The Chuck Norris Amendment

If you’re a heterosexual college student, state Rep. Wayne Christian, R-Center, wants you to stay that way. Just the heterosexual part; the House is still slashing funds for education, so you’re apparently on your own for the student part. But keep Rep. Christian in your thoughts next time you’re walking into your campus’ Chuck Norris Student Center for Family and Traditional Values, Martial Arts and Tractor Pulling.

In only a few moments of mic time on the House floor late Friday evening, Christian somehow managed to insinuate university gender and sexuality centers are making students gay, came dangerously close to equating such centers with terrorists, and probably had some analyst working the night shift at Google wondering, “Why do we have all these searches for ‘pansexual’ coming from Texas?”

During the budget debate in the Texas House, Christian offered an amendment mandating that Texas colleges and universities that spend funds on gender and sexuality centers also spend the same amount on what Christian called “Student Centers for Family and Traditional Values.”

Christian said his amendment was in response to centers like the one found at the University of Texas at Austin, which touts its gender and sexuality center as a safe place for students, “Serving Women and LGBTQA Communities.”

Here’s the amendment text:

Funding of Student Centers for Family and Traditional Values. It is the intent of the Legislature that an institution of higher education shall use an amount of appropriated funds to support a family and traditional values center for students of the institution that is not less than any amount of appropriated funds used by the institution to support a gender and sexuality center or other center for students focused on gay, lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, transsexual, transgender, gender questioning, or other gender identity issues.

So what Christian is supposedly attempting is to level the playing field, to provide a space where college students can be straight, a place where the heterosexual can go without fear that they might come out of there gay, where they like coffee without the latte, their football American and their beers domestic. Chuck Norris would be proud.

No, really. Here’s how Christian explained it (full video posted below):

Well, currently, the University of Texas, Texas A&M, some other schools have a gender and sexuality center — brick and mortar — that they are using for alternative sexual practices, to encourage them, by allowing them, by teaching them, by giving courses of study, by giving literature, questionnaires. I’m not treading on their rights to do that — to teach alternative sexual behavior — but my amendment says that it would just allow that if they’re going to do it, they have to spend equal dollars teaching, also at that university, or allowing at that university — not teaching — allowing the same space and the same opportunities for traditional family values.

Christian got even deeper in it when he offered terrorists as a metaphor, which rarely ever ends well unless you’re making a comparison to actual terrorists. The exchange came when state Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, challenged Christian to explain why the legislature should interfere with what universities do with their funding. Christian replied:

“If they were instructing students on how to make terrorism, bombs or murder, or whatever. There’s all kind of issues that we do not desire, that they study. So we do regulate what they can and cannot teach in our universities and all of our public institutions.”

And then there was the exchange when Castro challenged Christian to define the term ‘pansexual.’ He couldn’t.

Here’s video of the entire exchange.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-PAujB-r64&w=480&h=390]

Christian’s amendment passed. We wonder if the traditional values centers will include a course on “Western Civilization.”

5 thoughts on “The Chuck Norris Amendment

  1. Do “Traditional Values” include slavery, Wayne? Or just keeping the little missus barefoot and pregnant?

    As the noted left-wing liberal mooslim Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon!”

  2. Essentially Rep. Wayne Christian is suggesting establishment of these dedicated student centers to teach heterosexuals how to be heterosexuals ?

    (and perhaps, how to maintain a sense of superiority in a vastly heterosexual world)

  3. If one were to put together a class on “traditional family values” that is somehow different from existing courses and classes with a racial or sexual subject matter. what would it look like? And what evidence supports the subject matter to be presented?

    Where is “traditional values” defined? And, given the divorce rate, what constitutes “family values” includes a lot of hanky panky. If “man” is created in God’s image, then God’s behavior includes a necessary amount of adultery if only to keep the human race from being inbred, something the human race is particularly prone to.

    The “values” crowd treats the term “values” as a particular set of undefined values when a more accurate evaluatin would be to cluster sets of values in definable groups and associated with various culture groups. The real issue of “values” is not a yes/no dichotomy, but a definition of what kind of values.

    This is a subject that I have invested a modicum of thought theron, and present the following mini-thesis:

    1. The Prime Directive: In order to survive, a culture must protect and nurture the mechanisms to Feed, Breed, and Multiply (FB=M).

    2. These mechanism fall into two broad categories: Social Status, and relations with the Physical World (F4F):

    Social Status: Face, Fate, Fame, Fortune
    Physical: Time, Distance, Ground, Body.

    While this may look like a checklist or worse, a matrix, it is not. These mechanisms are rarely all alone, they are intertwined with others. Ownership of property, like cattle, land, mutual funds or Mayback pickup enhance face, fame, fate as well as fortune … sometimes in the negative version.

    3. The adherence to these strategis wihin a culture promotes harmony, save in the conflict between members of the same sex for access to the other.

    4. The presence of competing species that comprise an existential threat induces the culture to extreme measures (fight or flight). The absence of any real existential threat to human kind promotes the use of extreme measures to nurture or protect any segment of it, like tribe, family, village, or other human aggregate.

    5. The presence of a perceived threat to a group or a member of the group that threatens social status or physical space creates Drama. Drama is intoxicating. Karpman’s Drama Triangle posits that people like to play heroic role switching between the roles of victim, rescuer, and prosecutor.

    To do this, Villains must be created, if not extant in fact. Villains are the dark side of victim, rescuer, and prosecutor.

    Tea Party propaganda creates the necessary parts of the two sided Drama Triangle providing the definitions of qualified Heroes and Villains, That gender courses of instruction are seen as an existential threat attests more to the need for villainy than the actual existence thereof.

    The three parts of the BS decoder (Prime Directive, F4F, and the Two Sided Drama Triangle) have sharp edges, it’s hard to be a hero with a double ended blade.

  4. The strategy works well: accuse others of doing something that they are not doing, and then require an active effort to do the opposite as well, as if to balance a ‘liberal’ bias. The net effect is to establish a ‘conservative’ bias in public institutions.

  5. Every time I hear that some idiot bigot has pushed through something, I think, well…that’s over. AND I’M WRONG EVERY TIME. How are people voting for people who don’t even know a single thing that they are talking about. I’m a straight, 70 year young woman who has zilch against gays, transgendered people, etc. How many thousands of years is going to take for bigots to understand that people are BORN the way they are. Nobody in their right mind would deliberately decide to go through what those folks have to go through. Most gays, etc. are pretty intelligent people. A question I ask people is when did YOU DECIDE to be straight? Of course you didn’t “decide” anything. It happened while you were still growing in your mother’s uterus. You had no control over ANYTHING. Did you choose your sex? Did you choose the color of your eyes? Did you choose the color of your hair or whether later in life you would go bald? No. You had zero choices, friends, zero and that includes your sexual orientation and whether or not you would know you were born in the wrong body. The brain is hard wired. Every so-called “cure” of gay people has been a bald faced lie. People who are representatives need to have mental evaluations prior to being allowed to run for office. If they are defective…don’t permit them to run.