Opinion: Legislators in Iowa [and other states] deny human nature with bills aimed at children who aren't like others

By Art Cullen
Storm Lake (Iowa) Times Pilot

If there were one thing Iowa could agree on, you would hope it would be compassion for everyone. This life is complicated and confusing. Some boys like to play with GI Joe. Some like to play with Barbie. The discerning parent or teacher leaves them be and makes certain they do their arithmetic homework. They advise the boys with the GI Joes to be nice to the boys playing with the Barbies. Don’t bully them. People are different.

Art Cullen

Iowa Republicans controlling the legislature are in a mood to hassle people who may be different from them. All sorts of bills float around. This week, a legislator had to tell parents of transgender children that he doesn’t agree that this is right. Queer has no place in the classroom, the committee voted.

Under this law, a teacher would not be able to tell the boys that the boy in the corner is different, it is not his choice or the choice of his parents, and that people have been different from each other for time immemorial. The art teacher might remind the legislature to look up those Italian sculptors and their heroic nude males — hello in there! Or, the art teacher might remind us that the greatest artist in Iowa history, Grant Wood, hung out with other great artists and writers whose sexuality would draw rebuke from the morality police then and now. That’s why they hung out in Stone City. The bankers in Cedar Rapids looked the other way, thank goodness.

The reality is, and always has been, that human beings are not strictly heterosexual. Some people view reality through a moral prism predicated on the shame of St. Augustine or some other tortured soul. Recall that Augustine lived a playboy’s life of debauchery, saw the shallowness of it, and went on to saddle Catholic moral theology with an obsessive sexual predilection. Unfortunately, it finds its way into the legislature, where people forget the New Commandment: to love your neighbor as yourself.

If you loathe yourself, in a Calvinist sort of way, you are compelled to heap it on your neighbor. A little bit of that is going on in Des Moines. Iowa should be a place where we can approach each other with an attempt at understanding — especially in the classroom, where children need every bit of support as they sort out a confusing and mean world. Don’t lock Grant Wood in the closet. Don’t rebuke the goodwill that writer Tennessee Williams brought to the University of Iowa. Don’t shun that boy to the corner and deny his reality. It is possible to take a different point of view without being a heretic against God.

Too bad that this is how we have to learn. A lot of innocent children take the lumps. A lot of lives get traumatized. Eventually, we will appreciate the reality of a reckoning for cruelty. That’s a sin in anybody’s book.