The goal for these gang thugs is to make everyone afraid to protest the abuses, to make the treat of violence and harm so great people stop putting up supportive signs or speaking out. And it has worked in a lot of cases, with venues cancelling events. Horrible way the country is going. Hugs
Because we must make slavery look as beneficial as possible to the black slaves. White people were doing these subhumans a favor by enslaving them and they gave them a chance to find the true god, have shelter, to have food, and work which every republican thinks black people should do more of. Sickening, but she is a true believer in the white race and in the need to have her god in every aspect of everyone’s life, enforced by the Christian Taliban moral police gang thugs. Hugs
The Arkansas Department of Education instructed the 6 schools offering AP African American Studies to submit their curricula to the state to ensure they don't violate a new state law banning "indoctrination" and Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools https://t.co/MQ9YWKRJ4S
They aren’t just denying credit for the course, now the state is demanding schools hand over all books and course materials on African-American history. https://t.co/7YWBCf3guQ
At least 145 incidents of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism occurred nationwide during Pride 2023, three times the amount that occurred during Pride 2022, according to a new report. The violence underscores a year that included 356 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents, as well as an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation nationwide.
The report, created by the queer media watchdog organization GLAAD and the hate monitoring group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), found that between June 2022 and April 2023, 305 incidents of harassment, 40 incidents of vandalism, and 11 incidents of assault occurred nationwide.
Of the incidents, 138 involved drag events and performers, 33 involved schools and educators, 23 involved healthcare facilities and providers, and 22 involved government buildings and elected officials.
This isn’t surprising considering that right-wingers have increasingly claimed that drag performers, LGBTQ+-inclusive educators, gender-affirming medical professionals, and allied politicians are trying to “groom” and “sexualize” children and want to force them to undergo “genital mutilation.”
Nearly half of the reported incidents were perpetrated by individuals associated with extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front. Additionally, 128 of the incidents also involved antisemitic tropes, and 30 involved racist tropes, showing the overlap of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment with hatred of Jews and non-white races.
“Since many anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism incidents go unreported, the true numbers are likely far higher,” the report said.
GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said, “This new report makes abundantly clear that extremism is escalating against LGBTQ+ people and endangers every American… Extremists, including elected officials, must be held accountable for inciting violence and using vile rhetoric against marginalized people who just want to live in safety and peace.”
In June, the Western States Center, an anti-bigotry organization, wrote a guide on “Protecting Pride,” explaining how to protect events from extremist hate.
The guide recommends that event organizers create a vocally supportive coalition of partnerships with government, business, faith, and community organizations; coordinate with law enforcement to monitor and document online and local extremist threats; create safety response plans for coordinators and attendees to follow at events; and also teaches how to use media spokespeople to flip “groomer” claims by showing how extremists threaten local kids and families with violence and hate.
This is crazy. Another religious right wing judge pushing her views. She dismissed the suit saying there was no harm because a reasonable person wouldn’t think that the law precludes talking about gay people and same sex families. Just what the other trump judge said, but that is a lie. The law is written to allow any religious bigot to burden the school with lawsuits. Here are a couple examples from the article. Hugs
Based on the law, the Florida Board of Education recently instituted a new rule that says any K-3 teacher who is found to have taught their students about LGBTQ issues can have their licenses suspended or revoked. And in September, the Miami-Dade School Board voted against recognizing October as LGBTQ History Month over fears that it would violate the Don’t Say Gay law.
“It is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers,” wrote the judge.
For the second time, a Trump-appointed judge has upheld the legality of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.
Lambda Legal, the Southern Legal Counsel, and the Southern Poverty Law Center joined together with a group of LGBTQ students and their families to advocate for a preliminary injunction on H.B. 1557 – which prohibits K-3 teachers from talking about sexual orientation and gender identity issues with their students. The lawsuit argued that the law restricts free speech and encourages bullying.
But U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger dismissed their request.
“Plaintiffs have not directed this Court to any fact that would lead a reasonable person to believe that the law prohibits students from discussing their families and vacations at school or even on a school assignment,” Berger reportedly wrote in the decision, “or that it would prohibit a parent from attending a school function in a ‘pride’ t-shirt or generally discussing their family structure in front of other people.”
Lambda Legal staff attorney Kell Olson called Berger’s decision “wrong on the law and disrespectful to LGBTQ+ families and students.”
“H.B. 1557 suppresses wholesale the speech and identities of LGBTQ+ students and their families. It sends a message of shame and stigma that has no place in schools and puts LGBTQ+ students and families at risk,” Olson continued.
“The students and families at the heart of this case have experienced more bullying in the months since the law went into effect than ever before in their lives, but the court dismissed their experiences of bullying as ‘a fact of life.’ The court’s decision defies decades of precedent establishing schools’ constitutional obligations to protect student speech, and to protect students from targeted bullying and harassment based on who they are.”
Berger acknowledged some of the plaintiff’s bullying worries but said that “it is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers.”
“Indeed, middle school children bully and belittle their classmates for a whole host of reasons,” Berger continued, “all of which are unacceptable, and many of which have nothing to do with a classmate’s gender identity.”
A challenge to the Don’t Say Gay law was dismissed by another Trump-nominated judge, Allen Cothrel Winsor, in early October.
The Don’t Say Gay law, which went into effect on July 1, continues to make its mark on Florida schools.
Based on the law, the Florida Board of Education recently instituted a new rule that says any K-3 teacher who is found to have taught their students about LGBTQ issues can have their licenses suspended or revoked.
And in September, the Miami-Dade School Board voted against recognizing October as LGBTQ History Month over fears that it would violate the Don’t Say Gay law.
It is clear she supports the law. In the article, a man chaperoning kids felt he couldn’t mention his husband or their family as others were doing. That is the point of the law, to make the LGBTQIA disappear from society. Not mentioned, not heard about, don’t exist. Make it a weird fringe thing, instead of a large segment of the population. I don’t know how we get around the legal road blocks that the maga right has installed. Think of it, this judge says students, parents of students, and their legal representatives don’t have standing, yet the religious liberty legal groups can create a fictional business that doesn’t even exist and the court rules yes Christians have a pass to discriminate. What next, Christians suing to not serve black people? What about Jewish people. Yet if someone tried not to serve Christians their heads would explode and that would be illegal. Please note the related story of a trump appointed judge saying that gay kids shouldn’t be protected from bullying. “It is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers,” wrote the judge. Well that was changing just as acceptance of people of color stopped a lot of the tolerated bullying of black children, so the acceptance of the LGBTQ+ kids with anti-bullying programs was working also. Those programs were stopping the bullying and gay kids felt accepted and included at school. That is what the republicans were desperate to stop. That what these laws are doing. Hugs
U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger ruled that most of the plaintiffs lacked standing and accused them of “legal posturing.”
A Trump-appointed judge has dismissed a challenge to Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law for the second time.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger rejected a lawsuit brought by Lambda Legal, the Southern Legal Counsel, and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of a group of LGBTQ+ students, parents, and a nonprofit group seeking a preliminary injunction against the state’s Parental Rights in Education Act, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
“It is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers,” wrote the judge.
The legislation, signed into law last year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), bans instruction on topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and requires discussion of those topics to be “age appropriate” in higher grades.
This is the second time Berger has dismissed this case. Last October, she rejected a previous version of the lawsuit, giving plaintiffs until November 3 to file an updated version. (Another Trump-appointed judge, Allen Cothrel Winsor, dismissed a separate challenge to the law earlier this year.) As Orlando Weekly reported, the revised version of the lawsuit argued that the law violates the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by chilling speech related to sexual orientation and gender identity, while also raising equal protection and due process arguments.
“The impact of the law has been immediate and severe,” the revised version stated. “Defendant school boards and their agents have already begun implementing significant changes under the law. They have instructed teachers to review hundreds of books that acknowledge LGBTQ+ people and families and have eliminated vital support systems for LGBTQ+ students, including guidance and training that combat bullying and violence.”
In her 37-page ruling, issued last Wednesday, Berger wrote that all but two of the plaintiffs lacked standing. She also rejected the argument that the law forced one parent, David Dinan, to censor himself while chaperoning a school field trip “because he was concerned that mention or discussion of his husband or family could have been considered classroom instruction by a third party.”
“While Dinan felt his speech was chilled when he was acting as a chaperone, plaintiffs still fail to offer any argument as to how a reasonable person would have objectively believed that mentioning his same-sex spouse while acting as a chaperone would constitute instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity,” Berger wrote.
While the law does not explicitly ban the mention of LGBTQ+ people in schools, the Florida Department of Education has not yet released official guidance on how the law should be applied. At the same time, the law allows parents to sue school districts if they feel the law has been violated. Critics of the law say that it caters to particularly litigious parents who will sue school districts over their own interpretations of its provisions, forcing schools to foot the bill for frivolous lawsuits and, thus, chilling any mention of LGBTQ+ people out of an abundance of caution.
Berger also wrote that the plaintiffs “continue to include numerous allegations that appear to be wholly immaterial.”
“Even if such allegations are not immaterial,” she wrote, “the complaint is not the proper place for legal argument or posturing.”
Nearly half of all LGBTQ+ youth feel unsafe in school settings, and over half said they had been bullied due to their queer identities, a new report from the Human Rights Campaign(HRC) found.
But even though over half of queer respondents also showed signs of anxiety and depression, majorities of LGBTQ+ youth have also come out to their families and feel hopeful for the future nonetheless.
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RELATED STORIESAnti-LGBTQ+ legislation is making 66% of queer youth more anxious & suicidal
A recent survey suggested several ways to help LGBTQ+ youth, too.
The HRC’s 2023 LGBTQ+ Youth Report surveyed over 13,000 LGBTQ+ youth between the ages of 13 and 17, from all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Approximately 54% of transgender and gender-expansive youth and 46% of LGBQ+ youth surveyed said that they felt unsafe in at least one school setting. Nearly 60% of all LGBTQ+ youth said that they had been “teased, bullied, or treated badly” at school over their LGBTQ+ identities.
Only one in five LGBTQ+ youth reported school bullying to a school staff member. While 23.3% of these kids said the adult “didn’t help me at all,” 20.0% said the adult “helped me a lot.”
Additionally, 55.1% of survey respondents screened positive for depression, 63.5% screened positive for depression, and 64.7% rated their ability to manage stress as “fair” or “poor.” These rates were on average five points higher for transgender and gender-expansive youth. 48.9% of LGBTQ+ youth had received therapy in the prior year.
The HRC noted that these findings have likely been affected by the spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation nationwide. During the most recent legislative session, 10 have passed transphobic “bathroom bills,” 23 states have passed transphobic “sports bans,” six have passed “forced outing” bills requiring schools to out trans and gender-expansive youth to their parents, and six have passed “Don’t Say LGBTQ+” bills banning queer content from classrooms.
Despite this, 90.3% of LGBTQ+ youth said they were proud to be part of the LGBTQ+ community, and nearly 83% of queer youth said that they had come out to at least one member of their immediate family.
Trans and gender-expansive youth who feel free to express their gender identity around their families and those whose family members use their correct pronouns and names also reported the lowest levels of depression and anxiety among trans and gender-expansive youth.
Additionally, 56.8% of LGBTQ+ youth said they somewhat or strongly agree that “the LGBTQ+ community is accepted more and more every day.”
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860) is staffed by trans people and will not contact law enforcement. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for youth via chat, text (678-678), or phone (1-866-488-7386). Help is available at all three resources in English and Spanish.
But notice what book they don’t submit to the bot scan is the bible, which includes everything they programmed into it for getting rid of LGBTQIA inclusive material.
Official: “It is simply not feasible to read every book” for depictions of sex.
In response to recently enacted state legislation in Iowa, administrators are removing banned books from Mason City school libraries, and officials are using ChatGPT to help them pick the books, according to The Gazette and Popular Science.
The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials. Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be “age appropriate” and devoid of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.
But banning books is hard work, according to administrators, so they need to rely on machine intelligence to get it done within the three-month window mandated by the law. “It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements,” said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district, in a statement quoted by The Gazette. “Therefore, we are using what we believe is a defensible process to identify books that should be removed from collections at the start of the 23-24 school year.”
To determine which books fit the bill, Exman asks ChatGPT: “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If the answer is yes, the book will be removed from circulation.
The district detailed more of its methodology: “Lists of commonly challenged books were compiled from several sources to create a master list of books that should be reviewed. The books on this master list were filtered for challenges related to sexual content. Each of these texts was reviewed using AI software to determine if it contains a depiction of a sex act. Based on this review, there are 19 texts that will be removed from our 7-12 school library collections and stored in the Administrative Center while we await further guidance or clarity. We also will have teachers review classroom library collections.”
Unfit for this purpose
In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, it has been increasingly common to see the AI assistant stretched beyond its capabilities—and to read about its inaccurate outputs being accepted by humans due to automation bias, which is the tendency to place undue trust in machine decision-making. In this case, that bias is doubly convenient for administrators because they can pass responsibility for the decisions to the AI model. However, the machine is not equipped to make these kinds of decisions.
Large language models, such as those that power ChatGPT, are not oracles of infinite wisdom, and they make poor factual references. They are prone to confabulate information when it is not in their training data. Even when the data is present, their judgment should not serve as a substitute for a human—especially concerning matters of law, safety, or public health.
“This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results,” Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars. “The question of whether a book contains a description of depiction of a sex act can only be accurately answered by a model that has seen the full text of the book. But OpenAI won’t tell us what ChatGPT has been trained on, so we have no way of knowing if it’s seen the contents of the book in question or not.”
It’s highly unlikely that ChatGPT’s training data includes the entire text of each book under question, though the data may include references to discussions about the book’s content—if the book is famous enough—but that’s not an accurate source of information either.
“We can guess at how it might be able to answer the question, based on the swathes of the Internet that ChatGPT has seen,” Willison said. “But that lack of transparency leaves us working in the dark. Could it be confused by Internet fan fiction relating to the characters in the book? How about misleading reviews written online by people with a grudge against the author?”
Indeed, ChatGPT has proven to be unsuitable for this task even through cursory tests by others. Upon questioning ChatGPT about the books on the potential ban list, Popular Science found uneven results and some that did not apparently match the bans put in place.
Even if officials were to hypothetically feed the text of each book into the version of ChatGPT with the longest context window, the 32K token model (tokens are chunks of words), it would not likely be able to consider the entire text of most books at once, though it may be able to process it in chunks. Even if it did, one should not trust the result as reliable without verifying it—which would require a human to read the book anyway.
“There’s something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can’t understand books and can’t critically think at all,” Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.
More than 20 members of Congress want to join a federal lawsuit to help protect Gov. Greg Abbott’s buoy barrier in the Rio Grande, referencing Noah’s Ark and questioning if the river can be considered a “navigable waterway” despite being the fourth largest river in North America.
In a motion filed on behalf of U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, and other GOP members, lawyers for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation have asked to be part of the case and targeted how a key law is interpreted in it.
The U.S. Justice Department sued Abbott last month for deploying a 1,000-foot buoy barrier in the Rio Grande without first getting permission from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers as required by the federal Rivers and Harbors Act.
From their amicus brief:
Indeed, if one takes the Book of Genesis literally, then the entire world was once navigable by boats large enough to carry significant amounts of livestock. Under the federal government’s theory, these anecdotes would render any structure built anywhere in Texas an obstruction to navigation subject to federal regulation.
Arrington was among the 126 Republican House reps who voted to overturn the 2020 election.
NEW: Republicans are invoking Noah’s Ark in court to defend Greg Abbott’s border buoys in the Rio Grande
It is all part of their questioning of whether the federal government can really classify the Rio Grande as a federal navigable river despite it being the 4th largest river in North America
Texas Gov Abbott has installed circular saws between the Rio Grande border buoys to maim or kill anyone who attempts to climb over. Two bodies have already been found trapped in the floating barrier.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is under fire for installing buoys with “circular saws” in the Rio Grande along the U.S.-Mexican border. Mexican authorities say two people have died. pic.twitter.com/it5helvFYS
We filled more than 300 pages in a legal brief explaining — in detail — why Texas can use the floating barriers that we have placed in the Rio Grande River. https://t.co/mFLhNZk6UN
The cruelty is always the point. And the point is always pointless. By their lack of reason, anytime there’s a flood, no one can do a thing about it, because Noah has an ark.
Dumb Idiot Ham has something like this in his putrid attractions. There’s a placard at his “museum” claiming that it was OK for anyone to commit incest back then because it was a way for humans to produce children like rabbits in the mythical Pre-Flood world.
From that same book in their bible they’re always so fond of quoting to condemn LGBT’s,
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
If we’re going to use the Bible to justify drowning and killing people looking for a better life, it’s important to remember that Jesus first and foremost commanded us to treat others as we want to be treated. Moreover, the Bible is full of verses telling us we should help the poor, needy, and strangers.
None of the things you mention there seem very christian, not in my experience. All I remember is bootstraps, poor people are bad and queers rot in a lake of fire for eternity. They are quite adamant about all of that. Then it gets weird.
Most of the stuff that the fundies rally around is from the Old Testament, even though Jesus said to ignore all the old teachings (which is why the Christians think it’s okay to eat pork).
An independent state of Texas would last for about 15 minutes. Then the power would go out and the cartels would take control. Texas would be reabsorbed into Mexico. Past is prologue.
The Texas Republicans have gerrymandered and dirty tricked their way into staying in power, even though they don’t actually have majority support anymore. It’s a very divided state that remains in the hands of lunatics, for now. Eventually the majority will just be too big to suppress anymore, and it will flip.
Who thought these types of self entitled people who have seen a sudden rise in the power of their bigotry would stop at just erasing positive messages of the LGBTQIA. Well these right wing bigots are also racist. Please tell me how teaching kids to be nice to each other and work together is an ideology that must not be taught? What they really are saying is it is against the conservative right wing maga way to push white cis superiority. Just as they hate the pride flags and demand that any positive anti-discrimination against the LGBTQIA be removed from school, they are now saying that a poster showing inclusion of non-white people is traumatizing to their white snowflake children. Yes that is correct, black kids sharing a school and activities with white kids is unacceptable. It is an ideology just like rainbow flags. No shit. This is what the school board member said after a parent complained about it. In 2023 we have white people saying in public school we shouldn’t have mixed race positive messages, and we should allow the terrorizing and bullying of gay, lesbian, and trans kids because they don’t like them. I warned everyone this was their next step, DeathSantis along with the Huckabeast in Arkansas trying to outlaw the teaching of the real brutality of slavery / racism in the US history is just an opening to try to return the country to the open racism of the 1950s. Hugs
A trustee says a child was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms. Now, she’s arguing to remove displays of racial inclusivity and pride.
CONROE, Texas (KTRK) — Some Conroe ISD trustees want to crack down on displays of racial inclusivity and pride, saying they represent, “symbols of personal ideologies.”
One trustee says a child was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms.
School officials against this say a policy prohibiting political displays, not related to curriculum, already exists. The trustee who brought this forward didn’t realize that.
When it was brought to her attention, the trustee said she wants that policy to go further. Citing “a number of parents reaching out to her about supposed displays of personal ideologies in classrooms,” Melissa Dungan asked her fellow board members to crackdown on them.
“I wish I was shocked by each of the examples that were shared with me, however, I am aware these trends have been happening for many years,” Dungan said.
When pressed to share one of those examples, Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.
“Just so I understand, you are seriously suggesting that you find objectionable, a poster indicating that all are included,” Stacey Chase, another trustee, said.
Dungan wouldn’t say whether she found that poster objectionable, just that she wants to avoid “situations like that” by having the board adopt stricter standards and adhere to state policies already in place, prohibiting teachers from displaying political items not relevant to curriculum.
Another trustee even asked if the poster was illegal and went on to claim previous displays of pride flags were.
“We do have violation of this law,” Misty Odenweller said.
When asked if bible verses were also in violation of existing policy and should be removed, Dungan struggled to respond.
“Right? Would you agree?” trustee Datren Williams asked Dungan.
A trustee says a child was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms. Now, she's arguing to remove displays of racial inclusivity and pride. https://t.co/scyrw05x2q
These bigots have been emboldened by Trump, Abbott, DeSantis, and others, to publicly and proudly promote their racism. They are horrible people and should be publicly shunned.
Imagine if they saw the Mr. Rogers episode where he and his Black mailman friend both dipped their feet into a kiddie pool to cool off on a hot, summer day. The horror!
Conroe is a northern suburb/exurb of Houston. It’s not exactly the boonies but on the edge of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US and according to many sources the most diverse city in the US. People who think of race as black/white need to visit Houston where there are people from pretty much everywhere in the world where there are humans. Conroe, however, is about 72% white and as is typical in the outer burbs, these are people who fled Houston because they freaked out when an Indian or Chinese family moved in next door.
If children are being traumatized by posters showing inclusion, I’d take a good hard look at the parenting style of their fucking parents. Flags, all red.
This is a clip from Boston Legal. Obviously I do not own any of the rights to Boston Legal, I simply own the DVD set to season 3. However, I believe it is both a tribute to the show and a good sales pitch towards purchasing a copy of this show to introduce herein a clip that demolishes the absurd religious views on homosexuality. In this clip, Alan Shore presents his case as to why the man he represents has been scammed out of $40k by a religious organization that intended to “cure” his SSAD (“same sex attraction disorder”, aka homosexuality). Brilliant and appropriate for this moment in time.
Photo: Shutterstock
Scottie's Playtime 
