“This is the most gay-friendly governor California has ever
had,” says Gray Davis spokesman Russell Lopez to the San
Francisco Chronicle. Davis also brags that he is the most
abortion-friendly governor in Golden State history. And now Davis
can add to his resume a new boast: he is the most
transgender-friendly governor Junipero Serra’s state has ever seen.
AB 196 — legislation that makes it illegal for employers and
landlords to discriminate against crossdressers — received Davis’s
hasty signature this week. “The state Department of Fair Employment
and Housing could issue fines as high as $150,000 to employers or
landlords who discriminate,”
reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
This is the carnival wheel that state government has become
under Gray Davis. And East
Coast pundits consider Californians crazy for trying to get
off?
Davis signed another piece of bizarre legislation this week, as
equally reality-defying as his crossdresser bill: AB 96, a bill
that renames “low-performing” schools “high-priority” schools.
Davis apparently agrees with the bill’s author that the phrase
“low-performing” damages students’ self-esteem. “Words can make
children have a thirst for knowledge,” Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez
explained to the Los Angeles Times, “or they can hinder
their ability to succeed.”
In Gray Davis’s California, men who dress like women are
suddenly women, and crummy schools renamed “high-priority” are
suddenly good ones. This sad self-delusion is Davis’s favorite
policy mode. Confronted with an unpleasant reality, he redefines it
as a pleasant one. Normal people call this deception; he calls it
good government.
Davis’s delusion is of course deliberate: he signed these insane
bills so that homosexuals and hack teachers will vote against his
recall. But his grasp of reality isn’t so tenuous that he wants
most Californians to hear about them. Loath to appear as a champion
of civil rights for crossdressers, he signed AB 196 quietly, hoping
it would galvanize homosexuals without offending ordinary
Californians.
Republicans should publicize the ludicrous legislation. The
legislation is a joke, but its consequences are not. In a desperate
bid for votes, Davis is willing to fine employers and landlords
$150,000 for not hiring or renting to drag queens. Californians
outside of San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles would find this
unbelievable.
Even the most cynical pols must find Davis’s politics surreal.
He is well beyond the outer limits of customary shamelessness. Most
pols would find it hard to endorse driver’s licenses for illegal
aliens. Not Davis. Even as he triples the car tax and plunges the
state into Third-World debt, he is pressing for a costly Department
of Motor Vehicles program to accommodate lawbreakers, all so that
he can rally Hispanic leaders miffed at his rejection of the idea
last year to his side during the recall. “Driving is not a right
but a privilege,” young drivers are often told in auto class. So
much for that. Davis, for the crassest of political reasons, is
making it a right even for criminals.
Davis’s special-interest carve-up of California has cost the
state billions. But instead of suspending special-interest spending
to focus on fundamentals he accelerates it. One can’t pick up the
newspaper without learning of some new stupid state program. The
supposedly strapped UC system — which recently was toying with the
idea of hitting so-called “rich” students with a $3,000 surcharge
—
announced this week that its Santa Barbara school is creating a
doctorate program in Chicano Studies. And UCLA may get one soon
too. Once again Californians are asked to pay for a program that
divides them, a program with zero academic value that serves only
to destabilize the state.
Governors “friendly” to these special interests are unfriendly
to the common people they are supposed to serve.
