Sussex County, Alabama

Is Sussex County the Alabama of Delaware? It’s not hard to make the case.

Years before Roy Moore’s love of…um, purity hit the news, Sussex produced pious hypocrite Vance Phillips, who groomed his target until she turned 18 before destroying his life, and a good bit of hers, in pursuit. Another candidate for public office, Eric Bodenweiser, had his bid derailed by sexual assault charges. As you can tell by such incidents, they love them some religion down there — especially the Old Testament, where patriarchs laid with lots of women and Yahweh didn’t strike them dead, which means He must have approved.

Now the residents of SuxCo, along with scattered conservatives elsewhere in the state, are trying to turn a state policy on how schools should treat transgendered students into a conspiracy by the state to kidnap your children. State Republicans — which means, basically, the chowderheads of SuxCo — clearly intend to make this their issue in the 2018 elections.

The latest volley came in the Delaware State News, which printed this opinion piece on the issue from a psychiatrist in Lewes that reveals a whole lot more about the psychologist than the state. He makes an error that shows he must be a terrible psychologist — he assigns motive to the state, a pure cast of projection. He claims the state is trying to seize control of your children by allowing a child to, essentially, proclaim himself or herself transgendered without parental permission.

For a psychiatrist, of all people, to assign motive to a massive bureaucracy without considering any other possible reasons for the policy — the fraught relationship of teenagers with their parents, the high suicide rate for transgendered teens, in large part because of parental resistance to the news — shows a level of professionalism that should get him kicked out of any professional society to which he belongs. The essay illustrates that the good doctor is too dimwitted to feel any shame at parading his fears and insecurities before the public.

But he has done us a service, as all projecting conservatives do. Their obvious fear isn’t that the state will control their children, but that they, as parents, cannot. Many parents never come to grips with the fact that their children are individuals in their own right. It’s the whole reason conservatism, as this country defines it, exists — the authoritarian need to control other people, felt most keenly among people who can’t control themselves.