Iowa columnist: It’s much easier to get folks riled up about things they don’t understand or haven’t experienced.
The gift in having a career where you interview others is that people tell you stuff you didn’t know. Most of us hang out in our bubbles of personal experience. Some rarely leave the ZIP code in which they were born. They/we work with, play with, go to school with, and marry people who have more in common than not with them/us. Or so we think. As a talk radio host then newspaper columnist in the 1980s, the people of Iowa have often guided me in forming opinions. For example, my pro-choice beliefs about abortion were confirmed after meeting a woman who had become pregnant by her brother-in-law during a weekend pass from a hospital psychiatric unit. Abortion was illegal in Iowa before 1973. She sought help from Planned Parenthood to go out of state for the procedure. The executive director had invited me to sit in on abortion counseling sessions, and hers was one of three powerful conversations. (I did so with their permission and respecting their confidentiality). More: Iowa House passes ban on transgender girls playing K-12 and college girls‘ sports As for this week’s passage of an anti-transgender bill in the Iowa House, my hunch is there are two reasons why GOP members pushed and passed the legislation. One, humans tend to fear the unknown. However, the more likely explanation is that today’s extremists have had success in fanning the flame of intolerance and fear as a political sleight-of-hand trick. It’s much easier to get folks riled up about things they don’t understand or haven’t experienced. Complicated, nuanced, policy issues do not make for talk show fodder. I get it. On a slow spring day when the call-in lines were all open, I once asked WHO Radio listeners: „If you could be an animal, which animal would you be?“ And, the lines lit up. In the 1980s, I was a daily columnist for The Des Moines Register. I got a call from a couple who lived on a farm near Mason City. They asked if we could get together for lunch, and we did, meeting in a favorite spot across the street: Younkers Tea Room. Oh, how I miss the department store’s splendid, classic room, with heavy drapes, ironed white cloth napkins, and water glasses filled by the attentive wait staff. As we sat down, they kept looking at each other for reassurance. More: What it’s like to be a transgender child in Iowa They shared that their child was transgender, and they wanted people to know what it was like for their family.
