# "Weird" in Politics

(Oh shit, I'm getting overly political on my blag. This oughta be fun.)

Over the past week, Democrats have been referring to Republicans and their stated policy aims as "weird". And to be clear, the Democrats are *right*: Republicans do have policy goals that are exceptionally weird, in that they are centered around cruelty towards marginalized people. (I'll circle back to this in a bit.)

Conservative voters and Republicans alike have since tried to fight back against these claims by saying that Democrats, the people who support them, and the people Democrats want to support are "weird". Right-wingers have attacked trans people, drag queens, pro-choice advocates, and demographics who hold liberal/progressive values. Conservatives say that Dems supporting abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, the separation of church and state, and economic/social policies that (try to) center the marginalized instead of the powerful are "weird".

I have two problems with these clapback attempts. The first is simple enough: Everyone is weird in some way. (Some people have inflation fetishes; some people vote against their best interests.) "Normal" is a fiction -- a social construct. What we choose to normalize says more about us than what we believe is "weird".

The second is that, as I said, Republicans have genuinely weird policy goals that they often refuse to admit are their goals even as their policies spell out those goals in detail. If Republicans had their way, the government would...

* force a woman to carry her pregnancy to term even if doing so would kill her

* create a surveillance state centered around, and criminalize the existence of, LGBTQ people

    * and more specifically, surveil transgender people at every move to prevent them from being in "the wrong place"

* force libraries to remove books that conservatives don't like for any reason

* force poor children to eat substandard food or starve if they can't afford to buy food at school

* force a form of conservative Christianity upon the populace by destroying the wall of separation between church and state

* criminalize homelessness in a way that refuses to solve the underlying problems behind homelessness and poverty

* allow more mass-casualty shootings to happen by way of refusing to even consider any kind of gun control

* kneecap public schooling (at a minimum) in favor of private (often religious, sometimes for-profit) schools

* remove or water down any material about slavery, the civil rights movement, and other embarassments of American history from school curriculums

* celebrate and even revere the soldiers and leaders of the Confederacy

...and that's only what I could come up with in five minutes.

The Republican idea of "normal" is orthodoxy at gunpoint (metaphorical or literal): Everyone thinks and says the same things, everyone dresses according to an overly gendered dress code, everyone worships the same god and reads from the same holy book, everyone makes the same kinds of movies and TV shows and books, and so on and so forth, with those who are considered "weird" -- the blasphemers, the heterodox, those who don't buy into this bullshit -- receiving punishment for their sins against the divine righteousness of right-wing "normalcy".

Democrats don't really have a solid idea of "normal", and that's for the best. Democrats, by and large, don't want to impose rules about how you can think, talk, dress, act, or worship -- not unless those rules apply equally to all people and have a compelling interest in public safety. (Hence why most Democrats are pro-choice: Whether a woman wants an abortion is a choice she should have the right to make.) In effect, all the "weird" people that Republicans mock would be largely protected by Democrat policies because Democrat policies (more often than not) try to avoid criminalizing/punishing queerness, offensive speech, the practice of non-Christian religions, or other "weirdness" that isn't actually hurting anyone.

"Weird" as an attack line against Republicans works because they have weird beliefs, which drive weird policy goals that (as Kamala Harris pointed out) would drag the country back in time by at least a few decades. "Weird" as an attack line against Democrats falls flat because Democrats and their supporters look at what Republicans call "weird" and see something normal: People trying to get by in a shithole world by openly being who they want to be, sometimes in defiance of society's demands of who those people "should" be, without actually hurting people by doing so. 

Everyone is weird. Normal is a social construct. So what do you want to normalize?