Is there something about being elected to a state
legislature that automatically turns an otherwise normal person’s
brain to Silly Putty? Medical science needs to study this.
Wherever you live, if you take a
look at your state legislative body, you’ll most likely gag and say
to yourself: “What a parade of fools.” But let me assure you
that your fools will be elevated in your eyes to the vaunted status of
noble Athenian statesmen if you’ll measure them against Texas’,
who remain the platinum standard of legislative idiocy and ineptitude.
I ask you, has your state legislature taken the time
to contemplate the pressing public need to regulate the gyrations of
high-school teenagers? Texas has, so I rest my case!
State Rep. Al Edwards has boldly gone where only fools
dare tread — into the suffocating swamp of teenage hormonal behavior.
He’s the sponsor of the “sexy cheerleader” bill, which
dictates that our state education agency must intervene whenever
cheerleaders in any local school district perform “in a manner that
is overly sexually suggestive.” Al’s bill does not define
either “overtly” or “sexually suggestive,” leaving
such niceties to the pompom police who, presumably, will be in the stands
with binoculars trained on the teen bottoms of all of our cheerleaders,
chronicling every sexually suggestive twitch and jiggle. Needless to say,
the education agency was instantly flooded with applicants eager to serve
on this don’t-shake-your-booty regulatory agency.
When the bill reached the floor of the Texas House,
saner legislators derided it as “ridiculous,”
“stupid,” “insulting,” and “a disgrace”
— yet it passed! These are the same lawmakers who won’t devise
a financing plan to raise Texas schools to the educational level of, say,
Mississippi’s. But, by gollies, Texas is No. 1 in guarding against
devilish dancing by cheerleaders.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2005.
