Dan is benched in the anti-pronoun game

Dan Sullivan has had the distinct, sick pleasure of running some of the most heinous bills of our legislative session thus far. One of them was originally filed to keep pronoun usage in check under the guise of “free speech” on college campuses. It didn’t pass out of Senate Education without some of Dan’s fellow GOP colleagues speaking against it on constitutional grounds.

Now that the bill has been resurrected, Dan’s off the court.

We can’t begin to understand the strategy behind the GOP’s appointment of legislators to certain issues, but it seems like Dan went a little too hard in the paint with his hateful culture-war bills.

Recall that with SB71 he is trying to end affirmative action in our state, and he believes in it enough to sit before the Black Caucus and tell them how racism works. He’s also passionate about banning books and criminalizing librarians, as we see in his SB81.

After all the backlash of these and other bills, Dan’s been benched in the fight for his version of “free speech” on college campuses. The language of the bill has also been changed to be far less pronoun-driven. Remember that drag show bill that was gutted several weeks ago? This seems to be a similar situation, but we’ll wait to hear debate to know for sure.

Either way, Dan’s probably really sad to have been taken off of what would be another prime example of legislating rightwing culture war fear mongering. It’s his specialty, after all.