What the heck is eating these people. What have people like Ron and I ever done to them? Why do they think they are so much better than we are? Why do they think they should have the right to marry who they love while denying that right to us? I have known straight people who have gotten married and then divorced within a week yet the relationship of life long gay people or straight people who have more than two people in the relationship is unthinkable to them. I am tired of it. I did not sign on to their religious views, why do they think they get to force me to live by their church dictates? Being straight is not a badge of honor, the rest of us don’t care. Hugs
This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed the deceptively named “Respect for Marriage Act” in a 267-157 vote.
If this bill becomes law, it would formally repeal the Defense of Marriage Act—a law that was passed in 1996 defining marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman.
While I’m not surprised that all of the House Democrats voted in favor of this bill, I was confused by the 47 Republicans who followed suit.
God says that marriage is to be between one man and one woman—not two men, not two women. The GOP used to believe that too.
Will you pray for God’s intervention as this bill moves on to the Senate? Only He can save us from our evil and rebellious ways.
Make sure you know how your representatives vote because it reveals where they stand on these and other important Biblical and moral issues.
Remember, elections are our opportunity to vote for men and women who support Biblical values and morality.
Will you pray for God’s intervention as this moves to the Senate? Make sure you know how your representatives vote bc it reveals where they stand on important Biblical & moral issues. Elections are our opportunity to vote for men & women who support Biblical values & morality.
God says that marriage is to be between one man and one woman—not two men, not two women. The GOP used to believe that too.
Hm, your God had a much different definition of marriage in your Old Testament, where certain God-favored dudes not only had multiple wives, but also concubines, handmaids, and slaves that they could fuck at their pleasure. Guess that your God must have changed his mind for some reason.
So wait, God didn’t stop gay marriage the last time, right? Does that mean it is his will? Or if he stops this bill, is that his will? Or is he just a bully, giving gay people marriage, then taking it away? Or maybe, just maybe, He exists only in your imagination.
So the republican “freedom caucus” wants to end my freedom to be married to my husband. See what freedom they really mean? The freedom to harass and control other people even to what sexual pleasures consenting adults may have. Really, that is freedom, their controlling your bedroom. I fought when the republicans came for the trans people. I fought when they came for women body autonomy, I will fight now that they are coming for everyone else not following ridged rules of accepted behavior based on the rules of a book written 2,500 years ago. Scary times in the former land of the free. Hugs
The House Freedom Caucus is urging Senate Republicans to oppose the Respect for Marriage Act that would codify federal protections for same-sex marriage, even though its chair, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), voted in favor of the legislation.
“The ‘Respect for Marriage Act’ was rushed through the House as yet another weapon to distract, confuse, and deceive American Citizens. It allowed no hearings or markups, and less than a day to review,” the Freedom Caucus said in its official position statement.
“The radical Left has launched an all-out campaign on America’s traditional values and sacred institutions. It has weakened the nuclear family, attacked the norms of masculinity and femininity, and now it wants to further erode the sacred institution of marriage,” the caucus said.
The radical Left has launched an all-out campaign on America’s traditional values and sacred institutions. It has weakened the nuclear family, attacked the norms of masculinity and femininity, and now it wants to further erode the sacred institution of marriage,” the caucus said.
My god, drama queening much? – Its already law. It doesn’t do anything new. It merely protects what has already happened.
The nuclear family has been weakened by heterosexuals. It has nothing to do with radical left or radical right. You need to only look at three Trump marriages, three Gingrich marriages, and God knows how many marriages by Larry King.
The norms of masculinity and femininity are culture specific. In fact, they aren’t really norms. and no one is attacking them.
As for weakening the sacred institution of marriage, it’s not a sacred institution, it’s a civil contract which may have religion attached to it. If anything has weakened it— an assertion, not a proof — it is the heterosexual majority refusing to get married, preferring to shack up, or getting married multiple times. See Trump and Gingrich above. Not to mention, religious people who wine on and on about the sanctity of marriage, but seem to be divorced more often than anyone else
Why would there need to be discussions? It is about maintaining rights or taking away rights from people. Yes or no. We don’t need to hear you incessant sniveling bullshit about jeebus and the buybull.
The article claims big money funded groups are drawing up list of positions they want cleared to put their people put into. Yes some might be big money polluters but what do you want to bet that the religious groups are going to push hard and pay to get their people into the regulating bodies and they daily bureaucratic positions that make the daily rules the government functions on. This is another reason we cannot let the Republicans get into to office. Think of this, a Texas tRump judge said Biden couldn’t change tRump’s polices on the Southern border. That is the job of the president to set policy on the borders, but the racist don’t want no one allowed in policy to change, so this judge said Biden had to continue the tRump rules. Biden appealed to the SCOTUS which said they would leave the ruling in place and hear the case in December for a ruling next year. They never made tRump operate on a lower court ruling. So that tells you how the SCOTUS is going to rule, fully republican racist overturning the Federal government’s ability to set policy of the borders. ICE and the border patrol are now a rogue agency with no controls over them. Scary isn’t it. This is a bit long but worth the read. Better to be forewarned than taken by surprise. Hugs
Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Seth Herald, Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images
Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.
The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.
During his presidency, Trump often complained about what he called “the deep state.”
The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.
The reporting for this series draws on extensive interviews over a period of more than three months with more than two dozen people close to the former president, and others who have firsthand knowledge of the work underway to prepare for a potential second term. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive planning and avoid Trump’s ire.
As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.
Trump remains distracted by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results. But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025.
Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.
They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.
The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.
These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.
The centerpiece
Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.
Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.
Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections.
New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.
An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life.
Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.
Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.
It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.
Such pendulum swings and politicization could threaten the continuity and quality of service to taxpayers, the regulatory protections, the checks on executive power, and other aspects of American democracy.
Trump’s allies claim such pendulum swings will not happen because they will not have to fire anything close to 50,000 federal workers to achieve the result, as one source put it, of “behavior change.” Firing a smaller segment of “bad apples” among the career officials at each agency would have the desired chilling effect on others tempted to obstruct Trump’s orders.
They say Schedule F will finally end the “farce” of a nonpartisan civil service that they say has been filled with activist liberals who have been undermining GOP presidents for decades.
Unions and Democrats would be expected to immediately fight a Schedule F order. But Trump’s advisers like their chances in a judicial system now dominated at its highest levels by conservatives.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the federal civil service, is among a small group of lawmakers who never stopped worrying about Schedule F, even after Biden rescinded the order. Connolly has been so alarmed that he attached an amendment to this year’s defense bill to prevent a future president from resurrecting Schedule F. The House passed Connolly’s amendment but Republicans hope to block it in the Senate.
Machine-in-waiting
No operation of this scale is possible without the machinery to implement it. To that end, Trump has blessed a string of conservative organizations linked to advisers he currently trusts and calls on. Most of these conservative groups host senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The names are a mix of familiar and new. They include Jeffrey Clark, the controversial lawyer Trump had wanted to install as attorney general in the end days of his presidency. Clark, who advocated a plan to contest the 2020 election results, is now in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI. Clark is working at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the group founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
Former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government include names like Vought, Meadows, Stephen Miller, Ed Corrigan, Wesley Denton, Brooke Rollins, James Sherk, Andrew Kloster and Troup Hemenway.
Others, who remain close to Trump and would be in contention for the most senior roles in a second-term administration, include Dan Scavino, John McEntee, Richard Grenell, Kash Patel, Robert O’Brien, David Bernhardt, John Ratcliffe, Peter Navarro and Pam Bondi.
Following splits from some of his past swathe of loyal advisers, Trump has tightened his circle. The Florida-based strategist Susie Wiles is Trump’s top political adviser. She runs his personal office and his political action committee. When he contemplates endorsements, Trump has often attached weight to the views of his former White House political director Brian Jack, pollster Tony Fabrizio, and his son Donald Trump Jr. He often consults another GOP pollster, John McLaughlin. For communications and press inquiries Trump calls on Taylor Budowich and Liz Harrington. Jason Miller remains in the mix.
As Trump’s obsessions with 2020 fester, he has also broken with many traditional conservative allies in Congress. Most notably, his relationship with the man who delivered Trump the rock-solid conservative Supreme Court he hankered for — Sen. Mitch McConnell — is broken. McConnell is no longer on speaking terms with the former president.
Now Trump looks to Rep. Jim Jordan as his closest confidant on Capitol Hill. He has stayed close to former Rep. Devin Nunes, who runs Trump’s social media company, Truth Social. Trump continues to be a big fan of the far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The advocacy groups who have effectively become extensions of the Trump infrastructure include the CRA, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
Other groups — while not formally connected to Trump’s operation — have hired key lieutenants and are effectively serving his ends. The Heritage Foundation, the legacy conservative group, has moved closer to Trump under its new president, Kevin Roberts, and is building links to other parts of the “America First” movement.
Sources who spoke to Axios paint a vivid picture of how the backroom plans are taking shape, starting with a series of interactions in Florida earlier this year, on April 28.
Trump’s new targets
On that warm spring night in April, an armada of black Escalades drove through the rain from a West Palm Beach hotel to Donald Trump’s Mediterranean-style private club.
Donors and Trump allies were getting soaked through their clothes as they waited in a brief downpour to be frisked by wands before they could access the inner sanctum of Mar-a-Lago.
Inside, near the bar past the patio, a balding man with dramatically arched eyebrows was the center of attention at a cocktail table. He was discussing the top-level staffing of the Justice Department if Trump were to regain the presidency in 2025.
With a background as an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, a veteran of George W. Bush’s administration, was unknown to the public until early 2021. By the end of the Trump administration, he was serving as the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division — although other DOJ leaders paid him little attention. But Trump, desperate to overturn the election, welcomed Clark, the only senior official willing to apply the full weight of the Justice Department to contesting Joe Biden’s victory, into his inner circle.
In February of this year, Clark repeatedly asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination during a deposition with the Jan. 6 committee. And in the early hours of June 22, federal agents with an electronics-sniffing dog in tow arrived at Clark’s Virginia home to execute a search warrant and seize his devices.
But back in April, as Clark circulated at Mar-a-Lago wearing a loose-fitting black suit and blue shirt, any troubles related to the Jan. 6 investigation seemed a world away. Clark sounded optimistic. Half a dozen or so donors and Trump allies surrounded him at the high-top table.
One of the donors asked Clark what he thought would happen with the Justice Department if Trump won the 2024 election. Conveying the air of a deep confidant, Clark responded that he thought Trump had learned his lesson.
In a second term, Clark predicted, Trump would never appoint an attorney general who was not completely on board with his agenda.
There was a buzz around Clark. Given Trump wanted to make him attorney general in the final days of his first term, it is likely that Clark would be a serious contender for the top job in a second term.
By this stage in the evening, more than a hundred people were crammed onto the Mar-a-Lago patio. They were a mix of wealthy political donors and allies of the former president and they had come to see Trump himself bless Russ Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America.
Vought was a policy wonk who became one of Trump’s most trusted officials. Before joining the Trump administration in 2017 as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget — and ultimately going on to run the agency — Vought had a long career in conservative policy circles.
That included a stint as executive director and budget director of the Republican Study Committee — the largest bloc of House conservatives — and as the policy director for the House Republican Conference.
Trump was helping raise money for Vought’s CRA, which has been busily developing many of the policy and administrative plans that would likely form the foundation for a second-term Trump administration.
Trump himself was running late to the reception. But the introductory speaker, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, was filibustering, entertaining the crowd with stories about Trump and Vought’s efforts to fight a deep state that had tried to thwart them. Meadows paused. He scanned the patio. “Are there any Cabinet secretaries here?” he asked the audience. “Raise your hand if you’re a Cabinet secretary.”
Nobody raised their hand. “Well that’s a good thing,” Meadows said. “They often weren’t cooperating with us.”
Meadows was picking up on a theme from earlier in the day, when Vought’s group had held off-site sessions at The Ben, a luxury hotel a 10-minute drive up the coast from Mar-a-Lago.
In those closed-door sessions, Trump confidants, including former senior administration officials, discussed the mistakes they had made in the first term that would need to be corrected if they regained power.
They agreed it was not just the “deep state” career bureaucrats who needed to be replaced. Often, the former Trump officials said, their biggest problems were with the political people that Trump himself had regrettably appointed. Never again should Trump hire people like his former chief of staff John Kelly, his former defense secretaries, James Mattis and Mark Esper, his CIA director Gina Haspel, and virtually the entire leadership of every iteration of Trump’s Justice Department.
Shortly after noon, Kash Patel entered The Ben’s ballroom. Donors and Trump allies sat classroom-style at long rectangular tables in a room with beautiful views of the Atlantic Ocean.
The group was treated to a conversation between Patel and Mark Paoletta, a former senior Trump administration lawyer with a reputation for finding lateral ways to accomplish Trump’s goals. The Patel-Paoletta panel discussion was titled, “Battling the Deep State.”
Paoletta was a close family friend and prominent public defender of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas. Throughout the Trump administration, Ginni Thomas had taken a strong interest in administration personnel. She complained to White House officials, including Trump himself, that Trump’s people were obstructing “MAGA” officials from being appointed to key roles in the administration.
As Axios previously reported, Ginni Thomas had assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.
Her recommendations to the White House included appointing the right-wing talk radio provocateur and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino for a Homeland Security or counterterrorism adviser role. Thomas has recently been a subject of interest to the Jan. 6 Select Committee after the committee obtained text messages she sent to then-chief of staff Mark Meadows urging him to work harder to overturn the 2020 election.
Patel had enjoyed an extraordinary rise from obscurity to power during the Trump era. Over the course of only a few years, he went from being a little-known Capitol Hill staffer to one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. national security apparatus.
He found favor with Trump by working for Devin Nunes when he played a central role in the GOP’s scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Patel was the key author of a memo in which Nunes accused the Justice Department and the FBI of abusing surveillance laws as part of a politically motivated effort to take down Trump.
Some of Nunes’ and Patel’s criticisms of the DOJ’s actions were later validated by an inspector general, and Trump came to view Patel as one of his most loyal agents. He put him on his National Security Council and made him the Pentagon chief of staff.
In one astonishing but ill-fated plan, Trump had wanted to install Patel as either the deputy director of the CIA or the FBI late in his administration. He abandoned this only after vehement opposition and warnings from senior officials including Haspel and former Attorney General Bill Barr, who wrote in his own memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel becoming deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”
Never again would Trump acquiesce to such warnings. Patel has only grown closer to the former president since he left office. Over the past year, Patel has displayed enough confidence to leverage his fame as a Trump insider — establishing an online store selling self-branded merchandise with “K$H” baseball caps and “Fight With Kash” zip-up fleeces.
He hosts an online show and podcast, “Kash’s Corner,” and he is a prolific poster on Trump’s social media network, Truth Social. In May, Patel re-truthed (the Truth Social equivalent of re-tweeting) a meme of himself and special counsel John Durham “perp walking” a handcuffed Hillary Clinton.
He also set up the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust to raise money to sue journalists. He recently authored an illustrated children’s book about the Russia investigation in which “King Donald” is a character persecuted by “Hillary Queenton and her shifty knight.” Trump characteristically gave it his imprimatur, declaring he wanted to “put this amazing book in every school in America.”
During that April 28 discussion at The Ben, Patel portrayed the national security establishment in Washington, D.C., as malevolently corrupt. He claimed the intelligence community had deliberately withheld important national security information from Trump.
According to two people in the room, Patel told the audience he had advised Trump to fire senior officials in the Justice Department and he lamented the appointments of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray. Paoletta also recounted to the audience instances in which Trump officials refused or slow-walked lawful directives because they disagreed with the former president’s policies.
Patel’s message to the audience was that things would be different next time. A source in the room said later the takeaway from the session was that if Trump took office in 2025, he would target agencies that conservatives have not traditionally viewed as adversarial.
Sources close to the former president saidthat he will — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, “clean house” in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the “woke generals” at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI.
A spokesperson for Patel, Erica Knight, did not dispute details from this scene at The Ben in West Palm Beach when Axios reached out for comment.
Regarding his other post-government activities, she said Patel wanted Axios to include this statement, in its entirety, in the story: “The fundraising focus has changed from the Kash Patel Legal Offense trust to the broader K$H foundation with an expanded mission of a variety of efforts including education, youth development projects, and veterans assistance. All money raised via K$H merchandise will benefit these great causes. The Kash Foundation is properly operating as a not-for-profit organization, has applied for tax exempt status, submitted the designation request to the IRS and is awaiting a designation.”
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Kash Foundation would likely be required to file detailed annual reports on its finances and activities with the IRS. But until that tax-exempt status is secured, it is difficult to know what Patel’s group — currently structured as a legal trust, Knight said — has raised financially or how it has spent its money. Knight declined to provide details on the group’s activity to date.
Later that day, at the Mar-a-Lago reception for CRA, Trump confirmed some of these impressions from Paoletta and Patel about his deep-rooted animosity toward top people in his administration. In a 45-minute speech, Trump rambled over a long list of grievances about his government, according to a witness.
He ridiculed his first Defense Secretary James Mattis, calling him “the most overrated general” in history, and added that a lot of the generals were overrated and should not be allowed to appear on television. Eventually, Trump asked the people who were holding up their iPhones to stop recording.
Trump saved his kindest words that night for two individuals: Mark Meadows and Russ Vought. He praised their organizations and the important work they were doing.
During the past year, Vought’s group has been developing plans that would benefit from Schedule F. And while the power rests largely on the fear factor to stifle civil service opposition to Trump, sources close to the former president said they still anticipate needing an alternate labor force of unprecedented scale — of perhaps as many as 10,000 vetted personnel — to give them the capacity to quickly replace “obstructionist” government officials with people committed to Trump and his “America First” agenda.
In other words, a new army of political partisans planted throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Rejecting the textbooks puts Miami in a precarious situation by leaving the school district without an approved sex ed curriculum for middle and high school students.
LGBTQ supporters and Democrats rallied against the legislation, branded as “Don’t Say Gay,” disputing that those lessons are being taught in Florida schools and maintaining that the policies would further marginalize LGBTQ students and their families. | Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Miami-Dade County students could go months without sex education books after school board members this week rejected two proposed textbooks over concerns they violate the state’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill, known by opponents as “Don’t Say Gay.”
The decision, which came down to a tight 5-4 vote on Wednesday, marks one of the first major instances of the contentious measure shaping local school policies, an action that came amid parents opposing the books for broaching topics like abortion and contraceptives.
Rejecting the textbooks puts Miami in a precarious situation by leaving the school district without an approved sex ed curriculum for middle and high school students with the fall semester less than a month away. Miami-Dade is the fourth largest school district in the country.
“Some of the chapters are extremely troublesome,” said board member Mari Tere Rojas, who voted against the books. “I do not consider them to be age appropriate. In my opinion, they go beyond what the state standards are.”
Wednesday’s vote came after three hours of public comment and debate over the two “Comprehensive Health Skills” books for students in middle and high school, texts that have been under scrutiny in Miami for months now.
Miami-Dade school officials recommended approving the textbooks following a public hearing on June 8 to field some 278 petitions against the materials, which the district denied.
Some parents argued the lessons extend beyond what schools should be educating students on sex education while others contested that rejecting the books would allow a vocal group to drive the decision for a school district serving some 340,000 students. The outcry in Miami against the sex education books included the local chapter of County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative group that aims to “defend their freedoms and liberties at the local level.”
Under Florida law, any parent can opt their child out of sex education lessons.
“Our current … process defends parents and their children who do not want to be exposed to this,” said Steve Gallon III, the board’s vice chair who supported the sex education textbooks. “But we cannot deny parents who want to have access for their children to this critically important information.”
The move by the school board shows how Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, passed earlier this year and championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is shaping school curriculum in the wake of its passage. The law prohibits teachers from leading classroom lessons on gender identity or sexual orientation for students in kindergarten through third grade. It also prohibits these lessons for older students unless they are “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”
LGBTQ supporters and Democrats rallied against the legislation, branded as “Don’t Say Gay,” disputing that those lessons are being taught in Florida schools and maintaining that the policies would further marginalize LGBTQ students and their families, leading to drastic outcomes like bullying and even suicide. The bill also sparked a fight between Florida conservatives and Walt Disney Co. after the entertainment giant said it would work to repeal the parental rights measure.
County Citizens Defending Freedom’s local executive director, Alex Serrano, claimed Wednesday that “significant portions” of the materials proposed in Miami-Dade “may violate Florida state law” and “much of the content is not age appropriate, usurps parental rights, and is scientifically inaccurate and not factual.”
In snippets of the textbooks circulated by the group, they highlighted lessons surrounding unplanned pregnancies that include definitions of abortion and emergency contraceptives like the Plan B pill.
One speaker at the board meeting claimed the books teach students there are “nine genders,” a likely reference to a page that describes a list of gender identities such as androgenous, cisgender, nonbinary and transgender. The Miami Herald reported that the school board removed the “Understanding Sexuality” chapter from the books for middle and high school students.
“Teachers that will be providing this material to children, which is illegal in the state of Florida, and the board that votes to adopt this, in the end — the country, the state and your community, will consider all of you groomers,” speaker Lourdes Galban, told the board during public comment.
The majority of speakers at Wednesday’s meeting, including parents and students, supported the sex education textbooks and pushed for their adoption. They said that the lessons were crucial for students, pointing to sexual activity rates among teens and that they “want kids to be prepared when the time comes.”
“Parents who wish to limit their children’s information about reproductive health have always had the option to opt out,” speaker Gina Vinueza told the board Wednesday.
“The proposed approval of the textbooks today would not take that choice away from them. However, if the board does not approve the textbooks, they will be taking away the rights of everyone to public ed that is based on facts and science.”
The board’s move to reject the sex education textbooks could trigger school officials to restart the adoption process for the classroom materials. School staffers at Wednesday’s meeting estimated it could take between four and eight months for different books to be approved, a timeline posing an issue for high school students on tap to learn those lessons in the fall.
Miami-Dade’s sex education curriculum is embedded in science and personal fitness classes, school officials said.
An arrest warrant was issued Thursday for indicted Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters after she allegedly violated a protection order and her bond conditions by contacting an employee of the Mesa County elections division.
The warrant alleges that Peters sent an email on Wednesday to Mesa County Elections Director Brandi Bantz — with whom she is barred from having contact — seeking a recount of votes in the June 28 Republican primary for secretary of state. Peters lost that race.
Peters previously requested a recount from the secretary of state’s office but did not provide the roughly $250,000 necessary for the effort. Peters was on the verge of arrest last week as well after she violated the conditions of her bond and traveled to Las Vegas without court approval.
Peters, an election conspiracy theorist who denies the results of the 2020 presidential election, is under a grand jury indictment for allegedly facilitating a security breach in her county’s elections office during a software update last year. She will be in Mesa County District Court for that case in early August.
But don’t they understand? She’s special, and she was robbed. She only lost that election because people liked the other candidates better, and that’s a violation of her Sincerely Held Beliefs? Letting her win would make Baby Cheeses smile.
After reluctantly agreeing to transfer power, the former president told aides he wanted to give a new White House address doubling down on the lie that the election was “stolen”
A video of former President Donald Trump is played as the Jan. 6 committee holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The day after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, then-President Trump released a video finally, reluctantly agreeing to a transfer of power to the “new” Biden administration. As soon as two days after the release of the White House video, however, Donald Trump wanted a mulligan.
A person with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone that Trump told aides who were sticking by him that he wanted to deliver another speech to the nation, one in which he would double-down on the lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” via “fraud.”
The re-do speech, which Trump envisioned as a primetime address, would have been a tonal 180 from the video the White House posted the day following the Trump-inspired mob assault. The source adds that the president would have directly attacked the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s incoming administration, and vowed to supporters that he would continue “fighting” for them.
Since he left office, Trump has — in a way — delivered the follow-up address that he never got to give while in the White House, when lawyers and close advisers were warning him of his potential criminal exposure after the deadly riot. The twice-impeached former president has for months been repeating his anti-democratic lies in numerous speeches, rallies, interviews, and online posts. He has tried to argue that the violence at the Capitol took place independently of his actions. He has come out in favor of the Capitol rioters while promising to pardon them if elected to another term. He has cemented his lies about the 2020 election as widely-held mainstream conservative positions.
Trump’s push to deliver a second speech countering the one he gave on Jan. 7 came amid an internal struggle over his post-Jan. 6 messaging. The Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the work of the Jan. 6 committee, reported on Wednesday that the former president stubbornly refused attempts by staff to get him to condemn the rioters in the taped statement from the White House on Jan. 7
According to the Post, “over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over.” Trump was allegedly loath to call off the dogs and only agreed to do so after staff reminded him that Congress was considering invoking the 25th Amendment against him.
The public could get a glimpse of outtakes from Trump’s attempts to deliver the address during Thursday’s primetime hearing, in which the committee plans to lay out what they say are their final public arguments in their case against Trump. The committee is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s inaction in the 187 minutes between Trump’s speech at the rally at the Ellipse, and his afternoon message telling the “very special” rioters to “go home.”
In a clip released on Thursday by committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh and former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testify that Trump remained in the presidential dining room watching news broadcasts of the riot unfolding at the Capitol.
The committee is also expected to detail how Trump reveled in the chaos and violence taking place at the Capitol. “He wanted to see it unfold,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) said this week, according to the Post. “And it wasn’t until he realized that it was not going to be successful that he finally stood up and said something.”
This is a complete travesty. I understand why the family is upset. I have seen this before when white rednecks ganged up on small individual gay men and beat them to death. It was that way with one of my friends. The court did everything they could to help and excuse the men, and they got the minimum time outside the guidelines. The 6 of them beat a small man walking home from a night college class to death because they were afraid he would sex them. That was their defense. We were all angered the courts were protecting them, and I can understand why these family members are upset now. This man helped. He held the dying man’s legs. The murder got 20 years or more. This guy who helped him got 2.5 years? Something needs to be done about this, an investigation, an appeal of the sentence. This is clearly a racist finger on the scale of justice. Hugs
A federal judge sentenced former Minneapolis police Officer Thomas Lane to 2 1/2 years in prison Thursday for violating George Floyd’s civil rights, calling Lane’s role in the restraint that killed Floyd “a very serious offense in which a life was lost” but handing down a sentence well below what prosecutors and Floyd’s family sought.
Judge Paul Magnuson’s sentence was just slightly more than the 27 months that Lane’s attorney had requested, while prosecutors had asked for at least 5 1/4 years in prison — the low end of federal guidelines for the charge Lane was convicted on earlier this year. He said Lane, who faces sentencing in September on state charges in Floyd’s killing, will remain free on bond until he must turn himself in Oct. 4.
Lane, who is white, held Floyd’s legs as Officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd’s neck with his knee for nearly 9 1/2 minutes on May 25, 2020. Bystander video of Floyd, who was Black, pleading that he could not breathe sparked protests in Minneapolis and around the world in a reckoning over racial injustice over policing.
Floyd family members had asked Magnuson to give Lane the stiffest sentence possible, with brother Philonise Floyd rejecting the idea that Lane deserved any mercy for asking his colleagues twice if George Floyd should be shifted from his stomach to his side.
“Officer Lane did not intervene in one way or another,” he said.
Prosecutor Manda Sertich had also argued for a higher sentence, saying that Lane “chose not to act” when he could have saved a life.
“There has to be a line where blindly following a senior officer’s lead, even for a rookie officer, is not acceptable,” she said.
Magnuson told Lane the “fact that you did not get up and remove Mr. Chauvin when Mr. Floyd became unconscious is a violation of the law.” But he also held up 145 letters he said he had received supporting Lane, saying he had never received so many on behalf of a defendant. And he faulted the Minneapolis Police Department for sending Lane with another rookie officer on the call that ended in Floyd’s death.
In sentencing Chauvin earlier this month on civil rights charges in Floyd’s killing, Magnuson appeared to suggest that he bore the most blame in the case, telling Chauvin: “You absolutely destroyed the lives of three young officers by taking command of the scene.”
Lane did not speak at Thursday’s sentencing and neither he nor his attorney, Earl Gray, commented to reporters afterward. Prosecutors did not immediately comment afterward, but Philonise Floyd called the sentence “insulting” and said he didn’t understand why Lane — whom he called “an accessory to murder″ — didn’t get the toughest possible sentence.
“To me I think this whole criminal system needs to be torn down and rebuilt,” he said.
Lane’s attorney had argued that he twice asked his colleagues if Floyd should be turned on his side as officers restrained him face down and in handcuffs, as he said that he couldn’t breathe and eventually grew still.
Magnuson also said he would recommend that Lane serve his sentence at the federal prison in Duluth, a minimum-security facility about 2 1/2 hours from the Minneapolis area. The facility is classified as a “camp” and has no fence and has dormitory-style housing rather than cells. Prison assignments are made by the Bureau of Prisons.
Gray argued during the trial that Lane “did everything he could possibly do to help George Floyd.” He pointed out that Lane suggested rolling Floyd on his side so he could breathe, but was rebuffed twice by Chauvin. He also noted that Lane performed CPR to try to revive Floyd after the ambulance arrived.
Lane testified at trial that he didn’t realize how dire Floyd’s condition was until paramedics turned him over.
When Lane pleaded guilty in state court in May, Gray said Lane hoped to avoid a long sentence. “He has a newborn baby and did not want to risk not being part of the child’s life,” he said.
Chauvin was already serving a 22 1/2-year state court sentence for second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. His federal and state sentences are running concurrently.
Kueng pinned Floyd’s back during the restraint and Thao helped hold back an increasingly concerned group of onlookers outside a Minneapolis convenience store where Floyd, who was unarmed, tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
Magnuson has not set sentencing dates for Thao, who is Hmong American, and Kueng, who is Black. But he has scheduled a hearing for Friday on objections by their attorneys to how their sentences should be calculated under the complicated federal guidelines. Prosecutors are seeking unspecified sentences for them that would be lower than Chauvin’s but “substantially higher” than Lane’s.
Thao and Kueng are free on bond pending sentencing. They have turned down plea deals and are scheduled to go on trial Oct. 24 on state charges of aiding and abetting both second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
if this is not bias, anti-black, pro white, pro-cop bias then I do not think anything could be. This is why Black people in the US do not trust the police or the courts. I don’t either and I am white. Fuck all of this it needs to be changed. Hugs
The House passed the Right to Contraception Act on Thursday ― a bill that codifies the right to birth control and other contraceptives amid fears that the Supreme Court may come for that aspect of reproductive health care next after the high court repealed Roe v. Wade’s protection of abortion rights last month.
The bill passed despite 195 Republicans who voted against the bill in a final vote of 228 to 195. Republicans who voted against the legislation included Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Jack Bergman (Mich.) and Joe Wilson (S.C.). Just eight Republicans voted in favor of the bill.
NEW: The House passed the Right to Contraception Act on Thursday despite 195 Republicans who voted against it. The bill would codify the right to birth control and other contraceptives. https://t.co/vVZBUKaP3O
228-195: House passes the bill codifying the right to contraceptives into law.
Only eight Republicans voted in favor of the legislation: Cheney, Mace, Upton, Kinzinger, Katko, Fitzpatrick, Salazar, Gonzalez (OH). pic.twitter.com/PqN6G2DsNO
It is not just the RCC that is against contraceptives. Many Evangelical churches and mega churches want younger women to stop delaying families and preach against it.
I once heard a mega church sermon blaming women for delaying families, and The Pill made them infertile. Of course the women had delayed pregnancies because they were educated and with their husbands were saving for the down payment on a house in the $$$$ suburb.
Some popular forms of birth control work by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. If they support this bill, it can be used to say they are not truly pro-life and support killing babies.
That’s probably the most likely explaination. Doesn’t Plan B work that way, and also IUDs prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. So they are more afraid of the Pro-Life people than the anti-gay people.
Perhaps the Federal Goverment, as they have classified Tomatoes as vegetables, can classify abortion drugs as ‘contraception.’
It’s like a group insanity that’s infected the party to the very top level. They don’t seem to understand how unpopular allowing states to ban contraception is because they’ve gone down this rabbit hole of “but the poor little (zygote) babies!”
This is important to watch. It quickly goes over what happened to create the Roe down fall, but then gets to the situation we are in and what is coming. We are screwed. As one of the people said, this is a results drive court, they have the result they want and they don’t care if the law allows it, they will simply cherry pick and force it into being the current law as they wish get the result they want. In my opinion we now have a lawless court. The second time in the US and we will have them for the next forty years or maybe forever if the Democrats do not develop a spine and either expand the court to return it to the rule of law or remove the illegal justices that are on the current court. Hugs
Roe v. Wade has been overturned. So now what the hell are we supposed to do? The hosts of the Strict Scrutiny podcast — law professors Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shaw — are back to help Jon process the shocking decision. Writers Kris Acimovic and Tocarra Mallard also weigh in on why the Democrats answer to this crisis seems to be giving them $15.
![Demonstrators hold signs saying "It's OK to Say Gay!"](https://www.politico.com/dims4/default/c73e738/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5515x3677+0+0/resize/630x420!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F18%2F6e%2Fec74a44f4561a2a4a57edc8b3f5a%2Fflorida-same-sex-silencing-29222.jpg "Demonstrators hold signs saying "It's OK to Say Gay!"")
Scottie's Playtime 