Furry Panic Is the Latest Dumb GOP Attack on Public Schools

R&I – FS

It happened every time a school board member spoke up about changes to the Central York School District’s COVID-19 plan. “Meow!” a group of four people would taunt from the back of the room. “Cat!”

Amelia McMillan, a parent in the Pennsylvania district, recognized the four people. They’d supported Central York’s recent (and now overturned) ban on certain school books, many of them about race. After the mid-January meeting ended, McMillan said she saw the group corner a local father in a hallway.

“They were yelling at him about his kid being a furry,” McMillan told The Daily Beast. The group cited “an email someone sent to the board about furries. I heard him say, ‘Leave my kid out of this.’ Two administrators from the school broke up this interaction and shuffled the four aggressors out of the building, and then asked the father if he was alright. He told everyone standing there (myself included) that they were calling his child a furry and he asked them to stop.”

But it was in Michigan’s Midland school district, not Central York, that the claims finally caught fire.

“Yesterday I heard that at least one of our schools in our town, has in one of the unisex bathrooms a litter box for the kids that identify as cats,” a speaker at a school board meeting said, in a video that went viral in January. “And I am really disturbed by that.”

Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock soon amplified the cat scat claims. “Kids who identify as ‘furries’ get a litter box in the school bathroom,” Maddock wrote on Facebook. “Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools.”

Midland Public Schools do not provide litter boxes—unisex or otherwise. The district’s superintendent debunked the rumor in a scathing email. (“It is unconscionable that this afternoon I am sending this communication,” his email to parents began.)

Nevertheless, the allegations soon spread to Texas, where a GOP candidate (and activist with the right-wing parents group Moms For Liberty) added her own baseless claims about special privileges for furry students. “Cafeteria tables are being lowered in certain @RoundRockISD middle and high schools to allow ‘furries’ to more easily eat without utensils or their hands (ie, like a dog eats from a bowl),” she tweeted.

That allegation wasn’t true, either.

Just Think

Article URL : https://www.thedailybeast.com/furry-panic-is-the-latest-dumb-gop-attack-on-public-schools