In just a few short years in politics, Evelyn Rios Stafford has managed to make an impression at the highest levels of government, and at the most local, too.
The first transgender person to hold elected office in Arkansas, Rios Stafford serves as Justice of the Peace for her small district in Fayetteville. In her role, she’s officiated dozens of weddings for constituents. “That’s one of the highlights of this gig as Justice of the Peace. It always gives me such a warm fuzzy feeling to do that for people,” she told LGBTQ Nation.
Now, Rios Stafford is running for reelection to the post without serious opposition, a vote of confidence even before the election that constituents view her time in office as effective.
Rios Stafford’s first political involvement was getting a local civil rights ordinance passed in the late 2010’s. In 2020, she ran for an open seat on the local Quorum Court, the equivalent of a board of supervisors, and won. She represents about 16,000 people in her district.
At 49, with a broad smile and the easy, thoughtful cadence of a Texas native, Rios Stafford says being trans wasn’t a focus of her first campaign. “You know, I made one post…about it on National Coming Out Day during the campaign. But that was about it.” It wasn’t until after she was elected that “some folks got wind of the fact that I was a first of something.”
But her victory would become pivotal in the fight over trans rights in the state.
In 2021, the Arkansas legislature passed HB1570, also known as the Save Adolescents from Experimentation or SAFE Act. Like similar legislation introduced in other red states, the bill would ban all gender-affirming care for minors, prohibit insurance from covering gender transition procedures, and criminalize those assisting minors in the process.
The bill was awaiting Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson’s signature when Rios Stafford was enlisted by an Arkansas legislator to help halt the bill’s march into law. From the “phone call to me to meeting the governor was probably, I’d say 24 hours.”
While Rios Stafford was trans, she hadn’t transitioned as a youth. “I knew that I needed to also make space for folks who had this experience and were directly impacted, because their voices are really the ones that have been left out of this whole thing,” she said. Rios Stafford brought 18 year-old Willow Breshears, who began transitioning at 16 with her family’s active support, to the ornate conference room table for her meeting with the governor.
“This was probably the first time that he had ever had a sit down, face-to-face discussion with a trans person before, or in this case two trans people. And, you know, he was kind of starting at zero in terms of knowledge.” A 15-minute appointment turned into half an hour and then 45 minutes. “He was just wanting to know more, basically.”
“I was on pins and needles walking out of that room, like, you know, almost on the verge of having a panic attack. I was replaying all of my answers in my head, like, did I say the right thing, did I screw this up completely?”
Not only did Hutchinson veto the bill, he wrote a Washington Post op-ed explaining why and also went on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend his decision. No matter, the Arkansas legislature overrode his veto, though the law remains tied up in court challenges.
Still, Rios Stafford was satisfied to hear “echoes of some of the things we talked about” in Hutchinson’s defense of the veto.
“‘Traditionally, Republicans have held themselves up as champions of limited government,’” Rios Stafford told the governor. “‘In what way, shape or form is this limited government? Because this is big government. This is government getting in between the families and their doctors.’”
Rios Stafford’s own gender awakening was pivotal to her work in her adopted home state. She majored in English at Rice University in Houston and was pursuing a career in journalism when she got a call from the ABC-TV affiliate in San Francisco asking her to come in for an interview. She got the job. She was young and bright and on the loose in Baghdad by the Bay.
“It was a great time to come there,” she recalled. “During the dot-com boom, the city was kind of going crazy, and it was a really fun time to be there in my 20s. And obviously San Francisco is a place where you can really explore your identity, as well.”
Born and raised in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, she grew up attending Catholic school, where she encountered the first signs of her conflicted gender identity.
“In Catholic school, I had a boyfriend when I was 15. A couple of our friends knew about it, but it definitely wasn’t something that we were out about. I knew that I wasn’t straight, exactly,” she remembers thinking, “but I didn’t really have the language or knowledge to have an understanding of exactly in what way.”
In college, she figured it out. It was “literally, when I was, like, doing research in the college library, that I came across the idea of transgender. And it was this lightbulb moment of like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s what’s been going on with me.’”
In San Francisco, she embraced her new reality. “Gradually, I became more and more out,” Rios Stafford recalled. “It was not a surprise for some people. It was a surprise for others.” While she was “bracing for the worst,” she was “really pleasantly surprised and so grateful for having such a positive experience.”
Evelyn Rios Stafford on her wedding day Provided
“Back then, this was sort of like, this was new territory,” she said. “I think I was the first employee at an ABC owned-and-operated station to transition on the job.” The following year, Rios Stafford picked up two Emmys for her producing. “I feel like it was all tied together.”
The total package arrived shortly after she transitioned, when Rios Stafford met her future husband, Bob Stafford, an artist and graphic designer, online. She was “smitten from the beginning.” The two shared mutual friends in the arts scene South of Market in San Francisco, and Southern roots, as well. Soon after, the couple moved east to Stafford’s hometown of Fayetteville. They were married in 2016.
According to Rios Stafford, performing weddings in her job as Justice of the Peace is optional. “Not all the JPs do it. I have a feeling that one or two of them might not be on there because if they were on the list, they might have to do a same-sex wedding, and it’s against their personal beliefs or something? But I was like, ‘Sign me up! I’ll do anybody.’”
In a test of the maturity of anyone who happens across this story, Rockman School Board candidate Craig Ladyman has been exposed for posting violently queerphobic and antisemitic imagery online.
Ladyman posted an image of four pride flags arranged to form a swastika pattern on Trump social media network Truth Social under the incredible username “@LadymanForLiberty”. The candidate writes, “Like my new Pride flag?” (very respectfully capitalizing the “P” in “Pride”, of course).
Appalled parents and voters sent the post along to Superintendent Steven Matthews, who says he shares in their outrage.
“It makes me feel angry,” he tells Fox WXMI. “Certainly, a symbol like that represents the and represents divisiveness. It’s a symbol that I don’t think represents who we are as a community, and anybody who would use it I don’t think represent who we are as a community.”
In addition to the bastardization of the Pride flag, the invoking of nazi imagery is deeply unsettling to community members.
Rabbi David Krishef, a leader at the Ahavas Israel congregation in neighboring Grand Rapids, explains to WXMI the harm that sentiments like Ladyman’s pose.
“It cheapens the Holocaust, it cheapens the suffering,” he says. “It’s a misuse of the imagery, it’s a misuse of the language.
“No matter what’s going on in this country, whether you’re coming from the right wing being afraid of what the left wing are doing or vice versa, we are not rounding people up wholesale and consigning them to concentration camps and death camps. But that’s what the Nazi imagery evokes.”
Not to psychoanalyze transphobes on main, but this candidate’s anti-trans rhetoric is particularly vehement and loud. His official school board candidacy poster reads, “Vote Craig Ladyman/Rockford School Board/He knows what a woman is!”
It’s giving “graphic design is my passion”:
His campaign website boasts, “I promise to fight for parental rights and children’s rights in school. I will never go along with unconstitutional mandates, medical tyranny, or the woke agenda.”
We’re not saying that this man was so horribly bullied for his name growing up that gender stricture became deeply embedded in his psyche and is now his only personality trait. Not out loud, at least.
Bexar Sheriff Javier Salazar says there is an open investigation of Venezuelan migrants lured under false pretenses and displaced from San Antonio to Florida and then Martha’s Vineyard. The Majority Report crew discusses how the Venezuelan migrants were in the United States legally with court dates and promised expedited work papers. The MR crew questions the funding behind this political stunt and if it could possibly be Right-wing money as Florida Governor DeSantis’ office staff is involved.
Governor Ron DeSantis is confronted by a journalist about the state of Florida’s plans to spend tax money to displace migrants from Texas to Delaware. The Majority Report crew discusses how DeSantis wants to address people “trickling in” from border states to Florida by displacing them at the source. The MR crew talks about how asylum seekers are here legally though not citizens, and questions the usage of the word ‘legal’ when referring to people. The crew also mentions how DeSantis may be burning out quickly as campaigning for the 2024 election is still far out and questions DeSantis’ use of the ‘ultimate solution’ with regard to immigration.
“So this is how it works. You’re injected with graphene oxide. Once injected with the so-called vaccine, you become connected to the internet of things and you can be mind-controlled by artificial intelligence.
“And maybe 5G. Why are they putting 5G everywhere? It’s like the Tower of Babel. And how did God deal with the Tower of Babel? How much longer do you think he’s going to tolerate this satanic plan?
“This is trans-humanism. The internet of things. How would you like to be connected so that your thinking would no longer be your thinking, but it would be non-biological?
“The real question is who will control the computer that give you the messages? It won’t be your pastor.” – Anti-LGBTQ activist and supplements peddler Steven Hotze, speaking to a group calling themselves “Liberty Pastors.”
Hotze last appeared on JMG in August 2022 when he won a Texas ruling that may imperil insurance coverage for PrEP medications nationwide.
In April 2022, Hotze was charged with two felonies related to a bizarre 2020 “voter fraud search” incident. That case remains pending.
Hotze also appeared on JMG in 2020 when he left a voice mail for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, telling him to “shoot to kill” Black Lives Matter activists.
You may recall that Steven Hotze has compared gays to “communist termites” eating away at America’s moral fabric. He is also fond of declaring that it’s now a hate crime to denounce homosexuality.
It was Hotze who bankrolled the successful campaign to repeal Houston’s “wicked, evil, Satanic” LGBT rights ordinance, during which he compared gays to rapists and murderers.
According to Hotze, same-sex marriage will result in children “practicing sodomy” in kindergarten.
In 2017, he appeared here when he “prophesied” that God will deliver “just retribution” to lawmakers who vote for LGBTQ rights.
When he’s not calling on God to kill politicians or for the governor to kill Black Lives Matter activists, Hotze sells “miracle” supplements because high cholesterol doesn’t really cause heart disease.
Hotze regularly quotes QAnon slogans.
Watch the clip. There are slides!
Steven Hotze, a Texas-based religious-right activist and doctor, says that those who have received COVID-19 vaccines "become connected to the internet of things and you can be mind-controlled by artificial intelligence through maybe 5G." pic.twitter.com/BjpBqbPqja
ANd here I thought my cell reception was better becasue AT&T built a new tower a few blocks away. Noow we know that it is all part of the plan to control people, and we’re [aying for it through our cell phone bills.
The easiest solution for conservatives would be to turn off their cell phones, and disconnect their home internet completely.
As a person who actually works on this stuff, he’s so appallingly stupid that it boggles the mind. 5G is a problem but 4G wasn’t? And you know what the “Internet of Things” is? Any device that connects to the Internet and sends or receives data over it. The reason why they call it that is because those things might not be what we typically think of as “computers”. Your oven could be an ioT device because you could start it preheating while you’re on the way home. Your clothes dryer might be able to send performance data over the net and notify you if it needs service.
Just wait until he discovers what a “personal cloud” is… and no, it’s not a fart or BO. It’s when the various IoT devices on your body work in conjunction with each other to assist you. Your phone working with your watch and wireless headphones is a personal cloud. And as we move forward, more things that are on or in you will become part of your personal cloud. Hearing aids, contact lenses, implants in your body that monitor blood chemistry, etc… You think they’ve lost their shit now, just wait til they decide this is the “mark of the beast” they ramble on about.
Well, let’s see, according to your laughably puerile book of fairy tales, god made everybody speak a different language so that they couldn’t talk to each other to build the tower to heaven.
Then, humans developed new universal languages called “mathematics” and “science,” which allowed them to build the tower, where we discovered there’s no such dumbass thing as heaven.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg being interviewed during the Presidential Debate in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 19, 2020.Photo: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock
Out Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg called out Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Cornyn (R-TX) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) for their attacks on LGBTQ rights, asking why they think they are qualified to judge and tear apart LGBTQ families and take trans kids away from their supportive parents when no one is attacking their families in the same way.
Buttigieg was taking part in the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival. Journalist Evan Smith interviewed Buttigieg for over an hour, mostly about transportation policy, but asked a question towards the end about how Buttigieg feels about Cruz’s and Cornyn’s stated opposition to the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect federal same-sex marriage rights should the Supreme Court overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision.
Buttigieg started talking about how happy his family – his husband Chasten and their two kids – makes him, and said, “It’s puzzling to me that anybody would want to tear that up.”
“I’ve met both of your senators and your governor,” he told the Texan reporter. “I don’t know their spouses. I don’t really think about their marriages. But I can’t imagine a situation where I would attempt to undo one of their marriages. So what makes them think that they are fit to pronounce upon mine?”
Citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – which ended the federal right to an abortion in the U.S. in overturning Roe v. Wade – he said that freedom in America may have already peaked.
“The best thing about America is that every generation, more or less, has gone on to see greater rights and freedoms than the generation before it,” he said. “It has not been a straight line, it’s been a zig-zag, but if you look at the sweep of history, it has moved – in this country – in a very clear direction toward more rights, more freedoms, freedoms that have changed my life.”
“Sitting next to you as a married man and a war veteran who can talk about his husband and kids would have been, and be in this job that I’m in – would have been preposterous just 10 years ago,” he continued. “The question now for all of us living in America in these times is: Did we just live to see the high-water mark of rights and freedoms?”
Buttigieg also brought up Abbott’s order for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the supportive families of transgender children this past year for child abuse, threatening to take children from non-abusive households and put them in foster care if their parents affirmed their identities as transgender.
“You have a governor who, I mean, one minute they’re talking about parents’ rights, and next thing you know, they’re attacking parents, who, when confronted with that sometimes disorienting and sometimes even frightening situation of your kid coming out to you, being in an incredibly vulnerable position trying to do the right thing for your kids and a government official wants to come and investigate you for trying to take care of your kids?” Buttigieg said.
“They’re talking about banning books! They are banning books!” he said. A recent PEN America report found that Texas is the state that has banned the most books in the past year.
“So we’ve got to decide: are we going to be the generations of Americans who lived to see the high-water mark of rights and freedoms in the United States of America, or are we going to see to it that that expansion, that great American story of expanding rights and freedoms, continues on our watch.”
Cruz has come out against the Respect for Marriage Act. In September, he said that protecting federal recognition of same-sex marriage will violate religious freedom and would result in “weaponizing the Biden administration to go and target universities, K-12 schools, social service organizations, churches and strip them all of their tax-exempt status.” It is not clear how the bill would lead to those consequences.
Cornyn opposes the Respect for Marriage Act as well. He said in a statement in July that marriage equality is “already the law of the land. I think it’s a contrived issue because the Supreme Court decided the issue, so I don’t see any reason for the Congress to act.”
In a recent segment on his Fox News show, host Tucker Carlson shared the names and photos of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s board of directors while ranting against hospitals that provide gender-affirming care.
Gender-affirming care for both adolescents and adults has been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and many other professional groups as necessary and frequently life-saving for transgender individuals. Yet Carlson falsely framed the issue as medical experimentation on children, accusing hospitals of profiting off “the mental anguish of children” in thrall to a supposed “fad.”
Carlson directed his outrage primarily at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Earlier this week, anti-LGBTQ commentator Matt Walsh targeted VUMC in a Twitter thread falsely claiming that the staff at the medical center’s Transgender Health Clinic “castrate, sterilize, and mutilate minors as well as adults, while apparently taking steps to hide this activity from the public view.” VUMC has since shut down the website for its Transgender Health Clinic and released a statement defending the work they do for trans patients and accusing Walsh of misrepresenting the facts.
The stunt has led social media users to wonder whether Calson’s rant could lead to violence against the hospital’s staff.
“Within the past few hours after Matt Walsh’s attack on Vanderbilt and Tucker Carlson’s coverage, users of 4chan and the Donald are calling for the outright murder of doctors. This is exactly what they want,” tweeted Harvard Law Cyberlaw clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo.
Within the past few hours after Matt Walsh's attack on Vanderbilt and Tucker Carlson's coverage, users of 4chan and the Donald are calling for the outright murder of doctors. This is exactly what they want. pic.twitter.com/YNjI17EzbI
Earlier this month, Media Matters reported that Carlson had responded to the threats and harassment targeting BCH and other children’s hospitals by amplifying anti-trans misinformation. This week, in another anti-LGBTQ segment falsely accusing teachers and doctors of “sexualizing children,” Carlson went so far as to suggest that “neighborhood dads” should “mete out instant justice to anyone who even thought about sexualizing their kids.”
“No matter what the law says, your duty, your moral duty, is to defend your children,” he said. “This is an attack on your children and you should fight back.”
This country is not a theocracy yet! Why are these religious bigots crafting legislation to instill their religious beliefs into secular laws? I am tired of these people insisting I live according to the limits of the people who lived 2,500 years ago. Societies grow, they change, they improve, and the way we treat people shows that growth, unless you live by the regressive rules of a religion. Hugs
Pennsylvania GOP state lawmakers are pushing a bill to limit school instruction that is more expansive than the Florida legislation that has been described by its opponents as the “don’t say gay” law. During a rally at the Capitol, Republican lawmakers and supporters framed the legislation, House Bill 2813, as a way to guarantee parental oversight and control over the availability of school materials that they portrayed as increasingly obscene.
“It is patterned after the Florida bill, but mine goes further,” said Rep. Stephanie Borowicz, R-Clinton/Centre, the bill’s prime sponsor. “It really needs to be protected up through 12th grade, we need to go all the way,” she told reporters. The GOP gubernatorial candidate, Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Adams/Franklin, appeared briefly at the event to voice full-throated support for such measures.
Borowicz last appeared on JMG in March 2020 when she introduced a resolution calling for prayer because the COVID pandemic was God’s punishment for sin. Her first appearance here came in March 2019 when she held widely-criticized floor prayer for conversions to Christianity moments before the swearing-in of a Muslim rep.
This is so sad and hateful. In our great Commonwealth, we don't “other” people. That is literally antithetical to our history.https://t.co/bECHWH51VK
Pennsylvania state representatives have introduced a bill regulating classroom instruction that is more restrictive than Florida’s infamous “don’t say gay” law. https://t.co/LH04cow20U
The absence of talking about LGBTx people communicates a lot — it says we’re “controversial”, tainted in some way, not to be discussed in general public… it teaches shame. Which is 100% everything the Christian agenda wants to teach about us.
It’s funny you should mention 1976. I remember that year vividly. I was a junior in high school who had just come out to myself (albeit to no one else) and I can remember reading an article that year in Newsweek magazine about the happy homosexuals who were making a community for themselves in San Francisco. Back then, it seemed like the world was young and new and that all things were possible. Little did I know the fierce backlash that would result from those happy homosexuals who were just trying to live their lives with happiness and some degree of integrity. But I would soon find out. Anita Bryant appeared with her crusade the very next year and it wasn’t long afterwards that Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed appeared on the scene to turn the clock backwards.
“Borowicz’s bill also contains requirements for parents to be notified about health services provided through schools,” So if a school nurse found too many bruises on the kid, the school would have to give the abusive parents a heads-up? Yikes!
Yep, to these hateful higots children have no rights, they are just pieces of property so when property gets damaged the slave owner should be notified
Her district is smack-dab in the middle of the state, but avoiding Penn State University and its bedroom communities. She’s a stay at home mom and appears to believe that’s the only acceptable role for women– probably hates women who work for wages (including single parents . . . especially single parents).
Although the plain text of the Pennsylvania bill would include a ban on any instruction regarding sexual identity – even heterosexuality – the rhetoric around such laws has clearly targeted LGBTQ people, Pick said.
There should be lawsuits if any heterosexuality is mentioned in any way. Any relationships mentioned illustrating heterosexual relationships like James Madison and Dolly Madison.
Only when they say the schools are “grooming” you kids to be gay or trans.
They really want erasure of anything LGBT. Right now there is a big uproar in Sarasota FL because a teacher had to revise her teaching material so it didn’t mention Sally Ride was a lesbian or had a long term partner.
Nan sent this to me and it is a grand breakdown of how DeathSantis not only broke the law but was trying to use human suffering as a political hate tool. This is a clear case of racism and bigotry. Thank you, Nan, for the link. Hugs
I’m against trafficking of migrants.
But luring unsuspecting people onto planes with lies about jobs, housing, and education awaiting them, and then depositing them onto an island off the coast of Massachusetts that’s totally unprepared to receive them, is a form of human trafficking.
The people you’re talking about aren’t American citizens. They have no rights.
Even if they’re not Americans, U.S. law prohibits kidnapping people and moving them across state lines.
I didn’t kidnap them. They’re here illegally!
You don’t know that. Under our laws, these people are entitled to a hearing on whether they’re here legally— just like all the Cuban asylum seekers who for years have arrived in South Florida fleeing communism.
What I’m doing is appropriate and legal! I’m paying for part of it with funds from last year’s American Rescue Plan.
That money was for the COVID-19 health crisis. It isn’t a slush fund for whatever political stunt you dream up.
I’m also using every penny of the $12 million Florida budgeted to relocate migrants. I have a responsibility to the people of Florida to send migrants out of the state!
If you’re responsible for Floridians, why are you picking up people in Texas and transporting them to Massachusetts?
Many of the people who cross the southern border into Texas end up in Florida.
But the law gives federal officials the responsibility for handling immigration, not you.
You don’t know the Constitution. Article 10 gives powers not delegated to the federal government to the States.
No Governor, you don’t know the Constitution. Article 1 gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states. Neither you nor the state of Florida has the authority to off-load people you don’t want onto other states.
I’m not the only governor doing this!
I know. On Thursday Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent two surprise buses of migrants to Washington, D.C., where they were dropped off near the residence of Vice President Harris carrying all they have in clear plastic trash bags.
And we red-state governors are going to do a lot more!
So Republican governors can’t be bothered with pesky things like laws or the Constitution?
The U.S. immigration and asylum systems are totally broken!
Then why don’t you support fixing them instead of using immigrants as political fodder? Ask Republicans in Congress to stop blocking federal legislation creating paths to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants and to expedite asylum seekers and other legal immigrants.
You don’t understand politics. You have to play hardball.
You don’t understand morality or decency. You’re treating immigrants as if they’re political pawns rather than people. They’re no less people than was your maternal great-great-grandfather Salvatore Storti, who immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1904, or your great-great-grandmother Luigia Colucci, who joined Salvatore in the United States in 1917.
Keep them out of this.
And you’re treating the citizens of blue states as political hostages rather than fellow Americans. But they are no less American than the millions of retirees from blue states who have migrated to Florida, and their children and grandchildren who still live in blue states. We’re all in this together.
No we’re not.
And you’re acting as if governing is a child’s game rather than a pursuit of the common good. But it’s not a game. Our common good has depended on the sacrifices of generations of American service men and women, first responders, teachers, social workers, and public leaders who dedicated their lives to this nation.
I don’t have to listen to your speeches.
Look, I get it: Coping with immigration is difficult. It requires hard thought and hard work.
You betcha.
But you’re giving it neither.
Interview over!
I’m told you have presidential ambitions, Governor. If so, you might start acting like a statesman rather than doing stunts that make you a cynical clown.
Photo: Robert Stafford
Mayor Pete Buttigieg being interviewed during the Presidential Debate in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 19, 2020.Photo: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock
Tucker Carlson Photo: Screenshot
Scottie's Playtime 