I regret I am so far behind. It is too hard to sit at my desk, every 15 minutes or so I have to get up and walk around, but then after a few minutes have to sit. If I have a task I need to do standing for more than 15 minutes I have to take more medication to stop my back from giving out. I managed to get my MRI I needed this morning, came home ate and went right to bed. I got up at 2:30 as my back was not getting better. I see my pain doctor on the 6th of Feb. Hopefully I can quickly schedule some shots to my spine. I was getting them regularly to keep the pain down but I got hit with a couple very expensive bills from the spine shots and decided to see if I could handle the pain with muscle shots and pills. Turns out that won’t work. I have already had to take more medication than I like to take. If this doesn’t work I will go to the next level of pain medications. In the state of Florida it is hard now to get the drugs that caused such problems which can be managed but they want to force everyone to fentanyl even as the republicans scream about how deadly it is. The clips below are pure republican hate, making it so poor people on snap cannot buy any affordable foods not even can soup. No meats no matter the kind, no canned vegetables and so much more. And the continued attacks by republicans and DeathSantis on the idea of inclusion and anything LGBTQ+. I again today wont be able to catch up but there is always tomorrow I guess. Hugs
They’re using every angle they can to legalize discrimination, what’s next, LGBT people can’t own property? Blacks are not legal voters? This is just the tip of the iceberg that FL is becoming in it’s drive towards a state rooted firmly in the 1850’s and reestablishing laws from back then. It’s incidious and creeping slowly towards pre-civil war laws and acceptance.
This is exactly what (other) fascist takeovers did. Made teaching anything contradictory to their own agenda illegal, and arrested teachers who didn’t comply.
Like, it’s not even a jump. Even if this feels tame, this is fascism, done in the frog/boiling pot fashion.
What comes next are RightThink mandatory courses to re-educate teachers about the “correct and approved” Republican party dogma, which is that white Christian nationalism is doubleplus good.
See also the influence that creationists in Texas had on school textbooks. I’m a member of NCSE and they seem to be relatively quiet these days, but…eternal vigilance and all that.
Nov. 14, 1960…
At the age of 6, Ruby Bridges was the first black child to go to an integrated school. It’s American history. Your child can learn about it.
Why is Ron afraid of allowing this knowledge to be taught?
His preference to withwashi it comes off as very racist.
Hmmmm, So far Republicans have done NOTHING on the economy, immigration, jobs. Done a lot on education though like banning books, harassing teachers, & librarians and choosing for college students what they can and cannot study even though they’re paying for it 🤨🤨🤨🤨
Great point Daddy. Imagine what will come out of the mouths of the future Florida educated workforce when they migrate to other states to work. HR departments need to prepare.
I’m glad you posted those clips. Are evangelicals going to ban all cartoons from that era? How about all movies that have even one character in drag? How would that even work?
How do they define “adult cabaret?” And how is it different that regular cabaret? Also, I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of how a drag performance is inherently harmful to anyone.
Creeping ever closer to Gilead. Between this and the “don’t dare to bare” ladies shoulders thing in FL, it’s coming faster than we might think.
Margaret thatcher thought that by prohibiting teachers discussing homosexuality in schools would prevent kids turning out gay.
She was a fucking fool.
This new fascist trend in the US part of America is equally stupid.
Behind the anti-drag is homophobia, and behind that is evangelical bigotry.
I do fear for the safety of these people though. These lunatics have demonstrated that they are willing and able to harm and/or stir up mentally unstable followers of theirs to inflict harm (see that LibsOfTikTok hag). A drag queen friend of mine who has done drag queen story times recently told a group of our friends in a group chat that she gets several anonymous death threats per day via email or social media.
Never forget that evangelicals – who are directly responsible for this proposal – literally worship a genocidal deity. No wonder their entire lives are dedicated to violence and delusion.
I suppose some of these dorks actually think that preventing their kids from seeing drag will somehow prevent them from “becoming” gay, but I think the majority of them are just cruel miserable assholes who want to suck all the joy out of existence to punish all the people who never loved them. That and the grift of course.
True, that. But I also think that many of them are religionists who HATE anyone who doens’t conform to gender expectations. It’s one of the reasons they hate gay men, because they think we are acting like women, especially in the sex department.
So, Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis, Flip Wilson, Dustin Hoffman, and a large number of other male actors who have appeared in women’s clothing, will they be arrested if kids in Oklahoma watch their films?
Geez.
A felony to perform drag !
What happened American freedom?
Has America gone back to the Elizabethan age where they shut down theatres when there was a performance that they didn’t like?
In the Elizabethan Age, all roles were played by men, women were not allowed on stage. Everything was a drag show, but then as RuPaul says, “We are born naked and everything else is drag.”
The right is so desperate to have a white straight homogenous country that they claim reading to children with parents present while dressed in costume is porn and “adult” entertainment. WTF. I wonder if the people ever wonder if they can openly lie and make one group illegal will they next make your group illegal using lies? Hugs
A drag queen who goes by the name Flame reads stories to children and their caretakers during a Drag Story Hour at a public library in New York, Friday, June 17, 2022.
An Oklahoma bill would make it a felony punishable by a $20,000 fine for drag artists to perform in front of minors.
The bill by GOP Rep. Kevin West would also make it a misdemeanor for one to organize drag performances in public.
At least ten states have proposed legislation that targets drag performances, including drag queen story hours.
An Oklahoma bill would make it a felony punishable by up to a $20,000 fine for drag artists to perform in front of minors.
The bill would make it “unlawful for a person to engage in an adult cabaret performance” in public before a minor. The fine may fall in the range of $500 to $20,000, and it may also incur a prison sentence from 30 days to two years, according to the bill’s text.
State GOP Rep. Kevin West, who filed House Bill 2186 on January 19, told Insider that the bill is intended to limit performances “in a public place.”
“But if you have a private venue and parents want to take their children there, then that would not be affected by this bill,” West told Insider. “It wouldn’t be allowed where just the general public would be able to see the performance. So like a library or a school or something like that would fall into being under the jurisdiction of this bill.”
West’s bill specifically named drag queen story hours as events that would be considered unlawful, as well as other forms of “adult cabaret” performances. It would also create a misdemeanor for anyone who organizes or authorizes such performances in public or in view of minors, threatening a fine of $500 to $1,000 and a maximum of a year in county jail.
The bill compared drag performers to strippers and topless dancers, defining “drag queen” as a “male or female performer who adopts a flamboyant or parodic feminine persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup.”
One activist on Twitter also suggested that the wording may criminalize a woman displaying a “feminine persona” with heavy makeup around children, per Newsweek.
But West, in a statement to Insider, disagreed.
“I’ve gotten emails and seen stuff online where I’m trying to ban the drag queen shows. Well, clearly nothing in the bill says that those are being banned. It’s just making sure that they’re done in the location where it’s intended,” West told Insider.
“I think that it really just comes to some of those boundaries. We have a lot of laws on the books that prohibit certain activities in public spaces and with everything that we’ve been seeing for the last few years on this subject, I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of bills like this.”
The bill is scheduled to have its first reading in the Oklahoma House on February 6, per the Oklahoma legislature’s website.
It follows a trend of similar legislation gaining traction nationwide to limit drag performances, such as in Arizona, Texas, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, Missouri, Tennessee, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia, according to reporting by Newsweek and the ACLU. Drag story hours in California and North Carolina, and other states, have also been targeted by the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, over the past year.
In October, a coalition of Republicans in the US House introduced a bill to “Stop the Sexualization of Children,” specifically targeting drag queen story hours as “sexually-oriented events,” Insider previously reported. The bill would give parents grounds to sue public entities that use federal tax dollars, such as public libraries, for “sexually explicit materials or programs.”
From curricula to library books to teachers themselves, queer expression and education in U.S. public schools are being slowly but surely outlawed. One of the most severe cases of this degeneration of rights is in Florida under the rule of perennial messRon DeSantis.
The governor signed what’s likely the country’s most notorious anti-LGBTQ curriculum bill into law last year, commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
This week, he doubled down on his disdain for LGBTQ+ education of any sort, referring to its inclusion as “indoctrination” and “a political agenda”.
This latest denouncement came after being asked why his administration had rejected the curriculum for an advanced placement African American Studies course.
The offending material? A section on “queer theory”:
When asked about the AP African American studies course that was banned in Florida, Ron DeSantis goes in a homophobic rant that includes railing against intersectionality while doing his best Trump impression. This is about banning ideas he doesn’t like, plain and simple. pic.twitter.com/3PCVwctHPY
“This course on Black History, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory!” he exclaims. “Queer theory” is the widely accepted academic name for the field of LGBTQ+ studies, so the way he managed to make it still sound like a slur is kind of amazing.
His next question to the room proved his lack of understanding of both Black and LGBTQ+ people, ignoring the existence of a whole category of humans in one sentence:
“Now who would say that an important part of Black History is ‘queer theory’?” he asks incredulously.
Let’s think for a moment! Would Martin Luther King Jr.’s close advisor Bayard Rustin say so? How about women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith who helped create the genre of blues music? Do James Baldwin and Audre Lorde not exist in Black History to Florida?
This examination of the intersection of identities and how they interplay in culture and history is exactly the kind of knowledge DeSantis and co. want to keep from the nation’s youth.
“That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids,” he rails. “When you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons — that’s a political agenda. That’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards.”
Discussing Black history without discussing the way Black people continue to be disproportionately incarcerated seems to also be a big no-no to the governor. Makes sense coming from the governor of the state with the third highest number of inmates in the country.
“When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory,” he continues, “you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”
Throughout all this attempting to cover up historical figures and contributions, he firmly asserts that he’s still here for “cut-and-dry history”.
“You learn all the basics, you learn about the great figures,” he contradicts. “I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history. We have history of a lot of different shapes and sizes.”
He closes by very vaguely advocating for the teaching of “people that have participated to make the country great and people that have stood up when it wasn’t easy.” The unabridged facts of who stood up and against what aren’t as important to him as making sure the LGBTQ+ community isn’t among them.
A person holds up a sign that reads “Trans athletes belong in sports” during a demonstration. (Getty/Michael M Santiago)
A new report has found trans women do not have any advantages over any other women, when competing in elite sport, if existing rules are followed.
Findings from a report, which was commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, clarified that biomedical factors do not pose an advantage, but suggests social factors – like nutrition and training quality – do.
The new reportis an in-depth review of all scientific literature published between 2011 and 2021 in English regarding trans women and their participation in elite-level sports.
These studies show there is little evidence to show that factors relating to male puberty – such as lung size and bone density – produce an advantage for trans athletes.
Existing rules regarding trans women in sport most often relate to the suppression of testosterone to certain low levels.
The report concluded that trans women that have begun testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantage.
“There is not one discrete biomarker that allows easy comparison of athletes’ bodies to each other in terms of performance,” thereport reads.
Trans people, especially trans women, have been unfairly targeted in the elite and grass-roots sports worlds, with some even being banned entirely from competing due to anti-trans rhetoric.
Thereport found“strong evidence” that “elite sport policy is made within transmisogynist, misogynoir, racist, geopolitical cultural norms”.
These ‘norms’ are the outcome of a long history of exclusion of women in sports, especially women whose bodies did not conform to standards of femininity.
British Cycling suspended its trans and non-binary participation policy. It comes after trans cyclist Emily Bridges (pictured) was banned from participating in a top women’s event. It is still being updated. (YouTube/Sky News)
Bridges, whocame out publicly as trans in October 2020, was due to compete against some of the top female cyclists in what would have been her first women’s event on 2 April (2021).
British Cycling said it was informed shortly before the event by the UCI that Bridges was not eligible to compete under its guidelines at the time.
Despite new evidence proving that biological traits from trans people pose no real threat to cisgender men and women, the community is still vilified and barred from competitive sports.
After CPAC Leader Matt Schlapp was accused of sexual assault of a male Herschel Walker staffer, both the CPAC organization and Matt Schlapp’s wife, Mercedes Schlapp, have decided to blame…liberals. Texas Paul reacts.
In a heartwarming tale of family acceptance, a dad surprised his son by traveling almost 300 miles to be there for his first-ever drag performance.
The father of 20-year-old Alex Truesdale – whose drag name is Rosebud – traveled from Northern Ireland to West Lancashire, England to see the performance.
“He arrived at my door at 10 am, I couldn’t believe it. I was like ‘Why are you here?’” Truesdale told The Echo.
“It was such a wholesome moment my dad being there cheering me on like he always has since day one. My dad is my hero. He’s annoying and frustrates me sometimes but we always build a bridge, dry the tears and move on. I can tell him anything, especially since I flew the nest.”
Truesdale, a makeup artist, has loved drag since the age of four, but it took much longer for him to fully embrace it.
“I was in an extremely lonely place at the age of 11 and in that place of feeling isolated, I felt like I couldn’t turn to anyone. I began watching RuPaul’s Drag Race and I started using makeup as a way to project my emotions. When I turned 16, I finally came out and it gave me that boost of confidence I needed to try drag for the first time after religiously being captivated by RuPaul.”
Truesdale does not have a good relationship with his mother and said he dealt with nightmares and eating disorders after their relationship imploded. He grew up in Northern Ireland and endured endless bullying but refused to let it stop her from embracing her true self. Her dad, she said, has been her rock through it all, always supporting her and loving her for exactly who she is.
That doesn’t mean life wasn’t challenging, though.
“I used to get bullied daily in school up until the moment I came out,” he said. “I finally came to the realization that what everyone was saying was facts. I am gay and I am proud.”
“But being openly gay and happy was something a lot of people didn’t agree with that,” he went on. “There were plenty of moments when I wanted to just give up. But I didn’t because I reminded myself of four-year-old me who fell in love with [drag].”
Drag, he added, is “an escape from reality.”
“Drag helps me express how I feel in so many amazing ways. I would be lost without it. It’s my hobby, my passion and something that separates my boy job as a makeup artist from the crazy drag life as Rosebud. People think it’s the same person, but to me, it’s my safety blanket. Once I cake my face in makeup, chuck those heels on and throw a wig on I feel invincible, more so than I would as Alex.”
After an FAA systems outage left planes grounded for a few hours on Wednesday, Republicans had no interest in solving the problem, but were quick to blame everything on Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Meanwhile, Secretary Buttigieg got to work and and helped the FAA resolve the issue. Texas Paul reports on the GOP’s failed attempt to take him down.
Photo: Shutterstock
