DeSantis and his mindless minions are especially targeting the rights of LGBTQ students, because of ‘God’. Very dangerous shit.
Tennessee vs. Drag Shows. The parade of anti-drag show obsessives who have dressed in drag has already begun:
The law is part of a cascade of legislation across the country fueled by a conservative backlash to drag events, which has also spurred protests from far-right groups and threats directed at performers. Now that it is one of the first to succeed, with lawmakers in other states pursuing legislation with similarly ambiguous language, the law has prompted concerns about how it will be enforced and the implications it could have.
Proponents of the legislation have described it as a way to safeguard children, asserting that drag events can have sexualized language and suggestive performances that may be too mature for younger viewers.
Critics said the legislation reflected what many in the gay and transgender community have described as a bleak and dangerous climate in Tennessee, threatening people who are often marginalized and already uniquely vulnerable. The law over medical care has provoked the most alarm. The Tennessee chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics opposed the law, saying in a statement that it will “significantly limit our ability to practice to the standard of care established by numerous national medical organizations.”
Might as well say it: In Red America, members of the LGBTQ community are the successors to Germany’s Jewish community in the times of Hitler. Ignore what’s happening at everybody’s risk.
Get An Abortion, Get The Death Penalty. That’s what a South Carolina law would permit:
A bill currently in the statehouse could make the death penalty a possible punishment for women in South Carolina who undergo an abortion.
The bill aims to amend the South Carolina code of laws by adding sections that would define a person to include an unborn child at any stage of development, and to “ensure that an unborn child who is a victim of homicide is afforded equal protection under the homicide laws of the state.”
Vicki Ringer, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood, criticized the bill. “That’s a hard pill to swallow for anybody,” Ringer said. “To recognize that you are not valuable. To call this equal protection, it is far from equal. It is giving greater weight to a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus than it is to a human being. You can consider a fetus to be a person, but you can’t consider it to have more weight than the living person who is a life fully lived on this planet.”
If you think these three stories share a common thread, you’d be correct. The Rethuglican Party is fascist in every way, shape or form. Its enemy?: The ‘other’. Like ‘the trans’:
Sebastian Gorka, an alleged member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary who served as an advisor to former President Donald Trump, kicked off proceedings Friday morning from the main stage inside the Gaylord Convention Center. Democrats, he warned the crowd, are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.”
A short time later, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — a featured speaker at a white supremacist conference last year, where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and cheered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — took to the stage to make a big announcement.
“So last Congress, I did something radical and extreme because remember Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘she’s so extreme,’” she joked. “I introduced a bill called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act. And let me tell you my great news this morning, ladies and gentlemen: It couldn’t pass last Congress because Nancy Pelosi was the speaker of the House. She doesn’t believe in gender at all, but we have a new speaker in our Republican majority… and I’m going to be re-introducing my bill… that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender!”
The crowd roared. Greene’s cruel piece of legislation — based on a multitude of lies — would prohibit transgender Americans under 18 years old from receiving crucial health services that have long been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
Alaska Joins The Anti-LGBTQ Crowd:
In June 2020, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workplace discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity was illegal, Alaska quickly moved to follow suit.
It published new guidelines in 2021 saying Alaska’s LGBTQ protections now extended beyond the workplace to housing, government practices, finance and “public accommodation.” It updated the website of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights to explicitly say it was illegal to discriminate against someone because of that person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
The executive director for the state commission co-wrote an essay describing the ruling as a “sea change under Alaska law for LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights to be free from discrimination.”
But a year later, the commission quietly reversed that position. It deleted language from the state website promising equal protections for transgender and gay Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints. Only employment-related complaints would now be accepted, and investigators dropped any non-employment LGBTQ civil rights cases they had been working on.
An investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found the decision had been requested by a conservative Christian group and was made the week of the Republican primary for governor, in which Gov. Mike Dunleavy was criticized for not being conservative enough. The commission made the change on the advice of Attorney General Treg Taylor and announced it publicly via its Twitter feed — which currently has 31 followers — on Election Day.
Just so you know: I don’t, and didn’t, set out to turn the Open Thread into a themed piece. I generally start going through the different media sources each morning, and write blurbs on what interests me. Using that approach this morning, the theme just presented itself to me. This is very scary stuff, and I hope that you will all continue and/or step up your efforts to combat what is a clear move towards fascism.
What do you want to talk about?