Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold: 1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America, 2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians), 3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions, 4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and, 5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” “Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”
A bit on the long side, but really informative over what has happened and what is currently happening in this seeming never ending war on Public schools. Hugs. Scottie
Jennifer Pippin says had she known of Rick Wiles’ antisemitic views, she wouldn’t have appeared on his program, but she didn’t apologize for having gone on.
By ANDREW LAPIN/JTAUpdated: NOVEMBER 1, 2023 18:01Books that have been donated to the “Read with Love Book Drive” run by PFLAG Bucks County to help place LGBTQ+ books in Bucks and Montgomery County libraries are placed in a donation box at the Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, U.S., April 7, 2023.(photo credit: REUTERS/HANNAH BEIER)
A Florida organizer of the right-wing activist group Moms For Liberty who successfully pressed her school district to remove a version of Anne Frank’s diary recently appeared on a livestream banned from YouTube because of its pastor host’s antisemitism.
Jennifer Pippin, who chairs the group’s chapter in Indian River County, Florida, appeared in September on the show TruNews, which is hosted by End Times preacher Rick Wiles. Wiles is a conspiracy theorist who has claimed that Jews and Zionists have “attacked Christian culture” and railed against the “Jewish lobby” and “Kabbalah wizard rabbis.”
Wiles, who is based in the same county as Pippin, has also stated, “That’s the way the Jews work, they are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda.” He has claimed that “Israel” was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 2019 he stated, “It’s not Muslims that are going to kill us. It’s the Jews.”
The following year he called the first attempted impeachment of Donald Trump a “Jew coup.” adding that Jews would “kill millions of Christians” after they overthrew the president. The Trump administration credentialed the outlet multiple times, leading to major pushback from Jewish groups. The channel was permanently banned from YouTube in 2020 over Wiles’ antisemitic rants.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday, Pippin said she had not been aware of Wiles’ antisemitism before she appeared on his show and would not have agreed to it if she’d known.
A Little Free Library, which was designed to look like a prison, invites residents to take books that the library says have been challenged by schools across the state of Texas, in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 3, 2023. (credit: REUTERS/CALLAGHAN O’HARE)
Says she was ignorant of hosts’ views, but doesn’t apologize
“Honestly, I’ve never heard of him before,” she said. “And I wasn’t aware of anything that he said against any organizations or group of people or anything like that.”
Yet when she was asked if she was sorry for appearing on TruNews, Pippin responded, “Absolutely not. No.” She said she did not necessarily endorse the views of everyone she speaks to about her efforts to ensure that school libraries contain only “age-appropriate” material.
“My interview was a representation of me and our work with Moms For Liberty,” she said. “Just because somebody says or does something years ago that I don’t agree with doesn’t mean that just because I did an interview with him, I agree with every single little thing that he said or what his news outlet has put out.”
Although Moms For Liberty has some Jewish members in its leadership, the group borrows much of its rhetoric from Christian nationalist organizations and one local chapter has quoted Hitler in its communications to parents. The “parents’ rights” movement the group represents has largely targeted books about race, gender and sexual identity, but some Jewish and Holocaust books have also been caught in the dragnet.
Public figures call the graphic adaptation ‘pornography’
This spring Pippin’s school district on the state’s Atlantic coast, acting on her challenge, made national headlines when it agreed to pull “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” from high schools. A spokesperson told JTA at the time that the 2018 illustrated reimagining of Frank’s diary was “a fictional novel” and “not age-appropriate.”
Since then, opposition to the book has only grown. A Jewish parent at another Florida school district successfully petitioned for the book’s removal last month, while a middle-school teacher in Texas was recently fired for reportedly assigning and reading aloud passages from the book. Politicians and other public figures have since claimed that the book’s depiction of Frank’s attraction to another girl, and her descriptions of her own genitalia, were “pornography”; a local Florida news outlet claimed Pippin had called the book “sexually explicit” in her own challenge.
Pippin told JTA that the quote attributed to her was incorrect and that she did not object to the book’s sexual content, which she recognized came from Frank’s original diary. “I didn’t challenge it for the sexually explicit content because this was actually what she wrote,” she said. “This is what she was thinking in her teenage years, during the Holocaust.”
She instead said she objected to the book’s presence in her high school for a different reason: that it was a highly abridged version of the diary’s original text, and she and a local Holocaust education group jointly believed high school students should be expected to be able to read the original instead.
“They agreed that this one book, the graphic adaptation, should be permanently removed because they felt that children in high school should be reading the true diary of Anne Frank, and not the graphic adaptation, to get the actual, factual information from the diary,” Pippin said, adding that she supported “age-appropriate” Holocaust education in schools.
Wiles: ‘Marxist Communists are waging war against America’s innocent children’
Pippin said Wiles had reached out to her to ask about her challenge to the Anne Frank book specifically, although she said she did not think his questions about the book were antisemitic in nature and the two did not discuss the book in their live conversation.
Wearing a Moms For Liberty T-shirt, Pippin spoke to Wiles for around 30 minutes on his show, chiefly promoting the work of her group, which Wiles said he fully supported. “I will do everything I can to help you,” he told her. “I will help raise money, I will help organize, I will help you get a lawsuit against the school board.”
Wiles introduced his interview with Pippin by stating, “Marxist Communists are waging war against America’s innocent children in almost every state in the USA. They have infiltrated our nation’s local school districts and public libraries.” He concluded it by comparing Moms For Liberty’s battles with school boards to the French Revolution, adding, “If we don’t stop it really soon, none of us are going to survive over the next 10 years, because these people are violent. … They’re going after our children now.”
Pippin told JTA she did not agree with Wiles’ characterization of her activism and had tried to steer the conversation back to books.
TruNews has broadcast in various forms for more than two decades, and Wiles has taken aim at Muslims and LGBTQ individuals as well as Jews over time. In recent weeks, since his broadcast with Pippin and Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Wiles has posted almost exclusively content targeting “godless, atheistic, antichrist Zionism” on social media and called on the Israeli government to “stop the Palestinian pogrom.”
Let’s talk about the crisis at the US border with Mexico. Is it as bad as conservatives say it is? Turns out when you look at the data, immigrants aren’t the boogeyman that Fox News would have you believe. Let’s talk about what’s ACTUALLY happening at the border.
Even protecting kids from killing themselves and bullying is the target of hate from the “Christian” right. Seriously, you would think the Pro-life crowd would rush to protect children from death, instead they pretend that someone dressed in a costume reading a story is the real danger to kids. Sickening and the world needs to wake up to the cesspool that X, Twitter, and right wing media has become. Hugs. Scottie
The Trevor Project, which has nearly 350,000 followers on the platform, said LGBTQ young people are “regularly victimized” on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Trevor Project at the Los Angeles Pride Parade on June 11.Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images file
The Trevor Project, a national suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, announced it is leaving X, formerly known as Twitter, because of “increasing hate & vitriol on the platform targeting the LGBTQ community.” The decision comes just over a year after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk finalized his $44 billion purchase of the company.
“LGBTQ young people are regularly victimized at the expense of their mental health, and X’s removal of certain moderation functions makes it more difficult for us to create a welcoming space for them on this platform,” the organization wrote in a tweet Thursday.
The Trevor Project, which has nearly 350,000 followers on X, said the decision to leave was made with “input from dozens of internal and external perspectives.” In particular, the group wrote, “we questioned whether leaving the platform would allow harmful narratives and rhetoric to prevail with one less voice to challenge them.” But in the end, the group decided that leaving was “the right thing to do.”
The Trevor Project has made the decision to close its account on X.
At the end of its message, the organization directed LGBTQ young people to TrevorSpace.org, its own social networking space for queer teens and young adults. The Trevor Project also noted that it will continue to maintain its presence on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook.
X’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on The Trevor Project’s departure or its characterization of “hate & vitriol” on the platform.
As NBC News reported last month on the one-year anniversary of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, many LGBTQ people say the once-hospitable home for community building has turned toxic.
This, they say, is due in part to a number of policy changes and business decisions at the company, including the layoff of employees who worked on reducing misinformation and harassment on the platform, and the removal of the site’s previous ban on intentionally using the incorrect pronouns or names for transgender people, practices known as misgendering and deadnaming.
GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, releases an annual Social Media Safety Index and Platform Scorecard that evaluates social media platforms’ policies for ensuring the safety of LGBTQ users. In its most recent scorecard, published in June, X ranked in last place among the major social media platforms.
Since Musk took over the platform, LGBTQ people running some of the most-followed X accounts have abandoned it. Elton John, who has over a million followers, announced he was leaving in December, and Ellen DeGeneres, who has 75 million followers, hasn’t tweeted since April.
And The Trevor Project is not the only LGBTQ nonprofit to leave. The San Francisco LGBT Center, LGBTQ Youth Scotland and the U.K.-based Mermaids, a transgender charity, have also left the platform, just to name a few.
Another calm rational explanation of what is happening and the probable reasons why. The video details of the clear attempt of Israel to reclaim the land for its own use, removing all Palestinians from Gaza. Hugs. Scottie
Fox News host Sean Hannity reacted to the news that Issue 1, the Ohio abortion ballot measure was adopted. Hannity said that Democrats are “…trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.”
In 2008, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a radio interview that the fall of Rome, per some historians, was attributed to “…not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society.”
Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland examine the absurdity of recent attempts to paint the US as having a lack of leverage over Israel, walk through the practicalities of a ceasefire and what an attempt to actually dismantle Hamas would look like (if Israel or Biden cared).
Counterpoints’ Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky asked Rand Paul for his response to the israel/Gaza conflict after the October 7th attack by Hamas. Paul acknowledges that Israel’s response could potentially radicalize more people to resist violently and resist coming to a diplomatic conclusion.
Ah, the world it is a changing! The young are turning out in droves to vote against racism, bigotry, hate, and misogyny. It is time that the people stuck in the 1950s or who were in their prime in the 1970s, along with the fundamentalist religious crowd that wants everyone to follow their church doctrines to understand the society doesn’t want that. Society has moved along to the modern age. If you want to live in those old times / traditions, do so like the Amish / Mennonites. You don’t see them trying to force everyone to live their lifestyle. Hugs. Scottie
IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS
Transgender people can be baptised in the Catholic Church as long as doing so does not cause scandal or “confusion”, the Vatican has announced.
The Church’s doctrinal office also said trans people could be godparents at a baptism and witnesses at a wedding.
The move follows attempts by Pope Francis to make the Church more welcoming to LGBT people.
The Pope told one trans person in July that “even if we are sinners, he (God) draws near to help us”.
The Vatican’s updated stance comes after Brazilian Bishop José Negri wrote to the Church’s Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith with six questions regarding LGBT people and their participation in baptism and matrimony.
It states that a transgender person – including those who have undergone hormonal treatment and gender reassignment surgery – can receive baptism under the same conditions as other believers “if there are no situations in which there is a risk of generating public scandal or disorientation among the faithful”.
The document also explores Bishop Negri’s other questions, including whether trans people can be a godparent. It says that where an adult has undergone hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery they may be a godfather or godmother.
But it goes on to state that priests have the discretion to refuse such a request if “there is a danger of scandal, undue legitimisation or disorientation in the educational sphere of the church community”.
American Jesuit priest Fr James Martin, who is a supporter of LGBT rights, posted on X (formerly Twitter): “This is an important step forward in the Church seeing transgender people not only as people (in a Church where some say they don’t really exist) but as Catholics.”
While the document seems to set out clearly what the Church thinks in terms of trans people being baptised or acting as godparents, it is more nuanced on the other issues raised by Bishop Negri.
On the question of whether same-sex parents who adopt or use a surrogate mother could have a child baptised in the Church, the Vatican said a priest’s decision would have to be based on the “well-founded hope that he or she would be educated in the Catholic religion”.
There was a similarly nuanced response to a question whether a person in a same-sex relationship could be a godparent at a Church baptism. It said the person had to “lead a life that conforms to the faith”.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau almost, accidentally, voiced support for a ceasefire while answering a question during a leader’s summit in Washington DC. This while marches took place worldwide in support of ceasefire.
I want to thank Ten Bears for the link to this article. Look Israel is destroying entire city blocks full of people, civilians, children just to get one or two people they don’t even know are there. How is that in any way justifiable? The police suspect a criminal in an apartment building so they bomb the entire building killing everyone in the complex? Do you support that? How many civilian Palestinians need to die to equal the harm that was done by Hamas? 10,000 civilian Palestinians dead to the Israeli 1,400 dead. And the Palestinian death toll keeps rising. Bibi says no cease fire or humanitarian pause is because Israel might lose the world’s support to keep destroying Gaza and taking the land. Hugs. Scottie
Palestinians inspect the destroyed home of the Barhoum family after an Israeli bombing. Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
The Israeli air force says it has once again attacked hundreds of targets in the Gaza Strip and killed several Hamas commanders.
Around 450 targets were bombed from the air in the past 24 hours, the army said on Monday morning. These included tunnels, military installations and launching pads for anti-tank missiles.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also said troops had taken over a military complex on the ground. According to the military, “several Hamas terrorists” were killed during the operation.
Observation posts, training areas and tunnels are said to have been located on the site. The information could not be verified independently.
The Islamist Hamas movement, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, is classified as a terrorist organization by the EU and the US.
The military also reported attacks by the Israeli navy on command centres, anti-tank missile launching posts and other Hamas observation posts.
Hamas member Jamal Mussa was killed during the operations. He is said to have been responsible for “special security operations” and to have “carried out a shooting attack” on Israeli soldiers in the border area in 1993. The statement did not specify whether any soldiers were killed.
The current fighting started after the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement launched a terrorist attack from the Gaza Strip against Israel on October 7, killing 1,400 mainly civilians and taking some 240 people hostage.
Israel then launched a retaliatory bombing campaign to eliminate Hamas that has killed at least 9,770 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry there.
Palestinian children inspect the destroyed home of the Barhoum family after an Israeli bombing. Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
Palestinians bury their relatives, who were killed in the Israeli raids on the Maghazi refugee camp, in mass graves. Mohammed Talatene/dpa
23-year-old Democratic voter Atong Chan got into a heated exchange after she challenged Democratic primary candidate Dean Phillips on his opposition to a ceasefire.
