The news broke right before going on the air with my talk show on WWL - and I was so passionate about the topic that I put aside other things I had planned to talk about so I could address the breaking news.
This news was so outrageous that it had to be discussed. The idea that Americans would lose their 2nd Amendment rights for no legitimate reason was just appalling.
The idea of banning transgender people from owning guns is a perfect reflection of how sadly divided we are as a country. To randomly decide that trans people cannot own guns is to say that certain Americans, who are different, are NOT entitled to our most basic rights.
If an American citizen defines themself as a trans person, why should that prohibit them from owning a gun? It shouldn’t. And anyone who wants to judge ALL trans people by the few who have committed mass shootings, let’s remember that the overwhelming number of mass shooters have been white men. Should ALL white men lose their 2nd Amendment rights?
This idea of banning the right to own a gun to all trans people says that transgender people are trans first and American second. In our country today, many Americans define themselves and judge others as Democrat or Republican first and American second. It shouldn’t be that way. We should all be Americans first and anything else second, third, fourth, and so on.
We should also see this consideration from the Trump Administration as nothing more than a feeding of red meat at the right-wing radical zoo. And the idea that those on the right would support banning 2nd Amendment rights to American citizens makes them all hypocrites. It’s interesting that this argument may also put many liberals on the side of supporting 2nd Amendment rights.
And those who want to argue that being a transgender person is a mental disorder are simply concocting a mythical illness that is not supported by the top medical and psychological experts who believe that gender identity is merely part of human diversity.
A few callers in to my talk show today argued that being trans is a mental illness and why should they accept someone who wants to be referred to by a pronoun that does not correspond to their gender at birth. My response was - “Why should you accept anyone who has a nickname that does not correspond to the name on their birth certificate?” These people who are so outraged by someone wanting to be referred to by another pronoun accept countless people in their lives and in the media who have nicknames.
The outrage comes from the fact that there are Americans condemning other Americans only because they are different and maybe they are not understood. We have a lot of weirdos in America as a result of our freedoms and it is wrong to support stripping those unique Americans of their rights just because they are different.
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