I am an older gay guy in a long-term wonderful relationship. My spouse and I are in our 36th year together. I love politics and news. I enjoy civil discussions and have no taboo subjects. My pronouns are he / him / his and my email is Scottiestoybox@gmail.com
The two quotes from the article I added just below what I am writing give away the Fundamentalist Christian republican’s goal, which is to make those people they disagree with, that they hate, disappear from society. Their goal by taking LGBTQ+ media out of schools is to make it appear that all kids are straight and cis. No one can be different from them or their beliefs. Everyone must walk lockstep with them, their way is the only way people can live. Holy dictators. Their goal is to erase anyone different from them from the public view, from society. We must not let them do that. Hugs
A controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”-Adrienne Rich
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could possibly perpetuate the “psychic disequilibrium” that Adrienne Rich laments.
Trump’s Department of Education called the suggestion that rightwingers are trying to ban book a “hoax.”
The case arose from conflicts between those in favor of teaching LGBTQ+ topics in schools and those who believe in so-called parents’ rights on religious grounds when it comes to the education of their children. The case stems from some parents’ concerns about a policy sanctioned by the Montgomery County Board of Education requiring new elementary school storybooks covering LGBTQ+ topics that could be read in class.
One of the contested books is titled “Pride Puppy!” and is about a puppy who gets lost in the crowd during an LGBTQ+ Pride parade.
When the policy first passed, parents could opt their children out of the curriculum, but later, the board reversed that part. In this demographically diverse school district, some Christian and Muslim parents, in particular, objected. I wonder, though, whether they think parents should be allowed to opt their children out of reading age-appropriate stories about Jewish or Asian people, for example.
This case harkens back to one of the earlier curricular programs created in 1991 by the New York City Board of Education. The Children of the Rainbow Curriculum was introduced to first-grade teachers to “assist with teaching about multicultural social issues.” The board developed the program to counter the increase in hate crimes directed against members of marginalized communities.
The curriculum contained 443 pages of suggested readings, activities, and other lectures, all designed to help teachers promote academic and social skills while teaching about diversity.
Unfortunately, the section on families that covered LGBTQ+ people incited enormous criticism. Some opponents argued that it promoted sex and sodomy to kids.
The battle gained significant publicity, and the New York City Department of Education ultimately voted against accepting the entire Children of the Rainbow Curriculum.
And the moments of psychic disequilibrium continued.
Surplus Repression & Anti-Knowing
Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.
In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and that person’s restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization) and sustaining the life of the individual.
Nonetheless, we must establish a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from oppression, and minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society and enters into the realm of domination, control, and oppression).
Authorizing the “truth”
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.
Paul Simon laments in his song “Kodachrome” that his education consisted of neutralizing, meaningless content. “Everything looks worse in black and white,” he sang of the whitewashing of his lessons.
Metaphorically, most schools teach only in black and white, whereas most students want the array of colors Paul Simon wished for: “Those nice bright colors: the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”
Unfortunately, Simon’s educational system took his Kodachrome away: the camera film that captured the full spectrum of the rainbow from the brightest reds, oranges, and yellows, to the darkest blues and browns and deepest purples.
Schools across the nation are attempting to function amidst increased book banning and control of course content by state legislatures under the false flag of “parental rights.” It’s all part of the current tide of right-wing takeovers of educational systems.
People on the political right transform terms like “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into hate-filled and frightening epithets. In the process, they have driven us away from the underlying purpose of education.
The term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
In its original translation and intent, education includes the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge. This is in contrast to the placing or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the students’ waiting and docile minds, or what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
Surrounding forces – religion, parenting, schooling, and other types of socialization – often inhibit the maintenance of critical thinking facilities in young and old alike.
Let us take, for example, the Biblical warning in Genesis 2: 16-17, related to the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’”
The apples on that tree represent knowledge. When eaten, this “forbidden fruit” unlocks levels of knowing that can more than overturn the apple cart. But more importantly, it can give the knower a full-color spectrum of the workings of the world. We are encouraged, nonetheless, to think only in the black and white determined by those in power.
Figures like the biblical Eve and Greek Pandora, women, are blamed for the downfall of “man.” In fact, they were strong women who refused to be trapped under the thumbs of the patriarchy.
Additionally, the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus casts a cautionary tale on the gifting of knowledge. The chief of the gods, Zeus, punished him for offering mortals the best of the sections from a slaughtered cow while giving the gods the remaining fat and bones.
After an infuriated Zeus took back fire from humanity, Prometheus stole and returned it to mortals, thus turning the darkness from the spectrum of black and white to technicolor once again.
For Prometheus’ crime of returning light and knowledge to humankind, Zeus had Prometheus chained to the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver every day, which grew back every night.
Literature and cinema likewise warn of the horrific and often fatal risks of challenging the limitations placed by the powerful on the accumulation of knowledge.
The first film in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, released in 1968, can be understood as a recreation of the legend of Prometheus. A U.S.-based crew crash land their space vehicle on a strange planet in the distant future amounting to nearly 2000 years advancement on Earth, as they traveled at the speed of light.
The crew, led by Taylor – the Prometheus character – discover that the planet is ruled by a species of apes who possess what to the Earthlings appear as human-like qualities, including speech, high reasoning, and cultural artifacts such as museums, medicine, constructed homes, a judicial system, and written religious and governing scrolls.
A community of humans on this planet, on the other hand, lacks the facility of speech and operates on an animal-like intellectual level. The apes hunt, enslave, and murder humans to keep them from invading their gardens and stealing food and to use them in medical and psychological experiments.
Taylor rebels and protests his treatment by challenging the hierarchical ranking of apes over humans. Two apes listen to Taylor and befriend him, Zira and Cornelius, and they eventually come to believe that what they have been socialized to accept as factual was somehow manipulated and falsified.
Blond-furred Dr. Zaius (Zeus), Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, knows the truth regarding the origins of his species and the rise and fall of humans through industrialization and the power of the atom, which terminated life as it had been once known. His primary objective has been to keep the fire of “knowledge” away from his ape community and humans.
He attempts to destroy any artifacts and other remnants of pre-nuclear holocaust human society to keep alive the myth of perennial simian superiority. Knowledge, therefore, represents overturning the proverbial apple cart, undermining origin myths, and challenging hierarchal positionings.
These genesis/origin stories are examples of the concept of “hegemony,” a term coined by social theorist Antonio Gramsci to describe the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates dominant social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as common sense and part of the natural order.
This controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and closed The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and homosexual sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research and was a precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
Storm troopers carried away and torched over 10,000 volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and libraries, confiscating books they deemed “un-German.”
The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” On May 10, 1933, students and Nazi leaders across Germany set ablaze over 25,000 volumes. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, fired up the Berlin crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
In 2018, we witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ Christian crusader Paul Dorr check out four LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books from the Orange City, Iowa Public Library and burn them in a 27-minute October 2018 video diatribe on Facebook. – Dorr is the founder of Rescue the Perishing, a group “contending against moral evil to advance the Kingdom of Christ.”
The books in question were Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan; Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, by Christine Baldacchino; This Day In June, by Gayle E. Pitman; and Families, Families, Families!, by Suzanne and Max Lang.
In his video rant, Dorr argued that Two Boys Kissing was “designed to get 12-to-13-year-old boys to start having homosexual sex together.”
The fight for all the colors
To build off of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famed poem:
First they came for Leaves of Grass, and I did not speak out — Because I was not gay.
Then they came for Stone Butch Blues, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a transgender person.
Then they came for Critical Race Theory and Beloved, and I did not speak out — Because I was not Black.
Then they came for Maus, and I did not speak out — Because I am a Christian and not a Jew.
Then they came for books representing my experiences and identities — and there was no one left to speak out for me.
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These types of laws are marketed as to protect the kids. The right has learned that if they want people to back banning something bring out the trope “of it is needed to protect the innocent littlest ones, the children”. They are trying to do it with everything they disagree with and always have. In the 1970s they went after gay people, especially teachers claiming it was needed to protect the kids from the evil gays. They did it with drag queens a few years ago and are using the same trope against trans people. They insisted any book or media that had any LGBTQ+ characters or plot had to be removed from libraries to save the kids. They seem to think reading a book with a gay kid somehow makes real life kids gay? These people just want everyone to live by what they preach, to live by their precepts. They have no respect for the rights of other people to live and do as they want. They want to force their restrictive morality on everyone else and to their Christian hell with anyone who disagrees with them. They are dictators of how others live. I just do not get their fear of sex and the enjoyment of it. Hugs’
it indicates that the laws are “effective” or “working” — contentions that imply the goal is to prevent anyone from viewing adult content, rather than just minors.
A group of university researchers has published a study whose findings suggest that age verification laws are ineffective at achieving their stated goal of preventing minors from accessing adult content.
In states that have passed AV laws, some adult websites, including Pornhub, have opted to block access rather than shoulder the legal burden of compliance.
A representative for Pornhub parent company Aylo told Mashable that after the company complied with local AV laws in Louisiana, the site’s traffic dropped 80% in that state.
Focusing on search behavior as an indicator of adult content viewing habits, researchers at New York University’s Center for Social Media & Politics found that searches for Pornhub dropped 51% in states with AV laws, while searches for noncompliant platforms rose by 48.1%, and searches for VPN services rose by 23.6%.
In other words, people living in states with AV laws who did not want to submit identifying information to prove their age did not stop watching porn.
Instead, according to Aylo’s statement to Mashable, “They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.”
Aylo’s statement takes issue with the way many states have chosen to implement AV laws, calling said implementation “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.” The company believes that children should be shielded from porn, but that the best way to do that is for parents to employ content filters on individual devices.
To test the effectiveness of the laws, the researchers created a “digital twin” — a computer simulation — of each state, and compared actual observed search trends in those states with their model of what search trends in those states would have looked like had they not passed AV laws.
This revealed that users faced with an age verification requirement to view an adult site searched for alternative sites that did not require age verification, and for methods of circumventing age verification, such as using a VPN.
The team then used multiverse analysis, a technique that considers alternative research approaches to the same question, to confirm that its findings remained reliable under various scenarios.
While the researchers admitted that using Google Trends is inherently flawed due to the limitations of its data — for instance, it is not possible to know what percentage of users searching for AV-noncompliant sites or VPNs may have been minors — the study nonetheless concluded that AV laws were ineffective, since users in states with such laws simply seek alternative ways to access adult content.
They also noted that such laws effectively punish compliant sites and function to limit general access to adult content, not just minors’ access.
“Our findings highlight that while these regulation efforts reduce traffic to compliant firms and likely a net reduction overall to this type of content, individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification,” the study reports.
Numerous backers of the current spate of state AV laws have asserted that when adult sites withdraw completely from states with such laws, it indicates that the laws are “effective” or “working” — contentions that imply the goal is to prevent anyone from viewing adult content, rather than just minors.
I am at the allergist getting shots yesterday was the kidney doctor. So about this post and that hateful flag, where is the outcry from those same people demanding no books with gay characters, plots, or subject matter. Why are those people so worried about kids minds and moral standards so quiet when the kids are pushing a hate flag. tRump is searching media of immigrants with legal status for Jewish content to have them removed, yet the flag representing the government that killed 6 million Jewish people seem to be OK with him and his administration. Hugs https://www.joemygod.com/2025/04/nebraska-students-pose-in-locker-room-with-nazi-flag/
U.S. maternal mortality rate increased 27% over five years, NIH study finds
A new U.S. government paper documenting an increase in maternal mortality from 2018 to 2022 does not hedge in its conclusion, calling the issue “an urgent public health priority.” That it was published amid massive job and funding cuts at federal health agencies charged with reducing these deaths has not escaped notice.
CBS reviewed internal government documents:"Three weeks ago, 238 Venezuelan migrants were flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador… We could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans – 179 men- now sitting in prison." http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-re…
After Trump and Trumpism are consigned to the dust bin of history, we will need to spend a long time earning back the trust and friendship of our allies.
Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
