate and death?

by Edward Champion

Why I Will Not Be Celebrating the Fourth of July

The United States of America is too far removed from the humanity and dignity that it professes to espouse and is not worth celebrating this year.

In previous years, Independence Day was second only to Halloween as my favorite holiday. You’d show up to a park or a porch in your T-shirt and shorts, catch up with old pals casually overseeing a barbeque thronged with succulent chicken breasts slathered with promising sauce and glistening corn cobs that matched the searing hues of sunshine, and toss back a few beers while giddily tossing ground bloom flowers into the streets with a free-wheeling anarchy that was almost an instinctive homage to our founding firebrands. You’d set aside any stark political differences with casual unifying banter, knowing instinctively that the true quality bonding this nation was the invitational and subdued empathy of the American people. Very often you’d end up making out with a stranger, finding yourself in an unexpected summer romance and experiencing fireworks on the ground level that matched the bright showers exploding in the sky. The Fourth of July was the perfect midpoint to both summer and the year, allowing all to take stock in what had been accomplished and what was still possible. It was never an overtly jingoistic holiday — at least not for me or the people who I gathered with.

But I can’t find it within my moral core to party this year. Not while Trump blows $92 million on a fascist spectacle that is more befitting of a dictatorship rather than a democratic republic. This shameful and hopelessly corrupt administration would rather waste precious resources on empty jingoism, money that has been diverted from our cash-strapped national parks, that should be allocated to swiftly rectifying the traumatic conditions in concentration camps, perhaps addressing the lack of water and the indignity and the cramped space currently endured by the people who are needlessly criminalized there, much less punishing the cruelty of CBP animals who mock the deaths of undocumented immigrants when they’re not busy engaging in unacceptable racist rhetoric.

This is the kind of evil and unfathomable domestic policy that should cause anyone possessing even the tiniest sliver of a human heart to set aside their tongs and their big bags of fireworks to march loudly in the goddamned streets, vociferously denouncing the barbarism that our nation now practices without true representative resistance. But much like the epidemics of racism and gun massacres, we’ve grown accustomed to the comfort of looking the other way. We’re so seduced by the easy and enchanting susurrus of normalization, of pushing clear human abuses out of sight and out of mind to munch on our hamburgers, that the present administration only needs to keep ratcheting up the ghastly bar, counting on the fact that most Americans simply don’t or won’t give a shit.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” she depicted a thriving city called Omelas united by a Festival of Summer. The citizens were blissfully happy, but there was one small cost for this revelry:

In a basement under the one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is near ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes — the child has no understanding of time or interval — sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves for legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

America has become Omelas. The eerie parallels between the horrific conditions that Le Guin imagined and the realities that the children now suffering in the concentration camps are too nightmarishly exact. I remember this story being taught in high school and college. And there wasn’t a single student I recall who would attend the Festival of Summer knowing that this child existed. Today, I doubt very highly that any of these grown adults would say no to a festive holiday. How little we learn from the fiction that is meant to imbue us with empathy and compassion. But at least I can do my part by resisting a contradiction that should never have become fact in the first place.

It is clear that what now passes for the United States of America is a travesty of meanness and gleeful shame inflicted on the wanting and the impoverished, a sick cartoonish sideshow writ large into a heartless spectacle tacitly endorsed by both bloodthirsty Republicans who refuse to remonstrate against these inhumane conditions and the spineless Democratic arm led by the tepid and ineffectual Nancy Pelosi. While true progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren have been out in the field trying to get more information, genuinely caring about the plight of those who suffer, our disgraceful Speaker snoozes and roosts like a smug barnacle patiently awaiting her soy milk latte as people in need desperately approach her for drastic change. In a lengthy report from William T. Vollmann recently published in Harper’s (bless the man for his indefatigable diligence), the prolific writer simply talked to the immigrants, photographing the “black insignia[s] of humiliation” around their ankles and observing the salient and very human reasons why these innocents would wish to flee to America — namely, to escape violence and mayhem. (A detailed study by The Marshall Project earlier this year showed no impact on local crime from immigrants. Numerous other studies reveal inflated numbers from ICE and observe that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crime than the average American citizen.)

Like it or not, the immigrants who are mistreated and debased in the concentration camps are Americans. They have lives here and they are deserving, like any human being on this planet, of nobelesse oblige. So long as Americans are starved and denied sleep and bedecked with life-scarring trauma by callous ICE stooges who would sacrifice empathy for the glee of seeing them dead, I refuse to participate in a holiday that now represents a country united by blissful and complicit ignorance. Instead, I will spend the day reciting the Declaration of Independence to remind myself of just what this nation used to be, burning an American flag (a legal act of expressive resistance we thankfully still have) to protest our collective culpability, and thinking about how I can spend my time fighting the bastards with everything I have. These seem to me the only true duties of a principled patriot. I hope that you can find it within your heart to do something similar.