Cool Bunny

That’s the whole point of cheerleaders and anyone who is being honest would acknowledge it.   They wear short skirts, are inevitably cute and vivacious (ever see an obese, surly cheerleader?), and dance around a lot to get the audience going.   And as society has loosened up over recent generations, so have the styles and routines (and music) to which cheerleaders cavort changed.   That’s just the reality.

But in the state of Texas it seems the most important issue on the legislative agenda these days is a law that would ban “overtly sexually suggestive” cheerleading routines.  Things are so far out of hand in the land where football is a religion that the state government feels the need to take action.    Never mind that Texas is home to the legendary “Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” a group of well-endowed young women who gyrate wildly on the sidelines of football games wearing, well, wearing “uniforms” that make Hooters girls look downright dowdy.  Of course they’re sexy.....the folks who own pro-football teams know their audience.

Yet are we really to believe that parents, or the administrators, in Texas schools are  permitting lewd and lascivious displays of cheerleading?   Cool Bunny is shocked!  Shocked!  

Are the parents in Texas so out of touch with morality that they allow.....and even encourage....their daughters to turn themselves into the sporting event equivalent of lap dancers?   It must be the case, for the Texas legislature clearly sees the need to rein this behavior in.
                
Of course, the legislation doesn’t define what constitutes “overtly sexually suggestive behavior.”     When pressed to describe what the bill would actually prohibit, one of the bill’s sponsors could only offer the tired cliche of “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it.”    That’s not real helpful.    Instead of guidelines, the legislation leaves it up to the Texas Education Agency to determine what is or is not acceptable.

According to a spokeswoman at the agency,  they would have the authority to write a letter to a school district “requesting” a review on whether a routine was unacceptably racy.    There's some powerful stuff at work there.   A letter "requesting" a review.     Yet there are no guidelines that would give the school in question a baseline on which to make any judgments.   Moreover, since the school iss already permitting the cheerleaders to do these "questionable" routines.....presumably even in front of the parents, one might reasonably assume that no one in the school had any previous problems with it.    So inevitably the "review" will come back dismissing the concerns.....after all, what school is going to stand up and say "darn, you're right, we've been parading our cheerleaders out their like little hookers!"

One suspects that this has far less to do with cheerleaders and a lot to do with the on-going efforts of Christian Fundamentalists to use their new-found political clout (no coincidence one of the sponsors is a fundamentalist minister) to force their own puritan moral standards on a nation in which the majority of the population is clearly out of step.   The solution to the problem is simple.   Make all cheerleaders wear Burkas.   Then there would be no problem whatsoever with “overtly sexually suggestive” routines, and no ambiguity about what is appropriate and what is not.

dtf


“”A puritan’s a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.” G.K. Chesterton