Why America hates its children
Last summer, my kids and I spent a month in Greece, where their grandfather lives. Time and again, I was struck by a public attitude toward children I seldom encountered in America: unequivocal support. On Athenian buses, women older than myself frequently gave up their seats for my 5- and 8-year-old daughters. On one trip, an older woman hauled my younger child up next to her and tucked her hand underneath my daughter’s elbow to prevent her from being thrown forward with every sudden stop. She
US top diplomat urges Israel to make hard choices, work with Palestinians
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israel on Tuesday to make “hard choices” to normalize relations with more of its neighbours, a new appeal to smooth the path to creating a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu condemns ICJ genocide case; Gazans return to wasteland in north
Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday condemned South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in Gaza as “hypocrisy and lies”, as some Gazans returned to scenes of total devastation in the north of the enclave where Israeli forces have begun withdrawing.
A U.N. court began hearings this week on South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide — a bid to stop the conflict in Gaza and document what the Palestinian ally calls Israeli forces’ “genocidal conduct.” The U.S. calls the case “meritless.” Anita Powell reports; Patsy Widakuswara contributed.
Again the point of making the laws so vague is to instill fear of violating it as no one really knows how much it covers. That is the point of all these laws from Texas, Florida, and other maga states. It is so that people have to go to the extremes to avoid lawsuits that the laws makes almost impossible for them to win. It is all about returning the US to a time when the LGBTQIA was not seen socially nor in media in any positive way. During that time any media mention of the LGBTQIA had to make them the villain and beware little billy of the homosexual man. Of course, little Billy was in far more danger from the local Priest who was presumed a holy wonderful man because he preached the good religion, Christianity. These people pushing these to remove all mention of LGBTQIA from media, books, libraries, rainbows from schools are driven by fundamentalist religion or a desire to return to a time more comfortable for them. A time that existed only because some people did not have full equality to live openly as who they were in society. They hate that equality, and they love to engage in oppression of others.
Then they use the excuse they are preventing indoctrination. Specifically progressive indoctrination. But when you have to remove dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, and Genesis book of records, and any positive mention or anything not cis white republican ideology with forced Christianity what is that? Right wing republican indoctrination. It is reeducation camps. It also is about creating a two tier schools system. The public system for poor people that prepares them to be low level workers / laborers, and the privet schools for upper incomes wealthy kids who will be the overseers / managers/ owners of the workers. Hugs. Scottie
The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle, has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law. The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage. The Escambia County School District says these texts may violate HB 1069, a bill signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in May 2023.
HB 1069 gives residents the right to demand the removal of any library book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” as defined under Florida law, whether or not the book is pornographic. Rather than considering complaints, the Escambia County School Board adopted an emergency rule last June that required the district’s librarians to conduct a review of all library books and remove titles that may violate HB 1069.
Each school in Escambia County has thousands of titles. As a result, many school libraries were closed at the beginning of the school year pending the completion of the review.
At the completion of that process, more than 2800 books were removed from libraries. (This includes, in some cases, multiple copies of the same book.) These books are being reviewed again by the school district. But that process is proceeding extremely slowly. According to a list maintained by the Escambia County School District, fewer than 100 texts have gone through the final review process. Many of these books remain unavailable to students absent a parental “opt-in.”
The dictionaries, according to the school district’s data, remain locked away. Their exclusion demonstrates the preposterously broad language of HB 1069. Dictionaries do contain descriptions of “sexual conduct.” Merriam-Webster, for example, defines sex as a “sexual union involving penetration of the vagina by the penis” or “intercourse (such as anal or oral intercourse) that does not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis.” But the idea that we need to exclude dictionaries from schools to protect children defies all logic.
District staff responsible for the review at each school were given a checklist to determine whether a book should be withheld from students. The checklist suggests reviewers consult “Book Looks,” a right-wing websiterelied on by Moms for Liberty and other groups to justify the banning of books from school libraries. It was created by “Moms For Liberty member Emily Maikisch,” according to public records reviewed by Book Riot.
The Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFRP) obtained a copy of the checklist from the school district, which FFRP provided to Popular Information.
Along with dictionaries, thebooks removedfrom Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process includeeight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses, and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records. Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshall are also locked in storage.
Classic texts like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile are no longer available to Escambia County students. Twenty-three novels by Stephen King have been removed. The dragnet has also swept up books popular with the political right including Atlas Shrugged and two books by conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly.
The reality in Escambia County serves as a rejoinder to DeSantis, who has described concerns about book removals as a “leftist activist hoax” and a “false political narrative.”
At the same event, Florida Department of Education Commissioner Manny Diaz argued “[r]emoving clear instances of pornography and sexually explicit materials, often within arms reach of our youngest kids, is not book banning.” How would Diaz describe removing the dictionary?
DeSantis justified his statements by claiming that no school district in Florida had removed more than 19 books. At the time,148 bookshad been removed in Escambia County as part of the challenge process.Now, in part due to DeSantis signing HB 1069, more than ten times that many books have been taken off the shelves in Escambia County. And Escambia County is not an anomaly. Orange County, Florida, which includes Orlando, hasremoved at least 678 booksfrom library shelves.
Authors and parents fight back
Penguin Random House, five authors, two parents of Escambia County students, and the non-profit group PEN America sued the Escambia County School Board last May, alleging that the board’s actions violate the First Amendment. The lawsuit relates to decisions by the school board, prior to the passage of HB 1069, to permanently ban several books from Escambia schools.
The Escambia County School Board banned most of these books at the request of Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in the county. Baggett is responsible for hundreds of challenges in Escambia County and neighboring counties. She also appeared at the June 2023 board meeting and spoke in favor of the emergency rule.
Meet the Florida English teacher trying to ban 150 books from school libraries
Baggett has challenged books like And Tango Makes Three, the true story of two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who lived in the Central Park Zoo and raised an adopted chick. Inan interviewwith Popular Information, Baggett said she objected to And Tango MakesThree because it exposes students to “alternate sexual ideologies.” Baggett said she was concerned “a second grader would read this book, and that idea would pop into the second grader’s mind… that these are two people of the same sex that love each other.”
Last year, Popular Information reported that former and current students accused Baggett of being openly homophobic in class. For example, Baggett allegedly told a tenth-grade student that her sister, who had a girlfriend, was “faking being a lesbian for attention” because “nobody’s born that way.”
Florida English teacher pushing book bans is openly racist and homophobic, students allege
More recently, Baggett wasinvolved in a schemethat involved reporting a librarian in a neighboring county to law enforcement for failing to remove a popular young adult novel from the school library.
Although a material review committee in Escambia County voted 5-0 to reject Baggett’s challenge of And Tango Makes Three, the decision was overruled by the school board, which sided with Baggett. “The fascination is still on those two male penguins,” school board member David Williams said. “So I’ll be voting to remove the book from our libraries.”
The lawsuit alleges that the school board banned and restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed in those books.” In so doing, the school board has “prescribed an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
Today, there is an important hearing in the case. A federal judge will consider Escambia County’s motion to dismiss the complaint. In a brief submitted by the State of Florida in support of Escambia, Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the school board could ban books for any reason because the purpose of public school libraries is to“convey the government’s message,” and that can be accomplished through “the removal of speech that the government disapproves.”This is a novel argument about the purpose of school libraries.
They have to. Words come together to make sentences, and sentences create paragraphs. Then you’ve got people sharing information and getting ideas, and who knows where that could end up? People might start to think.
I knew that I was gay when I was three or four years old. I didn’t know what gay was, and I didn’t know what it meant. I certainly didn’t know about sex. But I knew that I was different from other boys in a way that involved other boys, and I knew that I had better not talk about it whatever it was.
When I was a child, I was a voracious reader. I went through at least two encyclopedia sets. One day, when I was about 10, I was thumbing through the dictionary looking for new words. I found the word “homosexual”, and knew that that word applied to me. It told me that I was not the only one.
And that is what they want to stop. Kids learning anything different other than the religious or right wing party line.
I hope the entry you read back then for homosexual was less judgmental than the one I read as a kid. Mine said being homosexual was about the worst thing in the world, or words to that effect.
I had a similar experience as you. Yet as Johnny says immediately below me, the reading I did secretively in the stacks at our public library did not make me feel confident. In fact, I felt there was something wrong with me. I understood it was who I was, but it was a long time till I could find pride in that.
Businesses and Universities around the country will start rejecting applicants from Florida. Having a diploma that you graduated from the Florida school system will automatically get your resume put into the circular file and it should.
Well they’re also banning science and history books, so why not dictionaries? I’m sure Prager U* can produce some word-books with definitions the fascists will like.
*No idea what the U stands for. Unacceptable? Useless?
History in Alabama is under attack again. A handful of state lawmakers are on a mission to erase it, to cancel those who would mention it and punish those who would protect it. No less than a revered state institution is on the line — the Alabama Department of Archives and History — and the stories it exists to preserve.
It’s LGBTQ history in lawmakers’ crosshairs. Founded in Birmingham in 2015, the Invisible Histories Project collects stories and material regarding LGBTQ history in the South — the things, it seems, many would like to pretend never happened.
In June, the Alabama Department of Archives and History invited one of the Invisible Histories Project founders, Maigen Sullivan, to speak in Montgomery about the group’s work, as part of a lunchtime lecture series. And that’s where all hell broke loose — this time.
Read the full article. As you can see in the June 2023 video below, state Sen. Chris Elliot [photo above] tried to defund the Archives shortly after the one-hour lecture took place. That bill failed. His new bill would fire the entire board.
Cancel culture strikes again.
Alabama Archives hosted a speaker on LGBTQ history. Republican lawmakers are pushing through legislation to fire the board.https://t.co/5stvXMxS0n
And acknowledging the crimes against LGBTQI+ people is some sort of lèse-majesté. Yasss, queen! Inflicting butthurtness upon homophobic hets is such a huge crime, so just don’t even dream of doing it or they’ll plot to toss you in jail… or worse. Really! In fact, they really like that “worse” option — and it ain’t pretty.
The point is erasing the LGBTQIA from public view. Like Russia did. Next is to make being LGBTQIA illegal, again like other countries do. This is not the end of it. It is a deliberate push to wipe out all progress of the past 70 to 80 years on equality and equal rights for those not cis straight white males. It is the first part in a war to return to white Christian cis straight male rule. Hugs. Scottie
A bill before the Legislature this year would replace trustees with political appointments.
Gay Pride Marchers in Birmingham, Alabama The Birmingham News The Birmingham News
History in Alabama is under attack again. A handful of state lawmakers are on a mission to erase it, to cancel those who would mention it and punish those who would protect it.
No less than a revered state institution is on the line — the Alabama Department of Archives and History — and the stories it exists to preserve.
But this time it’s not stories of Reconstruction or civil rights protests at risk of being lost. At least, not yet. Rather, something more recent.
In June, the Alabama Department of Archives and History invited one of the Invisible Histories Project founders, Maigen Sullivan, to speak in Montgomery about the group’s work, as part of a lunchtime lecture series.
And that’s where all hell broke loose — this time.
You see, the other Invisible Histories founder, Joshua Burford, had spoken as part of the same lunchtime lecture series the year before, and no one seemed bothered then.
But political winds changed. The Moms for Liberty types brought back the Inquisition and now a thing that had once escaped notice of all but a handful of history nerds became a moral panic of political importance.
A handful of lawmakers called the Archives and questioned why state money was being spent on such a thing. The Archives director, Steve Murray, explained it wasn’t state money but a grant that funded the lecture series.
Not that the funding mattered. These lawmakers did not want it to happen, period, regardless of who paid for it.
“I wanted to express my concern for this event,” state Sen. Chris Elliot, R-Josephine, wrote Murray in a text message I obtained through a public records request. “Ideally, I’d like to see it canceled.”
Canceled. There’s that word. The next time you hear someone yapping about cancel culture, look back at Elliot’s text message and remember who is trying to cancel who.
Murray declined, the event went forward as planned, and angry lawmakers began to plot retribution.
First Elliott tried to cut $5 million of state funding from the Archives, nearly half its budget. And remember, he already knew tax dollars hadn’t paid for the event.
This was punishment.
Elliott filed his first bill in a special session. Legislative leadership instead kept to the point of the special session to redraw congressional districts. Elliot’s bill died when lawmakers gaveled out and went home.
Now, Elliott has set his sites on those who control the Archives — its board of trustees.
“Ideally, I’d like to see it canceled.”
Alabama State Sen. Chris Elliott to Alabama HIstory and Archives Director Steve Murray regarding an LGBTQ historian invited to speak.
In a bill pre-filed for the 2024 session, Elliott would change the Archives governance from a self-nominating board to one controlled by the governor, lieutenant governor, and the Alabama House and Senate leaders.
All of the 21 current board members would be fired on June 1, 2024. Those board members include folks like Montgomery civil rights attorney Fred Gray, who knows a thing or two about Alabama history (because he made it).
But Elliott’s real target seems to be Murray.
“It really chaps me when we end up in a situation where you have unelected bureaucrats saying, ‘We know better. We’ll do what we want to do regardless of what the people think,’” Elliott said in a recent talk radio interview.
The thing is, I’ve seen Murray speak in at least a dozen public hearings, and I’ve seen him explain things to rooms full of lawmakers that they should have learned in fourth-grade Alabama History. Murray doesn’t fume, yell or condescend. Generally, he’s one of the more patient, soft-spoken people I’ve met in Alabama state government.
And I’ve never heard Murray speak the way Elliott described. Nor did Murray say any such thing in the text messages Elliott exchanged with him before the event.
The Alabama Department of Archives and HIstory was the first of its kind in the country and is home to the Museum of Alabama.Kyle Whitmire, al.com
I called Elliott to ask, who had spoken to him that way?
Turns out, no one. They just didn’t do what Elliott wanted them to do.
When I pushed him on it, Elliott argued that he doesn’t like how Archives and History board members are appointed and he said some things that weren’t exactly accurate.
“They are one of the few, if not only, self-perpetuating boards in the state of Alabama that does not at least answer to elected officials, or by extension to the people of the state of Alabama, and simply reappoints itself over and over and over again,” he said. “And you gotta wonder, is that good governance?”
There are a few problems with what Elliott said.
First, there are other boards that self-nominate to fill vacancies, including the University of Alabama Board of Trustees, and there are others controlled by professional associations, such as the State Board of Medical Examiners and the Alabama State Bar.
Elliott hasn’t filed bills to change how those boards work. I checked.
State Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, wants to fire the Alabama Department of Archives and History Board of Trustees after the department refused to cancel an LGBTQ historian’s speech last year.
Nor is it true the board lacks political oversight or that it is purely self-perpetuating.
The board does nominate its members, but those nominations then go before the Alabama Senate, where Elliott serves, for up or down votes — much like Supreme Court nominees go before the United States Senate.
If Elliott didn’t like any of these prospective board members, he could have voted against them. In fact, he’s had that opportunity 20 times since he became an Alabama state senator in 2018.
Care to guess how many he approved?
In the last four years, Elliott voted to approve all the people he now wants to fire.
Elliott approved three of those nominees this year — just two weeks before he took an interest in the LGBTQ stuff.
Not only did Elliott vote to approve those people for the board, but so did the cosponsors of his bill.
I didn’t get to ask Elliott about this during our phone call.
When I asked him how many Archives and History events he had been to — not counting the open-bar receptions special interest lobbyists host there — the phone call suddenly ended.
“Have a great day!” he said. “Bye!”
And the line went dead.
Text messages between state Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, and Alabama Department of Archives and History Director Steve Murray show Elliott knew the Food for Thought speakers series was not funded with state money. AL.com obtained the texts through a public records request.
Elliott’s record will have to speak for itself.
But what of his question: Is that good governance?
A handful of lawmakers out of 140 demanded an event be canceled because they didn’t care for its subject matter.
The director and the board declined to cancel it.
Because silencing a speaker who has tried to make Alabama history more accurate and more complete would be in direct conflict with Archives and History’s purpose — to document and share true Alabama stories.
They made the archives a place to tell Alabamians’ stories — not just the ones Elliott wanted told.
They did their jobs and now Elliott wants to fire them for it.
This is Don’t-You-Know-Who-I-Am politics.
This isn’t someone concerned with free speech.
This isn’t someone who cares about cancel culture. This is someone angry he doesn’t get to cancel someone else’s culture.
This is someone who wants to bring back the silence — to erase what little has been recovered and mute those who would speak of it.
Unless we say, enough.
Unless we say, this is history that won’t be forgotten.
Unless we say, not again.
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About the Authors
Kyle Whitmire
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for AL.com, where he writes about political culture in Alabama. Dislikes: corruption, cruelty, incompetence and hypocrisy. Likes: quiet heroes. He is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
He must never become president, nor anyone who supports his garbage. He was so stupid and unable to understand, ruled by money and desperate for power he was easily controlled by dictators and the wealthy. Hugs.
One of Europe’s most senior politicians recounted how former U.S. President Donald Trump privately warned that America would not come to the EU’s aid if it was attacked militarily.
“You need to understand that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you,” Trump told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in 2020, according to French European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was also present at a meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“By the way, NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO,” Trump also said, according to Breton. “And he added, ‘and by the way, you owe me $400 billion, because you didn’t pay, you Germans, what you had to pay for defense,’” Breton said about the tense meeting, where the EU’s then-trade chief Phil Hogan was also present.
That says everything we need know about his attitudes regarding America itself. Every fucking thing is about him and his overwhelming self-entitlement.
He was hoping to extort our NATO allies to get money to pay back his bankers — the russian oligarch’s. If he’s allowed into power again he will raid the treasury. There is no doubt in my mind. That’s exactly what he will do.
Especially if he manages somehow to float this idea that anything a President does while in office is “official duties” and he cannot be tried for it later.
I bet this made daddy Putin very pleased. Trump’s a good little daddies boy. Look how he beams at the sight of Putin. The former first hooker doesn’t get a smile out of Trump like this.
What more can I say. The republican dream, force poor women to carry every conception to full term / birth, but once born they ignore those same babies in poor families. They wipe their hands of them, ignoring their needs. They don’t want to give them medical care, food, schooling, and other “luxuries” but they do want to force them to be Christian. They do believe in spending money to force schools to display Christian religious texts. Yet they are desperate to remove any media supportive of anything not cis straight 1950s socially accepted, and to deny necessary, possibly lifesaving medical treatment for kids who have gender identity issues. Hugs. Scottie
Moving beyond efforts to block expansion of health care for the poor and disabled, Republican governors in 15 states are now rejecting a new, federally funded summer program to give food assistance to hungry children. The program is expected to serve 21 million youngsters starting around June, providing $2.5 billion in relief across the country. The governors have given varying reasons for refusing to take part.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said she saw no need to add money to a program that helps food-insecure youths “when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) said bluntly, “I don’t believe in welfare.” Other states declining to participate are Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming.
Moving beyond efforts to block expansion of health care for the poor and disabled, Republican governors in 15 states are now rejecting a new, federally funded summer program to give food assistance to hungry children. https://t.co/VZ1hUzxQtd
Republicans have repeatedly shown voters their true colors, and yet those voters keep backing them. It boggles the mind. Especially when those same Republicans quote things like what’s attributed to their religion. Except they forget their Jesus preached about helping those in need. Because f*ck those people, right?
Morally bankrupt Republicans are just setting up the deplorable conditions so their inbred wealthy donors have a cheap form of entertainment watching us all suffer.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said she saw no need to add money to a program that helps food-insecure youths “when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
It cost $2 million and you have a 1.8 billion surplus you ghoul.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said she saw no need to add money to a program that helps food-insecure youths “when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
it makes perfect sense when you understand that kids that don’t have enough to eat are fat.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s something in Conservative/Republican philosophy that viscerally hates children and young people. They’re psychopathic in their determination to make life worse for young people.
They’re the pro-forced birth party. Precious gifts until they’re born, then the little leeches are just a drain on the system. Why don’t they go out and get jobs?
Scottie's Playtime 