All is Not Peachy in Georgia

Cheesy title, I know. From Oklahoma we move to Georgia (don't worry, WV, I'm coming back around to you), where legislators there have decided that the best way to shore up their state budget is to do what they always want to do and go pick on the university: GA legislators have too much time on their hands.

The grand gist of their scheme is to go through the listed research categories of professors at the school and see what they can get rid of that doesn't fit their own agenda, herein labeled "unnecessary." Unsurprisingly, the thing that doesn't fit happens to do with being gay. Here are some excerpts.

Facing a $2.2-billion budget shortfall, the lawmakers say they are working with conservative Christian organizations to pressure the state’s Board of Regents to fire instructors like a University of Georgia professor who teaches a graduate course on queer theory.

“Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math,” state Rep. Calvin Hill was quoted as saying by the news service. Professors aren’t going to meet those needs “by teaching a class in queer theory,” he added. The lawmakers took aim at some of the faculty members after reading about them in an annual guide to faculty experts issued by one of the universities for publicity purposes.

University officials responded by explaining that the instructors were not teaching “how-to” courses, but on the sociological issues surrounding topics such as oral sex and male prostitution.

The article then goes on to say that teaching a course in criminology does not prepare a person to be a criminal, and you can almost read the for Christsakes! after it. Because after all, why bother studying the culture around you and how it works? Maybe if you don't study about it, you'll think it's perfectly OK for politicians to come in and dictate what sort of learning needs to happen, and they can get away with it. How much money is being wasted by some moron in the state capital perusing the annual guide to faculty members and circling the ones that say "gay"? Have they nothing better to do? I noticed philosophy and ethics didn't make Hill's list of important subjects. Maybe that explains how all the business majors got the nation in this fucking mess in the first place? And as for championing the sciences, Mr. Republican Hill probably supports his party's stance on things like stem cell research and evolution. If you really support science, get out of it's way. The last member of the intellectual Trinity on Calvin Hill's list is math, and herein is the most beautiful part.

Hill recently launched this little tidbit on his website:
Did you realize that every month, 200 to 300 young girls are sexually exploited in the state of

Georgia? Yes, you heard correctly, 200-300 girls a month right here in
Georgia. With almost 100 of them engaged in street prostitution, another 100
exploited through escort services and more than that appearing in Craigslist or
servicing their johns in major hotels. This exploitation of our young girls has
really turned into an epidemic. This is why I recently co-chaired a committee
on the commercial sexual exploitation of children and we presented our findings
and legislative initiatives this morning at a Capitol press conference.

Why, Representative Hill, where do you suppose those numbers came from? The math department? NO. From people studying PROSTITUTION. Which obviously doesn't mean they're out picking up prostitutes, but rather they are studying the issue for its cultural implications to give you facts and figures you can use to make society better.

Funny how research in something other than math, the sciences and business can sometimes do that, isn't it? Got any better way to make your salary?

-- DV