Celebrating Inseminated Persons Day

A lot of kids look forward to May when they can celebrate Inseminated Persons Day by giving their inseminated person flowers and making their inseminated person breakfast in bed. Or maybe they’ll even take their inseminated person out for brunch.

When the Governor’s office is controlled by one party and the Legislature by the other, the Governor’s budget proposal has two goals. One is to create public policy and the other is to make political statements.

Gov. Tony Ever’s just-introduced budget does a lot of both. His proposal on state prisons is an example of a serious — and very good — attempt at public policy making. More on that later this week.

But then there are a series of perennial nonstarters that Evers puts in every budget just to make a political statement. I think that’s fine. Governors have done it forever. He’s creating perfectly legitimate contrasts between his party’s positions and those of the other guys.

And when those political items are popular it makes all the sense in the world. So, sure, propose legalizing marijuauna, supporting child care, increasing support for public education, making it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage for medical procedures, etc. Make the Republicans vote against those things.

But then Evers proposed imposing gender neutral language all over the statutes. Now, I think that’s okay, if not absolutely necessary, from a public policy perspective. But it’s political malpractice. Not only is this provision dead on arrival, but it hands Republicans an issue.

One of the things that most hurts the Democrats is that they’ve gotten way out front of the voters on some social issues, one of them being sexual identity. Voters are now strongly supportive of gay marriage and that’s good. And, in fact, some of the gender neutral language is designed to clean up archaic language that predated the Supreme Court decision that made same sex marriage a right.

But gender politics as a whole is something Democrats would be better off avoiding. Famously, the Trump ad that featured the line “Kamala’s for they/them, Trump is for you,” was the most effective of the campaign. It signaled that Harris didn’t share voters’ values, not just on transgender issues but on other things.

So, knowing that and knowing that the Republicans had taken this stuff out of his previous budgets, why did Evers put this in his latest proposal? It’s one thing to put in popular provisions that you know will be rejected. It’s another to include unpopular ideas that you know will be rejected.

Moreover, this kind of thing gets press and gets remembered and overshadows the popular things Republicans will oppose. For example, Evers’ language would replace “mother” with “inseminated person.” Their perfectly rational explanation is that nobody is requiring you to call your mom an inseminated person. It’s just legally wonky statutory language. But nobody in the Governor’s office looked at that and saw the political problems? Nobody saw the obvious potential for mockery and for reenforcing a view of the Democrats as eccentric, to put it kindly?

This is the kind of unforced error Democrats have to stop making. There’s plenty of policies in the party’s repertoire that the public likes. Talk about those. Quash the other ones. And don’t hand the other guys a bludgeon.

Emphasize the positive. At least that’s what my dear old inseminated person always taught me.

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Reason.

Tolerance.

Pluralism.