At this point it's hard to tell just which satiric dystopia Trump's team of merry dimwits is trying so hard to model, but by God they are determined.
U.S. diplomats may soon be prohibited from using the phrases “sexual and reproductive health” and “comprehensive sexuality education” under a proposal being floated to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, four people familiar with the issue said.
That is a real honest-to-God news story being written in 2018, in the United States of America. The problem appears to be that saying "sex" makes Trump's hard-right Republican underlings feel all sad and uncomfortable inside and so how 'bout the entire U.S. State Department just STOP USING THAT WORD COMPLETELY IN ALL INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS TO MAKE THEM FEEL BETTER.
Instead of “sexual and reproductive health” and “comprehensive sexuality education,” U.S. officials would be instructed to use phrases like “reproduction and the related health services” in official communications, one of the people familiar with the issue said, while cautioning that could change.
I'll bet it could change. The group of goddamn idiots floating these ideas might tomorrow decide that "reproduction" and "health" are both bad words themselves. By next Monday they might be in a new panic because a foreign diplomat gave a speech showing considerably too much elbow, and we’ll be off to the races again.
Politico pins the blame for this particular mini-freakshow on Mari Stull, a former "wine blogger" turned State Department adviser currently under federal investigation for political retaliation against career department employees, and Bethany Kozma, an anti-LGBT pro-life ideologue whose most prominent recent contribution to the national discourse was having spasms over which bathrooms transgender students may or may not use.
Which sounds exactly like the sort of Trump appointees who would draft a new proposal to not let American diplomats say the s-e-x word when talking about s-e-x stuff. We should have guessed. If anything it’s a surprise it took this long.
Now, some may choose to look at this as a particularly stupid episode in a particularly stupid administration staffed with incompetent but devoted bumblefucks. That is your right. Me, I choose to look at this as evidence that mankind has, gadgets notwithstanding, not substantively evolved in tens of thousands of years and is in fact very very close to devolving back into the primitive ape-like creatures we came from. We will lose our words. We will lose our capacity to do math and grow crops and sign each other up for the latest diet scams. We will still have our iPhones, but nobody will exist who knows what they were originally for or how our ancestors made them so shiny.
And then we will all die out, eaten by a new species of enormous eight-eyed badger, and in at least some small measurable way it will be Mari Stull and Bethany Kozma's fault. Because of (makes wide sweeping gesture) this. All of this.