State Representative Ryan Dotson wants you to know that he is running for the United States Congress. He wants you to know he’s a veteran, a pastor, and a God-fearing man. But above all else (truly, above all else) he wants you to know that he has thought very deeply about penises.
Not his own, mind you. Other people’s. Where they go. What bathrooms they visit. What sports teams they might try out for. Ryan Dotson has given penises — specifically, penises he considers to be in the wrong place — more thought than most urologists.
His campaign flyer, which recently made the rounds on social media this week, lists his top accomplishments and priorities. Let’s review them together. I’ll wait while you get comfortable.
Item one: He authored a “Save Women’s Sports” bill, which — if you strip away the bumper-sticker polish — is legislation focused on who has what anatomy and where that anatomy may compete in volleyball.
Item two: He “led the charge” on stopping certain children from using certain bathrooms, which is to say he spent taxpayer-funded legislative hours deliberating over which restroom stall a ninth-grader walks into. One imagines the caucus meetings were lively.
Item three: He championed a ban on gender-reassignment procedures for minors, which, whatever your position on the policy, does mean his bronze-medal priority is also — you guessed it — about what’s going on in other people’s pants.
Three for three. A hat trick of crotch-focused governance. Give the man a medal, preferably one shaped like a fig leaf.
Now, I want to be fair to Representative Dotson. Farther down the flyer — well below the fold, as we say in the newspaper business — he does mention some other things. He is “Pro God, Pro Life, Pro 2nd Amendment.” He has been a pastor for 29 years. He was in the Army. These are, one assumes, things he’d like voters to care about. And yet his campaign strategist apparently looked at the full menu of conservative bona fides and said, “Lead with the genitalia stuff. Three times.”
One has to admire the commitment. In a political climate where candidates are expected to have positions on inflation, healthcare, infrastructure, and the national debt, Ryan Dotson has looked into the mirror and said: “I’m a one-organ man.” It takes real courage to run for federal office on a platform that could be summarized by a middle school health textbook.
I picture him arriving in Washington, being assigned to the House Ways and Means Committee, and immediately raising his hand. “Yes, Mr. Chairman, but have we considered what’s happening in the bathrooms?”
To be clear: voters are entitled to care about any issue they choose, and candidates are free to run on whatever platform moves them. But when a man puts on a suit, stands in front of an American flag, and tells you that his top three qualifications for federal office all involve the same six inches of human biology, it’s worth pausing to ask: is this a congressional campaign, or a TED Talk that took a very weird turn?
Representative Dotson says he’s ready to “take the fight from Frankfort to Washington.” One can only wonder what fight, exactly, he’s envisioning — and whether it requires a locker room.
God bless the Commonwealth.
