Do they really believe it or do they know how fucking gullible a large swath of their electorate is?

Absolutely. Any vague language has a way of being misinterpreted by the most fanatical and used for evil.

That child is dressed like a plant! Arrest him!

Unless animal control can run up to 60mph, that cheetah kid is getting away.

The bill makes exceptions for mascots, school plays and Halloween.

Source

Or starting on page 4 of the bill

You can't even meow, so no learning about the noises animals make

Almost every school mascot today is some sort of non offensive animal. Puma, panther, golden eagles, a few others. Probably setting up the magas who want to go back to some real non woke “American hero” names. Gen Lee Slavemasters, red injun killers, white supremists, things like that. lol.

It started because of school shootings, ironically enough. If you’re in a lockdown for hours while the cops take their sweet time, (coughUvaldecough), there’s a near 100% chance that at least one of the children in your class is going to need to use the restroom during that time.

Luckily, camp toilets are a thing:

They’re basically a 5 gallon bucket with a snap-on toilet seat lid. You use a trash bag to line it, then sprinkle an alginate powder in, (the same powder used in diapers) and it turns into a gel when it gets wet. This helps avoid the smell and splashing, and a single small sachet of alginate powder is enough for the entire bucket.

As an added bonus, you can use the bucket to store other things that might be needed in a shooting or extended lockdown. Tourniquets, gauze, protein bars, etc… It’s all there in a single grab-and-go location. Lockdown starts, you pull the bucket out of the closet, dump all the supplies out, and set it in the corner for kids to use if they need to pee.

But this very quickly got flipped around, because conservatives didn’t want the left to start using “schools need toilets in the classrooms because school shootings are so frequent” campaigns. So they flipped it around, and said schools were providing litter boxes to furries. There’s also a heavy anti-trans lean on the litter boxes messaging, which just plays into the conservative fear mongering even more.

I had an idiot teenager working for me who insisted it was happening at his school, but couldn't tell me which classroom or teacher was allowing it.

They have an “actively seek out bullshit that props up my radical beliefs and hatreds” filter.

One thing I'd like to see under Reactions would be one from furries, because we don't want litter boxes. That's not a thing. The whole premise is broken.

It's wiki entries like this that clearly label it as a hoax which is why Republicans think Wikipedia is woke.

bullying is a huge problem that needs to be taken far more seriously in our school systems

I fear the reason bullying isn't taken seriously in schools is because those in positions of power frequently use bully tactics to get there. Fascists and bullies are one and the same, and on some level, corrupt school administrators know that. School bullies provide useful extensions of fascist behavior, applied by peers to encourage conformity in environments where adults are absent. Why would fascists in charge ever want to stop that?

Hey, America, what the fuck?

Here I was laughing at a silly man trying to forbid something that never happens. Now I’m sad again. How on earth is this the lived reality of so many children? Can’t do much from over here in Europe but what the heck.