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The politician who championed the bathroom bill in the Texas Legislature in 2017 is now singing The Star-Spangled Banner.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick unfurled the first of his priority bills this week, in reaction to news that the NBAs Dallas Mavericks had stopped playing the national anthem before home games.

That went on for 13 games before anyone noticed, according to The Athletic. But when they noticed, they really noticed. The news traveled all the way to the lieutenant governor, and before you could say dawns early light, he had proposed the Star Spangled Banner Protection Act.

It hasnt been filed yet, but it would require the playing of the anthem at all events that receive public funding. Presumably, that would include sessions of the House and Senate, which start with prayers, and pledges to the U.S. and Texas flags, but no anthem.

It is hard to believe this could happen in Texas, but Mark Cubans actions of yesterday made it clear that we must specify that in Texas we play the national anthem before all major events, Patrick said in a news release. In this time when so many things divide us, sports are one thing that bring us together right, left, Black, white and brown.

Cuban is the owner of the Mavericks.

We respect and always have respected the passion people have for the anthem and our country, Cuban tweeted. But we also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them. We feel that their voices need to be respected and heard, because they have not been. Going forward, our hope is that people will take the same passion they have for this issue and apply the same amount of energy to listen to those who feel differently from them.

The problem, as far as professional basketball is concerned, has already been solved. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday that the leagues teams will be required to play the national anthem before each game.

That was after Patrick had a chance to tweet that Cubans decision was a slap in the face to every American & an embarrassment to Texas. Sell the franchise & some Texas Patriots will buy it. We ARE the land of free & the home of the brave.

The states culture wars are back, led by their most prominent warrior. In 2017, Patrick led the unsuccessful, session-dominating effort to prevent transgender Texans from using restrooms and other public facilities that match their gender. It was a divisive fight that fired up voters and activists who were variously delighted and outraged at the proposal. And it established the understated theme for the 2019 legislative session that followed: Were not messing with things like the bathroom bill this time.

Thats all behind us now. While its dealing with a pandemic, economic troubles, police behavior and funding, election and voting laws, and all the rest, the Texas Legislature is also going to discuss regulating the playing of the national anthem.

Patrick has kept his trap shut for the first month of the five-month regular session, buttoning his lip about the recount of the 2020 votes for his friend, Donald Trump, staying out of the news around the siege of the U.S. Capitol and holding his silence as Gov. Greg Abbott laid out his own priorities for the current session.

The lieutenant governor poked his head up at the beginning of the legislative session to make sure Republicans in the Senate can get things done without Democratic help when need be. But he has been uncharacteristically quiet.

Until, that is, he became aware of the absence of the sound of music. He was already working on presenting a list of legislation he wants the Senate to work on, but jumped at the prospect of a culture battle over the anthem and Cuban.

The man who brought you the bathroom bill is back, starting the game with a call for all to rise for the playing of the nations fight song.

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Analysis: A Star-Spangled culture war in Texas - The Texas Tribune

Unlike many of her predecessors, though, Gaga spoke to the LGBTQ community as one of its members. She told interviewers that her 2008 hit Poker Face was about masking her own same-sex desire, and in a 2009 Rolling Stone cover story she identified as bisexual. In clear ways, she set out to destabilize gender too. While other divas shellacked themselves into paragons of feminine glamour, Gagas grotesque fashions seemed to satirize the idea of the socialite, the model, and the doll. A rumor took hold online alleging that Gaga was actually a man in drag, or maybe a woman with a penis. Rather than seem offended by the plainly transphobic and obnoxious speculation, Gaga made sport of it. I do have a really big donkey dick, she told an interviewer when asked about the matter. Her bracing 2010 speech calling for the repeal of Dont Ask, Dont Tell demonstrated Gaga pairing her aesthetics with activism.

Gagas 2009 EP The Fame Monster added leather-goth angst to her sparkly brew, resulting in smashes such as Bad Romance and Alejandro. But she still needed to tackle the much-feared test of longevity facing new stars: the sophomore full-length album. For this, she would go lighter, brighter, and make all her subtext into text. To record the song Born This Way, Gaga turned to producersFernando Garibay, Jeppe Laursen, DJ White Shadowwho were conversant in both disco history and the new EDM sound that was trending at the time. Lyrically, she sought to make as clear a statement as possible. I want to write my this-is-who-the-fuck-I-am anthem, but I dont want it to be hidden in poetic wizardry and metaphors, she told Billboard. I want it to be an attack, an assault on the issue, because I think, especially in todays music, everything gets kind of washy sometimes and the message gets hidden in the lyrical play.

Indeed, outside of Chistina Aguileras Beautiful, scattered Black Eyed Peas tracks, and Kanye Wests provocations, the 21st centurys first decade was not a banner time for social conscientiousness in pop music. But as the always online, famously idealistic Millennial generation came of age, the tides began to change. Barack Obamas first years in office saw Beyonc, Kesha, Katy Perry, and other peers of Gagas make feminist messages a de rigueur subject on Top 40 radio. The emergence of Kendrick Lamarwho spoke to the grievances underlying the nascent Black Lives Matter movementmarked a renewed period of forthright political engagement in commercial hip-hop. MTV created a new award, Best Video With a Message, in 2011, and Born This Way won it.

Really, though, Gagas song reached back in time as much as it looked forward. The track drew from the 1970s Motown song I Was Born This Way, which was popularized by the openly gay singer Carl Bean. Its first lines go: Im walking through life in natures disguise / You laugh at me and you criticize cause Im happy, carefree and gay / Yes, Im gay. Talk about a this-is-who-the-fuck-I-am anthem, right? In a 2016 Vice interview, Bean explained how his openness wasmaybe counterintuitively, given how much gay rights have progressed since thenof its era:

At the time, what the disc jockeys coined as message music was pretty big, and thats what I wanted to do. Message music came out in the late 60s, and it caught on with the young folk at the time. We were in the middle of the civil-rights movement, women were staging sit-ins, and there was a huge dislike for the war in Vietnam. You started to hear, little by little, messages that spoke to what people were dealing with everydaywhat people were feeling Whether youre in the club or wherever, you were hearing about the times.

Message music never fully died out; Gaga was also inspired by the early-90s period of TLC and En Vogue singing of empowerment and safe sex. Whats notable is how these obvious predecessors for Born This Way were created by Black people speaking clearly from their own individual experiences.

Excerpt from:
The Lady Gaga Anthem That Previewed a Decade of Culture Wars - The Atlantic

The NBA put a quick stop to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cubans attempt to end the singing of the national anthem before home games. The anthem was sung and cheered before last nights tipoff against Atlanta in the American Airlines Center.

But many people say the short-lived drama is a microcosm of their experience in a culture that is increasingly hostile to their beliefs.

The Mark Cuban national anthem story is not a sports story. Its part of a much larger campaign against conservative values, financial analyst and Fox News news host Charles V. Payne wrote on Twitter.

Payne grouped the anthem in a cornucopia of issues that include the U.S. flag, religion and guns, saying they generate political attacks designed to demonize the brand.

Conservatives better fight back soon, he concluded.

The starred-and-striped conservative brand is draped with red, white and blue, and former President Donald J. Trump used it effectively, so much so that Americans not aligned with Trump are struggling to reclaim the symbols and the use of the word patriot.

A recent analysis of people who voted for Trump in 2020 found that patriotic sentiment was a unifying force that drove people to support Trump even if they had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. And oversized American flags and red caps became a controversial part of Trumps Make America Great Again brand.

The anthem, however, became a political issue because of an athlete, not a politician. And despite long-standing complaints about how difficult it is for ordinary people to sing, for many Americans, The Star-Spangled Banner is a beloved and reliably inspiring tradition that signals the start of diverse sporting events, from the Super Bowl to small-town 5K races, and is even a part of Super Bowl betting.

Heres a look at how a poem scribbled by an attorney in 1814 came to be part of Americas culture war in 2021, and what its future might be.

In the same week that Cuban said the anthem would no longer be played at Mavericks games, an article in People magazine described Sundays Super Bowl performance by Jazmine Sullivan and Erick Church as incredible and unifying.

Months earlier, however, the Mavericks owner had decided to drop the song before games.

According to Tim Cato of The Athletic, who broke the story, the anthem had not been played at any of the games at American Airlines Center in Dallas this season, and no announcement had been made. When asked about it, Cuban confirmed to The Athletic that he had made the decision, declining to say anything else.

Cuban later described the decision as something of a social experiment he had purposefully designed.

We have no problem with playing it. But we do want these very important conversations to continue, he told a reporter for The Dallas Morning News.

But the absence of the anthem had gone unnoticed for weeks, and in fact, the song was not always a pregame ritual in Dallas.

According to The New York Times, God Bless America had been sung before games for 16 years under owner Donald Carter. The national anthem replaced it when Ross Perot Jr. bought the team in 1996, and The Star-Spangled Banner continued after Cuban acquired the team in 2000, even as controversy erupted over former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernicks decision in 2016 to protest police brutality and racism by sitting, then later kneeling, during the anthem instead of standing with his team.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way, Kaepernick said to reporters after his initially quiet protest got attention.

Kaepernick, who has not been able to find work in the NFL since opting out of his 49ers contract in 2017, has since found greater sympathy for his action, as the 2020 death of George Floyd energized the the Black Lives Matter movement. The Mavericks knelt as a team during the anthem last year, even as some conservatives said they found the action offensive.

The minute one player kneels during the anthem, I am out, Dallas radio host Mark Davis tweeted in July, to which Cuban tersely replied, Bye.

He later added, The National Anthem Police in this country are out of control.

Francis Scott Key had a day job as a Maryland attorney, but he also had a window seat to history as he watched the British Navy bombard Fort McHenry in 1814 from Baltimore Harbor. (He was on a ship at the time, having been stuck there after helping to negotiate the release of a captured civilian, according to History.com.)

Inspired by the sight of the American flag waving over the fort and absent suitable paper, he wrote the start of a poem that would be called Defence of Fort MHenry on the back of an envelope. When completed, the poem was published in local newspapers and eventually set to the tune of an English drinking song. As much as it could in the 1800s, the song went viral, and by the end of the century, the U.S. military was performing it during ceremonies involving the flag, and President Woodrow Wilson declared it the national anthem in 1916 by executive order. (Congress followed up with its own proclamation in 1931.)

In an age when the sins of ancestors are under scrutiny, composer Key is a candidate for cancellation.

Though his celebrated anthem proclaimed the United States the land of the free, Key was in fact a slaveholder from an old Maryland plantation family, and as a U.S. attorney argued several prominent cases against the abolitionist movement. He did speak out against the cruelties of the institution of slavery, but did not see abolition as the solution, according to History.com, which is owned by A+E Networks.

Public sentiment toward the anthem, however, is still so strong that the NBA quickly moved to counter Cubans decision, issuing a statement saying that playing The Star-Spangled Banner is not optional and that all teams must comply. The Mavericks quickly agreed, ending that singular controversy, but adding another chapter in a multi-faceted debate that will continue.

Is the anthem, like the flag, an unnecessary point of contention, as NFL Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe recently said?

Or is controversy over the flag a deep and sinister sign that America is unraveling at the seams? Many conservatives fear the latter.

For now, the Mavericks story appears to have hardened the divide between Americans who cherish the anthem and those who say it does not represent them.

The Republican lieutenant governor of Texas even filed a bill that would require the national anthem to be played at all events that receive public funding.

To Washington Post sports columnist Barry Svrluga, that would defeat the purpose, as he says the anthem already suffers from overexposure. Hearing it so often 162 times in a baseball season, half that in basketball or hockey makes each version less special. At most ballparks and arenas, theres a hot dog-buying, finding-my-seat murmur beneath the song, Svrluga wrote.

Though Svrluga finds the singing of the anthem somewhat silly and agrees with Cuban that both perspectives pro and con should be heard, he sees that the anthem could also settle into a space where it is a unifier.

The Super Bowl performance of the anthem, after all, brought together a country singer (Eric Church) and a rhythm and blues artist (Jazmine Sullivan) that was widely praised independent of the national enthusiasm for the sign-language interpretation by Warren WAWA Snipe.

And earlier this year, when a Black professional opera singer, Emmanuel Henreid, joined with a white Portland State University student, Madisen Hallberg, in an impromptu duet of the national anthem, it was described on NPR as a magical moment.

Could more moments like that lift the anthem from the hand-to-Twitter combat of the culture wars?

Svrluga says its reasonable to debate whether a polarizing song should be played in a deeply polarized society.

But, he added, At a time when we need whatever unity we can find and sports might be one place to find it, the anthem could be a two-minute span when we agree that were all Americans, that we should be together rather than separate. It could remind us that not very long ago we had more in common than we did not. Its a nice way to think, at least.

Read more:
Why is the national anthem controversial? - Deseret News

Larry Flynt, the Hustler publisher and self-made pornography magnate who died yesterday at 78, was an extremely crass man.

Aesthetically, Flynt was a one-note gold accent obsession accentuated with frat-house-horny kitsch. Professionally, Flynt trafficked in offense, peddling whatever transgression would scandalize the most people.

He published nude photos of a revered, sanctified First Lady. He published a crude joke about a reverent televangelist coupling with his own mother in an outhouse.

Flynt provoked, insulted, and scandalized for profit. And he persisted to do so, despite enormous personal cost. This is how Flynt became an accidental First Amendment antihero, and an extremely important American.

Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, build a multi-million-dollar fortune in the adult ... [+] industry and became a free speech crusader before passing away in February at 78 years old.

A generation before the online culture wars and bad-faith actors popularized and then mangled the term, Flynt was a target of what we might call cancel culture. Except that unlike Josh Hawley whining about a (briefly) revoked book deal or Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald sanctimoniously self-canceling from plush jobs at the pinnacle of the mainstream media hierarchy in order to further self-promote, Flynt, a constant underdog, suffered and survived real physical and professional violence in the name of free speech, that almost always challenged a more powerful adversary.

In this way, he offered an example of what free speech actually is, and how precarious the First Amendment can actually be. He refused to be truly and actually canceled.

He took a bullet, went to jail, and gambled his fortune in commitment of this ideal. He was an antidote to the disingenuous and entitled contemporaries who cry victimhood at the first sniff of conflict, at the first challenge to their platform and authority.

You may not have enjoyed his company, and you may think Barely Legal doesnt offer much to Western civilization. That was the point. In these and Flynts many other contradictions is a lesson in what our societys ideals really are.

The Man With The Golden Wheelchair: Flynt was confined to a gold-plated wheelchair after a white ... [+] supremacist, upset that Hustler published pictures of an interracial couple, shot him.

Hustler was in every way a reactionary response to the social-justice warriors of the 1960s and 1970s. Flynt offered a rejection of both politically correct feminism and a repudiation of the smug, upper-crust liberal veneer of Playboy. Hustlers founding ethos was a direct appeal to the forgotten man trope, the blue-collar mans-man disturbed and disempowered by shifts in acceptable speech and thought. Flynt is sort of Donald Trump-like in that way, but he is also very hard to categorize.

In a very Hustler way, Flynt used his magazine to challenge accepted norms of racial and gender hierarchy. Flynt was confined to a gold-plated wheelchair after he was shot by a crazed white supremacist, who was upset that Hustler had published pictures of an interracial couple engaged in coitus. Keep in mind what a radical and provocative act that was, less than a decade after the Supreme Court struck down the countrys last miscegenation laws.

As VICE pointed out in a 2016 profile, Hustler also risked alienating that target basechauvinistic blue-collar heterosexual maleswhen it published photos of a pre-op trans woman. Heightening contradictions like these, a serial transgressor, Flynt became a darling for critical theorists and cultural critics.

But what set him apart from the intellectual dark web, the contemporary contrarians who deem any consequence for their speech choices as censorship, is that Flynt was at constant odds with the power hierarchy, and not its product nor its defender. Flynt never demanded that his speech be given someone elses platform, that Hustler not be sold in the seedy stores on the wrong side of town. That was okay; you knew exactly where to find him. Flynt did not demand Simon & Schuster publish Barely Legal, or scream into Substack when Chester the Molester wasnt given a full-page in the New York Times.

The Obscene Man: Flynt defended himself against multiple obscenity lawsuits throughout his career ... [+] publishing Hustler magazine.

The key moment in Flynts life, and the reason why he will live on forever in American jurisprudence and in law school textbooks, is his 1987 victory in the Supreme Court. Hustler Magazine vs. Falwell was the lawsuit triggered by the 1983 satirical Campari ad, in which Rev. Jerry Falwellwho used his immense power and clout with Ronald Reagan and the Republican party to marginalize gay people, AIDS victims, and, yes, womenwas portrayed as a drunk who debauched his own mother in an outhouse. Outrageous and obviously false, the genius of the ad is that it demonstrates the concept of First Amendment free speech in its purest form: an affront, to power.

Larry Flynt found one of the biggest bullies on the playground and took his shot. Larry Flynt made a big man feel small. He continued to do this during his bounty-hunting years, when he offered million-dollar rewards for verified information of major political figures committing corrupt or immoral acts.

Larry Flynt did not have a sacred cow and Larry Flynt wanted to offend everybody, but that always meant challenging most hierarchies of control.

The obvious exception to this, where Larry Flynt is unsympathetic, is Hustlers depiction of women. There is an argument to be made that any male-centered, male-dominated pornography industry harms women, who must be exploited and must have profit extracted from their labor in order for the business model to work. Hustler, of course, transgressed much further than this. Gloria Steinem believed that if Flynt had portrayed dogs and cats the way his magazine portrayed women, he would never have been in business. While she may be right, the irony is that Steinems broadside against Flynt and his somewhat hagiographical 1996 biopic, The People Vs Larry Flynt, fueled what was absolutely a moralistic cancel crusade, that gave Flynt more attention in the form of earned media than he could ever have paid for. And at that point, who was the more powerful figure: Americas most revered feminist, or the leering man-child and king of porn?

After defending himself against a lifetime of lawsuits, Larry Flynt became a self-styled free-speech ... [+] champion.

Larry Flynt hated the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. He hated corporate control of media and thought. He thought Donald Trump was a serial liar who deserved to be impeached. He thought cannabis should be legal and loathed the pharmaceutical companies, on whose products he was addicted.

At his best, Larry Flynt constantly challenged and afflicted power, and both accepted and challenged the attendant consequences. He would never be canceled, and heunlike many others using the same rallying cryknew exactly what being canceled meant.

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Larry Flynt, The King Of Obscene Who Refused To Be Canceled - Forbes

The HBO series His Dark Materials, based on the novels by Philip Pullman, recently concluded a strong second season. Fantasy author Erin Lindsey was particulary impressed with the shows lead villain, Mrs. Coulter, played by Ruth Wilson.

The performance of Mrs. Coulter and the way that shes written are just so brilliant in this series, I cant get enough of it, Lindsey says in Episode 453 of the Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Geeks Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that Mrs. Coulter is a highlight of the show. Shes such an interesting character because shes very icy, shes very evil, but she loves her daughter at some level, he says. Shes in incredible control of her emotions, but obviously has a lot of very strong emotions, and she has these flashes of humanity, but then is also very ruthless.

Like many characters in His Dark Materials, Mrs. Coulter has an animal companiona daemonwho represents her soul. Science fiction author Sam J. Miller found Mrs. Coulters relationship with her daemona sinister golden monkey who never speaksto be particularly memorable.

There were scenes that I found super hard to watch, the way they are communicating her self-harm and her relationship with her daemon, which is so horrific and disturbing, he says. That was probably the most emotionally engaged I felt the whole season.

Writer Sara Lynn Michener says that Mrs. Coulter recalls many complicated women who have risen to power within patriarchal institutions. She has decided that she is going to play this game better than everybody else in order to beat it, and because of that, there are things that she has decided to kill within herself that she shouldnt have, and there are things that she has sacrificed in order to have strength, Michener says. Its deeply tragic. Theres so much to say about and think about with this character.

Listen to the complete interview with Erin Lindsey, Sam J. Miller, and Sara Lynn Michener in Episode 453 of Geeks Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Erin Lindsey on controversy:

I suspect that this [Catholic] church would be positioned differently than its predecessor in terms of how it would see [shows] like this. Its speculation, but Pope Benedict and Pope Francis are famously rather different in their approaches to almost everything. Another piece of the puzzle too, frankly, is that when youre talking about controversy and culture wars, what registers on the radar is orders of magnitude more dramatic than something like this. I think weve been so whipped up in culture war conversations that are just so much bigger and more important than this onehowever institutions or individuals feel notwithstandingthat this probably felt like such a minnow, when we have bigger fish to fry.

Sam J. Miller on visual effects:

With a lot of the visuals in the first season, I could tell they were CGI, and in some cases the CGI was not as good as it could be, or disappointing, or I could tell when corners were being cutespecially the polar bear fight. But it never bothered me in Season 2. I thought that they had really upped their game. The sets of Cittgazze were so gorgeous, and so much of that was real stuff. Although I will say that I had a moment of rage in one of the behind-the-scenes things. The guy who designed [Cittgazze] talked about how, I went to 140 locations, and I couldnt find one that was right, so we decided to make our own. And Im like, I want the job where I go to 140 140!awesome old cities, and then say, Nah, Im going to make my own.'

Sara Lynn Michener on Mary Malone:

It was absolutely how I had pictured her from the books, because shes this wonderfully motherly scientist, and thats the sense that I got from the character in the book, and so to see that come to life was really extraordinary. This whole series is wonderfully cast. Her character is fascinating, and I love that theres that connection to the tenuous relationship with people who are curious about religion and curious about big questions, and the natural fit of somebody starting off as a nun and becoming a physicist, which makes perfect sense to me, having been raised religious and departing from that when I was a teenager. So yeah, I loved the character.

David Barr Kirtley on character deaths:

I remember watching the Lord of the Rings special features, and Peter Jackson talking about this issue where the story is that Boromir is going to get killed in this battle with a bunch of random Uruk-hai, and Peter Jackson is like, I felt like we needed to have one particular Uruk-hai whos a character. And so they built up this Uruk-hai with the white hand on his face to be this character that you recognize, so that when Boromir is killed and Aragorn fights this orc, its not just some random orc that youve never seen before. And I wonder if we needed something like that here, where one of the Magisterium soldiers has been built upand it wouldnt have to be hugeso that its not just some faceless stormtrooper, its somebody that weve seen in a couple of scenes before.

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Mrs. Coulter Is One of the Best Villains on TV - WIRED