Rejecting the textbooks puts Miami in a precarious situation by leaving the school district without an approved sex ed curriculum for middle and high school students.
LGBTQ supporters and Democrats rallied against the legislation, branded as “Don’t Say Gay,” disputing that those lessons are being taught in Florida schools and maintaining that the policies would further marginalize LGBTQ students and their families. | Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Miami-Dade County students could go months without sex education books after school board members this week rejected two proposed textbooks over concerns they violate the state’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill, known by opponents as “Don’t Say Gay.”
The decision, which came down to a tight 5-4 vote on Wednesday, marks one of the first major instances of the contentious measure shaping local school policies, an action that came amid parents opposing the books for broaching topics like abortion and contraceptives.
Rejecting the textbooks puts Miami in a precarious situation by leaving the school district without an approved sex ed curriculum for middle and high school students with the fall semester less than a month away. Miami-Dade is the fourth largest school district in the country.
“Some of the chapters are extremely troublesome,” said board member Mari Tere Rojas, who voted against the books. “I do not consider them to be age appropriate. In my opinion, they go beyond what the state standards are.”
Wednesday’s vote came after three hours of public comment and debate over the two “Comprehensive Health Skills” books for students in middle and high school, texts that have been under scrutiny in Miami for months now.
Miami-Dade school officials recommended approving the textbooks following a public hearing on June 8 to field some 278 petitions against the materials, which the district denied.
Some parents argued the lessons extend beyond what schools should be educating students on sex education while others contested that rejecting the books would allow a vocal group to drive the decision for a school district serving some 340,000 students. The outcry in Miami against the sex education books included the local chapter of County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative group that aims to “defend their freedoms and liberties at the local level.”
Under Florida law, any parent can opt their child out of sex education lessons.
“Our current … process defends parents and their children who do not want to be exposed to this,” said Steve Gallon III, the board’s vice chair who supported the sex education textbooks. “But we cannot deny parents who want to have access for their children to this critically important information.”
The move by the school board shows how Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, passed earlier this year and championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is shaping school curriculum in the wake of its passage. The law prohibits teachers from leading classroom lessons on gender identity or sexual orientation for students in kindergarten through third grade. It also prohibits these lessons for older students unless they are “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”
LGBTQ supporters and Democrats rallied against the legislation, branded as “Don’t Say Gay,” disputing that those lessons are being taught in Florida schools and maintaining that the policies would further marginalize LGBTQ students and their families, leading to drastic outcomes like bullying and even suicide. The bill also sparked a fight between Florida conservatives and Walt Disney Co. after the entertainment giant said it would work to repeal the parental rights measure.
County Citizens Defending Freedom’s local executive director, Alex Serrano, claimed Wednesday that “significant portions” of the materials proposed in Miami-Dade “may violate Florida state law” and “much of the content is not age appropriate, usurps parental rights, and is scientifically inaccurate and not factual.”
In snippets of the textbooks circulated by the group, they highlighted lessons surrounding unplanned pregnancies that include definitions of abortion and emergency contraceptives like the Plan B pill.
One speaker at the board meeting claimed the books teach students there are “nine genders,” a likely reference to a page that describes a list of gender identities such as androgenous, cisgender, nonbinary and transgender. The Miami Herald reported that the school board removed the “Understanding Sexuality” chapter from the books for middle and high school students.
“Teachers that will be providing this material to children, which is illegal in the state of Florida, and the board that votes to adopt this, in the end — the country, the state and your community, will consider all of you groomers,” speaker Lourdes Galban, told the board during public comment.
The majority of speakers at Wednesday’s meeting, including parents and students, supported the sex education textbooks and pushed for their adoption. They said that the lessons were crucial for students, pointing to sexual activity rates among teens and that they “want kids to be prepared when the time comes.”
“Parents who wish to limit their children’s information about reproductive health have always had the option to opt out,” speaker Gina Vinueza told the board Wednesday.
“The proposed approval of the textbooks today would not take that choice away from them. However, if the board does not approve the textbooks, they will be taking away the rights of everyone to public ed that is based on facts and science.”
The board’s move to reject the sex education textbooks could trigger school officials to restart the adoption process for the classroom materials. School staffers at Wednesday’s meeting estimated it could take between four and eight months for different books to be approved, a timeline posing an issue for high school students on tap to learn those lessons in the fall.
Miami-Dade’s sex education curriculum is embedded in science and personal fitness classes, school officials said.
An arrest warrant was issued Thursday for indicted Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters after she allegedly violated a protection order and her bond conditions by contacting an employee of the Mesa County elections division.
The warrant alleges that Peters sent an email on Wednesday to Mesa County Elections Director Brandi Bantz — with whom she is barred from having contact — seeking a recount of votes in the June 28 Republican primary for secretary of state. Peters lost that race.
Peters previously requested a recount from the secretary of state’s office but did not provide the roughly $250,000 necessary for the effort. Peters was on the verge of arrest last week as well after she violated the conditions of her bond and traveled to Las Vegas without court approval.
Peters, an election conspiracy theorist who denies the results of the 2020 presidential election, is under a grand jury indictment for allegedly facilitating a security breach in her county’s elections office during a software update last year. She will be in Mesa County District Court for that case in early August.
But don’t they understand? She’s special, and she was robbed. She only lost that election because people liked the other candidates better, and that’s a violation of her Sincerely Held Beliefs? Letting her win would make Baby Cheeses smile.
Hildegard von Bingen (b. 1098), a German nun, was a woman of many talents: abbess, composer, mystic, writer, philosopher, and, perhaps most surprisingly, medical provider. And although it may sound implausible to the modern ear, Hildegard the Catholic nun—who is now sainted—also prescribed medicinal abortions.
In the medieval era, monasteries served as proto-hospitals, with nuns and monks tending injured and ill community members, soldiers, and travelers. Hildegard’s parents had tithed their tenth child to the church, so at age 14 she was sent off to a double monastery (housing men and women) in the Lower Rhine region. It’s likely she was trained as a worker in their infirmary.
Hildegard published several works on religion and science. She is believed to have begun writing her two massive medical texts, Physica and Causae et Curae, around 1150. In the books, Hildegard makes 437 claims of medicinal uses for 175 different plants. She describes the use of several botanical emmenagogues (menstruation stimulators) and abortifacients: asarum, white hellebore, feverfew, tansy, oleaster, farn.
In the case of asarum, also known as European wild ginger or wild spikenard, she explains: “A pregnant woman will eat it, either on account she languishes or she aborts an infant which is a danger to her body, or if she has not had a menstrual period for a time period so that it hurts.”
Hildegard prescribed other treatments specifically for “retention of the menses:” A bath of fresh river water heated with warm tiles and filled with tansy or chrysanthemum, mullein, and feverfew. The bath should fully cover the belly. Tansy is a well-known abortifacient. In addition to the bath, the person should “take rifelbere [barberry] and one-third as much yarrow, aristologia, and about one-ninth as much yue, and crush this mixture in a mortar. Put it in a little bag and then cook it in wine; add clove and white pepper (a little less white pepper than clove) and honey. Drink this daily both fasting and with meals… for five days or fifteen or until the matter is resolved.”
Many of the plants Hildegard mentions have been proven by modern pharmacological studies to be effective at bringing on menstruation or abortion, though it’s important to note that medieval preparations and dosages have not been replicated exactly.
Illustration of the flower, fruit, and root of a wild tansy plant. Plate 6 from Elizabeth Blackwell’s A curious herbal.
Blocked menses was seen as a problem in humoral medicine. And just like other types of bodily blockages (bowels, for instance), it required unblocking. A regular period was a necessary monthly expulsion of evil humors. Retention could cause “suffocation of the matrix.” Some scholars argue that treating retained menses was always about treating amenorrhea, in hopes of increasing fertility. But it’s very likely people also used these methods to end unwanted pregnancies.
“That the herbs widely advocated to stimulate healthy menstruation were also reputed to cause abortion created a zone of opportunity for women who resolved to terminate a pregnancy,” the historian Etienne van de Walle wrote in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
Prescriptions for birth control or abortion methods were widely circulated among medical professionals and also regularly appeared in household recipe books. The first century pharmaceutical textDe Materia Medica, by the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, lists 959 substances, 141 of which are noted to bring on menstruation, 49 to expel an embryo, 18 to terminate an embryo, and six to “cause abortion.” Such recipes regularly appeared in medical books throughout the medieval era, which suggests that abortion was considered a routine healthcare procedure.
Although these written medical texts are all that remain of women’s medical care during this period, much of the knowledge would also have been passed down orally from woman to woman, across generations. “[T]he presence of folkloric knowledge regarding the female body as well as the need to control the body’s reproductive purpose are difficult to ignore, particularly in light of many sources which seek to ‘move the menses’ or evacuate the womb,” writes Lydia Harris, a historian specializing in abortion and contraception in medieval Europe. It’s believed that Hildegard learned what she knew about the medicinal properties of botanicals, tinctures, stones, and animal parts not only from her superiors at the monastery, but from nearby folk healers and herbalists. That’s because her texts mix the Latin of traditional medicine with a healthy dose of German terms and folkloric wisdom.
A plant (Aristolochia rotunda L.) related to birthwort: entire flowering plant. Coloured etching by M. Bouchard, 1774.
At age 50, she decided to move north to Bingen on the Rhine and have a new monastery built for her. She would go on to spend 30 years as an abbess there. This is where she wrote her medical books and where she became a renowned medical practitioner.
“According to the monk Theodoric, who was an eye witness, she had to so high a degree the gift of healing that no sick person had recourse to her without being restored to health,” wrote the physician F. A. Reuss in the introduction to his 1855 translation of Physica. “It is certain that Hildegard was acquainted with many things of which the doctors of the Middle Ages were ignorant.”
If these medical handbooks offer a peek into the practice of abortion in medieval Europe, then laws and religious texts can tell us more about what society thought of abortion in theory. Opinions on abortion and contraception were as varied in the medieval era as they are now. Officially, the church considered ending a pregnancy a sin, though if done before the fetus was “formed” or “ensouled”—once the pregnant woman senses fetal movement, known as the “quickening”—it was a much lesser sin than a late-term abortion. Often, “quickening” meant the difference between one year of penance or three.
“From the earliest Christian times, churchmen had inveighed in vain against both contraception and abortion, and there is no doubt that common herbs with effective contraceptive and abortifacient properties were well known throughout early medieval Europe,” the historian Julia M. H. Smith writes in Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000.
What’s unclear is how far these teachings trickled down through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Did these dogmas make it into the sermons or guidance of local parish priests? Though fervently against abortion, one early church father preached the surprisingly progressive stance that sex workers shouldn’t be condemned for having abortions; her clients were to blame, not her. “For even if the daring deed be hers, yet the causing of it is thine,” Father John Chrysostom proclaimed in his Homily 24.
In the early and late middle ages, several secular law codes throughout Europe also punished abortions, but likewise typically considered how far along the pregnancy was and whether the woman’s life was threatened. Lawmakers also felt it was necessary to punish women who maliciously deprived their husbands of an heir. It was a wife’s duty to provide her husband with progeny; sabotaging that obligation couldn’t go unpunished. Overall, laws tended to be more concerned with another party causing the termination of a wanted pregnancy, either through coercion, poison, or assault.
Yarrow (Achillea santolina): flowering plant with leaf and floral segments. Etching, c. 1718, after C. Aubriet.
“Both intentional and violent abortion happened and were punished, but not always in the same way and to the same extent,” medieval scholar Marianne Elsakkers explains.
Women were largely the ones penalized. According to Elsakkers, several Old Frisian laws “explicitly associate women with poisoning, knowledge of herbs, remedies and recipes, and finally the female witnesses.” Similarly, Old Germanic laws “imply that women were the ones who knew the recipes for abortifacients, and that fertility management was usually women’s business.” But at least one law suggests “husbands could be involved in intentional abortion, and that they may have agreed to the procedure, or forced or pressured their wives into having an abortion.”
Abortifacient herbs were not without their risks. Depending on the dosage, there could be a fine line between efficacious and harmful. An overdose of asarum, for instance, can lead to paralysis; too much yew can cause heart problems or death. Many medieval laws regulated the supply of herbs classed as potentially poisonous. The fact that medieval laws and church texts address abortion suggests that it was a common enough occurrence to warrant mentioning and codifying, though just how often abortion occurred in the medieval era is impossible to determine. Lacking official data on abortions, historians must consider the fact that there likely was a gap between what the law declared and what happened in society.
“It is difficult to determine how much influence theologians actually had over the reproductive practices of medieval women, if they actually had any at all,” Harris concluded in an article in Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. Just how much sway official religious and legal doctrine had over what actually happened between practitioner and patient is tough to parse. Outside of monasteries, medicine was primarily practiced in the domestic realm, most often by the women of the house or by lay folk healers. Knowledge of basic medical treatments was an essential element of women’s household management. Most midwives were women, so their work faced less oversight than that of university-trained male physicians. The relative invisibility of women practitioners and patients rendered regulation of their interactions virtually impossible.
Elsakkers asserts that “in many cases probably no one else besides the pregnant woman and her (female) helpers would ever know about the abortion. It seems that resourceful women would have been aware of how their bodies worked, they would have known what to do, and whom to consult, when coping with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy.”
Bilberry plant (Vaccinium myrtillus L.): flowering and fruiting stems with separate floral segments and a description of the plant and its uses. Coloured line engraving by C.H.Hemerich, c.1759, after T.Sheldrake.
And just like in modern times, wealth and power meant greater access to abortions. Ladies of the court had storied apothecaries at their disposal, while the poor had to do with whatever they could glean or procure from folk healers.
“[M]edical treatises produced by and for wealthy Christian women across the Middle Ages… had a host of pharmaceutical contraceptives, various practices for inducing miscarriages, and surgical procedures for the termination of pregnancies,” historian Roland Betancourt writes in Scientific American. “[W]ealthy and elite Christian women had not only recourse to the best medical knowledge of their era but also the privacy to undertake these practices without shame.”
It may seem hard to square Hildegardean medicine with the religious beliefs she professed: a saintly Christian woman healer describing abortifacients. But Betancort assures us this was the norm: “When it came to saving a woman’s life, Christian physicians unhesitatingly recommended these procedures.”
Hildegard may indeed be a continuation of the tradition of saintly reproductive medical care. After examining hagiographies and other texts from 5th through 8th century Ireland, religion historian Maeve Callan concluded: “These accounts celebrate saints who perform abortions, restore female fornicators to a virginal state, contemplate infanticide, and result from incest and other ‘illegitimate’ sexual unions. Moreover, the texts themselves generally reflect a remarkably permissive attitude toward these traditionally taboo acts, an attitude also found in Irish penitentials and law codes.”
Medical providers understood that uterine diseases, pelvic malformations, age (too young or too old), and other issues could cause premature or difficult births that would endanger women’s lives. The loss of the fetus was seen as an acceptable price to pay for saving the life of the pregnant woman. The fourth-century medical writer Theodorus Priscianus likened abortion to pruning the branches of a tree or ejecting the cargo of an overladen boat during a storm.
“The overall consensus, although officially against any form of controlling procreation, was also sympathetic to the dangers that awaited women and the social implications that the loss of a mother would have had on a family structure if she were to die from an unwanted pregnancy,” Harris noted.
These views would have informed Hildegard’s ethos. Gestational age and, with it, “ensoulment” or “quickening” of the fetus were taken into consideration, but medieval practitioners prioritized the health and well-being of the pregnant woman.
After reluctantly agreeing to transfer power, the former president told aides he wanted to give a new White House address doubling down on the lie that the election was “stolen”
A video of former President Donald Trump is played as the Jan. 6 committee holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The day after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, then-President Trump released a video finally, reluctantly agreeing to a transfer of power to the “new” Biden administration. As soon as two days after the release of the White House video, however, Donald Trump wanted a mulligan.
A person with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone that Trump told aides who were sticking by him that he wanted to deliver another speech to the nation, one in which he would double-down on the lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” via “fraud.”
The re-do speech, which Trump envisioned as a primetime address, would have been a tonal 180 from the video the White House posted the day following the Trump-inspired mob assault. The source adds that the president would have directly attacked the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s incoming administration, and vowed to supporters that he would continue “fighting” for them.
Since he left office, Trump has — in a way — delivered the follow-up address that he never got to give while in the White House, when lawyers and close advisers were warning him of his potential criminal exposure after the deadly riot. The twice-impeached former president has for months been repeating his anti-democratic lies in numerous speeches, rallies, interviews, and online posts. He has tried to argue that the violence at the Capitol took place independently of his actions. He has come out in favor of the Capitol rioters while promising to pardon them if elected to another term. He has cemented his lies about the 2020 election as widely-held mainstream conservative positions.
Trump’s push to deliver a second speech countering the one he gave on Jan. 7 came amid an internal struggle over his post-Jan. 6 messaging. The Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the work of the Jan. 6 committee, reported on Wednesday that the former president stubbornly refused attempts by staff to get him to condemn the rioters in the taped statement from the White House on Jan. 7
According to the Post, “over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over.” Trump was allegedly loath to call off the dogs and only agreed to do so after staff reminded him that Congress was considering invoking the 25th Amendment against him.
The public could get a glimpse of outtakes from Trump’s attempts to deliver the address during Thursday’s primetime hearing, in which the committee plans to lay out what they say are their final public arguments in their case against Trump. The committee is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s inaction in the 187 minutes between Trump’s speech at the rally at the Ellipse, and his afternoon message telling the “very special” rioters to “go home.”
In a clip released on Thursday by committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh and former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testify that Trump remained in the presidential dining room watching news broadcasts of the riot unfolding at the Capitol.
The committee is also expected to detail how Trump reveled in the chaos and violence taking place at the Capitol. “He wanted to see it unfold,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) said this week, according to the Post. “And it wasn’t until he realized that it was not going to be successful that he finally stood up and said something.”
Please listen to this until it gets to Joe Biden. It is not long. This is why the Democrats are losing, why the young people don’t want to follow this party or vote for them. It makes me sick. Compare this to the fire brans on the other side, even to tRump. We are so screwed in the elections. Hugs
Sylvester Stallone is apparently ignoring California’s new rules aimed at conserving water during the current drought, and “End Of Days” star Arnold Schwarzenegger has been credibly accused of passing gas into a fellow actor’s face on the set of that film.
So for this week Ron has been trying to run a new exhaust fan in the hallway bathroom. When he built the bathroom, he added an extra switch for such a fan and ran the electrical wiring for it and placed it somewhere in the wall. Deactivated of course. He has not been able to remember where it was. So we went back and forth and I found a tool for finding wires in the walls this morning but he got a stubborn streak. Over the last two days he has torn all the ceiling down and insulation in our bathroom next to the wall that is next to the hallway bathroom hoping the wires would magically appear. And it did not. Now all this time I have been at my computers finding the device to find wires, but Ron has resisted going and getting it.
Then I had a thought, he has just insulated and put up the green board on our bathroom side of that wall. I suggested to him he install the exhaust fan in the wall between the bathrooms and run the flexible hose up to the vent to the roof inside the wall and that would let him work on the entire thing including putting in a new switch from our side of the wall. He thought for a minute, then looked at me and in all seriousness said, “Go back to your office I don’t want to talk to you right now”! Because he realized everything I said made sense. He would have had to tear down the entire ceiling in that bathroom which was grand looking, if he did not do as I suggested. He has gone off to Home Depot to buy everything needed to do just what I said. I asked him why he did not have the electrical parts already and his response was “I used them all, I need to buy more, why are you not in your office doing what you do, and by the way what do you want for lunch”! I think I have rubbed a sore spot. 😀😁😄😂😋😎😍 Hugs
This is a complete travesty. I understand why the family is upset. I have seen this before when white rednecks ganged up on small individual gay men and beat them to death. It was that way with one of my friends. The court did everything they could to help and excuse the men, and they got the minimum time outside the guidelines. The 6 of them beat a small man walking home from a night college class to death because they were afraid he would sex them. That was their defense. We were all angered the courts were protecting them, and I can understand why these family members are upset now. This man helped. He held the dying man’s legs. The murder got 20 years or more. This guy who helped him got 2.5 years? Something needs to be done about this, an investigation, an appeal of the sentence. This is clearly a racist finger on the scale of justice. Hugs
A federal judge sentenced former Minneapolis police Officer Thomas Lane to 2 1/2 years in prison Thursday for violating George Floyd’s civil rights, calling Lane’s role in the restraint that killed Floyd “a very serious offense in which a life was lost” but handing down a sentence well below what prosecutors and Floyd’s family sought.
Judge Paul Magnuson’s sentence was just slightly more than the 27 months that Lane’s attorney had requested, while prosecutors had asked for at least 5 1/4 years in prison — the low end of federal guidelines for the charge Lane was convicted on earlier this year. He said Lane, who faces sentencing in September on state charges in Floyd’s killing, will remain free on bond until he must turn himself in Oct. 4.
Lane, who is white, held Floyd’s legs as Officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd’s neck with his knee for nearly 9 1/2 minutes on May 25, 2020. Bystander video of Floyd, who was Black, pleading that he could not breathe sparked protests in Minneapolis and around the world in a reckoning over racial injustice over policing.
Floyd family members had asked Magnuson to give Lane the stiffest sentence possible, with brother Philonise Floyd rejecting the idea that Lane deserved any mercy for asking his colleagues twice if George Floyd should be shifted from his stomach to his side.
“Officer Lane did not intervene in one way or another,” he said.
Prosecutor Manda Sertich had also argued for a higher sentence, saying that Lane “chose not to act” when he could have saved a life.
“There has to be a line where blindly following a senior officer’s lead, even for a rookie officer, is not acceptable,” she said.
Magnuson told Lane the “fact that you did not get up and remove Mr. Chauvin when Mr. Floyd became unconscious is a violation of the law.” But he also held up 145 letters he said he had received supporting Lane, saying he had never received so many on behalf of a defendant. And he faulted the Minneapolis Police Department for sending Lane with another rookie officer on the call that ended in Floyd’s death.
In sentencing Chauvin earlier this month on civil rights charges in Floyd’s killing, Magnuson appeared to suggest that he bore the most blame in the case, telling Chauvin: “You absolutely destroyed the lives of three young officers by taking command of the scene.”
Lane did not speak at Thursday’s sentencing and neither he nor his attorney, Earl Gray, commented to reporters afterward. Prosecutors did not immediately comment afterward, but Philonise Floyd called the sentence “insulting” and said he didn’t understand why Lane — whom he called “an accessory to murder″ — didn’t get the toughest possible sentence.
“To me I think this whole criminal system needs to be torn down and rebuilt,” he said.
Lane’s attorney had argued that he twice asked his colleagues if Floyd should be turned on his side as officers restrained him face down and in handcuffs, as he said that he couldn’t breathe and eventually grew still.
Magnuson also said he would recommend that Lane serve his sentence at the federal prison in Duluth, a minimum-security facility about 2 1/2 hours from the Minneapolis area. The facility is classified as a “camp” and has no fence and has dormitory-style housing rather than cells. Prison assignments are made by the Bureau of Prisons.
Gray argued during the trial that Lane “did everything he could possibly do to help George Floyd.” He pointed out that Lane suggested rolling Floyd on his side so he could breathe, but was rebuffed twice by Chauvin. He also noted that Lane performed CPR to try to revive Floyd after the ambulance arrived.
Lane testified at trial that he didn’t realize how dire Floyd’s condition was until paramedics turned him over.
When Lane pleaded guilty in state court in May, Gray said Lane hoped to avoid a long sentence. “He has a newborn baby and did not want to risk not being part of the child’s life,” he said.
Chauvin was already serving a 22 1/2-year state court sentence for second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. His federal and state sentences are running concurrently.
Kueng pinned Floyd’s back during the restraint and Thao helped hold back an increasingly concerned group of onlookers outside a Minneapolis convenience store where Floyd, who was unarmed, tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
Magnuson has not set sentencing dates for Thao, who is Hmong American, and Kueng, who is Black. But he has scheduled a hearing for Friday on objections by their attorneys to how their sentences should be calculated under the complicated federal guidelines. Prosecutors are seeking unspecified sentences for them that would be lower than Chauvin’s but “substantially higher” than Lane’s.
Thao and Kueng are free on bond pending sentencing. They have turned down plea deals and are scheduled to go on trial Oct. 24 on state charges of aiding and abetting both second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
if this is not bias, anti-black, pro white, pro-cop bias then I do not think anything could be. This is why Black people in the US do not trust the police or the courts. I don’t either and I am white. Fuck all of this it needs to be changed. Hugs
The House passed the Right to Contraception Act on Thursday ― a bill that codifies the right to birth control and other contraceptives amid fears that the Supreme Court may come for that aspect of reproductive health care next after the high court repealed Roe v. Wade’s protection of abortion rights last month.
The bill passed despite 195 Republicans who voted against the bill in a final vote of 228 to 195. Republicans who voted against the legislation included Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Jack Bergman (Mich.) and Joe Wilson (S.C.). Just eight Republicans voted in favor of the bill.
NEW: The House passed the Right to Contraception Act on Thursday despite 195 Republicans who voted against it. The bill would codify the right to birth control and other contraceptives. https://t.co/vVZBUKaP3O
228-195: House passes the bill codifying the right to contraceptives into law.
Only eight Republicans voted in favor of the legislation: Cheney, Mace, Upton, Kinzinger, Katko, Fitzpatrick, Salazar, Gonzalez (OH). pic.twitter.com/PqN6G2DsNO
It is not just the RCC that is against contraceptives. Many Evangelical churches and mega churches want younger women to stop delaying families and preach against it.
I once heard a mega church sermon blaming women for delaying families, and The Pill made them infertile. Of course the women had delayed pregnancies because they were educated and with their husbands were saving for the down payment on a house in the $$$$ suburb.
Some popular forms of birth control work by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. If they support this bill, it can be used to say they are not truly pro-life and support killing babies.
That’s probably the most likely explaination. Doesn’t Plan B work that way, and also IUDs prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. So they are more afraid of the Pro-Life people than the anti-gay people.
Perhaps the Federal Goverment, as they have classified Tomatoes as vegetables, can classify abortion drugs as ‘contraception.’
It’s like a group insanity that’s infected the party to the very top level. They don’t seem to understand how unpopular allowing states to ban contraception is because they’ve gone down this rabbit hole of “but the poor little (zygote) babies!”
![Demonstrators hold signs saying "It's OK to Say Gay!"](https://www.politico.com/dims4/default/c73e738/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5515x3677+0+0/resize/630x420!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F18%2F6e%2Fec74a44f4561a2a4a57edc8b3f5a%2Fflorida-same-sex-silencing-29222.jpg "Demonstrators hold signs saying "It's OK to Say Gay!"")
Scottie's Playtime 
