I apologize for not posting since Wednesday but I suffered a great tragedy. My mother passed away in her sleep after a long illness. She was my rock and my queen. She supported all that I did with all of her heart and always pushed me to be the best and fight for what was right.
Subsequently this blog will be taking a very short hiatus and will return sometime between Thursday and Sunday.
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| Libs of TikTok ended up deleting this tweet after it failed to cause outrage. |
Poor Libs of TikTok.
The site's latest attempt to portray teachers and LGBTQ folks as 'groomers' of children backfired. Hard. People ended up praising the high school for its innovation and fun. It's getting harder and harder to push that outrage mojo. And the tweet below is right. Sometimes the most annoying and dangerous people are the ones who see ugliness in everything. Especially in every facet of LGBTQ life.
Libs of Tik Tok deleted this video after people pointed out that this high school looks super fun. Imagine being so warped by hate that you see something sinister at work in this video https://t.co/a4KsPUHUx8 pic.twitter.com/uKl9gUbIF4
— Ari Drennen 🏳️🌈 (@AriDrennen) July 27, 2022
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| Ron DeSantis makes a claim about teachers which he doesn't back up |
This is the thing with the constant attempt to create outrage. You get openly desperate and downright ludicrous. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made a huge name for himself with the lie that LGBTQ people and drag queens are supposedly 'grooming' kids to be sexually active.
Now he has taken that nonsense a step farther. He definitely has presidential aspirations but with this new claim to his moral panic, DeSantis seems to be running out of juice.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) claims elementary school workers are "instructed to tell" kids to switch genders:
— The Recount (@therecount) July 27, 2022
"That is happening in our country. Anyone that tells you it's not happening is lying to you." pic.twitter.com/QSeBcYKL50
Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, continuing his months-long, fear-based attack on the LGBTQ community, appears to be claiming that elementary school teachers are “instructed” to tell children they they might be transgender, and insisting if anyone dares to disagree with him, they are “lying.”. . . “This will be for elementary school kids, where they’re instructed to tell them, ‘You may have been born a boy, that may have been what you said, but maybe you’re really a girl.’ That’s wrong. That has no place in school – so that is happening in our country. Anyone that tells you it’s not happening is lying to you,” DeSantis, talking very fast, says in the video.
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| Texas attorney general Ken Paxton |
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| Before it was passed in March, many people had serious problems with Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' law. Now, two lawsuits have been filed. |
Now we are cooking.
From The Hill:
Civil rights groups, including Lambda Legal and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in a lawsuit filed this week argued that a newly implemented Florida education law “silences and erases” LGBTQ+ students and families.“The law, by design, chills speech and expression that have any connection, however remote, to sexual orientation or gender identity,” reads the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court on behalf of 12 plaintiffs. The complaint is the latest challenge to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed by its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Plaintiffs in the suit are seeking to block the enforcement of the law within four Florida school districts.Under the law, which was signed by the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March and took effect early this month, public primary school teachers are barred from engaging in classroom instruction related to sexual orientation or gender identity. Public school educators through high school may not address either topic in a manner that is not “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” for their students. The measure also empowers parents to directly sue a school district if they are dissatisfied with its implementation of the law, which legal scholars have said will likely chill the speech of teachers fearful of unintentionally violating the law.“This vigilante enforcement mechanism, combined with the law’s intentionally vague and sweeping scope, invites parents who oppose any acknowledgment whatsoever of the existence of LGBTQ+ people to sue, resulting in schools acting aggressively to silence students, parents, and school personnel,” the lawsuit, also filed by the Southern Legal Counsel (SLC) and private counsel Baker McKenzie, reads.
Larkins, the founder and president of the school's Queer Student Union, testified against the Parental Rights in Education bill on the Florida Senate floor in February. Then, in March, Larkins taught their history class about the 1969 Stonewall uprising, a dayslong protest that began after a routine police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood. Video of Larkins' presentation went viral.Plaintiffs David Dinan and Vikranth Gongidi, a married same-sex couple, said they are "deeply concerned about the negative effect" that the law could have on their family. Their children, who are 8 and 9 years old, are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit.. . .Parents Jennifer and Matthew Cousins said they are afraid the law will harm their four children, particularly S.C., who is 12 and a rising seventh grader. S.C. came out as nonbinary last year and uses they/them pronouns, according to the complaint.
Another lawsuit filed against the law in March calls the measure a “blatantly unconstitutional” attempt to stigmatize and erase LGBTQ+ identities in Florida public schools. The complaint filed by Equality Florida, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and others names DeSantis, Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran and other education officials as defendants.
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| Ben Shapiro |
When I read mess like this, I don't know WHY folks think of arch conservative Ben Shapiro as a brilliant mind. There are so many things wrong with his tweet. Can you guess what they are?
For one thing, if you took Shapiro's argument further, one could say that there is no Constitutional right to interracial marriage. And isn't it strange (or convenient) how people like SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas formulates that same argument to use against marriage equality but not interracial marriage.
Could it be because Thomas is in an interracial marriage. That is a point we shouldn't be afraid to continuously make and amplify.
But more to the point, I personally think the Founders wouldn't laugh at the idea of marriage equality. I don't think they would recover from seeing a black president, women voting, etc. etc. It's rather an inane idea to actually talk about the intent of the Founders. Who cares what they would think? They are, for lack of a politer word, dead. We shouldn't be ruled by the wishes of deceased men particularly when, in spite of their attributes, they lived in a world of open racism, sexism, and extreme xenophobia.
Lastly, what's all of this nonsense about a sexual relationship. That's underscores the problem with people like Shapiro. No matter how many times LGBTQ people tell and demonstrate, folks like Shapiro are intent on reducing our relationships to that of carnality. It doesn't matter how long we stay together, how many children we raise, or our overall loving family situation. People like Shapiro see LGBTQ couples and they want to do is pigeonhole into matters of sexual intercourse.
They have every right to that opinion. What they do not have a right to do is impose it on us. Our relationships are also about love and commitment. No one has a right to minimize that. None of it.
