Category: Abuse
These are some of the news and memes I have been seeing in the last few days.
Independent journalism is a threat to Republicans and must be stopped at all costs.
Josh McKoon [photo above] first appeared on JMG in 2015 when he introduced an ultimately failed bill to legalize anti-LGBTQ discrimination by businesses and employers.
In 2016, he appeared here for his pointless bill to “protect” preachers who refuse to officiate same-sex marriages.
According to McKoon, the veto of his 2016 bill by GOP then-Gov. Nathan Deal was “slap in the face to conservatives, to evangelicals and to the broader faith community.”
‘Til Tuesday 🎧 Blue Bear DJ 🎸4 days ago
The Confederate monuments (and the flag) are kept around to keep the flame alive that the South is gonna rise up again, and next time they’re gonna win. I can’t tell you how many times I heard “The South shall rise again!” growing up. Far too many Southern whites are still bitter about losing the war and having slavery taken away from them. And the end of segregation just made them even angrier. The Union may have won the war, but far too many Southern whites remain unreconstructed in their heart and mind. They revere the monuments for what they stand for. So, I’m not one bit surprised that the Georgia GOP wants to keep those monuments in place.
O/T: Ms Lindsey’s staunch defense and filthy boudoir mouth at yesterday’s interview explained:
Ah, yes, good ole days.
Just a reminder:
“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.” (Leviticus 20:10)
Fortunately he’s positioned the sign for concealment if needed.
Because those poor kids cold get a job and pay for their own damn lunch!
architect_tim Unbordered Americana day ago
and pull them out of school so they are both poor and dumb …equals perfect Fox New viewers.
… well because we all know that nothing says “Loving Christian” better than “Hungry Poor Children”.
now they can live in fear of being human trafficked. By their own parents because they cannot afford to feed them.
GOP: “Why should I pay for free lunches for those rugrats? Let their whore mothers who should have kept their knees together pay for their lunches.”
Also GOP: “Anybody who even gives a pregnant 14-year-old a ride to a state that offers abortions gets the death sentence.”
It is not about abortion… or anything except policing women’s sexuality, keeping the poor poor, and maintaining the rich white cishet “Christian” men from feeling threatened in anyway.
I used to work for my State’s Free Lunch program. You wouldn’t believe the number of kids who told me that the School Lunch was the only real meal they got all day. And they feared the coming of summer because it meant the wouldn’t be getting a real meal until school started again.
You have to be really malignant to pull a meal out of a hungry kid’s mouth.
This is what Republicans want for us all. While they might mouth platitudes against violence, this is EXACTLY what they and right wing propaganda outlets stir up with their incessant, vitriolically hateful rhetoric against the LGBTQ+ communities.
Aged 21 and 23.
They must know fucking everything at that age.
They must be so bright, politically astute and have vast knowledge of international history.
Or else they are another pair of ‘fucking morons’ (thanks Rex) or Evangelicals or pro-life , again fucking morons.
Or all of the above
Anastasia Beaverhousen3 days ago
Is the Grand Wizard of Florida going to offer them a job on the fire department and give them shelter in FL?
Uncle Mark: HoHo-smoking homo Boreal3 days ago
You can fix stupid, but you should spread plastic on the floor first. 😉
Silverwynde 🌻🇺🇦🌻 Uncle Mark: HoHo-smoking homo3 days ago
Well, at least one person can fix stupid:
Uncle Mark: HoHo-smoking homo3 days ago
Grabbed his gun in his sleep and woke himself up with a gunshot wound to his leg !!
– Geez…does he sleep with his gun in bed or on a nightstand next to him?
– Already loaded?!!
– No safety on?!!
WTF?!!
A common statement from the religious side of this issue goes something like this “stop shoving your gay agenda down our throats”. In the same breath, they go on to say, “You don’t see us shoving our religion down your throat”.
Well then…
Have you ever had a homosexual knock on your door (usually around dinner time) asking if you have found Elton John?
Have homosexuals ever passed laws that make the government print “In Homosexuality We Trust” on your money?
When was the last time homosexuals passed laws that rewrote the Pledge of Allegiance to say, “One Homosexual Nation”?
Have homosexuals erected a monument with Marc Jacobs’ top 10 fashion rules at your local courthouse?
Have any homosexual groups spent millions trying to pass laws to outlaw marriage between a woman and a man?
Have homosexual activists worked to pass laws limiting birth control, abortion, etc?
Did a homosexual ever prevent you from buying liquor or a car on Sunday?
Is there a book promoting homosexuality in almost every hotel room in the country?
Have homosexuals pushed for laws to make the missionary position illegal?
Have homosexuals tried to pass a law allowing them to legally refuse service to Christians?
Right, they have never shoved their religious agenda down our collective throats.
Nic Peterson Doug1054 days ago
Do the homosexual children beat up the straight ones while the teachers pretend not to see?
#TOLERANCE:
As a liberal, I am constantly accused of being intolerant for not accepting someone’s hateful or repressive convictions.
It’s as if “tolerance” has come to mean accepting and respecting someone else’s views, regardless of what they are or who they affect.
And that’s wrong.
Tolerance: a fair, objective and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc.,. Differ from one’s own;
freedom from bigotry
Being open-minded does not mean arbitrarily respecting everyone and accepting everything.
There are things that no one should tolerate, such as bigotry, suppression of liberty, denial of equal rights, and abusive restrictions.
I try to preach and practice tolerance, but I do not have to tolerate anyone’s intolerance.
There is never an excuse or justification for hatred or abuse.
Moms force kids to stomp on rainbow flags in horrifying protest against their LGBTQ+ classmates
Again, it is driven by fundamentalist religious people and their demand to have everyone live by their church / religious doctrines. The right claims that social acceptance and tolerance of people who are different from them, the LGBTQ+, is indoctrination. But teaching kids to stomp on a symbol of another group, teaching kids to yell insults to kids different from them, teaching kids to hate is somehow not indoctrination but good parenting to these bigots. Being kind and respectful of a kid’s feelings and respecting their desire to be addressed by a preferred name or pronouns is abuse, but including your kids in a violent shouting hate shouting when they might be either soon feeling or are feeling that they are different is again good parenting. These people want to close off young minds and deny young people the right to develop into more than clones of their parents. The pro-LGBTQ+ supporters showed up in great numbers and that is what we need in the US also.
One last point. These people scream leave our kids alone, but they are the ones attacking other peoples children. These peopel demand the right to not only teach hate to their children but to also they demand the right to teach that same hate to every other child regardless of those kids parents wishes. They demand parental rights not only for their children but yours as well, removing your parental rights over your own child. Leave our kids alone should be the slogan of the LGBTQ+ parents. These haters are terrorizing the LGBTQ+ kids and their teacher supporters in the schools, yet they claim others are indoctrinating or grooming kids. Hugs
Photo: Screenshot TwitterProtests against “gender ideology” in Canada’s capital city Friday brought far-right conservative Christians and Muslims together to attack Ottawa’s local school board for supporting LGBTQ+ students.
The unusual alliance was met by an equal or greater number of counter-protesters defending the rights of LGBTQ+ kids and denouncing “transphobic, fascist ideology.”
A new directive by the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board inspired the demonstration, organized by notorious far-right Canadian provocateur Chris Elston, aka Billboard Chris.
The all-staff notice advised the use of they/them pronouns for students until their preferred pronouns were expressed.
Video from the demonstration shows Muslim women and others encouraging young children to stomp and dance on progress Pride flags strewn on the ground and clapping with joy.
The clip shows an older white man holding a large Canadian flag leaning down to shake one kid’s hand in solidarity.
“Right on, boys!” he declares, beaming.
Shouts of “Leave our kids alone!” were heard up and down the street where the protest took place, home to two high schools and a primary school.
“This is going to horrify Justin Trudeau,” posted Keean Bexte, with the far-right media site The Counter Signal. “All of these proponents of childhood mastectomies and penectomies are officially on notice. The minority communities that have propped up your governments have finally had enough.”
It is very rare for transmasculine teens to get mastectomies before the age of 18 and genital surgery is not performed on trans minors.
Police announced they made five arrests at the demonstration, without providing details. Scattered acts of violence were reported.
While a heat wave, fires, and smoke have enveloped the region since the beginning of June, Bexte laid recent high absentee rates at Ottawa schools at the feet of the school board and their nonbinary naming advisory, claiming parents were pulling their kids out in “silent protest” of Pride Month.
Hundreds showed up to counter the right-wing alliance.
The counter-protest “fills my heart,” said Emily Quail, an organizer and mom of a child at one of the nearby schools.
“The only way to correctly counter fascism is by showing up like this on the street and telling them we outnumber them,” she told The Canadian Press.
“We will not let them spread their transphobic, fascist ideology anywhere, here or anywhere else, and that starts with community strength and that’s what I’m really proud to see today.”
The Ottawa area school board condemned Elston for planning the protest in front of schools.
“It really raises doubts about a group that, I think it goes without saying, but it’s a group that is literally targeting children,” said Alex Silas, a school district official.
In 2020, Elston, a Vancouver insurance agent, paid for a billboard declaring, “I ❤️ JK Rowling”, and then wore the message on a sandwich board at protests after it was denounced as “hateful expression” and taken down.
How the Nazi Regime’s Pink Triangle Symbol Was Repurposed for LGBTQ Pride
https://time.com/5295476/gay-pride-pink-triangle-history/
Is history repeating itself? Are the Nazi fascist rising again, using their favorite targets again? You know the gays, the non-whites, the Jewish people. Look what is it the fundamentalist Christian nationalist racist bigots want so badly? To return to a time when the white people were given automatic privilege and superiority in the country. A time socially where white men were automatically assumed to be in charge and women were subservient as well as dependent on men. When society catered to the white cis heterosexual people with no mention in public of those others. All they are doing with these ban laws is to return to those days by banning all advancement in society, in our culture. Here is the most important paragraph in the article, I think. Hugs
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), that changed when the Nazis came into power in the 1930s. Hitler saw gay men as a threat to his campaign to purify Germany, especially because their partnerships could not bear children who would grow the Aryan race he wanted to cultivate. During that period, gay-friendly bars and clubs started being shut down, authorities burned the books at a major research institution devoted to the study of sexuality, and gay fraternal organizations were shuttered. These efforts only increased after the Night of the Long Knives, the 1934 purge of Nazi leaders who were accused of trying to overthrow Hitler; they included Storm Troopers leader Ernst Röhm, whom the SS murdered, later citing his homosexuality as justification for his murder. A Nazi revision of the 1871 law took effect in September of 1935, outlawing anything as simple as men looking at or touching one another in a sexually suggestive way, and enabled authorities to arrest people even if they had only heard rumors that people had been engaging in such behavior. (Lesbians, however, didn’t face the same criminal penalties.) The Gestapo began to keep “pink lists” of violators.
Prisoners wearing pink triangles on their uniforms are marched outdoors by Nazi guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany on Dec. 19, 1938.CORBIS/Corbis—Getty ImagesWith LGBTQ Pride Month beginning June 1 — a month chosen to honor the history of activism epitomized by the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 — celebrants around the world will be getting ready for parades and other tributes. Symbols such as the rainbow flag and the pink triangle will abound; for example, Nike has announced a new line of LGBTQ history-themed sneakers, including two that boast pink triangles.
The brightly colored symbol is now often worn proudly, but it was born from a dark period in LGBTQ history and world history.
Just as the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David, they forced people they labeled as gay to wear inverted pink triangles (or ‘die Rosa-Winkel’). Those thus branded were treated as “the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy,” as one scholar put it.
The roots of the Nazi persecution of gay people are deep. Since German unification in 1871, a section of the country’s criminal law widely known as “paragraph 175” had said that men who engaged in acts of “unnatural indecency” could go to jail. In 1877, the German Supreme Court of Justice clarified that to mean evidence of an “intercourse-like act.” But the law was only enforced sporadically. And the fact that it was almost impossible to convict anyone unless he confessed to such a crime in court meant that police just kept a watchful eye on gay bars and events, and Germany ended up becoming home to a vibrant gay community. Historian Robert Beachy argues that, ironically, the law spurred scientific interest in the study of sexual preferences, and that research tended to encourage a more scientific understanding of human sexuality, which further allowed the idea of gay rights to flourish.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), that changed when the Nazis came into power in the 1930s. Hitler saw gay men as a threat to his campaign to purify Germany, especially because their partnerships could not bear children who would grow the Aryan race he wanted to cultivate. During that period, gay-friendly bars and clubs started being shut down, authorities burned the books at a major research institution devoted to the study of sexuality, and gay fraternal organizations were shuttered. These efforts only increased after the Night of the Long Knives, the 1934 purge of Nazi leaders who were accused of trying to overthrow Hitler; they included Storm Troopers leader Ernst Röhm, whom the SS murdered, later citing his homosexuality as justification for his murder. A Nazi revision of the 1871 law took effect in September of 1935, outlawing anything as simple as men looking at or touching one another in a sexually suggestive way, and enabled authorities to arrest people even if they had only heard rumors that people had been engaging in such behavior. (Lesbians, however, didn’t face the same criminal penalties.) The Gestapo began to keep “pink lists” of violators.
Between 1933 and 1945, by the USHMM’s count, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating this law, and about half went to prison. It’s thought that somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps for reasons related to sexuality, but exactly how many died in them may never be known, between the scant documentation that survived and the sense of shame that kept many survivors silent for years after their ordeal.
From the few survivors and prison guards who have shared their stories, it’s been learned that those sent to concentration camps were segregated, for fear that their sexual preference was contagious. Many were castrated. Some were used as guinea pigs in various medical experiments to find a cure for typhus fever and a cure for homosexuality, the latter of which led the SS to inject them with testosterone to see if it would make them straight. At the same time, some Kapos (prisoners selected by the SS to keep fellow prisoners in line) are said to have demanded sexual favors from prisoners, who were known as “doll boys,” in exchange for extra food or protection from hard labor.
Yet in the post-war years, fear of arrest and imprisonment didn’t go away. The Nazi law stayed in place until a 1969 West German law decriminalized gay relationships among men over 21. As one of the USHMM’s curators has pointed out, even as the Allied powers carefully worked to scrub Nazism from Germany, they left that part alone — perhaps because they had anti-gay and anti-sodomy laws of their own. Paragraph 175 wasn’t repealed until 1994.
As the gay liberation movement grew in America in the ’70s and the ’80s, so did awareness of the persecution of gays during the Holocaust, as books and data about period started being published.
Former “doll boy” Heinz Heger’s 1972 memoir The Men With The Pink Triangle described SS guards torturing prisoners by dipping their testicles in hot water and sodomizing them with broomsticks. Data on these victims started to be cited in 1977, after a statistical analysis by sociologist Rudiger Lautmann of Bremen University claimed that as many as 60% of the gay men sent concentration camps may have have died. The first reference to pink triangles in TIME also appeared that year, in a story about gay-rights activists in Miami who attached the symbols to their clothes as a show of solidarity while protesting a vote to repeal a law protecting gay people from housing discrimination. When the magazine noted that the symbol was “reminiscent” of Nazi-era yellow stars, a reader wrote in to note that they were in fact analogous, not “reminiscent,” as both the star and the triangle were real artifacts of that time. “Gay people wear the pink triangle today as a reminder of the past and a pledge that history will not repeat itself,” he added.
And while the Miami effort did not succeed, the activists did succeed in bringing national attention to the way they had reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of solidarity. In 1979, Martin Sherman’s play Bent, inspired by Heger’s memoir, opened on Broadway; in the play, one of the characters trades in his pink triangle for a yellow star, “which gives him preferential treatment over the homosexuals,” as TIME’s review put it. The magazine called the play “audacious theater” and a “gritty, powerful and compassionate drama.” Sherman later said that he had also based the play on research by Holocaust scholar Richard Plant, who was having trouble finding a publisher who would turn it into a book, as the topic was still considered taboo. It was later published as The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals.
By that time, the gay community was facing a very different threat: HIV and AIDS. The activists who formed the organization ACT-UP to raise awareness about this public health crisis decided to use the pink triangle as a symbol of their campaign and alluded to its history when they declared, in their manifesto, that “silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.” Avram Finkelstein is credited with designing the campaign’s pink triangle — which is right-side up, instead of the Nazi-era upside-down pink triangle — after conservative pundit William F. Buckley suggested that HIV/AIDS patients get tattoos to warn partners in a 1986 New York Times op-ed. Earlier this year, Finkelstein said that the op-ed was a “galvanizing moment,” at a time when there was “public discussion of putting gay men into concentration camps to keep the epidemic from spreading.” This bolder stance required a more boldly colored triangle. He explained that the triangle in the middle of the campaign’s signature “Silence=Death” poster was fuchsia instead of pale pink, as a nod to the punk movement’s adoption of the “New Wave” color. (He said the background of the poster is black because “everyone in lower Manhattan wore black.”)
More recently, pink triangles have been visible during gay rights demonstrations worldwide that were sparked by reports that gay men were being persecuted in Chechnya. For example, outside of the Russian embassy in London on April of 2017, protesters scattered pink triangles with messages written “Stop the death camps.” Three months later, the German parliament voted unanimously to pardon gay men convicted of homosexuality during World War II, awarding €3,000 to the 5,000 men still living, and €1,500 for each year they were imprisoned. The vote came about 15 years after the issuing of an official apology and almost a decade after the unveiling of a memorial to gay Holocaust victims in Berlin. Another well-known memorial is the Pink Triangle Park in the Castro district in San Francisco, which calls itself “the first permanent, free-standing memorial in the U.S. to gay Holocaust victims.”
The last death of someone forced to wear the pink triangle during the Nazi era is believed to have come in August of 2011, with the death of Rudolf Brazda at the age of 98. The symbols of pride that will be proudly worn around the world this month are a reminder of both what he survived and the pride that came after.
Child With Two Mothers Left Sobbing After Couple At Student Track Event Accuse Her Of Being Transgender
My dogs that love gravy! Is this where we are as humans, in politics where 9-year-old children are targeted to prove a political / religious point? The two articles miss some important points about this incident.
This child was not in puberty, it wouldn’t matter if she was a boy or girl or trans as at this age most children are the same in development. No hormones have kicked in to change them either way. It is only a non-scientific religious view that says that even from birth there is a huge difference between male and female children.
Also why did the man and the woman with him wait until just as the girl was to do her event? “”She went to step up to compete for the grade four shot-put final, and right before she went to throw, a grandfather of a student said, ‘Hey, this is supposed to be a girls’ event, and why are you letting boys compete.'” If the grandfather had an issue with a student participating, shouldn’t he have raised it earlier? They say he is a grandfather of a student, was he trying to throw the girl off her game so his own grandchild could have a better shot?
“This has destroyed our beautiful daughter’s confidence, and she was inconsolably crying during this whole event and continued once it was over and we were leaving. Not to mention, she was unable to concentrate on her track and field finals and the shot-put throw for which she had qualified,” Kari said.
But another thing both articles miss is the open bigotry against the child’s parents, who were a same-sex couple. Have we devolved so far in to the depth of inhumanity that hatred of the legal way two people live and raise their child makes the child fair game for attacks? Is that decent or moral. They went after the child due to the child having two mommies instead of the religiously preferred mom and dad. “Starr said the man’s wife then started calling her “a genital mutilator, a groomer, and a pedophile.”” So they already knew about the girl and her family, they knew she had same sex parents.
So this is what the right wing wants, young children attacked with same sex parents too afraid to be open and in the public life of their child. It is really not just disrespect or deplorable actions on by bigots, it is active terrorism. The goal was clear and they accomplished it. They caused a 9 year old child to be afraid, to be unable to do their best, reduced to tears at the hate of people they did not even know. How anyone can see this and not be as angry as I am is beyond me. How anyone can justify these actions is something I don’t understand. But the right does justify it, they glory in it, to them this is a win. The Matt Walsh types won’t see their fingerprints on this child’s tears, nor the worry and fear of the parents for the safety along with ability of their child to be confident in themselves. Instead they relish the ability to destroy a family that is different from their demanded model, and they enjoy the fear they create as they think it makes them powerful and correct. Sick bastards! Hugs
Last thing. From the comments I read I followed the news articles found on this asshole. He is an asshole. He is rather wealthy and felt no problem with over charging workers / companies coming to fix problems in the areas of his motel. He seems to be a typical entitled white fundamentalist asshole who thinks god shines only on him and that gives him the right to gouge and cause grief to others. He is always right and his god agrees he is always right. My gods has the prosperity gospel religion spread so wide that the teachings of the one in the bible itself no longer matters? Hugs
Castanet reports:
Two Kelowna moms are speaking out after their 9-year-old daughter was verbally assaulted at a track and field event on Thursday at Kelowna’s Apple Bowl. The mothers, who choose not to identify their daughter, say she was competing in a shot-put event when a grandfather of one of the other participants started yelling at her.
“She went to step up to compete for the grade four shot-put final, and right before she went to throw, a grandfather of a student said, ‘Hey, this is supposed to be a girls’ event, and why are you letting boys compete.’ My daughter is cisgender, born female, uses she/her pronouns. She has a pixie haircut,” said mom Heidi Star.
Star says the man then carried on to demand certification to prove that her daughter was born female. Star said the man’s wife then started calling her “a genital mutilator, a groomer, and a pedophile.”
Read the full article.
According to Star, her daughter was left “inconsolably crying.” The school superintendent says that the man will be banned from future school events. Kelowna, population 211,000, is located in British Columbia, around 250 miles northeast of Vancouver. Hit the link.
9-year-old daughter was verbally assaulted at a track and field event
Yes. Picking on a child is so manly
Fucking horrible
This happened in much more liberal Canada. Imagine if this happened in Florida?
It’s spreading all over. In Norway there have been threats to Pride events, and the words and phrases are taken from the US far right.
I am convinced that the whole trans panic these bigots are perpetrating is just an excuse so they can look into children’s underpants. Accusations of “groomer” and “pedophile” are deflections.
they seem to be already staring at the children’s groins. He looks like he was having Roid Rage moment.They are gone. Picking on Kids is malicious .
My 1st impression of his photo was that he was using steroids. His verbal assault on a child sways me to believe that too.
It is not the Democrats pushing these “show us what is in your panties” laws. It is not Democrats who are pushing — and getting — laws that criminalize breathing while trans.
There are MANY reasons to dislike and distrust the Democratic Party, but this at least is not one of those reasons.
When I saw the headline I wondered which shithole American state did THIS happen in?
In case you missed this over the weekend 🔥
AMEN . . . They were driven by the love of white baby jesus to make that 9 year old cry.
I think this is a bit more accurate
Steve Schmidt reacts to Donald Trump being indicted for multiple felonies | The Warning
Uncertain – gay themed short film
Thank you to Luis Fernando Midence to allow us to show this short film. Watch more of his films here: https://vimeo.com/guatguy
Small town Pride organizer forced to flee state after “groomer” group targeted him
Domestic terrorism against the public by religious gang brownshirt thug enforcers of the conservative wing. Please notice this is entirely religious driven, using Christian fundamentalist talking point. They are desperate to turn the secular US in to a religious Christian theocracy with their own moral police and Taliban enforcers. They are demanding the right of superior privilege for their religion yet deny any rights to others or other faiths. Notice also thewy changed their name to protecting the children to get more people to agree with their bigotry. Notice the leader of the religous group was asking for the pride leader to take down a old picture on his facebook page that said everyone should get laid once. Just that idea that people should be able to have enjoyable sex at least once was offencive to them. Hugs
Alex Keen wanted to show support for his local LGBTQ+ community. Now he’s afraid to even enter his home.
By Daniel Villarreal Friday, June 9, 2023
The downtown area of Connersville, IndianaPhoto: YouTube screenshot
Alex Keen, a 38-year-old gay man who grew up in the conservative rural Indiana town of Connersville (population 13,310), wanted to show support for his local LGBTQ+ community. So, last December, he founded a group called “Whitewater Pride” and later organized three events for this Pride Month.
Soon after announcing the events, two residents — Melissa Rose and her husband Andrew Rose — set up a now-defunct Facebook group called “Whitewater Groomer Removers,” which insinuated that Keen is a child sex abuser. Its members harassed his events’ sponsors. Keen has been followed in public by the group’s supporters and has gone into hiding. He now plans on moving out of the state, worried that someone will target him for violence.
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“I spent most of my life in the closet. I didn’t come out until I was 36. And so living in this community, surrounded by right-wing Christian conservatives, it’s hard to be gay, it’s hard to come out of the closet,” Keen told LGBTQ Nation. “I just wanted there to be some kind of organization, some kind of support for the LGBT community… Having that support system around us is very important.”
Keen’s group, which mostly consists of him and three board members, purchased a table at the May 15 Celebration in the Ville community fair. For Pride Month, his group planned two all-ages games nights at the local Fayette County Public Library, a drag night at a local bar named Ozzie’s on June 15, and an all-ages pool party at the Roberts Park Family Aquatic Center on June 30.
But on April 29, Ozzie’s bar canceled the event after people complained, Keen said. LGBTQ Nation contacted the bar for comment. The adults-only event didn’t have any drag queens booked. Instead, it offered a $50 award to the attendee wearing the best drag.
Around the same time, Keen became aware of a Facebook group named “Whitewater Groomer Removers.” One of its members linked to Keen’s personal Facebook page, and another wrote, “Sick… Let’s make him famous for trying to groom children.”
Andrew Rose posted an image of Pantera’s album Vulgar Display of Power that showed a man being punched in the face.
Rose wrote, “The vibe of this song is the vibe I’m going for with this group…. I refuse to allow these freaks impost their will in my community…. I plan to protest every event put on by the suspected child grooming operation known as ‘whitewater pride’ (as well as any other group promoting the same degeneracy) & I’m going to need A LOT of good people behind me. I crated this group to organize & discuss such matters.”
Melissa Rose posted an image of a late March edition of the local newspaper, the Connersville News Examiner, specifically an article mentioning Whitewater Pride’s efforts. She told her group’s members to call the paper and complain, stating, “We don’t want this group sexualizing and grooming our children in Fayette County.”
LGBTQ Nation contacted the Roses for comment.
One of their group’s members reposted an image from Whitewater Pride’s Facebook group announcing its three Pride Month events. Commenters wrote, “Pride is a sin in the eyes of God! And everything associated with it,” “Our kids are targeted by the left,” “Yes they are! Bas**rds are everywhere,” “Shame on all of them.”
When Keen looked through the group’s members, he recognized about a third of its members, including a person who regularly cut his lawn. He knew some of these people from around town. A week after discovering the group, he stopped staying at his home. Ever since, he has stayed at a friend’s place about 10 minutes away.
“It’s got to the point it’s affecting me physically,” he said. “I usually wake up and throw up in the morning, not really eating anything.”
By May 5, “Whitewater Groomer Removers” changed its name to “Protecting Our Children.” Its banner image showed a white man rolling up his sleeves.
As the May 15 Celebration in the Ville community fair approached, Melissa Rose sent messages to Sassy Peacock Events, the fair’s organizer, discouraging them from allowing Whitewater Pride to host a table at the event. She claimed that the group wants to allow pornography in schools, let “men be able to use girls’ locker rooms and restrooms,” and legalize the “mutilation of children under the age of 18” (even though gender-affirming genital surgeries aren’t conducted on minors).
At this point, Whitewater Pride’s Facebook page only contained posts about respecting people’s pronouns, Indiana’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, suicide and bullying statistics for queer youth, a bio of Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, announcements of upcoming game nights, a call for volunteers, and posts recognizing International Women’s Day and the International Transgender Day of Visibility.
“They are most certainly trying to set up a stronghold of far left sexually inappropriate ideologies for children,” Melissa Rose wrote to Sassy Peacock Events. “These are all of the issues that they are fighting for, on the side of evil, and that is ver much going to be devisive in a Conservative, Christian family oriented community. They should not even be trying to do all of this political activism while also trying to embed themselves in our community, under the guise of ‘helping kids to feel accepted.’… [They are] doing all of this work to indoctrinate confused kids.”
She demanded that Sassy Peacock Events allow her group to have a booth as well and suggested that she might stage a possible protest.
Though that protest never materialized, Sassy Peacock Events contacted the mayor’s office and local police anyway. In a public May 2 Facebook post, the organizer wrote, “There will be an extensive multi-departmental security presence Friday evening for set-up, through the night and all day Saturday till the end of the event. The whole downtown area has security cameras, there will be multiple drones capturing footage for us throughout the event as well.”
“We expect everyone to behave in a professional, respectful manner,” the organizer added. “Sassy Peacock Events has no tolerance for hate speech, disruptive displays, harassment, or protests.”
In early May, Whitewater Proud announced that it had received a grant from the Fayette Community Foundation, a local organization that funds local non-profit efforts, as well as small donations from a few other local businesses. The Roses’ followers called the foundation and those businesses to complain, Keen said.
During one of Whitewater Pride’s game nights at the Fayette County Public Library in early May, three older men from a “second amendment club” showed up to try and disrupt the event, the library staff told LGBTQ Nation. The men complained about the hour-long event, even though they’re poorly attended and held in a private room separate from the main library.
“It was all awful and I wish it hadn’t happened,” library staff said of the men’s appearance.
On May 15, Andrew and Melissa Rose confronted Keen at one of his library game nights. In a video of their conversation in the library’s lobby, Andrew Rose said it wasn’t right to “indoctrinate” children. He claimed that Keen’s group and game nights “encourage children.”
“They’re sitting there,” he said. “They’re watching, they’re observing.” At this time, however, no minors had ever attended the game night.
“God doesn’t think it’s right either,” Andrew Rose told Keen. When Keen told him that he was free to have his own religious beliefs, Andrew Rose said, “Well, LGBT is a religion.”
Melissa Rose told Keen that she and her husband are “super nice and calm and wouldn’t harm anyone” and that her online comments had no “context of anger, violence, or hatred behind them.” She claimed that Facebook commenters had called her group’s members’ employers to get them fired and that her son’s girlfriend had also been “targeted.”
“We’ve had people from all over the globe, LGBT, coming and then saying we are literally causing harm and violence and trying to eradicate their community,” she said.
Melissa Rose then expressed disappointment that Keen and his group didn’t publicly defend her group when a nearby Pride organization, Rainbow Richmond, made an April 28 Facebook post referring to the Roses’ group as an “active hate group.” Keen has no affiliation with Rainbow Richmond.
“You could have certainly approached [Rainbow Richmond] and said ‘Look, this really is just escalating the situation, All this is doing is just fueling the fire of hatred and ignorance,’” she told Keen. “We didn’t want to contribute to any sort of disruption in the community or make you guys feel threatened in any way.”
She also admitted that she took down her group’s page when she “realized it was getting so much attention.” She then asked if Keen would make a statement against her group being called a hate group.
“I started hysterically laughing,” said Jama Sullivan, a local straight ally who was present during the discussion. “I was like, ‘First of all, we’re not doing that. Second of all, you are bigots…. I told her, ‘You started a fire and you’re getting burned a little from the flames, and you want us to put it out? Like, no, it doesn’t work that way.’”
Sullivan said she too has been publicly identified and targeted by Roses’ followers because of her support for Whitewater Pride.
“I put cameras all around my property because now we’re worried because you’ve targeted us,” Sullivan said she told the Roses. “It takes one person you’ve triggered, one person to come to my home and shoot at my house. I have a child there. So no, we will not put out a public statement on your behalf. You’re an idiot.”
When another person asked Melissa Rose why their respective groups can’t just co-exist, Rose said, “You can exist. No one’s trying to stop you.”
Melissa Rose then said that she doesn’t think that it’s appropriate for Keen to say he supports children because his personal Facebook page contained a photo, taken years ago at the Coachella Music Festival, of something that said, “Everyone should get laid once.”
“I think you should delete that,” Rose told Keen. He told her that he had already deleted that post.
During the conversation, Sullivan said she pointed out to the Roses that the U.S. Catholic Church has been accused of hundreds of thousands of child sex abuse cases.
“You’re not at our local Catholic school saying, ‘Get these kids out of here. They’re not safe,’” Sullivan told the couple. “You’re the library attacking adults. I mean, there’s not even children here. It’s just adults in a room playing games.”
“In Connersville,” Sullivan said, “we have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state of Indiana, one of the highest unemployment rates in the state of Indiana. We have one of the highest drug uses in the state of Indiana. Connersville is ranked like 92 out of 100 in the healthiest cities in Indiana. The education system is suffering dramatically. The rate of high school dropouts is astronomical.”
She recently advised a lesbian friend against moving to the town because she’d likely be targeted with hate if she and her same-sex spouse walked into a Walmart store holding hands.
“So what can we do, as a community, to make people feel welcome to get them to stay here?” Sullivan asked rhetorically.
The Roses showed up again at June 5 Pride Month game night with three fellow protesters. Keen said they “got incredibly worked up” when four older teenagers showed up to play games.
“I heard one of them call me a coward when I walked away from them,” Keen said. He said that the protesters followed him to his car after the game night ended. Though he hasn’t personally received any death threats, Keen hasn’t returned to his home since early May. He plans on selling his house and moving out of state because he no longer feels safe.
He contacted several LGBTQ+ and Pride organizations around the state for advice on how to safely hold his events. Volunteers from other local Pride groups have said they’ll help with their security. That may come in handy, since the Roses have reportedly pledged to protest his June 30 pool party.
Despite the intimidation, Keen has added one extra event to his Pride Month plans: a June 28 march through Connersville on the 54th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
“I just want a combined show of strength that the LGBTQ community in the area has come together and is going to stand up to the people who want to bully us back into the closet,” Keen said.
Sullivan praised Keen when he first told her about his plans to start Whitewater Pride because she felt their community really needed it. But when Keen told her of his plans to leave the state, she said, “You can’t Alex, because they win. You’re letting them win.”
“I’m angry. I’m so angry,” she said. Keen told her that he doubted anyone would want to continue leading Whitewater Pride after he leaves because of all the hatred he’s endured.
“I think I’m going to tell him, I’ll [run his group] in the interim and take applications for a new director,” Sullivan said, “because I don’t want this to go away.”
More slaves for corporate profit.
Start the young and work them until they die. Keep the wages as low as possible to keep them desperate enough to take any job in any conditions. All for corporate profits and greed. In this time of hurt for the US public, corporations are recording record profits as their price gouging keeps inflation high. In an attempt to keep the highest profits, the fed tried to blame the inflation on workers wages increasing a small amount, but it has been proven that what is driving inflation is corporate profits. Hugs
Coming Out | This Is Who I Am
This video is from ten years ago. Not that long ago, right. Yet this boy describes some of the same feelings of being the only one that I did. My gods his story was so close to mine except no one came to help me back in 1970s. I suffered, took the abuse, tried to fight the bullies who had the backing of the teachers. All on top of being abused at home. If I only had someone to talk to about it all, any positive role model to turn to. So much a lifetime of harm I could have been avoided / saved from if I had just had someone to go to who was LGBTQ+ friendly. That is why we need the rainbow stickers and flags in classrooms, that is why we need pride rainbow merchandise in stores. Social acceptance, and safety along with being able to be open by the LGBTQ+ kids. This is what the right is desperate to remove and take away. They don’t want acceptance of gays, lesbians, trans, and non-binary people. They want a strict heterosexual 1950s cisgender role’s society. Hell and be damned to those people that don’t fit that mold. Their god and their comfort come first. How many more kids need to suffer this way? If your concern is for children, understand there are LGBTQ+ children in schools. Hugs
