I appreciate all the good words for this guy, but really, him doing his is not necessarily attributable to characteristics he may have due to autism. It’s because, in most ways, people with autism are like anyone else.

Excuse me while I miss the point, but that is a lovely baby name though. Carolyn Rose Brown sounds like fucking poet.

Haha I love that. My grandmother always said first babies get here when they get here, all other babies come in 9 months.

One of the more satisfactory things I’ve discovered in my dorky genealogy hobby is just how many of my super-religious, holier-than-thou relatives got married and had a baby five to seven months later. Of course these were all “preemies,” even though they were full birth weight and entirely healthy. Hmmmm.

It’s a food baby.

Isn’t one of the reasons it’s so dangerous is that, since it’s “not a sport” it doesn’t require the samE safety regs as football and “real” sports. (Also doesn't it have a higher injury rate then football??)

I go to a nurse-midwife for my lady parts care, and until I was ALL the way through menopause she reminded me often that it’s actually a fairly high-risk time for pregnancy—women assume they’re infertile or nearly so and get sloppy about birth control, and ovulation is unpredictable. She always made sure I had a…

I have had actual nightmares about this.

And teeth. I was babysitting one time and one of the kids knocked out his front tooth and I promptly put it in a glass of milk, just like the cartoon dinosaur on the commercial had been telling me for years. When his dad got home, he scoffed at me for doing that but later called me back to thank me because the dentist…

Eh. I was a cheerleader. Straight ponytails can get caught, too. If that were really the concern, they’d have everyone put their hair in a bun, and maybe under a swim cap for good measure. This is about aesthetics.

Yeah, I have a HUGE issue with how cheering is generally on the side of boy’s games still. In one school where I taught, cheering was very serious business, but they were still expected to decorate the boys’ lockers before games.

My problem with it isn’t the sport vs non-sport aspect (I don’t care about sports in general) it’s the “you must become a stepford doll to participate” aspect of it AND the insanely dangerous stuff they do with no safety gear. If I signed my son up for circus acrobatics class (a real thing where I live) he’d be…

Straightening curly hair can be just as damaging, if not more so, than curling straight hair. Now I am one of those people with stick straight, would not even hold a curl for an hour when I was in high school kind of girls, I have been where you have. But believe me when I say that my suffering to get curly hair has…

It looks pretty, but gets gigged for supposedly looking unprofessional. It’s sort of like big boobs — great for social situations, will block you from progress at work.

Four. Dear lord, that's crazy.

Yes. I was afraid too. And then I had a daughter. And my mother in law gave her a little cheerleading outfit. My husbands side of the family is Very Serious about cheer, I have kept my opinions to myself for years. ANnnnyhow my neice said “oooh! I had that! She can cheer like me!” And then basically I blew my cover.…

Exactly. They don’t have to be all the same height. They don’t have to be all the same race. They don’t all have to have the same color hair or length of hair, but the texture/straightness of the hair is now a thing? Bullshit. BULLSHIT.

Yeah, that is such a bullshit excuse.

Are you seeing the picture of her hair? Do you have any clue the amount of time and effort it takes to straighten that, and the damage it causes?

Have you seen the Penn and Teller’s Bullshit episode about cheerleading? It's fascinating and everyone should watch it right now. They discuss not only it's status as a sport, injuries (including interviewing a girl aho was paralyzed from cheerleading) and the bizzarre corporate conspiracy that owns everything from…