Episode 20: What Level of Dante’s Inferno Is This?

Well, we started out on a light note, talking about watching a certain game show only old people watch and setting up our cat “daycare” so we can work from home in relative peace … And then we went on at some length about podcasting and making videos for our Instagram page and our YouTube …

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Well, we started out on a light note, talking about watching a certain game show only old people watch and setting up our cat “daycare” so we can work from home in relative peace …

And then we went on at some length about podcasting and making videos for our Instagram page and our YouTube channel, talking about the complexity of recording audio and video separately and trying to sync them up (which is why, ultimately, we settled on podcasting).

But then it got weird. We could not, of course, let the week pass without commenting on the principal at Tallahassee Classical School who got fired for showing students the statue of David, as the school had done every year in recent memory. The bright spot, of course, being that just about every news outlet that covered the story, including NPR in the story we link to here, had to show the … uh … Full Monty, so to speak. 

And there’s an even weirder angle to this story: According Peter Schorsch on Twitter, school board chairman Barney Bishop III, the guy who asked for the principal’s “resignation” over the statue of David, has some rather interesting, er, garden statues of his own.

Finally, we couldn’t avoid the other awful story of the week: another school shooting, this time in Nashville, where a semiautomatic-rifle-wielding maniac killed three young children and three school staffers at a private Christian school. We’ve talked about this before — because, of course, these incidents happen so frequently — but, as parents, we and our kids have lived with this insanity almost nonstop since Columbine in 1999. 

And as awful and inexcusable as this latest school massacre was, there is yet another awful twist. According to Nashville police, shooter might be transgender, though that’s not yet confirmed according to Reuters, so, naturally, the worst people in the world are blaming the trans community as a whole for the murders of these innocent kids. They claim that there’s some alarming uptick in trans or nonbinary people committing mass shootings, citing this incident, the December 2022 shooting in Colorado Springs where the murderer may or may not be nonbinary, and a couple of other incidents over the past few years. But here’s the thing: even if those incidents involve trans or nonbinary people, the number of trans and nonbinary people who commit crimes like this is infinitesimally small compared to the endless stream of mass shootings that happen in schools, churches, synagogues, grocery stores … and nearly everywhere else in America.

So you have to ask yourselves: What level of Dante’s Inferno is reserved for the kinds of monsters who use the killing of innocent children as an excuse to promote bigotry and hate against marginalized people? 

Anyway, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast. 

The post Episode 20: What Level of Dante’s Inferno Is This? appeared first on In the Shadow of the Evening Trees.