How Irrational Bans and Education Policy Are Weaponizing Systemic Injustice Against Marginalized Communities

[0:04] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. We talk about the most recent attempt to erase trans people. Douglas loses his cool over the murder of Renee Good. And then we talk about the next big idea Christian nationalists are using to push religion in the public schools. It’s called the success sequence. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[1:00] One of the most pressing social justice issues of our time, of my time, right now that I feel within my bones that I have to stand up for is the rights of the transgender community. And LGBTQ plus a in general and trans community specifically that me as a cisgendered white cisgendered man needs to do whatever I can to throw my privilege power of privilege into the mix to try to help because I just don’t get it I just don’t get it you know we’ve been down this road before with indiscriminate discrimination based on absolutely no reason except blind bigotry and religion, in this case religion as well. We’ve been down this road before.

[2:09] We’ve changed for the most part, evolved for the most part, and here we go again. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand the mindset of somebody who is so opposed, to transgender people having rights that they will use the power of the state to make sure that they don’t have any rights, that they don’t exist. I just don’t get it. It’s heartbreaking. It hurts me. It makes me emotional. And even though I am of the privileged class, I have been bullied. I’ve been excluded in the past for various reasons. I remember being told by a kid that I went to elementary school with one time that I didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t important because I was a bastard.

[3:12] He was highlighting the fact that I did not have a father growing up. My father was killed in Vietnam in 1968, shortly after I was born. And so I grew up without a dad. And I would get excluded and harassed and bullied for that for many, many years. It wasn’t until adulthood when finished high school and into college that by that time, nobody gave a crap. And it wasn’t a big deal. But then I would get discriminated against because of my size. I’m overweight. I would get discriminated against because I wasn’t a college graduate. I remember having a debate with somebody and they asked me what my college degree was in. And I said, I didn’t have one. And they said, well, you’re uninformed. So your opinion doesn’t matter.

[4:06] Things like that. So I get that. I get the feeling it feels awful. It feels terrible. And I don’t want my friends and loved ones who are trans to feel that way. And it just seems like we go from one thing to another where these bigots, these Christian nationalist bigots and conservative bigots and racist bigots are trying to erase trans people. We have this here in Ohio, they had the gender affirming care ban. The Supreme Court even ruled in favor of keeping the bans. And one of the reasons why that they are keeping the ban and they’re considering the sports ban, and they just had oral arguments this last couple of weeks, in particular in West Virginia. And the conservative justices are like, well, there’s not very many trans people. So, you know, if we ban them from sports, that’s not real discrimination. That’s not hurting people. That’s not hurting enough people. You know, like your class of people that are being discriminated against depends on the number.

[5:26] And I think that’s a ridiculous way to look at it. The writer, the Substack writer, Aaron, and I don’t have the last name, I’m sorry, but their Substack is Aaron in the Morning. They write about LGBT stuff. Has my take on this, so I’ll just read her words. It says, but this is arguably an offhand comment at best, condensation at worst, a post-Scrometti affirmation that the court does not see trans people as a distinct class worth protecting. Skrometti was the gender-affirming care ban decision. During questioning, many justices refused to recognize the long and storied history of legal discrimination against the trans community in the United States. Conservative justices suggested that because most anti-trans laws do not actually use the word transgender, that they can’t possibly be a symptom of discrimination against trans people.

[6:27] We’ve seen the fallout of this mental legal gymnastics before. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion in Scrimetti, this line of thinking was used to justify racial segregation by arguing that while different races are separated, they are all separated equally. And that’s the line that they were using in these oral arguments when they were talking about it. It says nearly, and Sotomayor goes on, Nearly every discriminatory law is susceptible to a similar race or sex-neutral characterization, Sotomayor had said, of Loving v. Virginia, which challenged a state anti-misgenitization law. A prohibition on interracial marriage, for example, allows no person to marry someone outside their race, while allowing persons of any race to marry within their races. And so the argument is that that’s that laws that prohibited interracial marriage wasn’t discrimination because you could still get married.

[7:39] It says in today’s and Aaron in her article goes in today’s legal battle over trans rights, this manifests as trans erasure. The more the government can plausibly deny the existence of trans and intersex people, robbing them of legal recognition, the more it emboldens lawmakers to discriminate. The logic rests on the idea that you can’t violate the constitutional rights of a group if that group does not exist.

[8:08] On Tuesday, justices further grappled with the combined and contradictory legacies of the 2025 Scrimetti case, which upheld Tennessee’s law preventing trans youth from accessing many kinds of gender-affirming care, and the 2020 Bostock decision, which established employee anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people.

[8:30] And see, that’s the thing, is the 2020 Bostock decision is at a conflict on this. Republican-appointed swing Justice Neil Gorsuch was the primary author of the Bostock decision. He argued then that trans people were constitutionally entitled to protections from discrimination on the basis of sex. This time around, Gorsuch sparred with attorneys over what sex even means.

[8:57] But as University of California Berkeley School of Law Dean Edwin Tremensky notes in an analysis on SCOTUS blog, Over the last year, the court has failed to follow the logic of Bostock in upholding discrimination against transgendered individuals. And then the other thing that Aaron points out, too, is that Justice Coney Barrett even pointed this out, that such laws that ban trans women from women’s sports could actually be used to segregate women and men in other cases that doesn’t have to do with athletics. What if, for example, a state produced evidence that women outperform men in math, that women’s good grades put men at a disadvantage academically? Would women need to be culled from advanced math? Would there be required men’s only remedial option? Seems to me like there would be some risk on your understanding that that would be OK, Barrett remarked. And as far as competitions go, liberal Justice Alina Kagan added, how about chess club?

[10:06] West Virginia Solicitor General Michael Williams, arguing in favor of the state in their case, said this would fail to require sex segregation because there’s an actual lack of evidence of meaningful psychological differences that are reflected in the existence of the express regulations in the athletics context. And then Aaron notes that this was nonetheless been a successful push to ban trans women from many gendered chess tournaments.

[10:37] So it has been used that way. And so this is what I just don’t get. And then the other thing, too, if you do a look on Google or TikTok or one of those YouTube shorts, there was a LGBT friendly content creator that was standing outside the Supreme Court interviewing some of the transphobes that had showed up to support banning. Trans women from sports, and asked them to name five professional women’s athletes.

[11:15] And none of them could because they don’t care about women’s sports. They’re bigots. They just want to ban trans people because they don’t like trans people. There’s no reason to ban them. The science is not out. And it does support the fact that if a trans person gets gender-affirming care, they are less likely to commit suicide and they’re more successful in their lives and more happy. And it just bothers me that these religious extremists fight so hard to hurt these people. And they’re like, well, it’s just a tiny fraction of people. It doesn’t matter. The 14th Amendment means something or it doesn’t mean anything.

[12:13] You know, and that is being equal under the law. We all should have equal rights. There should not be any discrimination at all for anything. And the fact that these anti-trans laws take away not only the rights of transgender people to get the kind of medical care that they want and to participate in the sports that they love, it also prevents parents from supporting their trans children.

[12:43] And that’s another thing that breaks my heart because not not all parents of trans children are bible thumpers and throwing them out of the house i mean there’s quite a few of those but there are some parents that actually love their children for who they are and who they love no matter what and we should be supporting that and not passing these stupid, irrational laws. For what? We’re not protecting women. We’re not protecting girls. We’re not protecting sports. We’re just instituting a bigotry and discriminating against a class of people who have no power. And it’s just easy pickings.

[13:35] And we should be ashamed That we’re doing that People should be ashamed That they’re doing that, Because I can tell you That the Jesus I know The Jesus of the Holy Bible Would be embracing trans people.

[14:00] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. If you’re like me, and you try to keep up on the news to know what’s going on out there, you probably are aware of the tragic incident that took place in Minneapolis last week. An agent of the federal government, an ICE agent, and in case anybody doesn’t remember, ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

[14:45] And they have basically been created, they were created when the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9-11, and it’s part of that whole government surveillance and anti-terror thing. But the current administration that we have now under President Trump is using it as their personal police force, doing it in a way that is pretty much illegal, unconstitutional, against established norms. You just cannot make anything about this even okay it’s just not and this has been going on since uh trump took office again at the beginning of 2025 and it all stems from an aide to president trump stephen miller who is just objectively a nazi, He is a racist, anti-immigrant bigot. And for some reason, he has the ear of the president. Well, we know the president’s a racist, too. He has a history of it. He also doesn’t like women. We have a history of that. He doesn’t like disabled people. We have a history of that.

[16:11] So Stephen Miller has this big idea that he’s going to get all the illegal immigrants, the criminals, out of this country. And it was never about getting the worst of the immigrants out. It was about getting immigrants out completely.

[16:29] And so they’ve been terrorizing neighborhoods and arresting people at, like, their jobs and walking down the street and driving down the street. And they’ve been just acting like a Gestapo, a modern-day Gestapo. And this terrorizing of people, both citizens and non-citizens alike, has really caused a lot of issues. There’s been a lot of protests. And believe it or not, most of the protesting has been nonviolent, not a riot or anything like that, no matter how much these ICE agents have been wanting to make it so, so that they could get tough. Because a lot of these guys have, I’m guessing, have had terrible childhoods and they like to dress up as military guys. These are the guys that when they, during Trump’s first term, I think it was, when they allowed them to carry rifles and they’d strut around and go to the mall wearing these long rifles and they were really getting macho. Well, those are the same guys that are in ICE.

[17:48] They wouldn’t be hired as cops because they’re mentally challenged. Most of them are very heavyset and can’t even pass basic physical fitness standards that ICE actually has. And so they basically like to dress up and carry around guns and terrorize people. So you’ve been having this confluence, and they’ve been doing this in… Areas that are typically democratically run, they’re controlled by people.

[18:28] Elected officials from the Democrat Party. And Trump has been doing this retribution tour where he goes after these, quote, blue areas, unquote, with the National Guard and ICE enforcement. So it led to this situation in Minneapolis where a—and this is what happened. This is the facts. These are the facts. You can look it up. There’s plenty of witnesses. There’s plenty of video. But this is what happened. A convoy of ICE agents were going through Minneapolis. One of them got stuck in a snowbank. So the other one stopped to try to retrieve this car out of the snowbank.

[19:13] The people in this particular neighborhood thought it was an enforcement exercise that they were coming in to harass the neighborhood. And they started protesting, blowing whistles, yelling at them, telling them to get out. Then there was this other woman who had a minivan. Her name was Renee Good. And she was not blocking the road entirely, but she was letting them know that she was watching. And she had a conversation with an ICE agent who was walking around her car. Meanwhile, Renee’s partner was giving him the business, because that’s what you do with ICE agents that are harassing your neighbors, is you give them the business. And then he comes around to the other car and a couple guys from another ICE vehicle get out and try to open her driver’s side door to pull her out and they say, get out of the car. Her wife tells her to drive away, and she starts to drive away, and this ICE agent that her wife had been giving him the business, he pulls out his gun and he fires three shots into the driver’s side and kills Renee Goode.

[20:39] And the car uncontrollably crashes into a parked car. Now, immediately, even before any investigation was done, within hours, within a couple of hours after the incident, Kristi Noem and the other Nazi affiliates in the administration were trying to make it out to be that she was a domestic terrorist trying to kill this agent and he was just defending himself. And that was a total lie. She was just an average Joe person. She had a child. She had a dog in the car. And they just happened to be in the area, and they were trying to help their neighbors because they thought that they were being terrorized by these ICE agents. I do need to also point out that they were white women. And so one of the things that the administration and their buddies at Fox News have been talking about is how they were both lesbians and making that part of the story, even though that had nothing to do with the story. And so… And so you see this tragedy happen, and you’re like, well, how can it happen? And then you get some people say, well, she had just complied and got out of a car.

[22:05] And I’m sorry, but that is just totally wrong.

[22:11] We’ve heard that argument before when the police have killed unarmed black people over the years. Like the guy that was trying to sell single cigarettes and he was murdered. And then we had George Floyd. He was murdered by a cop. And usually the argument from the law and order people, the right wingers start out, well, if he had just complied or she had just complied. And that’s just so wrong. Because I’ll tell you, I’ll explain it to you. And in the 1930s, when the Nazis, the first version of Nazis, came to power in Germany, they got control of the legislature, the Reichstag, and they came up with this law called the Nuremberg Law. And the Nuremberg Laws were anti-Semitic and racist laws introduced to Nazi Germany in 1935. And the legislation comprised two measures, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. It prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans, barred Jewish households from employing German women under the age of 45.

[23:29] A supplementary decree issued in November of 1935 defined who was legally considered Jewish and brought the Reich citizenship law into effect. On November the 26th, further regulations extended the measures to gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards, classifying them with Jews as enemies of the race-based state.

[23:50] To avoid international criticism, prosecutions under their laws were delayed until after the 1936 Summer Olympics. And there was other policies that were legalized, such as boycotting Jewish businesses, things like that. And so that’s the problem when you start saying, well, you know, if they just listen to the cops or if they just been not obstructing justice or violating the law. That’s one of the things that J.D. Vance was talking about, that Renee had violated the law. And so that’s the thing, is laws are a construct, a social construct, in order to govern our society. They’re not inherently good. They’re not inherently bad. What happens is the outcomes of these laws. So the Nuremberg laws were used as the first step to the Holocaust. You know, you strip the rights of a class of people. Then you say that they can’t be in your country. Then you ship them off to concentration camps. And then you kill them. You murder them.

[25:11] And you see bits and pieces of that here in the United States currently with the Trump administration. Now, I know there’s going to be some Republicans that are going, hey, Doug, don’t stop calling us Nazis. That’s not going to solve anything. But a duck is a duck. If it’s quack, it’s quacking, it’s quacking. And the Nazi vibes are seriously cracking, quacking. And it’s not just anti-Semitic, it’s anti-immigrant and how they’re dehumanizing immigrants. Even if they’re here legally, they did it the right way. That’s another argument they like to talk about immigration is they need to do it the right way. Even if they did it the right way, some of these immigrants are being deported today. They’re being rounded up, they’re being detained, and they’re being deported today. So, forgive me if I don’t believe they’re bullshit about law and order and if she only complied. It’s bullshit.

[26:22] And if you have a police force that won’t even abide by decent standards and policies that have been put in place because of people that have gone rogue and murdered people for the sake of getting rid of them, then I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. And I’m not going to debate whether or not she was trying to run him over. It looked like she was not trying to run him over because if she was trying to run him over, she would have run him over. She did everything in her power to avoid running him over. She turned her wheel sharply to the right. She backed up to start. So she was not trying to run him over. There’s also a policy that ICE is supposed to follow where you don’t stand in front of a moving car or a car that’s running.

[27:21] And there was a report that came out that they did a study back before 2020 where 67% of ICE officer-involved shootings happened because they stood in front of the car to give them a justification for shooting the driver or shooting at the car. Most professional police departments have policies about shooting at moving cars. That you just don’t do it. There’s no reason to do it, especially if they’re driving away, you don’t do it.

[27:57] You know, the only reason that that guy should have shot at her at all was if she had a gun and she was shooting at him. And that didn’t happen.

[28:08] And so then they fall back on this crappy, well, she weaponized her car. And that is just ridiculous. If you look at the videos, even the stuff that they released that supposedly showed that he was justified, which he wasn’t. The fact that they released that video and at the end he called her an effing bitch. That’s all you need to know. This guy should be in jail.

[28:39] But I’m going to tell you, I don’t want to hear any, any opposition to this administration talking about, well, we’ll have to investigate things fully. We’ll have to do this or we’ll have to do this. ICE needs to be shut down. These guys need to be stripped of their police power, and they don’t even have police power, but they should be stripped of their guns, their masks. They should be jailed. They should be out of a job so that stuff like this will stop happening.

[29:16] And so that’s what happened in Minneapolis this past week. If you consider yourself an American, and it’s ironic that it’s the 250th anniversary of our revolution, and this shit is going on where we have a wannabe dictator, racist dictator, who’s using his own private police force to terrorize people just because he doesn’t like them.

[29:43] There’s no legal justification for doing it. So I expect that once this administration goes away, if we’re still around when this administration goes away, that there’s going to be a lot of perp walks as we send a lot of these people to prison, because a lot of them deserve to be in prison for a long time.

[30:39] It is a fact that in this world, there are the haves and the have-nots. There are people that are fabulously wealthy. They have 2.5 kids, a picket fence, a dog, a house, a car, and they’re happy. And then you have people who have none of those things. And in some cases, they’re also happy. But they don’t have a lot of money or they live in a crappy neighborhood and a crappy house or they have bad things that happen to them on a constant basis, et cetera, et cetera. And so what you have then is you have people who don’t need any help and then you have people that need help. And so what usually happens is that the people in power, or at least academically or politically that think about these things, they want to allow so that everybody’s the same, I guess is an easy way of saying it.

[31:49] It just depends on what tactic that they use. And for most Christian nationalists and political conservatives, they always boil it down to you are poor because you make poor choices. And since they are in charge of the statehouse or other political entities, they want to impose what they believe is the right choices on you because you don’t make the right choices. And this is particularly comes from a religious background, a religious take on poverty or people needing help through public assistance, that sort of thing. And so it is here in Ohio where they like to do these cultural war things and force prayer in the school and study the Ten Commandments. And these are the same people that don’t like the government telling them what to do, but yet they want to tell you what to do. And so they have come up with a bill, Senate Bill 156 here in Ohio. It’s called the success sequence.

[33:09] And basically what it is, it’s going to require public schools to teach kids the success sequence. And it means a three-pronged framework for youth and young adults, based on research from diverse institutions, that individuals who complete at least a high school education, obtain full-time work, and marry before having children are overwhelmingly less likely to live in poverty in adulthood. Now, that sounds very nondescript, very nonpolitical. It sounds like common sense, but it’s not. For one thing, this bill was drafted by Al Katrona. He’s a Republican who helped create the Charlie Cook Memorial Day and wants to ban books. And he’s also the one that that marshaled in Senate Bill one that upended higher education in Ohio, forcing schools to end DEI and and other programs to help marginalize students. So, you know, he wants to he wants to tell you how to live your life. And so the friendly atheist, he did a nice article on this bill. So I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I do want to highlight some of the information that he has in this article.

[34:38] And I’ll throw the link to the article in the show notes. The Hemet Mehta writes, it says, along the way, the text of the bill ignores the underlying reasons someone may or may not be successful. If you grow up in a wealthier family and don’t have medical issues, you’ll probably avoid poverty regardless of whether you go to college or get married. The irony is that the legislation says it relies on the, quote, best research methods available, describing the positive personal and societal outcomes associated with the success sequence, unquote.

[35:15] But if the evidence says the success sequence itself is misguided, then what? The bill doesn’t say the policy will be discarded if that happens. And people during the hearings on this bill in the Senate, they gave counter information about this bill, and it still didn’t sway the Republicans. They still passed it.

[35:38] Says State Senator Kent Smith, a Euclid Democrat, read from a separate study that poked holes in the success sequence research. He noted that not everyone graduates from good schools. Many people face racism and other structural issues in life, and it overstates the importance of marriage. He said, since the 1960s, marriage has been a weaker component in the fight against child poverty and work and has become more important in getting out of poverty. The success sequence misrepresents values among low-income individuals, Smith said, research and surveys show that poor Americans generally value work, education, and marriage just as much as those in the middle class. Their behavior is not a rejection of those ideals, but a reflection of their limited availability to act on them due to systemic barriers. Now, I mentioned that this success sequence has its roots in religion.

[36:36] And it’s like the purity, purity people that, you know, you have to be married to have kids. That’s the one thing. And then they include this, well, you have to have a job before you get married, before you have children, and this is what will make you successful. But what they fail to realize, and they always fail to realize that sometimes people have children and they don’t want to be married for whatever reason. Maybe the father of the child is a butthead or some other reason. And.

[37:13] And I know there’s a companion bill being considered that was just introduced recently that would require DNA tests for infants that are born to prove paternity, or I’m guessing to prove paternity. Because basically what it is, is they think that if they force families together, then that will remove the burden from the state. You know, if you have a single mother who has an out-of-wedlock birth and they force the, you know, they peg it on the man who got the woman pregnant and they force them together, that somehow that’s going to change things. And again, that’s all based on this religious bigotry ideal that the only reason why bad things happen to you is because of your poor choices.

[38:10] And then the other thing that I wanted to point out about this article that the Friendly Atheist did is that one of the sources or one of the things that he brought up was an analysis by policy analyst Matt Bruning, I’m not sure how to pronounce that, who had a very comprehensive takedown of the success formula. And so you know i’ll throw that uh link if you want to go directly to that but i read that and and it was like that’s that’s the thing you know they really do that and um yeah and so they kind of gives a little bit of history of it says uh the reason uh he’s taught about there’s a couple of different studies about the success sequence. And so he said, you know, why is there differences in those studies? It says that the success sequence is not some kind of time immemorial wisdom about poverty. Up until the 1970s, the majority of U.S. adults did not have a high school degree, and a little less than half of women had their first child before the age of 21. almost nobody in the history of the world has followed the sequence.

[39:28] The sequence is instead an ad hoc way of expressing the author’s personal, cultural preferences at this moment in time. If educational attainment continues to rise, eventually college will replace high school in a success sequence. And if the age of the first birth continues to rise, so too will the SS-approved age of first birth. Indeed, I suspect that if S and H, that’s one of the studies, were writing their book today, their birth delay rule would be set at age 25, as bourgeois culture is nowadays pretty disapproving of a 21-year-old having kids.

[40:07] You know, it’s all cultural. And it says even the differences between S&H and W&W, that’s the other study, reflect disagreements each of them have about culture. For instance, W&W do not believe in delaying childbirth while S&H are big supporters of it. In his other writing, Wilcox laments the fact that having children has come to be seen as a capstone rather than a cornerstone of adulthood. In her other writing, Saw Hill advocates free IUDs for poor women. The precise content of the SS gives you more insight into the cultural views of the author than the causes of poverty. And so this policy analyst, this Matt Brewing, goes through why the success sequence is bunk. And one of the main points that he points out is it doesn’t fit economic policy. You can’t fit economic policy into it. Success sequence is trying to make poverty seem like a simple problem. It actually makes it way more complicated than it really is. And he says, in a capitalist society, the national income is distributed using factor payments, payments to capital and labor. Capital income is extremely concentrated, and so it is not a huge factor when it comes to keeping people out of poverty.

[41:35] Labor income is much less concentrated, but only half the population receives labor income. The other half, children, elderly, disabled students, caregivers, and the unemployed, do not work and are therefore almost entirely locked out of the direct distribution of income.

[41:53] The percentage of people who are working varies a bit, depending on the macroeconomic situation, but not that much. So at any given time, the challenge of poverty is just the challenge of moving money from the right side of the above graph, and there’s a graph in this paper, and the left side of the graph. And so here’s the important point. It says, for the purposes of our poverty metrics, this challenge can be met by either combining people on the right side of the graph and family units with people on the left side of the graph, or using the welfare state to transfer money from the right side to the left side. It says, from the perspective of an overall society, if you are trying to limit poverty solely through approach number one, that is creating more family units, what you want to do is match every worker with a non-worker, then combine as many of these worker-non-worker duos as you can into a family unit. The optimal family would be something like a unit with 10 workers and 10 non-workers living together in a single dwelling. This is to ensure that each unit has the same one-to-one ratio of workers to non-workers and ensures income from workers spreads to non-workers and ensures that the economies of scale, which are reflected in poverty lines, are as high as possible. In practice, of course, family units are not that big and most of them do not have a one-to-one ratio. Instead, non-workers are distributed very unevenly across family units.

[43:21] And it says, when non-workers are spread very evenly across family units, the necessary redistribution from workers to non-workers doesn’t happen, and so you get high poverty. It says, rather than redistributing people across family units, the welfare state approach attacks the poverty problem redistributing income across family units. By levying a tax on all workers in order to fund cash payments for non-workers, old age pensions, disability benefits, child allowances, caregiver allowances, unemployment benefits, the welfare state ensures the income from workers spreads to non-workers regardless of the composition of each family unit. This approach effectively achieves the desire one-to-one worker to non-worker ratio across the entire society, and is sufficiently comprehensive and generous, brings poverty down to a very low level. And we had a perfect example of that during the pandemic when they basically untied the purse strings and made sure that, you know, people that had SNAP were getting, you know, almost triple what they should be getting.

[44:36] They sent out those stimulus payments, the $600, $700, or however much it was per person. You’ve also had other times where Scandinavian countries were doing basic income experiments, and that lowered poverty. And so if you get them actual money, redistribute income to these non-working people.

[45:05] That lowers the poverty rate. And again, the important point is that not everybody can work. Old people, disabled, children, you know, and people that just aren’t able to work for whatever reason, mental health issues, whatever. And so they need to be taken care of. You know, they used to put them in a shack on the edge of town or whatever. They don’t do that anymore because that’s just not good, good being a good neighbor.

[45:44] So that is why the success sequence is bunk. It’s because it doesn’t address the real reasons for poverty. And the real reason for poverty isn’t you don’t have a spouse and you have children in the wrong time period. It’s just that that poverty is much more complicated than that simple sequence sequence that they’re trying to promote. And so that’s what’s going on in Ohio. And like I said, I’ve got an article linked to an article from Hemant Mehta and that policy analysis. And that’s why people see this and they’re just like, well, what’s going on with that? And again, it’s all rooted in Christian nationalist religious idea that you are where you’re at in your Latin life because of your poor choices and you need to be punished for those poor choices.

[46:54] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Glass City Jam, composed using the Amplify Studio.