Nazis Target The Trans Community. How else should I phrase it?:
The Republican-dominated Kentucky legislature voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to override the governor’s veto of a bill that will create a host of new regulations and restrictions on transgender youth, including banning access to what doctors call gender-affirming health care.
The bill, described by L.G.B.T.Q. rights groups as among the most extreme in the nation, was vetoed on Friday by Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, but it was overridden in both the State House and Senate, where Republicans hold supermajorities.
The law, which began as a fairly narrow bill but steadily grew into a much larger package of restrictions, specifically bans surgeries, puberty blockers and hormone therapy for children under 18. It also forbids school districts from requiring or recommending that students be referred to by pronouns that “do not conform to a student’s biological sex as indicated on the student’s original, unedited birth certificate.”
The law also compels doctors to cease treating patients who are undergoing gender-transition care, adding that if physicians deem that ceasing treatment is likely to “harm the minor,” they may set a time frame to “systematically” phase out treatment.
The law is part of a wave of legislation filed in recent years by Republican state lawmakers to restrict and regulate the lives of transgender youth. At least 10 states have passed similar bans on transition care, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Tennessee and Utah.
On Wednesday, the governor of West Virginia signed a bill into law that will also ban transition care for minors unless the child has been “diagnosed as suffering from severe gender dysphoria” by at least two health care providers and has parental consent. In two more states — Idaho and Missouri — the passage of bans appears imminent, according to Erin Reed, a legislative analyst who is opposed to bills limiting access to transgender medical care.
The Nazis are coming for the Trans Community. It’s up to us to fight back.
How Disney Outmaneuvered Hapless DeSantis: AKA, when is a Board not a Board?
In apparent retaliation for the critique, DeSantis replaced the previous Disney-friendly oversight board known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District with a new board, the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, made up entirely of his own appointees, including religious and conservative activists. The board is responsible for approving infrastructure projects, as well as maintaining more mundane aspects of the park, such as trash collection and management of sewer systems. Disney would have been to some degree beholden to DeSantis’s board for its sign-off on major projects, in theory allowing it to hold sway over the company.
But in a bureaucratic coup, Disney and the previous board signed an agreement on Feb. 8 — the day before the Florida House passed a bill paving the way for the DeSantis appointees — that transferred much of the board’s power to Disney.
The new board, much to its chagrin, apparently discovered the agreement only recently.
“I’m surprised that they didn’t tell us about it as soon as we were appointed,” one of the board members, Brian Aungst Jr., told local station News 6 as the board held a meeting on Wednesday. “We had to find out about it late at night on a Friday night.”
Ron Peri, another board member, said at the meeting that under the agreement, “this board loses, for practical purposes, the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintain the roads and maintain basic infrastructure.”
Sad.
FACT: Israel Hasn’t Been A Democracy For A Long Time. Yes, it’s an opinion piece, but it’s a fact:
It is a fractious stalemate. But it is not new. Indeed, at its root is the more than 50-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. What has changed is that the right was once more content to follow Netanyahu’s lead, to let him “manage” the occupation as it entrenched itself more with each passing year. Now, the hard right wants to move beyond managing the occupation toward what some of its politicians, like finance minister Betzalel Smotrich, call a “decisive” moment – toward the final defeat of the Palestinian national movement, the de jure annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of the Palestinians living there. Rightwing control over the judiciary is the first step toward making this a reality.
For this reason, Israeli politics will remain fundamentally unstable as long as the occupation persists as a putatively temporary military dictatorship that Israel upholds indefinitely. Yet the problem is that the very same factors that enabled the protest movement against the judicial overhaul plan to swell to the size that it did prevent the movement making the conceptual switch that it must make if it is not to fight the same fight over and over again. It must move beyond a defense of the status quo against the threat to it posed by the radical right and toward a recognition of the roots of the right’s judicial plan in its annexationist and eliminationist agenda. But the occupation is precisely what many of the protesters – who draped themselves in Israeli flags, who took to the streets in their military caps and berets, who pledged only to return to serving in the occupied territories if the judicial plan was dropped – don’t want to talk about. The great unity of the protest movement was possible because it left thorny issues like territorial compromise to the side.
Yet Another Advertorial From The News-Journal. The beneficiary of this butt-kissing? Target. No, I will not excerpt. I would, however, appreciate some public explanation for the editorial policy guiding this almost-daily occurrence. Because, whatever it is, it’s not journalism.
What do you want to talk about?