A Southern Republican U.S. senator is seeking to dump that job and instead become governor. That candidate largely has avoided public forums and direct comparisons to the Democratic challenger, relying instead on party-line voting and name recognition. One could be talking about Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, but the clear “champion” here is Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville.
The former Auburn football coach has eclipsed our own MAGA cheerleader, and recently “out-weirded” her. Tuberville metaphorically grabbed the ball, scampered backwards into the wrong end zone, and spiked that ball so hard it bounced up and slammed him in the groin.
Tuberville took to the floor of the Senate to lambast gender confusion and furry culture. He promoted his intention
in advance on social media. The Alabama senator bloviated, “I’m heading to the Senate floor to talk about how the Democrat-Socialists have intentionally caused mass gender-confusion, leading to violence and a disturbing trend of online ‘furry’ culture.”
This was not a rant in a bizarre hallway interview. Tuberville planned this. He spoke for roughly 20 minutes. He had visual aids. His staff published an online transcript.
“It is clear that this gender confusion is a mental illness plaguing our society, and there is significant overlap between people who are gender confused and the furry community,” he concluded.
He then expressed shock “that many airline pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community. Lord help us,” he implored, adding “You can’t make this up.”
Clearly someone did make this up, and the Alabama senator fell for it, or perhaps he cobbled it together from disjointed parts of right-wing online conspiracy theories and fever dreams. This author only has limited experience with the furry community.
(The author poses with the mascot of the Knoxville Ice Bears.)
I can state definitively, however, that my efforts to find reliable evidence of furry behavior in the cockpit have fallen flat. Perhaps it’s that term cockpit that confused Tuberville.
Soaring prices, rampant government corruption, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and a global climate crisis have not so motivated Tuberville, but a private sexual kink from a small group of people has him all atwitter.
Tuberville’s Democratic opponent is Doug Jones, a serious and moderate man with an impressive record as a civil rights attorney. I met him once at a Knoxville event and he was exactly the calm and reasoned person you see in interviews. Jones briefly held a U. S. Senate seat from Alabama, winning a 2017 special election when Jeff Sessions moved up to be Donald Trump’s attorney general. Jones narrowly won over the extremist and bombastic judge Roy Moore. During that campaign a group of overzealous Democrats crafted a dirty trick by creating web content suggesting Moore favored alcohol prohibition. Jones denounced it immediately and insisted it stop.
On our side of the Alabama border, Memphis councilwoman Jerri Green, 48, is running an energetic and policy-oriented campaign for governor. Her best hope, however, is that the rising Democratic tide can combine with the effect of two independent candidates splitting up the vote. She then could become governor with a plurality of votes cast.
My dear, departed friend Molly Ivins used to talk about things that were “more than passing strange.” That phrase seems to apply to the fact that both Tuberville and Blackburn are odds-on favorites to become governors, despite neither showing a solid grasp of real concerns or a serious plan for what to do with the office.
Mark Harmon is a professor of journalism and media at the University of Tennessee.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Tuberville defeats Blackburn in Crazy Proclamation Contest | Opinion
