If you’re on the lookout for some life coaching, Dr. Ben Carson awoke from his slumber, yet again. Let’s see what message he brought to Fox News on Memorial Day: “America right now is like a cruise ship that is about to go off of Niagara Falls with tremendous carnage and death.” Hmm… Never mind. This sounds more like some nightmare he had after seeing “Titanic.” Anyway, we at the Alligator would never do you like that. We’d never give you up, let you down or run around and desert you. So, relax and fade away into our latest segment of…
Darts & Laurels
Israel just had its first-ever transgender beauty pageant, Miss Trans Israel. Not only was the pageant exclusively transgender, but it also included contestants who were Christian, Muslim and Jewish — because nothing truly brings us all together like deciding on which girl is a hotter 10.
Kidding aside, this is yet another big step for transgender rights and tolerance, especially when considering the extremist opposition — we saw this last year when an ultra-Orthodox Jew killed a 16-year-old girl and wounded five others in a stabbing at the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade. So we give this pageant a shining laurel for its testament to progress. And these shifts of tolerance stretch beyond Israel.
In early May, the Philippines elected its first transgender woman to congress: Geraldine Roman. Replacing her mother on the seat of congress, Roman, also a Catholic, has pledged to fight for equality of opportunity and often steers conversations toward the issues, not solely resting her laurels on her gender swap. So we extend Ms. Roman a laurel in good faith for her future work and its implications.
We bring up these examples of transgender progress in Israel and in the Philippines for a reason. Transgender rights isn’t something new, nor is it a P.C. pandering or liberal lack of morals. It’s something people are fighting for in the name of civil rights all around the world, and it should be viewed as such.
In other news, Georgia’s under sausage fire — not the “Georgia on My Mind” Georgia: the other one, the country south of Russia. In the capital city of Tbilisi, a vegan cafe fell under siege Sunday evening from a group of more than a dozen men wearing sausage links around their necks, wielding slabs of meat on skewers and brawling with café-goers and passersby.
While the exact identity of these brawlers is unknown, the café owners and Tbilisians fear they have ties to the ultra-nationalist, rightist, neo-Nazi groups who’ve stirred trouble, marched in the streets and committed vandalism in recent days and months. Obviously, we dart these people for their unjustifiable harassment.
If we may indulge ourselves a moment, though, consider this: parading around with meat against presumptive vegans? If these people really are neo-Nazis, they’re not very true to themselves — Hitler leaned toward vegetarianism in the later part of his life. If vegan cafes were around in 1937, these extremists would be smacking their own Fuhrer with sausage links. Clearly, bigotry doesn’t do well for critical thinking, or common sense.
In fact, we’ll give these people a double dart just for being a word that rhymes with bath-holes or bricks. It’s a good thing this sort of behavior is all the way on the other side of the world and not in our own political landscape — that’d be crazy.
