Is the point we are at now, the anti-LGBTQIA haters can’t get the books they hate out of schools or public libraries, so they call the police and lie that porn is being shown to kids? These groups did a sneak attack and got into positions to act on their racism and their bigotry. But now people understand who they really are and the public is fighting back. The majority doesn’t believe what the haters do, just as the majority of the public doesn’t agree with the maga republicans and what they are claiming and want to do. Just as the maga republicans keep claiming that they speak for the country, they represent what the people want, which is clearly not true, it is the same with the haters. They also claim to represent the people, the public, the parents, everyone! Yet their ideas and what they want are very unpopular, so clearly they don’t speak for the majority, do they? This is like calling in bomb threats to stop drag shows. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t give you the right to deny it to everyone else. Hugs. Scottie
The ACLU is concerned about a police officer’s having searched a classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School for the coming of age novel, “Gender Queer” after receiving a complaint. The incident has prompted outrage in the school community.
AP FILE PHOTO
GREAT BARRINGTON — The plainclothed police officer who entered an eighth grade classroom to search for a book wore a body camera and recorded the incident, leading to more legal questions and concerns.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech advocates say they are alarmed by the recording, as well as the entire Dec. 8 incident that took place after classes let out at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.
They also say they cannot recall any instances of police going to a school to search for a book. Schools and libraries have internal procedures for book challenges.
“That’s partly what is so concerning,” said Ruth A. Bourquin, senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia. What are we doing?”
The Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee and Superintendent Peter Dillion have, in a statement sent to the school community Tuesday, apologized for how it handled the situation, stating “clearly and unequivocally” that it does not support book banning, and committed to making all of its students feel safe.
“The recent incident at the middle school has challenged and impacted our community,” according to the statement. “Faced with an unprecedented police investigation of what should be a purely educational issue, we tried our best to serve the interests of students, families, teachers, and staff. In hindsight, we would have approached that moment differently. We are sorry. We can do better to refine and support our existing policies. We are committed to supporting all our students, particularly vulnerable populations.”
The ACLU has requested that body camera footage and other records related to the complaint and the investigation, Bourquin said.
It was an anonymous complaint that led Great Barrington Police to open a probe about whether parts of the book, “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, could be considered obscene material or pornographic.
Police then notified the Berkshire District Attorney’s Office as per the department’s policy.
They also notified school and district administrators they were coming to the classroom, and the officer was escorted there by the school principal. The teacher, who kept the book in her resource library, was surprised to see the officer. The officer announced he was turning on his body camera and then looked for the book and did not find it.
The DA ordered the investigation closed. The matter of whether the book is appropriate now rests with the schools.
In its letter, the BHRSD School Committee said the incident “has challenged and impacted our community.”
“Faced with an unprecedented police investigation of what should be a purely educational issue, we tried our best to serve the interests of students, families, teachers and staff. In hindsight, we would have approached that moment differently. We are sorry,” the letter said.
The committee said it would work to collect feedback on how it can do better, starting by hosting a community meeting on Jan. 11.
“It is the obligation of the district to use its policies, existing or amended, to select curriculum. In this case, the content was not the issue. The process challenging it was. We want to ensure that students and staff feel safe and supported and that families’ voices are heard.”
“Gender Queer” is a coming-of-age memoir about reckoning with confusion about gender and contains sexually explicit illustrations and language.
It is this that many in LGBTQIA+ community say they believe is the reason for the censorship — not so-called “obscenity” concerns.
In Massachusetts the testfor obscenity is if the material is of interest sexually, depicts or describes sexual conduct “in a way that is patently offensive to an average citizen of this county,” and “has no serious value of a literary, artistic, political or scientific kind,” according to the state.
It was a complaint about so-called obscene materials in the classroom that police say led them there — something they said they had a duty to investigate.
But the ACLU’s Bourquin disagrees.
“We’re very troubled by this notion,” she said. “They say anytime someone could call they have an obligation to go marching into places wearing a body cam, and you know, interrogating people,” Bourquin said.
State laws, she said, are “pretty clear about police not having roles in this situation.”
Both the state and federal constitutions also protect the rights of students to receive information, she added, noting the ACLU and GLAD — Legal Advocates & Defenders for the LGBTQ Community — sent an open letter in January to school superintendents statewide given the rise in attempts to ban school library books.
The letter, also sent to the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, noted that legally such bans “may constitute unlawful discrimination.”
The letter says the courts “have recognized that the fact that some parents do not want their children to read certain books cannot justify depriving other students of their rights of access.”
The ACLU’s letter serves as a legal guide for schools and students’ rights to have access to information that is “free of censorship,” and says the ACLU stands “ready as a resource in this fight.”
The librarian at Du Bois middle school, Jennifer Guerin, made another point about that access. She said that it is “critically important for concerned community members to remember that the current situation is not about forcing a book into students’ hands.”
“It’s about the freedom to read,” Guerin said. “It’s about providing voluntary access to a well-written, highly acclaimed resource in a safe place for a teenager who might want or need it.”
A complaint that led police to search a middle school classroom for the book, “Gender Queer,” sparked a demonstration by Monument Mountain Regional High School students on Friday. The ACLU and other free speech advocates are worried both about the police involvement and about book banning in general.
HEATHER BELLOW — THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE
Using obscenity as an excuse to censor books with literary value is a heavy legal lift, said Bourquin. Obscenity laws have been “carefully crafted to ensure not tromping on constitutional free speech rights.”
If a book has value and isn’t meant to sexually arouse it will be hard for it to fail the legal test for obscenity, she said.
That test is “very specific,” and not something the average person or police officer necessarily would know, said Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition.
“It’s not a very easy test,” Silverman said. “And just because you have a community member pointing to something and saying, ‘That’s obscene,’ well, that doesn’t mean that it is obscene under the First Amendment.”
Like Bourquin, Silverman is stunned by the police involvement and thinks it wise to set a precedent for the future given the uptick in school book challenges.
“While it might be rare now, it doesn’t mean that it will be rare in the future,” Silverman said of police involvement in school literature. “I think the school and the police department have to come forth with a policy to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The American Civil Liberties Union says it has “deep concerns” after a police officer in plain clothes entered a classroom, turned on his body camera, and searched for a book someone reported was sexually explicit. https://t.co/Sn0hAqyuer
Someone called the police to report that a Massachusetts classroom was harboring obscene material: Gender Queer.
The book does not meet the legal definition of obscenity: "Many see it as an important story helping build empathy," said the superintendent. https://t.co/IzbIZ1k7RQ
Thug gang rule is the maga republican way. Hugs. Scottie
Colorado Supreme Court justices face flood of threats after disqualifying Trump from ballot
The latest round of threats fits a familiar pattern: Trump faces a legal setback, and officials face threats.
This report is on the lies and atrocious propaganda of Israel and it’s supporters. Israeli authorities themselves have lowered the number of killed by Hamas to 1,000. The lies about all the babies killed was debunked as only one baby was killed by Hamas and the burned babies and others turned out to have been by Isra
In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends.
At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign. Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.
Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court.
A "delicate matter." Hundreds of thousands in debt, Thomas privately told a GOP lawmaker that Congress should give SCOTUS justices a pay raise. If not, “one or more justices will leave soon.”
Clarence Thomas threatened to quit SCOTUS unless he could get rich, so Republican politicians arranged for billionaires to start inundating him with money and gifts in exchange for his continued service. He gladly accepted the trade-off. https://t.co/AIVt3gBXSl
Thomas wanted to hang out with the 1% and didn’t hear a 1% kind of income or have a trust fund. So he learned to grift off them. Honestly I’d rather do without than beg, but that’s just me. Like any of those billionaires ever considered him their equal. Is he that stupid? Yes. This is a man who doesn’t hang his law school diploma on his wall because he believes it is “cheapened” because he got in on affirmative action. (Which to me means he thinks he didn’t really deserve his spot in that year’s class. I’m tempted to agree but maybe his grades were that good.) He still had to do the work and pass all the classes to graduate. But that’s the chip on his shoulder. For me that explains a lot of what he’s like. He should never have been on the court, but Thurgood Marshall had resigned and Bush thought he could only get a replacement confirmed if he found a black conservative judge and who else was there? He’s the poster child for unearned promotion. And deep down he knows it and resents it. What else was there to do but cash in? What a sad, sorry, excuse for a human being. He’s unworthy to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Marshall much less sit in his seat.
His chip goes back further than that, to childhood color discrimination. He was known—to his Black classmates!—as “ABC”, for “America’s Blackest Child” (to be clear, as an insult).
If one goes deeply into debt on that income, it should raise questions about how competently one manages personal finances, sort of like those poor credit ratings adversely affecting getting a job.
That is more than a sufficient salary as it is. And I understand that at the time he complained, it was relatively higher when adjusted for inflation. It’s still a really good salary.
Israel pummels Gaza as Houthis vow more Red Sea attacks
Israel kept pounding the shattered Gaza Strip on Tuesday while Yemen’s pro-Palestinian Houthi movement vowed to defy a U.S.-led naval mission and keep hitting Israeli targets in the Red Sea.
Listen to the student. He makes it clear that the attempts by people like Bridget Ziegler and other haters to make only one man / one woman cis straight sex acceptable, the students still are tolerant of other ways to express sexual enjoyment. What the students are not OK with is the hate and hypocrisy. He calls her out for teaching hate towards same sex relationships and the LGBTQIA while engaging in lesbian sex and FFM sexual relations with her husband, again while demanding it is wrong to have sex out of marriage. Hugs. Scottie
As the Sarasota County School Board convened for the final time this year on Tuesday, Bridget Ziegler entered the board chambers facing a rift largely driven by agenda item No. 1: a colleague’s resolution calling for her resignation.
Zander Moricz, who was the class president at Pine View School in Osprey and now attends Harvard, said Bridget Ziegler deserved to lose her job, but not because of her private sex life.
“That defeats the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, which is that a politician’s job is to serve their community, not to police personal lives,” Moricz said. “So, to be extra clear Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job.”
Read the full article. The clip below has gone wildly viral with millions of views on TikTok, where I came across it a dozen times last night. Watch every second.
“You don’t believe in public schools — you send your kids to private… you deserve to be fired not because of a threesome, but because you are terrible at it.” pic.twitter.com/uehU7IIGp7
I would agree with that IF she agreed that other people’s private business is their own private business. But she vilified people for doing exactly what she was doing in her own bedroom. She’s bisexual but mistreated others for identifying as lgbt. She thought this was okay for others, so it’s good enough for her.
As J is pointing out, it’s not her sex life that’s the issue here – it’s her hypocrisy. Her bisexual, polyamorous sex life is evidence of the hypocrisy – that’s its only importance to anyone but herself.
That’s it. Her fellow conservatives would kick her off the school board on the irrelevant issue of her sexual “immorality.” He realizes it is her hypocritical judgmental sanctimony that is the real problem, not the issue of her private sex life.
The bottom line is this: Ziegler’s refusal to resign her School Board seat is more than just a morality play. If Ziegler steps down or is removed, three out of the five School Board seats, not just two, will be on the ballot in August 2024.
That’s right: What’s truly at stake here is that we could vote on a majority of the School Board’s seats on Aug. 20, 2024. And that would give us a chance to have a School Board with leaders who are more interested in students, teachers and academic achievement than posturing for a national audience in the culture wars.
“That defeats the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, which is that a politician’s job is to serve their community, not to police personal lives,” Moricz said. “So, to be extra clear Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job.”
I had to look up the kid’s sweatshirt and it turns out that “you give me the ick” is teen slang for being grossed out by someone, often for undefinable reasons.
I think it can be both at the same time. Sort of like one of our cats. She will watch the dogs play with a toy she wants. When they are outside, she’ll bat it with all her might to move it under something like a grandfather clock from under which the dogs can’t retrieve it. She can’t, either, but the satisfaction she feels is tremendous. I try to stay on her good side.
That’s part of it. It’s also racism. Private schools were rare in the US until local districts were losing the last of their desegregation lawsuits in the late 60s and early 70s. (Yes, I know Brown was 1954. It was up into the 1970s for many districts to finally comply!) And then homeschooling also for the same reason. They can say whatever they want and some of it is religious and political but a lot of it is not wanting their kids to get to know black and brown kids growing up.
Context: This isn’t the first time Zander made a headline.
The class president at a Florida high school says he wasn’t allowed to share his experience as a gay student in his graduation speech or how the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law will affect students like him, so he got creative.
This is not the serious stuff I normally post. But in a way it is. It is a wonderful story of a high school boy not sure of himself, a father that talks only about girlfriends to the boy, and about overcoming fears of not being accepted or fitting in. It is only 17 minutes long, wonderfully subtitled. Just click the watch on YouTube. Hugs. Scottie
Max isn’t sure about his sexual orientation until he meets Leon, his openly gay classmate at his new school. When Max is singing an original song at a school concert something beautiful happens.
This video quotes a Harvard study that show 36% percent of trans kids are sexually assaulted when forced to use the sex on their birth certificate rather than the bathroom they gender identify with. Then the video talks about how the anti-trans bathroom laws physically harm trans kids while not help cis kids to stay safe at all. It is not cis kids in bathrooms being attacked, but trans kids. Hugs. Scottie
Scottie's Playtime 