This ain't pretty but it's not meant to be a reason to declare defeat. We have two options -vote like mad and plan to fight just in case they do take over.
But declaring defeat should never be an option.
From Reuters:
U.S. Republicans in Congress are lining up behind legislation that critics say would roll back protections for transgender people, setting a playbook for action on a divisive social issue should they take control of Congress this fall. The bills have no chance of becoming law this year, as Democrats narrowly control both chambers of Congress.But they are a sign that Republicans aim to elevate a battle over transgender rights that has so far largely played out at the state level. Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would block federal funding to colleges where transgender women are allowed to participate in sports with cisgender women. A separate bill would allow transgender people to sue medical personnel who helped them transition as minors.
Another bill would block funding to schools that disobey state laws regarding "materials harmful to minors," mimicking state laws that have been used to remove books discussing history around race and LGBT themes. The bills have support from key Republicans in the House and Senate. Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has promoted the sports bill at a press conference and in a conservative newspaper. It is backed by 127 of 211 House Republicans.In the Senate, five Republicans have sponsored a version of the bill targeting medical providers, including Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. Republicans would be in a position to advance those bills next year if they win control of the House or the Senate in the Nov. 8 midterm elections, which analysts say is likely.
According to the Sun Sentinel:
Friday’s meeting drew more than 150 people, with supporters of the proposed rule — many of them sporting “Let Kids Be Kids” decals and making biblical references — vastly outnumbering opponents. Speakers supporting the proposal included a Baptist minister, members of the Florida Citizens Alliance, the head of the Christian Family Coalition, the founder of the Florida Prayer Network, a representative of the Florida Federation of Republican Women and a man carrying a giant American flag on a pole.
As Florida policymakers pursue state-level restrictions on transgender care, legal and medical experts from Yale Law School, the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center and Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, University of Texas Southwestern, and University of Alabama at Birmingham have released a new report that identifies and refutes the many unscientific claims behind the effort. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration’s (AHCA) June 2 Report alleges that nationally accepted standard medical care for gender dysphoria does not meet generally accepted medical standards for Medicaid coverage. A team of seven scientists and a law professor argue the State of Florida’s position is “thoroughly flawed and lacking scientific weight.”The report, “A Critical Review of the June 2022 Florida Medicaid Report on the Medical Treatment of Gender Dysphoria,” represents the first comprehensive examination of Florida’s June 2 Report, which the authors contend is a misleading document intended to justify denying Florida Medicaid coverage for gender dysphoria treatment. Nothing in Florida’s June 2 Report calls into question the scientific foundations of standard medical care for gender dysphoria, according to the authors.
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| Florida governor Ron DeSantis |
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| Along with the late Antonin Scalia, the religious right have been engaging in an extensive program to influence two other SCOTUS justices through meals and entertainment. Guess who they are? |
The Family Research Council’s multimillion-dollar headquarters sit on G Street in Washington, D.C., just steps from the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a spot ideally situated for its work as a right-wing policy think tank and political pressure group.From its perch at the heart of the nation’s capital, the FRC has pushed for legislation banning gender-affirming surgery; filed amicus briefs supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and advocated for religious exemptions to civil rights laws. Its longtime head, a former state lawmaker and ordained minister named Tony Perkins, claims credit for pushing the Republican platform rightward over the past two decades.What is the FRC? Its website sums up the answer to this question in 63 words: “A nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to articulating and advancing a family-centered philosophy of public life. In addition to providing policy research and analysis for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, FRC seeks to inform the news media, the academic community, business leaders, and the general public about family issues that affect the nation from a biblical worldview.”In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, though, it is also a church, with Perkins as its religious leader.According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and given to ProPublica, the FRC filed an application to change its status to an “association of churches,” a designation commonly used by groups with member churches like the Southern Baptist Convention, in March 2020. The agency approved the change a few months later. The FRC is one of a growing list of activist groups to seek church status, a designation that comes with the ability for an organization to shield itself from financial scrutiny. Once the IRS blessed it as an association of churches, the FRC was no longer required to file a public tax return, known as a Form 990, revealing key staffer salaries, the names of board members and related organizations, large payments to independent contractors and grants the organization has made.
Join Family Research Council and FRC Action for our second annual Pray Vote Stand Summit! We will equip and encourage believers as we discuss current cultural issues impacting faith, family, and freedom and evaluate these through the lens of a biblical worldview. We will cover important topics like protecting the unborn, the importance of the nuclear family, domestic and international religious liberty, and our education system as well as ways we can act and influence these for the benefit of our families, churches, communities and nation. As we do this, the PVS Summit will encourage believers to embrace the true source of our strength, the Lord Jesus Christ and His Word. Join us as we pray, vote, and stand in these challenging days!
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the FRC, Liberty Counsel and the American Family Association as hate groups for their anti-LGBTQ stances and advocacy. But (the Political Research Associates researcher Fred) Clarkson . . . said focusing on that designation misses the larger sphere of the FRC’s political influence. In recent years, he said, the FRC’s rhetoric and actions have influenced politics away from democracy and in a direction that is “distinctly theocratic.”“Abortion and LGBT issues are not the war,” he said. “They’re battles in the war.”
Haters tried. Haters failed.
From MSN:
About 100 activists lined the sidewalk outside of Hamburger Mary's, an LGBTQ-friendly restaurant in downtown, Sunday to stand against a handful of anti-transgender protesters from North Texas who came to demonstrate outside a drag show at the restaurant.The dozen or so protesters with Protect Texas Kids, a group that claims children are being “indoctrinated” by gay and transgender activists, were largely drowned out by boos and chants from the counter-protesters who vastly outnumbered them. “Stop the hate, stop the fear, everyone is welcome here,” the crowd chanted. Soon after the protest started, a small group of men, some of them wearing Nazi regalia, arrived to join the anti-trans protesters, shouting homophobic slurs and Nazi slogans across Prairie Street.. . . Outside the restaurant on Sunday, the 100 or so counter protesters danced along to the disco and funk music booming from Hamburger Mary's, holding up large cloth banners to protect patrons from view and cheering when some of the performers came out to take pictures. The anti-trans demonstrators and counter-protesters lobbed insults at each other from across Praire Street, but the standoff never amounted to a physical confrontation.(Kelly) Neidert, a well-known conservative activist, said her group traveled from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, to denounce a performance that she acknowledged was taking place at a privately-owned business, but one that she said was “inherently sexual.” “I don’t think parents should be allowed to take their kids to these events, and I think that there should be a law banning it from happening,” Neidert said.The anti-trans demonstrators left Hamburger Mary’s after about three hours, followed shortly after by the counter-protesters. For the counter-protesters, their large turnout, compared to the paltry showing from the anti-trans demonstrators, was proof that Houstonians would not abide hate.
Have y'all heard of this new anti-LGBTQ group called 'Gays Against Groomers.' The group will have you to believe that it is a coalition of gays who think that the 'radical gays' are making us all look bad supposedly sexualizing and indoctrinating kids. It's the old "America would accept and tolerate LGBTQ people if we didn't try so hard to be outrageous' argument on steroids combined with the even older lie that LGBTQ people are 'recruiting' children.
We know nothing about this group except for how it conveniently sprang up on Twitter out of nowhere, appropriates right-wing lies against LGBTQ people, and that the conservative propaganda industry is trying hard to make it seem legitimate.
I say it's all astroturfed bullshit, probably from the same grimy political crevice which created and funds that droll Libs of TikTok. And like Libs of TikTok, 'Gays Against Groomers' uses the modus operandi of mischaracterizing tweets and slandering people as examples of LGBTQ people supposedly sexualizing children.
Or, as the tweet below shows, making up all sorts of nonsense about LGBTQ people, teachers, and drag queens which borders on parody.
Even the name is a joke. 'Gays Against Groomers' or 'GAG' for short? Does the group even know the irony of it all? It claims to be against sexualization while reeking of sexualization.
If the group isn't legitimate, it wouldn't surprise me. Far right conservatives have a tract record of making fools of themselves when they attempt to portray themselves as "appropriate gays." Of course if this group is in any small way legitimate, then it's obvious that its either telegraphing some serious internal homophobia or some serious carnal desires which I suggest its members need to take care of instead of pushing up on the rest of the LGBTQ community.
Hating on us ain't gonna get you laid.
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| SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas wants to revisit decisions favoring LGBTQ Americans. Rolling Stone magazine just pointed out a possible breach of ethics between him and an anti-LGBTQ hate group. |
This article from Rolling Stone magazine needs more attention. It underscores just how brazen far right conservatives and some SCOTUS justices are:
At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court. Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded.“You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
With the expansion of equal rights for LGBT people, especially, the Liberty Counsel has come into their own, working to attempt to ensure that Christians can continue to engage in anti-LGBT discrimination in places of business under the guise of “religious liberty.”Through lawsuits and its annual Awakening conference in Orlando, the Counsel attempts to enforce the idea that Christian beliefs and law trump all other law. Staver has warned about homosexuality, abortion, and the consequences for Christians who oppose homosexuality and marriage equality, saying they will be targeted for their views. He even went so far as to call for a new revolutionary war as marriage equality advanced. In March of 2015, Staver stated that he would personally advocate disobedience to any U.S. Supreme Court ruling that favored marriage equality, and that “collectively, we cannot accept that as the rule of law.”During the 2015 brouhaha over Indiana’s religious freedom law, Staver likened “the homosexual lobby” to terrorists, claiming that “it’s hard to negotiate with people who are irrational and who are inventing things that simply don’t exist.” He has also supported the criminalization of homosexuality both in the U.S. and in other countries, stating in one instance that Malawi’s anti-homosexuality laws were in its “own best interests” after the U.S. reportedly withheld monetary aid to the country because of its efforts to outlaw homosexuality.In the Counsel’s amicus curiae brief in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas lawsuit in which the Supreme Court decriminalized sodomy, the attorneys writing (including Staver) called for the court to uphold anti-sodomy laws, stating that “This Court again should decline to deprive states of the power to enact statutes that proscribe harmful and immoral conduct.” The Liberty Counsel went on to say that statistical evidence “demonstrates, however, that those who engage in homosexual conduct are at increased risk for numerous diseases as compared to heterosexuals.”
Every group has to deal with stereotypes created out of prejudices. And of course that includes LGBTQ people.
I made a short list:
We are trying to recruit children
We like lots of sex, the unhealthiest the better
We are disease ridden individuals
We are criminals
We hate Christians
It's same message Anita Bryant pushed in the 70s, the Moral Majority pushed in the 80s, the religious right pushed in the 90s, and the same message we are being bombarded with today by people like Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, Seth Dillon, and the rest of that bunch.
And like in the past, it's being prettied up and disguised behind the veneer of parental rights, protecting the children, religious liberty or whatever boardroom concept conservatives have dreamed up. But as difficult as it is, we must never forget the rip off the mask every chance we get and expose just what we're dealing with.
When you rip away the disguise, below is what you see. Lies, lies, and more lies.
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| Kari Lake |
