Last week, Leigh Tauss wrote about Tucker, an old, portly pussycat that has become an Instagram sensation in Raleigh. Dan took issue with our headline calling Tucker “gross”: “The type of person who calls older animals gross, accurately or not, is the same type who gives their pets away when they have children and happily houses their ailing grandparents in retirement homes—a person easily inconvenienced. But that’s probably not the author. I mean, someone ‘probably’ thinks Tucker is adorable, right?
“I’m being mean, sorry.
“I will point out that, although Tucker has become a sensation, he is only just bordering on the definition of ‘meme.’ There are too few derivative works with varying degrees of social application to consider him as such (the term ‘meme’ is overused in describing specific socio-cultural phenomena, so cut that shit out). So don’t pigeonhole Tucker. In fact, I would hazard a guess that most downtown (read: Capitol district) folk enjoyed his company long before his foray into social media.
“I used to hang out with him on the courthouse steps after a date with the law. He would occasionally accompany me the few feet from the front doors of The Oxford to Sono in exchange for a light cheek scratch. He is urbane and genteel. He keeps vigil in the shade. We rightfully worship this tremendous feline. If you want something to call gross, do more reporting on the NCGOP.”
“When I saw him, I thought it was sick or pregnant,” Varvara Krasa writes on Facebook. “Now I know that it’s just a very old and fat cat.”
“He is chonky and he is proud!” adds Leslie Lazarus.
As for Tucker himself, his human assistant, Ron Kirk, texted: “He read the story, and, while indifferent, he didn’t have any complaints.”
That’s the best we could have hoped for.
Last week, Tauss also wrote about how the Raleigh City Council had diverted $30,000 from its contingency fund to a nonprofit that provides health care to the indigent but also has ties to an anti-abortion group and a pro-LGBTQ conversion church. After we published the story online—but before the print edition hit the streets—council member Kay Crowder, who pushed her colleagues to award NeighborHealth Center the money, announced that she had changed her mind and wanted to rescind the grant.
Matt Ballentine doesn’t see what the big deal is: “This happens all the time with Catholic and Muslim nonprofits, hospitals, and universities. What exactly is the difference here? Of course they are personally pro-life but also have to abide by the patient’s choice. The connection to conversion therapy is a stretch. According to their website, they have twenty-three partners, including six different churches of various backgrounds, homeless shelters, and the YMCA. So because one of these twenty-three partners has a link on their own website for Beyond Imagination, it’s implied that this community health center is complicit as well? I’m glad they were awarded this grant. This article states that they’ve seen 1,190 uninsured patients. That’s an amazing thing.”
Amy Simpson doesn’t think it’s quite so amazing: “How was this even a consideration? The description [of NeighborHealth as] ‘faith-based’ should have been all they needed to know to decline the grant. The First Amendment prohibits giving public funds to religious organizations.”
And George Greene writes that council member Stef Mendell’s rationale for saying that NeighborHealth should keep the money even though she thought the council’s decision was a mistake “is plumb stupid. No matter how good their work may be, there are plenty of other health-care-related nonprofits that could use that same money to do the same amount of good, without the pseudo-religious bigotry attached.”
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