Well, if it quacks like a duck...

As a New Yorker my wallet is painfully aware of that.

As I said, any state that wants to leave, go right ahead - we're not paying for them anymore.

Same goes for NY.

You want to leave the US? We're keeping all the money. No more funding ungrateful assholes sounds great!

In fact - we used to. Not in great detail, but we used to; it's pretty much what you said. I grew up in the 80s, which was this time everyone seems to look back on with crazy nostalgia. And some of the other similarly old people out there might remember this whole thing we had back then called an AIDS epidemic.

We had assemblies at school to talk about it. Videos in the classroom. All sorts of stories all over the media explaining that if you have sex, you have to be safe. Songs on the radio. Famous athletes, musicians - hell, your favorite cartoon characters were out there telling you about it. This led to a huge bump in sex ed all through the 90s (at least in blue states) which were well thought out and highly regarded. This was replaced during Dubya's reign in most places for abstinence only, but it very much existed prior to the backlash.

Exactly. "Absolutely no sex education before 3rd grade" is a pointless law - who exactly is teaching kindergartners about sex? - but that's a reasonable stance.

Unfortunately that is not what the law actually states: "[c]lassroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate."

This, of course, is overly vague.

What constitutes instruction - answering a student question? A discussion of a topic? A full lesson?

What kind of specific content are we addressing - the existence of LGBTQ people? What that term means? Gender roles and place in culture? Sex education?

Who decides what's age or developmentally appropriate? How do we decide this for an entire class of kids in later grades?

Nothing here is nailed down at all, and attempts to do so were quickly shot down to intentionally keep the language vague. This gives the bill the quality of having equally viable interpretations: one can correctly say that it prevents discussion of safe sex with kindergartners (good!) as well as discussions of historical figures such as Joan of Arc (who have defied gender roles of their time - which may or may not be part of the banned instruction) straight up to graduation.

It is true that the law does not specifically state that you can't say gay. It's also true that it's vague enough that this is an entirely reasonable interpretation of the restrictions placed upon teachers in any grade; since any arbitrary breach will result in penalty, it is indeed safer to simply never come close to any topic even tangentially related to sex or gender in any way.

It's not.

I hate needles. I've passed out from vaccinations before, even if they're not painful - I even had to sit for a half hour after a flu shot once.

Rabies PEP consists of 4 visits. The first is 4 shots of vaccine in the arm and immunoglobulin injected as close to the wound as they can get. The 4 vaccine doses were almost entirely painless - the immunoglobulin is not. It's thick and you get a lot of it.

The other three visits - at day 3, day 7, and day 14, if memory serves - are each just one injection of a dose of vaccine, and aren't any more painful than a flu shot. Generally you're a bit wiped for the rest of the day, but nothing terrible and no soreness the next day.

Unfortunately, the only place they have this is the ER. That can mean a long wait and some nasty bills. Better than rabies though.