"This whole thing is just weird and, honestly, a little creepy." That comes from a debate in the Texas state legislature that was supposedly about "furries," a subculture of people who dress up as anthropomorphic animal characters. But it wasn't the furries that state Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat, was calling creepy.
That would be Republican state Rep. Stan Gerdes, author of the FURRIES Act, an embarrassing acronym that unpacks into the "Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education Act." Gerdes claims to believe that children in elementary schools are "identifying" as animals, and that the schools are indulging this supposedly dangerous delusion by letting kids eat out of dog bowls or use litter boxes instead of regular bathrooms. Absolutely no part of that true, and it is indeed "a little creepy" for Republicans to obsess over an entirely imaginary problem.
