They claim trans kids needing to use the toilet are a threat needing to be addressed at the highest levels of government but kids who cannot even get a license to drive, cannot sign for their own medical care, cannot buy alcohol, have known lack emotional and judgment control at this stage of development / age in their lives can walk around with weapons with mass killing capacity in public with no restrictions. Tell me what really the indoctrination is, what really is the harm to society. This is the republican ideology that makes no public safety sense at the same time republicans claim that drag queen reading hours where men dress up in costume to read to children with adults present are a danger to children and society. WTF! These republicans want to destroy civil society, and install some kind of dystopian mythical wide west macho idea that never existed. In the real history, western towns and cities had strict no carry gun laws. Guns for most people were tools rarely carried. They were expensive and ammo also expensive and hard to get / store. Think about it, there was no Amazon or large guns / ammo store nearby to just walk over to and get a few hundred rounds. I wish these people would learn history and reality and get their heads out of right wing mythology. Hugs
Missouri’s Republican-led House on Wednesday voted against banning minors from openly carrying firearms on public land without adult supervision.
The proposal to ban children from carrying guns without adult supervision in public failed by a 104-39 vote. Only one Republican voted in support of it.
Democratic Rep. Donna Baringer said police in her district asked for the change to stop “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St. Louis carrying AR-15s.”
“Now they have been emboldened, and they are walking around with them,” Baringer said. “Until they actually brandish them, and brandish them with intent, our police officers’ hands are handcuffed.”
The measure was part of an hours-long House debate on the best way to fight crime, particularly in the St. Louis area.
Republican Rep. Lane Roberts —- a former Joplin, Missouri police chief and state public safety director — initially included the restrictions on children possessing guns in a broader crime bill, which the House voted to give initial approval to later Wednesday. But lawmakers on a House committee that Roberts leads stripped the provision on guns last week.
“Every time we talked about the provision related to guns, we knew that that was going to be difficult on our side of the aisle,” Roberts said Wednesday.
Republicans decried the effort as an unneeded infringement on gun rights.
“While it may be intuitive that a 14-year-old has no legitimate purpose, it doesn’t actually mean that they’re going to harm someone. We don’t know that yet,” said Rep. Tony Lovasco, a Republican from the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon. “Generally speaking, we don’t charge people with crimes because we think they’re going to hurt someone.”
Other provisions in the measure would allow the governor to appoint a special prosecutor in counties with high crime rates, a provision targeted at St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner.
Republican lawmakers for years have criticized Gardner, a 47-year-old Democrat first elected in 2016 as St. Louis’ first Black female prosecutor.
She is one of several progressive prosecutors elected in recent years with a focus on creating more fairness in the criminal justice system. But Republican lawmakers say she’s not doing enough to fight crime.
This is great. The short post details his upset and anger at a lot of religions being accepting of gay people. Many have come to the idea that the sin is the sex act not the person’s orientation, and some sects are allies and supportive of gay people and same sex relationships. But you see this interferes with their grift of raising money from bigots, mostly older religious people who are sure gays being allowed to exist in society will anger the god of all things to the point he will destroy or hurt the entire country including maybe them. If most churches catch up with the modern era, well the people won’t be told how bad and evil it is so they won’t give up their merger social security check or make the big donations these hate groups have come to depend on to keep them living well. Think of the fund raising pitches they have lost recently. They can not raise money on stopping abortion after the SCOTUS gave a completely religious ruling on the issue. They fund raised hard to stop same sex marriage before the congress and Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act with every pitch saying they could stop it if you gave just another donation. But of course, they failed again. Now Brian Brown has another pitch about the gays he is pushing to grift more money. That is not to say these people are not dangerous and that they don’t still have a lot of inflance on the right with the republican leaders. Bigotry and fear raise a lot of cash and gets votes. And both the republicans and the fundamentalists / evangelical religious groups do want to wipe the LGBTQ+ out of society to install their religious doctrines into laws to regress the US society back to the past and keep it there. Simply put their comfort zones and what they can deal with is 70 or 80 years old, and their holy book is stuck in the deep past of 2,500 years ago. They can not accept the modern age when their all knowing god only knew what was accepted by a minority 2,500 years ago. Hugs.
Want to live in a theocracy? This is the situation in the US, we have a set of Christian Nationalist aided by traditionalist conservatives that think 1950s was the golden days in society in the US. This is not just an attempt to roll back the advances in society the last 70 years, changes that are normal if you look at history, this is an attempt to lock all of society to a point in the past with it never changing. We are at a very dangerous point in history. Look how this people project their actions on others claiming the LGBTQ+ and their supporters are violent thugs, are brown shirts and SS troopers, are intolerant of others views, all the things these Christian nationalists do to the LGBTQ+ community. You don’t see the LGBTQ+ removing Christian books or the bible from libraries defunding them for having books with Christian characters, attacking churches or places where bible studies are happening. The Christians are not the victims here. Hugs
OT. I am really trying to post and to make sense of the information. I had a setback with my pharmacy for the new medication my pain doctor prescribed due to the Florida government’s laws so I had to call them, and it will be three days from when prescribed to when I may be able to get it. There were other problems. The pain doctor removed one medication to add another stronger one, but that caused a problem with the pharmacy which is under threat from the Florida government on any pain medication. I hurt so bad right now in back, arms, legs, fingers that I can hardly reason and make this post. The doctor offered me several different changes of medications including OxyContin and its versions, Vicodin, and the one that scares me the most Fentanyl. They agree I need more pain relief than I am getting. They scheduled an appointment next month for an injection into my T6 /T7 vertebrae but there is also a problem with my T8 vertebrae. Another issue is under Medicare I can only get 4 injections a year in any one area. Plus another issue is the amount of steroids I can take with my poor bones VS the number of injections I need to relieve the pain. Also remember the state of Florida legislators think they know more than the trained professions so they restrict the help I can get. The important thing is my doctors now all agree I am beyond functioning, and they need to go to a higher level to help me. Also a side note: I got a jury summons. I showed it to my pain doctor. She said no way you can do that; they would be calling an ambulance if you tried. She wrote a letter to the clerk of court and had her office fax it to them. I also sent an email to the clerk of court with the same. I got a reply very shortly saying I was permanently removed from jury duty. Understand I have done jury duty before, and I take it seriously and back then wanted to do it. I even might say I enjoyed doing it. But there is no way I can do so now when I cannot sit to read news or even handle my blog that I love. Hugs
He tried to de-fund Sesame Street for letting a gay actor appear on the show. Now he’s taking on the drag queens running America.
A staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ Arkansas Republican is warning his constituents about the dangers of drag queens “running this place” and said that Christians have to “take authority” over the government in the U.S.
“We must take authority,” Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R) said on his Save the Nation with Jason Rapert broadcast. “God told us to go out there and be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth, subdue it, and have dominion over everything.”
“Friends, the reason the country is struggling,” he continued, “is because the Christians in America have failed to take authority and now is the time to choose, now is the time to stand.”
“Look, do you think that America is gonna be free with a bunch of drag queens running this place? No!” he said, not mentioning any drag queen by name who is in a position of political power in the federal government. There is only one known former drag queen in Congress, Rep. George Santos (R-NY), and he haspromoted staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ political positions.
“If you’re tired of that stuff, it’s time to make a change,” Rapert continued.
“This is a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people. It was created for you to be in charge,” he said, likely referring to his conservative constituents and no one else.
Former Arkansas state senator and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers Jason Rapert declares that Christians “must take authority” over government: “Do you think that America is gonna be free with a bunch of drag queens running this place?” pic.twitter.com/cUp6pyr4XF
Former Arkansas state senator and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers Jason Rapert declares that Christians "must take authority" over government: "Do you think that America is gonna be free with a bunch of drag queens running this place?" pic.twitter.com/cUp6pyr4XF
Rapert has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ statements and actions. In 2020, he suggested cutting off funding for PBS because out actor Billy Porter was going to appear on an episode of Sesame Street.
“I can pass a bill to cutoff all funding for the rebroadcast of PBS programming through AETN [Arkansas’s PBS affiliate] and also stop all funding for AETN altogether if necessary,” he wrote on Facebook at the time.
In a separate Facebook post, Rapert claimed to have signed a petition to stop Porter from appearing on Sesame Street, a petition started by Canadian rightwing website Lifesite News that claims to have over 38,000 signatures.
The petition said that Sesame Street was trying “to push drag queens on children,” even though Billy Porter isn’t a drag queen. It claimed that Porter’s appearance on the show would “sexualize children” and cited a statistic about the epidemic of suicide among transgender youth, implying that Sesame Street will turn kids transgender and being transgender leads to suicide.
“The LGBT activists who behave as Nazis are trying to ruin anyone who ‘disagrees’ with them – even grandmothers,” he said on Facebook. “Simply believing in the Bible is offensive to these activists. They can’t stand it if you disagree. They demand full compliance with their diminished morality. They clearly behave just like the ‘brown shirts’ and ‘SS’ troops that Nazis used to destroy Jews and anyone who disagreed with the Nazi ideology.”
“I don’t care what THEY believe, but I refuse to let them intimidate those who disagree with them,” he continued. “Our laws should not give special protections to people who behave this way. It is a sad time in American history.”
That same year, he tried to get the Arkansas Senate to ban marriage equality despite the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges protecting same-sex couples’ right to get married in every state. He claimed that a “silent majority” spoke out against equal rights in the 2016 election and “they’re going to speak again.” His bill failed.
“It is not bigoted to say that marriage is between a man and a woman,”he said at the time.
In 2020, he spoke out against his state’s mask mandate, calling measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic “draconian measures” as originating from “liberal hacks” who are “spreading fear.”
“There is no question that Covid19 is serious and can be very deadly for those with underlying conditions and the elderly,” he wrote in a Facebook post about then-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s (R) mask mandate. “But the fact is 99% of our nation has not been afflicted and this pandemic is no worse statistically than other severe outbreaks we have endured without draconian measures isolating the healthy and shutting down our entire economy.”
By July 2020, he had been hospitalized for pneumonia after testing positive for COVID-19. He told his supporters that his family was “sincerely grateful for the many prayers of love and support that have been expressed on our behalf.”
This bill is specifically aimed at gay and trans people, especially gay and trans kids. In the article on Rep talks about traditional values and we all know what that is code for. A view that society was better in 1950 when white Christian men were in assumed to always be in charge, women were subservient to those white Christian men, black people knew and kept to their place, while the LGBTQ+ were hidden from society never being seen or talked about publicly. These republicans want to enshrine in law the right to discriminate against those they think shouldn’t be in society. They want to have it be legal to show your displeasure / hate by denying people public services that are extended to the people they think are good normal people. If you think this is OK for doctors to deny care to LGBTQ+ people because they don’t like them, substitute black for LGBTQ+ and do you still see it as OK. I worked around doctors and I can tell you many are bigots and racists. Especially now that it costs so much to go to college and medical school new doctors tend to be from families of doctors. It is fast becoming a profession that runs in families while those not wealthy students tend to be come either Phyicians Assistants or go into nursing and become Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner. I have sat at the nurses desk and listened to the most bigoted religious doctors (Catholic doctors seem to have a huge moral superiority chip on their shoulders or at least the ones I worked with did.) talk about their patients / the families of patients that horrified me. I have told the story of a highly religious catholic doctor that refused to recognize or honor the legal paperwork giving a same sex partner authority over his lovers care going to the extent to contact the estranged family to instead follow their wishes. When told by the hospital legal department that he was not allowed to do that and to include the same sex partner the doctor came in, signed himself off the case, and left. Our ICU director had to scramble to find a doctor with the needed credentials to take over care as the patient was in an ICU which needs doctors with certain qualifications. The point was his bigotry and hate for gays meant more to him, was more important to him than the health of the patient, the patient’s wishes, or the patient’s long term same sex relationship. Think what would have happened had this law that they are trying to pass would have let that doctor do? How is that tolerable? Hugs
HB 303, which allows medical providers to decline services based on moral or religious beliefs, cleared a key House vote Monday.
State lawmakers in the House of Representatives gave broad approval Monday to a bill that would allow medical providers, health care facilities and insurers to deny services based on “ethical, moral, or religious beliefs or principles,” signaling the bill’s likely advancement to the Senate this week.
House Bill 303, sponsored by Rep. Amy Regier, R-Kalispell, passed the Republican-majority chamber largely along party lines, with 65 votes in favor and 35 against, after roughly 20 minutes of debate.
Regier portrayed the bill as a “preservation and protection for medical conscience” in the state for practitioners and health care institutions that object to specific “lifestyle and elective procedures” such as physician aid in dying, prescribing marijuana or opioids, abortion procedures and gender-affirming medical care for transgender people.
“To be clear, this bill would not give the right to refuse to serve a person. It would only apply to the narrow circumstances where a nurse or physician cannot conscientiously perform a specific procedure,” Regier said.
A subsection of the bill says it is not meant to conflict with the federal emergency health care access law known as EMTALA as it applies to health care institutions, such as hospitals. But the bill does not provide a holistic exemption for emergency departments and emergency health care providers. When it comes to abortion, for example, the bill would require providers to opt-in to participating in those procedures in writing beforehand.
Similar legislation has had recent success in other states. For instance, a Medical Ethics and Diversity Act was signed into law in South Carolina last spring. The legislation in that state saw support from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious advocacy group that is also backing the Montana proposal.
The opposition to South Carolina’s legislation, including from transgender patients and LGBTQ advocacy groups, echoes concerns now surfacing in Montana over HB 303. Medical associations and groups, including the Montana Hospital Association, Montana Primary Care Association, Montana Nurses Association and the Montana Medical Association, testified against the bill during a January committee hearing, saying it would put patients’ care at risk.
During Monday’s debate on the House floor, Democrats reiterated that the bill includes no discrimination protection for patients, and does not guarantee that a patient has a right to access health care even if a specific provider declines to participate in those services.
Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, told fellow lawmakers the bill would mean transgender people like herself could be turned away from medical services they need.
“What is actually going to happen is it will be a denial based on diagnosis. Something like, I am diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” Zephyr said. “And the thing is, that is inherently discriminatory because you cannot pass my diagnosis from who I am. To deny me based on my diagnosis of gender dysphoria is to deny me based on my being a trans woman.”
Republican moderates appeared to try and derail the bill by proposing a strategic amendment during Monday’s floor session.
As written, HB 303 does not apply to a “health care institution or health care payer owned or operated by the state or a political subdivision of the state.” Some Republican representatives showed interest in striking that provision from the bill, an amendment that would have triggered a higher threshold for the bill to pass because of a specific provision of the state constitution. That amendment, proposed by Rep. Tom Welch, R-Dillon, failed in a 39-61 vote.
Republicans who spoke in support of the bill on the floor said they hoped the bill would protect freedom of expression for medical providers, even those they disagree with.
“I think in this increasingly lack of traditional values and conscience world, and oftentimes profit-driven world, that protection needs to be provided for providers and health care workers that do have those values and do have that conscience,” said Rep. Jerry Schilling, R-Circle.
Other Democrats who considered the bill as part of the House Judiciary Committee urged lawmakers to consider the unintended consequences of the bill. Rep. Laura Smith, D-Helena, said she’d heard stories from parents of young children faced with challenging medical circumstances who feared that, had HB 303 been in place, their desires for care would have been trumped by the prerogative or ideology of their providers.
“This is just one of many examples that I receive where medical teams have tried to deny parents’ rights to choose procedures for their children,” Smith said. “If the bill passes, it will take away parental rights, and your constituents’ parental rights, to make these life-and-death procedural and medical decisions for our own children.”
The bill ultimately passed with widespread Republican support and one affirmative vote from Rep. Frank Smith, D-Poplar. Four Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in opposition.
If the bill passes a third, non-debatable vote this week, it will then be transmitted to the Senate and assigned to a committee for a second hearing.
Speaking to Montana Free Press Monday afternoon, Regier said she was pleased by the vote margin.
We are constantly being lied to by people online. These people are not your friends. Do not trust someone just because they claim to belong to your political “team”. The lying has become endemic. By design it has caused us to hate, fear, and fragment.
DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate
Facing accusations of whitewashing history after his administration blocked a new Black studies course for high-achieving high schoolers, Gov. Ron DeSantis has countered that Florida students already must learn about the triumphs and plight of African Americans.
State Sen. Jason RapertPhoto: Screenshot
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