Is the point we are at now, the anti-LGBTQIA haters can’t get the books they hate out of schools or public libraries, so they call the police and lie that porn is being shown to kids? These groups did a sneak attack and got into positions to act on their racism and their bigotry. But now people understand who they really are and the public is fighting back. The majority doesn’t believe what the haters do, just as the majority of the public doesn’t agree with the maga republicans and what they are claiming and want to do. Just as the maga republicans keep claiming that they speak for the country, they represent what the people want, which is clearly not true, it is the same with the haters. They also claim to represent the people, the public, the parents, everyone! Yet their ideas and what they want are very unpopular, so clearly they don’t speak for the majority, do they? This is like calling in bomb threats to stop drag shows. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t give you the right to deny it to everyone else. Hugs. Scottie
The ACLU is concerned about a police officer’s having searched a classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School for the coming of age novel, “Gender Queer” after receiving a complaint. The incident has prompted outrage in the school community.
AP FILE PHOTO
GREAT BARRINGTON — The plainclothed police officer who entered an eighth grade classroom to search for a book wore a body camera and recorded the incident, leading to more legal questions and concerns.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech advocates say they are alarmed by the recording, as well as the entire Dec. 8 incident that took place after classes let out at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.
They also say they cannot recall any instances of police going to a school to search for a book. Schools and libraries have internal procedures for book challenges.
“That’s partly what is so concerning,” said Ruth A. Bourquin, senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia. What are we doing?”
The Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee and Superintendent Peter Dillion have, in a statement sent to the school community Tuesday, apologized for how it handled the situation, stating “clearly and unequivocally” that it does not support book banning, and committed to making all of its students feel safe.
“The recent incident at the middle school has challenged and impacted our community,” according to the statement. “Faced with an unprecedented police investigation of what should be a purely educational issue, we tried our best to serve the interests of students, families, teachers, and staff. In hindsight, we would have approached that moment differently. We are sorry. We can do better to refine and support our existing policies. We are committed to supporting all our students, particularly vulnerable populations.”
The ACLU has requested that body camera footage and other records related to the complaint and the investigation, Bourquin said.
It was an anonymous complaint that led Great Barrington Police to open a probe about whether parts of the book, “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, could be considered obscene material or pornographic.
Police then notified the Berkshire District Attorney’s Office as per the department’s policy.
They also notified school and district administrators they were coming to the classroom, and the officer was escorted there by the school principal. The teacher, who kept the book in her resource library, was surprised to see the officer. The officer announced he was turning on his body camera and then looked for the book and did not find it.
The DA ordered the investigation closed. The matter of whether the book is appropriate now rests with the schools.
In its letter, the BHRSD School Committee said the incident “has challenged and impacted our community.”
“Faced with an unprecedented police investigation of what should be a purely educational issue, we tried our best to serve the interests of students, families, teachers and staff. In hindsight, we would have approached that moment differently. We are sorry,” the letter said.
The committee said it would work to collect feedback on how it can do better, starting by hosting a community meeting on Jan. 11.
“It is the obligation of the district to use its policies, existing or amended, to select curriculum. In this case, the content was not the issue. The process challenging it was. We want to ensure that students and staff feel safe and supported and that families’ voices are heard.”
“Gender Queer” is a coming-of-age memoir about reckoning with confusion about gender and contains sexually explicit illustrations and language.
It is this that many in LGBTQIA+ community say they believe is the reason for the censorship — not so-called “obscenity” concerns.
In Massachusetts the testfor obscenity is if the material is of interest sexually, depicts or describes sexual conduct “in a way that is patently offensive to an average citizen of this county,” and “has no serious value of a literary, artistic, political or scientific kind,” according to the state.
It was a complaint about so-called obscene materials in the classroom that police say led them there — something they said they had a duty to investigate.
But the ACLU’s Bourquin disagrees.
“We’re very troubled by this notion,” she said. “They say anytime someone could call they have an obligation to go marching into places wearing a body cam, and you know, interrogating people,” Bourquin said.
State laws, she said, are “pretty clear about police not having roles in this situation.”
Both the state and federal constitutions also protect the rights of students to receive information, she added, noting the ACLU and GLAD — Legal Advocates & Defenders for the LGBTQ Community — sent an open letter in January to school superintendents statewide given the rise in attempts to ban school library books.
The letter, also sent to the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, noted that legally such bans “may constitute unlawful discrimination.”
The letter says the courts “have recognized that the fact that some parents do not want their children to read certain books cannot justify depriving other students of their rights of access.”
The ACLU’s letter serves as a legal guide for schools and students’ rights to have access to information that is “free of censorship,” and says the ACLU stands “ready as a resource in this fight.”
The librarian at Du Bois middle school, Jennifer Guerin, made another point about that access. She said that it is “critically important for concerned community members to remember that the current situation is not about forcing a book into students’ hands.”
“It’s about the freedom to read,” Guerin said. “It’s about providing voluntary access to a well-written, highly acclaimed resource in a safe place for a teenager who might want or need it.”
A complaint that led police to search a middle school classroom for the book, “Gender Queer,” sparked a demonstration by Monument Mountain Regional High School students on Friday. The ACLU and other free speech advocates are worried both about the police involvement and about book banning in general.
HEATHER BELLOW — THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE
Using obscenity as an excuse to censor books with literary value is a heavy legal lift, said Bourquin. Obscenity laws have been “carefully crafted to ensure not tromping on constitutional free speech rights.”
If a book has value and isn’t meant to sexually arouse it will be hard for it to fail the legal test for obscenity, she said.
That test is “very specific,” and not something the average person or police officer necessarily would know, said Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition.
“It’s not a very easy test,” Silverman said. “And just because you have a community member pointing to something and saying, ‘That’s obscene,’ well, that doesn’t mean that it is obscene under the First Amendment.”
Like Bourquin, Silverman is stunned by the police involvement and thinks it wise to set a precedent for the future given the uptick in school book challenges.
“While it might be rare now, it doesn’t mean that it will be rare in the future,” Silverman said of police involvement in school literature. “I think the school and the police department have to come forth with a policy to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The American Civil Liberties Union says it has “deep concerns” after a police officer in plain clothes entered a classroom, turned on his body camera, and searched for a book someone reported was sexually explicit. https://t.co/Sn0hAqyuer
Someone called the police to report that a Massachusetts classroom was harboring obscene material: Gender Queer.
The book does not meet the legal definition of obscenity: "Many see it as an important story helping build empathy," said the superintendent. https://t.co/IzbIZ1k7RQ
This report is on the lies and atrocious propaganda of Israel and it’s supporters. Israeli authorities themselves have lowered the number of killed by Hamas to 1,000. The lies about all the babies killed was debunked as only one baby was killed by Hamas and the burned babies and others turned out to have been by Isra
Listen to the student. He makes it clear that the attempts by people like Bridget Ziegler and other haters to make only one man / one woman cis straight sex acceptable, the students still are tolerant of other ways to express sexual enjoyment. What the students are not OK with is the hate and hypocrisy. He calls her out for teaching hate towards same sex relationships and the LGBTQIA while engaging in lesbian sex and FFM sexual relations with her husband, again while demanding it is wrong to have sex out of marriage. Hugs. Scottie
As the Sarasota County School Board convened for the final time this year on Tuesday, Bridget Ziegler entered the board chambers facing a rift largely driven by agenda item No. 1: a colleague’s resolution calling for her resignation.
Zander Moricz, who was the class president at Pine View School in Osprey and now attends Harvard, said Bridget Ziegler deserved to lose her job, but not because of her private sex life.
“That defeats the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, which is that a politician’s job is to serve their community, not to police personal lives,” Moricz said. “So, to be extra clear Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job.”
Read the full article. The clip below has gone wildly viral with millions of views on TikTok, where I came across it a dozen times last night. Watch every second.
“You don’t believe in public schools — you send your kids to private… you deserve to be fired not because of a threesome, but because you are terrible at it.” pic.twitter.com/uehU7IIGp7
I would agree with that IF she agreed that other people’s private business is their own private business. But she vilified people for doing exactly what she was doing in her own bedroom. She’s bisexual but mistreated others for identifying as lgbt. She thought this was okay for others, so it’s good enough for her.
As J is pointing out, it’s not her sex life that’s the issue here – it’s her hypocrisy. Her bisexual, polyamorous sex life is evidence of the hypocrisy – that’s its only importance to anyone but herself.
That’s it. Her fellow conservatives would kick her off the school board on the irrelevant issue of her sexual “immorality.” He realizes it is her hypocritical judgmental sanctimony that is the real problem, not the issue of her private sex life.
The bottom line is this: Ziegler’s refusal to resign her School Board seat is more than just a morality play. If Ziegler steps down or is removed, three out of the five School Board seats, not just two, will be on the ballot in August 2024.
That’s right: What’s truly at stake here is that we could vote on a majority of the School Board’s seats on Aug. 20, 2024. And that would give us a chance to have a School Board with leaders who are more interested in students, teachers and academic achievement than posturing for a national audience in the culture wars.
“That defeats the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, which is that a politician’s job is to serve their community, not to police personal lives,” Moricz said. “So, to be extra clear Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job.”
I had to look up the kid’s sweatshirt and it turns out that “you give me the ick” is teen slang for being grossed out by someone, often for undefinable reasons.
I think it can be both at the same time. Sort of like one of our cats. She will watch the dogs play with a toy she wants. When they are outside, she’ll bat it with all her might to move it under something like a grandfather clock from under which the dogs can’t retrieve it. She can’t, either, but the satisfaction she feels is tremendous. I try to stay on her good side.
That’s part of it. It’s also racism. Private schools were rare in the US until local districts were losing the last of their desegregation lawsuits in the late 60s and early 70s. (Yes, I know Brown was 1954. It was up into the 1970s for many districts to finally comply!) And then homeschooling also for the same reason. They can say whatever they want and some of it is religious and political but a lot of it is not wanting their kids to get to know black and brown kids growing up.
Context: This isn’t the first time Zander made a headline.
The class president at a Florida high school says he wasn’t allowed to share his experience as a gay student in his graduation speech or how the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law will affect students like him, so he got creative.
This is not the serious stuff I normally post. But in a way it is. It is a wonderful story of a high school boy not sure of himself, a father that talks only about girlfriends to the boy, and about overcoming fears of not being accepted or fitting in. It is only 17 minutes long, wonderfully subtitled. Just click the watch on YouTube. Hugs. Scottie
Max isn’t sure about his sexual orientation until he meets Leon, his openly gay classmate at his new school. When Max is singing an original song at a school concert something beautiful happens.
This video quotes a Harvard study that show 36% percent of trans kids are sexually assaulted when forced to use the sex on their birth certificate rather than the bathroom they gender identify with. Then the video talks about how the anti-trans bathroom laws physically harm trans kids while not help cis kids to stay safe at all. It is not cis kids in bathrooms being attacked, but trans kids. Hugs. Scottie
Check out this impressive new ad — or you don’t have to — from Mothers for Democracy, a 501(c)(4) political group that got its start in Texas with grassroots protests against Gov. Greg Abbott’s rightwing extremism (just as a reminder that Texas progressives are still as pissed off and active as iconic Texas Dems like Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, or Barbara Jordan). They’re very definitely positioning themselves as the polar opposite of that other bunch of moms who say they’re for liberty but want to ban books — and certain people too.
The ad, “Thoughts and Prayers,” debuted on social media yesterday to mark the 11th anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. It’s a fresh indictment of the cliché the Right has offered instead of action following mass shootings, from Newtown to Uvalde and since.
The ad begins with a little girl at the edge of a backyard swimming pool reaching for a pink flamingo floaty, priming you to think this is going to be another safety PSA. Which it is, just not about pools, because as the onscreen text explains,
The number one killer of children in the USA … [girl yelps and tumbles into pool]
is not drowning
or car wrecks
or cancer
The girl’s distraught mom arrives on the scene, but instead of jumping in to rescue her daughter, kneels at the edge of the pool and prays, “Please, please, God, save her! Do something! Save her!” [camera cuts to a close-up of the mom’s praying hands, the blurry shape of the girl at the bottom of the pool] “Please save her, please!”
Then neighbors show up to say their “thoughts and prayers” are with her, including one couple relaxing in the pool’s attached hot tub, in swimsuits and enjoying beverages (in pool-safe, nonbreakable containers, for safety). “Thoughts,” she says, finishing a drink. “Prayers,” he adds, nodding at Mom.
Onscreen, we’re shown the statistic that many of us have known for far too long:
The #1 killer of children in the US is
GUN VIOLENCE
The ad closes with an overhead shot of the backyard, the scene centered on the blurred image of the little mannequin in a red dress at the bottom of the pool, over which the final text unscrolls:
THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS
ARE MEANINGLESS
WHEN YOU CAN ACT
The scene blacks out and transitions to a white screen and the words “Act Now. Demand Gun Reform,” with a link to Mothers For Democracy’s gun reform page, which calls out “the hypocrisy of people who say ‘thoughts and prayers’ while going on with their lives as if nothing has happened.”
For the ad, Mothers for Democracy partnered with gun safety groups Newtown Action Alliance, Lives Robbed (founded by parents of victims and survivors of the mass shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School), and Change the Ref, the group founded by the parents of Joaquin Oliver, who was murdered in the massacre in Parkland, Florida. That group also brought us that devastating ad where they invited prominent gun advocates to address an empty “graduation” ceremony for the “lost class” — all the kids killed by guns, who’ll never see their own commencement ceremonies.
The ad is the first of what Moms for Democracy hopes will be six for the 2024 campaign season, on “crucial issues that directly impact families” that also include “quality public schools, climate action, healthcare access, LGBTQ+ rights, and voting protections.” Yep, they have an ActBlue link if you want to help; I gave a few of my Ameros just to find out what with they come up with for climate. On Xitter, the group noted that it didn’t use an ad agency, but rather that it (and we assume the partners?) developed the ad with an in-house team, which is pretty cool, too.
As the circle of Americans directly affected by gun violence expands, year by year, there are more and more people who desperately want the madness to end. They include some impressively talented communicators, like Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida), who started campaigning for gun control when he was 15 and horrified by Sandy Hook — and is a survivor himself, having witnessed a 2016 shooting in Orlando. Together, we can all make sure we’re heard.
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Earlier I posted the version that had no words. I wished I had known this version was out there. It is about the same except this one has the words in the book, which are also on the screen for you to read along. Plus the CC is really good. Again this is based on real life. His young boy knew in his heart who he was and was not. In real life as in the book, the dad helped his son by accepting who he is, not trying to make him what he is not. I don’t know if the boy is trans, but I have seen him dressed in princess outfits with more boyish style hair and no real makeup. So he maybe gender fluid or nonbinary. It doesn’t matter, accepting young people even children for who they are and giving them the chance to grow and be, to learn for themselves who they are is what is important. Oh, I should mention this inoffensive book about a dad’s love helping him accept his son is one of the most banned books and a constant target of the fundamentalist Christians and maga right wing crowd. Mom’s for liberty and Mom’s of TikTok hate this book and claim it is porn and teaches sexualization of little kids. Hugs. Scottie
My Shadow Is Pink, by Scott Stuart, is a beautifully written rhyming story that touches on the subjects of gender identity, self acceptance, equality and diversity.
Watch more at amebatv.com!
Kian Lilien as: Boy Ryan Andes as: Dad Music: Celebration by Stephen Keech (license: YHDSPSYOVPCDAOSJ)
In honor of Pride Month, Director and Writer Steven Hunter and Producer Max Sachar present their Pixar SparkShort, Out. A short film in celebration of family, love, a rambunctious little dog, and so much more. Out is now streaming on #DisneyPlus. #DisneyPlusPride
There are no spoken words, just a lot of emotions expressed. A grand short animated movie. Be the change you want to see, be the person standing up for equality and the right to be who you are. Hugs. Scottie
My Shadow is Pink is about a young boy, born with a pink shadow that loves princess, dresses & “things not for boys”. This is a story of daring to be different, and having the courage to be true to yourself.
Created by Scott Stuart.
The picture book “My Shadow is Pink” was released by Larrikin House in 2020 and has gone on to become a best-seller globally. “My Shadow is Purple” comes out May 2022.
Scottie's Playtime 