Today on "Great Moments in Self-Righteous, Intolerant Butthurt"

(BTW…Mike Melgaard is my new hero.)

I’m hardly one to defend big box retailers like Target. (Full disclosure: I worked at a Target in east Portland during Christmas a few years ago. It was…awful, but that’s not a story I care to revisit.) Still, I fail to see how the company’s taking an action with the intent of treating people with respect could be viewed as anything but positive. This being humanity we’re talking about, there are unfortunately plenty of trolls out there who’ve taken issue with Target…for reasons that have far more to do with their own ignorance than anything substantive.

Some folks are convinced that Target’s decision is an example of PC run amok- angry, hateful Liberals conspiring to take away the freedom of parents to teach their children traditional gender roles and expectations. (I mean, is this even ‘Merica if I can’t dress little Johnny in blue and little Julie in pink? What’s next, unisex bathrooms??) Frankly, how not separating toys by gender will do anything except increase chaos in the toy aisles is beyond me. Going against generations of tradition is not necessarily a bad thing. Change can be good…but it’s most certainly NOT an attempt to teach children that it’s “bad” to identify as a boy or a girl.

There’s something to be said for deciding to do things differently. In this case, Target’s simply making a business decision. That so many have chosen to interpret the company’s actions negatively and infer that Target is now pushing some sort of transgender agenda is absurd- amusingly so. I thought it might be interesting to present a representative sample of the collective butthurt, if for no other reason than to demonstrate how astonishingly stupid people can be about the silliest things. Kind of makes you wonder what these trolls might accomplish if they focused their considerable range on doing something positive, doesn’t it?