Thank God for Mississippi

By James Moore

There is a story, maybe apocryphal, which has made the rounds in the Texas capitol for about four decades. I suspect more than a germ of truth to the little narrative. A state senator, who was head of the public education committee, was holding a hearing on funding for schools and teacher pay. A long list of witnesses had signed up to complain about the government’s penurious ways with the mechanics and funding of our educational system. One of them was a tiny, gray lady, retired, and off to the side, holding a piece of paper, waiting her turn to be called to sit at the big table in front of the microphone and at the center of attention.

When her moment arrived, she put the paper in front of her, covered with scribbled words and numbers, and looked up at the senator. He asked her to raise her hand to be sworn in, and to state her name for the record and so the crowded chamber might take note. The formalities completed, the senator, as bellicose as existed in Texas state politics, addressed the witness.

“What is it you want to share with us today, ma’am?” he asked.

“Well, I just have a series of questions I want to ask you and the other senators on this esteemed committee,” she said.

“Oh, well, go ahead then,” he said.

“Senator, I want to ask were you aware that Texas is 49th in the U.S. in per capita spending on our children’s education? That we are 49th in teacher pay? We’re 49th in adult literacy? 49th in teacher retirement pay? And 49th in adult literacy? 49th in high school graduation rates? But even outside of education, we’re 49th in the percentage of our children covered by health care? And 49th in supplementing the federal school lunch program for the poor and indigent?”

She stopped, ready to go on, still looking at her words and numbers scratched on her piece of lined yellow paper. Barely able to compose herself, the gracious and indignant lady lifted her head to look down the long, shining walnut table to the other end where the portentous senator sat, staring at her. She surrendered but not without one final question.

“Senator, what do you have to say to all that?”

He was ready with his answer and raised his open hands into the air, and, quite literally bellowed at her.

“Thank God for Mississippi!”

Texas, though, continues to close on Mississippi in our political race among the ruins to the bottom of all meaningful lists. Our governor, and the troubled souls who serve him, has discovered a menace much greater than the hordes of evil Mexicans he sees crossing the Rio Grande in his fevered nightmares. As connected as the 2025 world might be, Texas is still down here at the bottom of America, literally and symbolically, and digital information often travels imperfectly, which means most of our fellow citizens might be unaware of the fact our public schools are beginning to endure an invasion of “furries.”

And how I wish I were making this up.

I am not talking about rats or mice or raccoons or opossum. This is something far more insidious and threatening the very infrastructure of our educational system. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a man who has won his battle to take tax money from public schools and give it to private religious institutions, has been telling his constituents from the sandy shores of Galveston to the ragged peaks of the Franklin Mountains, that children are going to school dressed as cats and that teachers and administrators are accommodating them with littler boxes in classrooms. The governor, an educated man with a law degree, appears to believe that children are transitioning from human to cat and tax dollars are supporting their new animalistic orientation, or whatever it might be called, though it almost certainly lacks a political category.

And let me say again how I wish I were making this up. I promise, however, I am not.

Abbott and his merry band of Trumpublicans have been pushing a completely debunked, fantastical story about what they describe as a “furries trend,” and it helped them win political support for his school voucher plan, robbing tax money from public schools to give to private, mostly Christian, institutions of learning. The governor recently spoke at a gathering of Baptist ministers in Austin and said the furries must be stopped, and he told the clergy of an important piece of legislation to do the job. The new law is called the “Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Educations Act,” or, well, you figured it out, the F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but this is not satire, and I am not making it up.

State Rep. Stan Gerdes (R – Scaredy Cat) has authored and filed the bill to save our Texas civilization. The language prohibits “non-human” behavior by a student. (Good thing it only restricts students from non-human behavior because Abbott’s razor wire and guns on the border seem to qualify him for that descriptive.) The poor schoolchild can no longer present “himself or herself as anything other than a human being.” (This puts many Texas pols outside the law.) Kids are also restricted from wearing animal ears, barking, meowing, or hissing. Exceptions in the bill exist, of course, to protect Friday night lights football and the enduring need to dress up as a team’s animal mascot.

Straight-faced and crooked-souled, Abbott told those ministers that furries were a big part of the reason Texas parents wanted to spend public money on private schools.

“In some small rural sections of school districts in the state of Texas,” he said, “They have in their schools, what are called furries. Kids go to school dressed up as cats with litter boxes in their classrooms. If you have a child in a public school, you have one expectation: your child’s going to be learning the fundamentals of education, reading and writing and math and science. If they’re being distracted by furries, those parents have a right to move their child to a school of their choice.”

There isn’t a litter box in Texas big enough to contain the bullshit in his statement. Abbott is a hollow man, fending off imaginary characters and curses for political effect but refusing to pass legislation to protect Texas school children from guns or give them health care. He is more bothered by non-existent kiddie costumes than the idea that two of the children who died at the Uvalde massacre were decapitated by a hail of bullets from a legally purchased AR-15, which he made easier to purchase with reduced restrictions a few months after the tragedy. There lives no greater hypocrite or liar beneath the lone star than the man in the governor’s mansion.

The furries nonsense has been around for a couple of years and has been completely debunked. Not one instance of such behavior has ever been documented or proved, even though the chair of the Republican Party in Williamson County insisted that schools in the Round Rock district were lowering cafeteria tables to make it easier for furries to eat. The larger social problem might have been if they were sniffing each others’ butts or engaging in conversation about trying out for the varsity fetch team. Throw a frisbee to a furry and see if they can catch it with their teeth! Go team! The school administration denounced the 2022 claim, of course, but that doesn’t stop the governor from repeating the idiocies, though he never names any schools, because there are none. Poor fella a few years ago only had to worry about which bathrooms students used and now he’s dealing with this furry flap. Where do we get such great men in Texas to withstand the torrents of history?

State Rep. Gerdes, who wrote the Furries Bill and introduced it into the legislative hopper, said that he spoke with a district superintendent of Smithville Public Schools and was informed that furries were happening all over the state and schools don’t have the ability to stop it. That superintendent, Cheryl Burns, denied ever making such a statement and said there were neither students dressed as cats in her schools nor litter boxes. Nonetheless, she felt compelled to walk the campus searching for litter boxes and kids dressed as cats, a useful expenditure of an educator’s time, eh? These nonsensical stories are nothing more than a campaign to attack public schools by the Texas far right, and districts all across the state are enduring a shortage of funds to pay and keep teachers, provide computers and construct new classrooms. But mustn’t we invest in furry infrastructure, though, to keep our kids furry?

For entertainment purposes only, watch the video below as State Rep. James Talarico takes apart the ignorance and the Furries bill’s sponsor.

Bill sponsor Gerdes issued a news release when he filed the Furries legislation and said he anticipated the subculture would show up at the capitol “in full furry vengeance.” “Just to be clear, they won’t be getting any litter boxes in the Texas Capitol,” he wrote. The furries movement must have been waylaid by a large can of open tuna somewhere because none of them showed up as Gerdes had predicted. Language in the measure prevents students from “licking oneself or others for the purpose of grooming or maintenance,” and Talarico suggested a school might get in trouble for students licking their fingers after eating Cheetos. But he left no doubt about where this delusion originates and its purpose.

“Governor Abbott has used this litter box rumor to paint our schools in the worst possible light,” he said. “That’s because if you want to defund neighborhood schools across the state, you have to get Texans to turn against their public schools. So you call librarians groomers, you accuse teachers of indoctrination, and now you say that schools are providing litter boxes to students. That’s how all of this is tied together.”

It’s also how Abbott keeps getting reelected because the people in Texas don’t give a damn about the fact we have a million children without health care, decaying schools, departing teachers, polluted air, corporate overlords dumping millions into the governor’s bank accounts, property taxes so high they are forcing people from their homes, dwindling water supplies from overdevelopment, and the closure of 26 rural hospitals because the legislature’s refusal to expand Medicaid coverage makes continued operations financially impossible.

Rome burns, and we turn our swords against the imaginary furries.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

Also by James Moore: Remember When We Listened to the Radio?

 

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”