Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia (R) expressed her support for a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill on Tuesday by arguing that “LGBT is not a permanent thing.”
During a 15-minute speech on the Senate floor, Garcia argued in favor of a bill that would prevent teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with younger students.
“Gay is not a permanent thing, LGBT is not a permanent thing,” Garcia began. “This isn’t about targeting. This is perhaps about rerouting the responsibilities back to the parents.”
Garcia went on to spout fake statistics about LGBT suicide rates and told a story about a trans woman who prefers to date women. Which proves something, apparently.
Garcia is the founder of Latinas For Trump, for which Trump rewarded her with a Homeland Security post.
She was elected to the Florida Senate in November 2020 in the now-infamous “ghost candidate” scandal in which votes were siphoned away from the incumbent by a man with same last name. Garcia, allegedly, was not involved in the plot which has resulted so far in one arrest.
Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia (R) expressed her support for a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill on Tuesday by arguing that “LGBT is not a permanent thing.”
During a 15-minute speech on the Senate floor, Garcia argued in favor of a bill that would prevent teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with younger students.
“Gay is not a permanent thing, LGBT is not a permanent thing,” Garcia began. “This isn’t about targeting. This is perhaps about rerouting the responsibilities back to the parents.”
The lawmaker insisted that her friends and family are “all LGBT but I don’t pander on that.”
Garcia then seemed shocked as she told the story of one transgender woman who prefers to date women.
“A friend of mine went through the whole transition as an older man, 58-years-old, became a woman and guess what?” she said. “He still likes women! He went through the whole process and we’d laugh together and I’d say, why do you want to deal with the hormones? Why do you want to worry about the extensions and the hair and boobs and the nails and he loved it.”
“So he had a sexual experience,” she added. “And he realized that he continued to like women.”
Garcia also shared false “statistics” about gender-affirming surgery, which has been shown to reduce suicidal ideation.
“You know, a lot of people don’t know that I think that the statistics are that 4 out of 7 people who do the full transition end up committing suicide because it’s tough,” she claimed.
“This one is personal to me. Because of my former boss. I have a 14-year-old son who is gay. Recently came out as gay. I have his permission to talk about this. He didn’t want to tell his friends where I worked.
“He was ashamed of where I worked, rightfully so, but also the fact that there’s this ‘don’t say gay’ – even slogan – out there, it’s making children feel different.
“It’s creating a problem where I don’t think there is one.” – Former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham, today on The View. Watch the clip.
Don’t bother vaccinating your kids against COVID, even though the CDC says it’s a good idea. Quit fussing; they’ll be fine. Dr. Joseph Ladapo promises.
You don’t have to wear that mask, either. Dr. Ladapo says it’s a lie that they save lives, and that doctors who believe otherwise are “zombies.” That was his actual word.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his recently confirmed surgeon general know they are a lot smarter than all those epidemiologists, virologists, cardiologists and pulmonary specialists at the Centers for Disease Control and state and local public-health officials. They are the heroes of the narrative they’ve created and they are ready to deliver the
Gov. Ron DeSantis held this slickly produced event on March 7, showcasing several COVID-denying medical experts. Screenshot from DeSantis’ YouTube channel. – Original Credit: YouTube screenshot (Courtesy photo)
message with lights, cameras and snappy catchphrases.
DeSantis has picked up the phrase “COVID Theater” and is using it a lot lately. It’s an odd choice coming from the office that has stage-managed a public health crisis into a series of sound bites and rants about freedom and jobs.
Monday’s 90-minute roundtable to announce the anti-vax position for kids took things to a whole new level. Shot in a studio, it featured a large table with DeSantis flanked, Last-Supper-style, by a cast of six COVID skeptics. Behind them, a giant, curved video screen displayed more than 200 individual (people pictured on) video feeds. According to the Tampa Bay Times, many of them were state employees, presumably getting paid to serve as living wallpaper. The screen would occasionally be taken over by the giant heads of more “experts,” including some of the nation’s most notorious anti-mask, anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine advocates.
All this time and money – taxpayers’ time and money – was devoted to delivering one message: Parents don’t need to vaccinate healthy children against COVID. But there was an insidious, ridiculous subtext that the bulk of the last two years has been an elaborate illusion crafted to make people afraid.
It’s a sharp contrast to the message being put out by the nation’s medical community. After two years of trying to predict an ever-shifting pandemic, health leaders are wearily gathering around this consensus: They are not really sure what’s coming next. COVID could be mostly gone by the end of the year. The highly infectious omicron variant could continue to infect people. Or we could see yet another variant – possibly even more contagious, or more debilitating, or more fatal. Which option is most likely? They don’t know.
All they can do is recommend the safest decisions, with the most medical support. And that means vaccination, for kids as young as 5. It’s true that children don’t catch COVID easily– at least, not the current variant. It’s also true that vaccines aren’t providing protection for as long as some people thought. Florida has dropped from its 60,000-plus peak of daily new infections to a still-grim 1,800. But COVID is still a threat, and about 170 people die every day. Kids are still getting infected as well. The vaccine reduces children’s chance of getting COVID significantly – up to 91 percent – and it lessens symptoms and duration. If another nasty variant emerges, it could save lives.
That doesn’t seem to move Ladapo or his boss DeSantis, who seems more concerned with coming up with new ways to make “Fauci” into a verb and yelling at high school students to take off their masks. They’ve co-opted a dangerous, highly infectious disease into a political stunt. And now they’re urging parents to ignore the best available protections for their children.
If this is a play, DeSantis is the one writing the script, seemingly blind to the reality that he’s directing a farce.
Notie they not only want to block abortion in their own state, but want to prevent the people in their state from using a legal medical service in another state. Think of it. This is the party of Personal responsibility and small government. I guess they want to shrink government small enough to fit in your underwear.
The measure could signal a new strategy by the antiabortion movement to extend its influence beyond the GOP-led states poised to enact tighter restrictions if the Supreme Court weakens its landmark precedent upholding abortion rights.
Missouri state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R) is shown in December in St. Louis. (Neeta Satam for The Washington Post) (Neeta Satam /For The Washington Post)
The pattern emerges whenever a Republican-led state imposes new restrictions on abortion: People seeking the procedure cross state lines to find treatment in places with less-restrictive laws.
Now, a prominent antiabortion lawmaker in Missouri, from where thousands of residents have traveled to next-door Illinois to receive abortions since Missouri passed one of the country’s strictest abortion laws in 2019, believes she has found a solution.
An unusual new provision, introduced by state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R), would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident obtain an abortion out of state, using the novel legal strategy behind the restrictive law in Texas that since September has banned abortions in that state after six weeks of pregnancy.
Coleman has attached the measure as an amendment to several abortion-related bills that have made it through committee and are waiting to be heard on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Abortion rights advocates say the measure is unconstitutional because it would effectively allow states to enact laws beyond their jurisdictions, but the Republican-led Missouri legislature has been supportive of creative approaches to antiabortion legislation in the past. The measure could signal a new strategy by the antiabortion movement to extend its influence beyond the conservative states poised to tighten restrictions if the Supreme Court moves this summer to overturn its landmark precedent protecting abortion rights.
An abortion doctor from Kansas City, Mo., travels across state lines every month to provide care at clinics in the Midwest. (Whitney Leaming, Alice Li/The Washington Post)
** you may need to go to the link above to see the video, it wont post on here**
“If your neighboring state doesn’t have pro-life protections, it minimizes the ability to protect the unborn in your state,” said Coleman, who said she’s been trying to figure out how to crack down on out-of-state abortions since Planned Parenthood opened an abortion clinic on the Illinois-Missouri border in 2019.
A Supreme Court decision that undercuts Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion across the United States,probably would create a national landscape that encourages patients to cross state lines for abortions, with Democrat-led states moving to protect abortion rights as Republican-led states further limit them.
The trend has been apparent in Texas, where the majority of people seeking abortions since the state’s six-week abortion ban took effect in September have been able to obtain the procedure at clinics in neighboring states, or by ordering abortion pills in the mail, according to a report from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. Demand for abortions has skyrocketed in Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Mexico and other nearby states. Planned Parenthood clinics in states that border Texas reported that patient traffic increased by nearly 800 percent, and independent providers reported comparable increases.
Since Planned Parenthood opened its clinic on the Missouri-Illinois border in October 2019, 10,644 Missouri residents have received abortion care at the clinic, according to Planned Parenthood. By early 2021, the last remaining clinic in Missouri was typically providing between 10 and 20 abortions per month, according to preliminary data from the Missouri Department of Health.
Coleman said she hopes her amendment will thwart efforts by Missourians to cross state lines for abortions. The measure would target anyone even tangentially involved in an abortion performed on a Missouri resident, including the hotline staffers who make the appointments, the marketing representatives who advertise out-of-state clinics, and the Illinois and Kansas-based doctors who handle the procedure. Her amendment also would make it illegal to manufacture, transport, possess or distribute abortion pills in Missouri.
Olivia Cappello, the press officer for state media campaigns at Planned Parenthood, called the idea “wild” and “bonkers.” She called the proposal “the most extraordinary provision we have ever seen.”
If enacted, the measure almost certainly would face a swift legal challenge.
Elizabeth Myers, an attorney for Texas abortion rights groups in a court challenge to the six-week abortion ban, said states cannot regulate activities beyond their borders. She drew a parallel to marijuana laws, which also vary from state to state: While Texas lawmakers can outlaw marijuana, and punish anyone who uses the drug within Texas borders, she said, they have no jurisdiction over a Texas resident who uses marijuana in a state where its use is legal.
“A state’s power is over its own citizens and its own geographical boundaries,” Myers said. “These are limits imposed by the federal constitution and federal law.”
Coleman’s proposal still may succeed in deterring out-of-state abortions, said Myers. Like the Texas law, the proposal itself could have a chilling effect, where doctors in surrounding states stop performing abortions before courts have an opportunity to intervene, worried that they may face a flurry of lawsuits if they violate the law.
Coleman rejects arguments that her law is unconstitutional.
“That’s what they said about the Texas law, and every bill passed to protect the unborn for the last 49 years,” she said.
Supporters of abortion rights stand on both sides of a street near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis on May 30, 2019, as they denounce the Trump administration’s tightening of rules for federal funding of reproductive services. (Jeff Roberson/AP)
Coleman prayed outside the clinic on the Illinois-Missouri border on the day it opened, she said. Since then, she said, she’s been talking to “anyone who would listen” about legal strategies for decreasing the number of Missouri women who seek abortions in other states.
While Coleman says she has been happy to see the sharp decline in abortions in Missouri, she says she can’t fully celebrate the success when so many women are obtaining the same procedure a few miles away.
“It’s just tragic,” she said of the number of Missouri residents who get abortions in Illinois. “It feels very sad and heavy.”
Abortion clinics in states that support abortion rights are preparing for a surge of new patients if Roe is overturned. They are opening new locations and advocating for legislation that would allow them to accommodate more people. Lawmakers in several states have proposed bills this session that would allow nurse practitioners and nurse midwives to perform abortions, in addition to physicians, while others are planning to create statewide databases that will allow out-of-state patients to more easily plan their abortion care.
“We’ve got already half of states that have passed some kind of law to restrict or eliminate abortion access,” said California state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D), who has introduced legislation to help make California a “sanctuary state” for people seeking abortion access. “We definitely are and intend to be a national beacon for reproductive freedom and reproductive justice.”
NEW
A new Missouri bill would prohibit women leaving the state to get an abortion.
If this style of legislation is somehow found legal, it would have a huge impact in a post-Roe v Wade world. https://t.co/kpPiOzVj3J
Michael Flynn, a right-wingconspiracytheorist who served as national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, spoke at a campaign rally Saturday for MAGA pastor Jackson Lahmeyer in Oklahoma, where he falsely claimed that “the word ‘Creator’ is in the Constitution four times.”
Flynn, who was a key player in so-called “Stop the Steal” campaign and continues to travel the country promoting the “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, has endorsed Lahmeyer, a fellow right-wing conspiracy theorist, in his bid to unseat Sen. James Lankford in the Republican primary. On Saturday, he used his time at Lahmeyer’s campaign rally to deliver a rambling speech insisting that this nation is locked in “a spiritual war” against the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—who he called “a demon”—and therefore needs elected leaders like Lahmeyer who realize that the rights enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights come from God.
“Democracy is always a fragile type,” Flynn said. “You read the Federalist Papers, you read [the Founder’s] writings—because this is all about the people that we’re talking about tonight running for office, and others that are out there—you read all these things, you study the history of this country, you study how it was founded. That’s why the word ‘Creator’ is in the Constitution four times. ‘We are endowed by our Creator.’”
“When you go home, look at the Bill of Rights and lay the Ten Commandments right down next to them,” Flynn continued. “Put them right next to each other, and you’ll get a sense of how they developed the Bill of Rights. The rights that the Creator gave us. These are God-given rights; these are not man-given rights.”
“Then you take two other documents, our Constitution and for those who study the Bible, and you look at those two documents because there’s so much [in common],” Flynn added. “The Constitution and the Bible, those two documents are the fulfillment of the promises in the Bill of Rights and the Ten Commandments. That is what gives us our ability to be able to be this free, just unbelievable country that we are.”
This is the reality many may want to ignore or deny. There are very vocal motivated religious groups pushing for the right to discriminate and deny daily rights of personhood to the LGBTQ+ people all over the country. They often win in the smaller contests where they can act and cause fear in local politicians. They will not stop at just one victory, they are on a mission from their god to declare us, the LGBTQ+ an abomination. I have 15 of these stories in my cue I want to address over the last three days but until I get the router / computer issues fixed I can only do a few things as far as posting goes. Why is it Christain to hurt others? Why is it Christain to deny the other person rights? Christain’s see rights as a zero sum game if others have some, they lose some. It is not that way. There are enough rights to go around if you want to give others’ rights. But if you want only your group to have rights and the others under your control, then you are like the Christians.
An ordinance in Nebraska’s capital city that extends discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity could be put on the ballot this November or rescinded after referendum petitions garnered four times the needed signatures.
The “Let Us Vote” referendum initiative needed 4,137 signatures, equivalent to 4% of voters in Lincoln. But petitions were signed by more than 18,500 voters in just 15 days, forcing the Lincoln City Council to put the Fairness Ordinance on the ballot or rescind the law, according to the Nebraska Family Alliance.
Read the full article. Photo: Nebraska Family Alliance executive director Karen Bowling.
The Let Us Vote referendum has successfully obtained more than four times the needed signatures to require the #LNK City Council to rescind or put the so-called “Fairness Ordinance” on the ballot after being signed by 18,501 Lincoln voters in just 15 days!https://t.co/BlO6EXkeWK
Scottie's Playtime 