It’s Pride Month! While some corporations like Target are hiding their pride for the sake of loud conservatives, others are doing everything they can to virtue signal to consumers. Jon Stewart rips off the mask of corporate “values” and examines how corporations will perform caring about issues like DEI, climate change, or patriotism, as long as it means bigger profits, and how quickly they backtrack on those moral stands when it no longer suits their bottom line. #DailyShow#Pride#Diversity#Target
I love that they say Vermont doesn’t care about vulnerable children when these people want to abuse vulnerable LGBTQ+ children by forcing a religion on them that calls them an abomination. They want the right to force these kids into conversion therapy or to not let them transition. This is seriously scary shit. Hugs. Scottie
They claim it’s religious discrimination to not let them foster children they say they will refuse to accept.
Two Christian families in Vermont, alongside the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, are suing the state after it stripped their foster care licenses over their homophobic and transphobic beliefs.
“Vermont says they’re unfit to parent any child because of their traditional religious beliefs about human sexuality,” said ADF legal counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse in a press release. “Vermont seems to care little about the needs of vulnerable children, much less the constitutional rights of its citizens. That’s why we’re suing them in federal court.”
Roger Gannam said that trans-inclusive anti-discrimination policy would lead to sexual assaults against women.
The Wuoti and Gantt families filed the lawsuit along with the ADF on Tuesday, initiating a formal complaint against the state.
Vermont changed its policies regarding foster families in recent years to better support LGBTQ+ youth. It requires that foster parents are supportive of young people’s identities – such as properly gendering trans youth or allowing kids to embrace their sexual orientation.
It strictly prohibits “discrimination and bias based on a child or youth’s real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
The lawsuit argues that both families are required by their religion to misgender any foster children, stating that “a person’s sex is binary and fixed by God at conception.” It goes further in arguing that, in the case of the Gantt family, they believe that trans people must detransition and that people should not gender trans people correctly.
The lawsuit also claims that Kaitlyn Wuoti had gender dysphoria as a child, leading her to be filled with “compassion” for children. Both Brian and Kaitlyn Wuoti believe that they cannot even associate with a Pride parade or those in it because “they convey a message about human sexuality that goes against their faith.”
Radke emphasized in a statement that while DCF does not comment on pending lawsuits, the lawsuit was nevertheless filed at the beginning of Pride Month, a time normally dedicated to celebrating LGBTQ+ people.
“It is a human right for all to be valued and supported, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity,” Radke said. “The Family Services Division is here to serve all and upholds that expectation for both its staff, as well as the foster parents who agree to take on the care of the youth in our custody.”
This lawsuit comes at a time when LGBTQ+ youth are especially vulnerable, facing attacks on their healthcare across the world. This atmosphere contributes to stigma against these youths. Moreover, LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to be homeless and in the foster system.
“It’s the role of families to provide that kind of affirmation and validation,” said Amanda Rohdenburg with Outright Vermont. She says it’s impossible to tell who is LGBTQ+ just by looking at them, so LGBTQ+ youth might be placed with anti-LGBTQ+ foster parents. “They are at high risk of experiencing rejection or internalizing homophobia or transphobia that impacts their sense of sense over their lifetime.”
The named defendants in the suit are Department for Children and Families (DCF) Commissioner Christopher Winters, Deputy Commissioner of the DCF’s Family Services Division Aryka Radke, and DCF’s Director of Residential Licensing & Special Investigations Stacey Edmunds.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont, Windham Division and has Gretchen M. Wade of Wadleigh, Starr & Peters, P.L.L.C as additional legal counsel.
The Alliance Defending Freedom is known for its ties to the book The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, which was written by former ADF CEO Alan Sears and ADF member Craig Osten. They group also supports banning LGBTQ+ individuals from the military and the Boy Scouts of America.
The ADF has filed lawsuits across the country, such as in the case of 303 Creative vs. Elenis, where they defend an individual trying to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals based on religion.
I recommend going to the linked article. It has a lot of information on the lawsuit and how petulant the two men are. Here are some quotes. Much more at the Salon link. Hugs. Scottie
Even though the plaintiffs suing for the right to flunk female students for abortion include boilerplate arguments in which they feign concern that abortion is “killing,” the legal filing makes it clear that what really outrages Bonevac and Hatfield is that Title IX prevents them from controlling the private lives of students. Along with their anger about abortion, they grouse about not being allowed to punish students “for being homosexual or transgender.” They also argue they should be able to penalize teaching assistants for “cross-dressing,” by which they appear to mean allowing trans women to wear skirts.
As Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day wrote, the language of the legal complaint is “downright petulant.” The picture painted is of two men obsessed with controlling student lives based on what they’re packing inside their underwear. It should be common sense that college students should be graded on their performance in class, not whether or not their professor resents their sex life or sexual identity. Alas, because the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Texas banned abortion, it’s created a pretext for every busybody who wants to spend less time grading papers and more time working himself into an angry froth over the imagined sexual exploits of his students.
Even though Bonevac and Hatfield work in Austin, Texas, they filed their lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. The reason for this is not mysterious: Donald Trump-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The right-wing judge has a long and frankly unhinged history of screeching at top volume about the evils of “sexual revolutionaries.” (Yes, that does sound like a compliment, but he doesn’t mean it as such.) It takes very little to draw Kacsmaryk’s sexualized condemnation. Premarital sex, for instance, makes one a “sexual revolutionary.” Using contraception within marriage also makes one an irredeemable pervert. In his legal writings, Kacsmaryk is very clear that sex is only for procreation within marriage, and anything outside of that should draw legal sanction. He has not weighed in on whether there should be restrictions on what sexual positions are legally permissible within the procreation-only marital sex, but give him time.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,’” University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield. Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” students should not be allowed time off to get abortions.
If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students.
Even though Bonevac and Hatfield work in Austin, Texas, they filed their lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. The reason for this is not mysterious: Donald Trump-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The right-wing judge has a long and frankly unhinged history of screeching at top volume about the evils of “sexual revolutionaries.”
Bonevac [screenshot above] can be seen in the October 2016 video below expressing his devotion to Trump.
Judge Kacsmaryk, a former lawyer for an anti-LGBTQ hate group, was exposed last year for failing to disclose millions in stock holdings.
Kacsmaryk was previously exposed for failing to disclose virulently anti-LGBTQ interviews and acting to hide his authorship of an anti-abortion article ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing.
More recently, he upheld a ban on drag shows at a Texas university. Kacsmaryk’s ruling to ban abortion pills is pending before the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the issue in March.
Two male Texas professors are suing to flunk students who get abortions.
Their reason? The students had "consensual sexual intercourse."
Remember folks, if you find out during a wanted, planned pregnancy that the fetus is dead and CHOOSE to terminate, that’s an “elective abortion.” These people are as ignorant as they are cruel.
Whenever marriage equality comes up, they all scream about how gay marriage means the end of the human race bc children. So now they want to make it impossible to get an abortion, which means more people will be using contraception. Then they want to eliminate contraception to increase births, many of which will be unwanted. But that’s the best I can figure their plan is.
I want to thank Ali for the link to this story. I will try to post the comment she left pointing me to it. I do not mind a link here or there in the comments if it leads me to new good article on issues. Ali has offered me many links in the comments and all of them so far have been worth reading, and yes many I end up posting like this one. Thank you Ali. Hugs Scottie Below is Ali’s comment.
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!
When I was a kid and well up until into my teens in the 1990s, the right wing in America sold us a dystopian vision of what would occur if gay and lesbian people were granted equal rights, most notably, the right to marry.
According to conservative pundits and politicians, if we allowed same-sex marriage to occur, every street in America would immediately, overnight, turn into the most extreme version of a San Francisco leather parade. Innocent families would be forced, Clockwork Orange style, to watch as bulging crotches were shoved into their faces, sparkling zippers twirling before them, women dressed in men’s clothes, men wearing dresses, the kinkiest sexual acts occurring in public at the drop of a hat.
On Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, equal marriage rights would surely end up in people marrying ducks, cows, goats, etc. Certainly.
But in the decades since then, after figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both now thankfully six feet under) blamed LGBTQ people for events like 9/11, none of that happened. For sure, there are sometimes leather parades, but they’re mostly happening in the same places where there have always been leather parades and nobody there is bothered by them.
Instead, after the epochal event of same sex marriage becoming legal, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No forced Pride parades breaking out in rural Alabama. No kids in Montana getting instructed on the fine art of same-sex kissing. No families in Orange County, California, compelled to learn the words to “YMCA” in gender reeducation camps. Nothing at all.
Why? Because the vast majority of LGBTQ people are just as boring as straight people. They have jobs, go to school and work, take care of their kids, have marital bliss and squabbles and all the rest of it. They aren’t activists militantly marching in the streets for issues or disco, but simply want to make it through another day in peace. Boring as hell, like all of us are.
And this is a triumph. Because for all of American history, the people in power – almost always wealthy, straight, white, men – have attained power and retained power by demonizing everyone else who doesn’t look like them. Black men were after their daughters, Muslim people are terrorists, women are emotional hysterics, and on and on and on. These people profit off of the dehumanization of others and by working overtime to scare people about the horror that could happen if we treated everybody with equality and respect.
Yet every time that the country gets over itself and fulfills the words of the Founders in ways that they could not comprehend in their limited view of the world and who truly deserved “liberty,” we collectively discover that the nightmare was always total nonsense.
This is a lesson to keep in mind as we watch in horror as the right whips up fears about immigrants, transgender people, and refugees from the Middle East in our current electoral cycle. Integrating LGBTQ families into the mainstream of American life made the country stronger, not weaker. Our collective understanding increased, the rich tapestry that is the United States benefitted from increased diversity. The only ones who lost out were close-minded bigots who can’t accept that the world doesn’t look like the deranged fantasies in their brains (and never existed in reality).
Boring is good. We’re all boring. Reject the lurid fantasy world of the haters and instead embrace the mundane reality of a diverse world. And throw a leather parade, if you feel like it. This is America, where you’re free to do so if you like.
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NEW: Texas grade school curriculum would infuse the Bible with history and arts lessons under a new proposal from top education officials. MLK's Birmingham Jail letter, for example, would include Biblical stories on "civil disobedience." @PoojaSalhotrahttps://t.co/D3TyT9XpX5
Important story from @The74 The ostensible reason for the curriculum changes is to support cultural literacy. But do students need to read the Book of Matthew in public school to understand The Last Supper? https://t.co/jd0Wsufbjn
Little claims he’s been targeted for harassment and retaliation over his lawsuit. He’s being represented by the anti-LGBTQ hate group, the Thomas More Society, who claims that Little has a First Amendment right not to have the flag within his sight.
Per reports, Little’s salary is more than $200,000. In 2021, a Long Beach lifeguard tower decked out for Pride was destroyed in arson, much to the delight of commenters on the YouTube clip below.
A Christian lifeguard in California is suing his local fire department after it allegedly threatened to dismiss him for refusing to display a Pride flag at his workplace, court documents show. https://t.co/Bq7d9C3SWB
Last year the group’s founder claimed to The Federalist that his foie gras business was boycotted by local restaurants after he posted an anti-LGBTQ screed on Instagram, putting his family in a “dire financial situation.” In the clip below, he talks about that supposed betrayal and rants about “sexual degeneracy.”
With a month of pride celebrations kicking off tomorrow, a group of Catholic men from Louisianna are preparing a prayer rally to reclaim their town from the LGBT agenda.https://t.co/e6mw7eLGzj
Cultists are also raging in the comments of Walmart’s Instagram post. Sample reply: “Walmart and Pride whatever it is, I hate all this because you glorify everything in this world except what God has created to be from the beginning, which is a family, man married to a woman and their children!! Why don’t you give a true family unit a special month??? This evil agenda to shove all that’s unnatural down our throat will be your downfall one day!! God will not be mocked!! Yes, everyone has a right to choose how you live but why does it have to be glorified for a month??? Just wrong!!!”
If the goal was to make “Pride” toxic for brands, as conservative Matt Walsh urged, then mission accomplished. Now, thanks to Bud Light and so many other casualties of excessive Pride, Americans have started to realize how much power they have to change the corporate landscape.
And now for the tRump cult out cries about that guilty verdict.
I love how every accusation they make about Biden and the democrats / left turns out to be a confession by the republicans. For example they claim that Biden has weaponized the Department Of Justice and is controlling the AG Merrick Garland. But the republicans and trump have been calling for the locking up of his pollical opponent since his first run in 2016. He and his supporters have long called for locking up Biden. These people don’t want to run a country, they want to rule the country and everyone in it. They want to raid the treasury and hammer anyone who tries to stop them. Simply put they wrongly claim no one has ever been charged with this same crime, but it has been charged over 9,000 times. But they are now a cult and if the dear leader says it it must be so, reality be damned. Hugs. Scottie
Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution https://t.co/l0ekYagThWpic.twitter.com/L8Lc6YAMo4
Wow! Joe diGenova suggests on Laura Ingraham's show that Republicans should buy guns because there is a civil war coming. "It’s going to be total war." pic.twitter.com/ctBB1ikrd0
JMG: Regarding Kelly’s lie about E. Jean Carroll, New York’s 2022 Adult Survivors Act was certainly not passed with her in mind and in fact resulted in lawsuits against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, and rapper Sean Combs. In total, nearly 3000 suits were filed before the law expired in 2023.
NBC News: Trump supporters are trying to doxx the jurors in Trump's criminal trial.
A non-profit that conducts public interest research found posts of the purported addresses of jurors on a fringe message board known for pro-Trump content.
believe that the woman in the back shouting “fuck the king and the queen” is the same one seen below bouncing her enormous bare tits earlier today.
'F*** the King': Furious moment Trump supporters clash with British couple outside his NYC hush money trial as cops escort them away after they visited 'purely for entertainment' https://t.co/5B0celZ9R1pic.twitter.com/vyuWS59LWF
— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) May 29, 2024
#NOW Trump Supporters TEAR UP SIGNS of Anti-Trump protester, shove boobs in her face and break into a SHOVING MATCH outside NYC Court during Trump’s Hush Money Trial pic.twitter.com/n6PVUOQunG
— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) May 30, 2024
NOW: An anti-Trump protester walks into the pro-Trump rally across from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse and has her signs snatched and ripped
A pro-Trump protester then flashed her breasts in the anti-Trump protester’s face pic.twitter.com/EyaoQeVfWE
Footage relayed by a freelance journalist from outside the courthouse appears to show supporters of Donald Trump attacking a protester, repeatedly ripping up the person’s protest signs, and shoving and yelling “f**k that b**ch” in their face. https://t.co/IL7lsMLd35
Judge Merchan just told the jury that they do not need unanimity to convict. 4 could agree on one crime, 4 on a different one, and the other 4 on another. He said he would treat 4-4-4 as a unanimous verdict.
False reports about the jury instructions in former President Trump's New York hush money trial have led to online threats against Judge Juan Merchan. https://t.co/jnN52R0YGq
Trump called it ridiculous, unconstitutional and un-American “that the highly Conflicted, Radical Left Judge is not requiring a unanimous decision on the fake charges against me.” At first glance, it might appear that the former president doesn’t understand one of the basic tenets of the legal system: that guilty verdicts in criminal cases have to be unanimous.
The jury must be unanimous when it comes to determining whether Trump is guilty or not guilty of each specific falsifying business records count, and whether he did so in an effort to unlawfully impact an election, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan said.
He added, however, that the panel did not have to be unanimous about which of those three types of crimes could serve as the underlying violation that brings the state election charge into play. In Trump’s case, prosecutors have offered three types of crimes that would make the state election-meddling charge come into play: federal election law crimes, tax crimes or false business records.
Leavitt went on to claim that President Joe Biden has targeted “innocent” Americans such as the Jan. 6 rioters charged for their roles in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. “They’ve thrown [them] in the gulag in Washington, D.C.,” said Leavitt, who added that Trump said he’d pardon the rioters on “day one” of a second term.
Trump press secretary says their Project 2025 agenda will seek “revenge” on those who oppose Trump, adding that criticizing Trump is a “crime” that requires “justice” pic.twitter.com/HDUNeaIRsF
Watch: A Michigan man left a judge flabbergasted when he appeared in court via Zoom on suspended driver’s license charges, while driving his car. This occurred on May 15, 2024 during Washtenaw County J. Cedric Simpson’s criminal docket hearings. pic.twitter.com/WjqUHq3RCK
Rumors of Trump using the N-word during production of The Apprentice have swirled for years. Executive producer Mark Burnett has long refused to release any outtakes from the show. In 2018, Trump tweeted that the N-word “does not exist in my vocabulary and never has” and that Burnett backs him on this “fake news.”
For 20 years, I couldn’t say what Donald Trump did on the set of The Apprentice. Now I can. https://t.co/yHWnZYKy1l
Read the full article. Per Reuters, Yullo acted in response to the Parkland mass shooting. Yullo also fined insurers $13 million for providing the NRA’s “Carry Guard” coverage for members accused of wrongful death shootings.
So what started out to be a simple fix of a malware problem on the blogging computer I used to completely change all my old Chrome tabs into Firefox tabs. I don’t like the new agreements on Chrome about information gathering no matter who you make your settings to prevent. Basically everything you do is recorded and sent to Google. It is frustrating. Firefox has less work ability and on Chrome I could always recover old tabs if I did not delete them in entire windows, even on other devices. So far Firefox doesn’t seem to have the same ability. If I start to lose to many pages or comments, then I will have to switch back. While privacy is important I need function much more. I need to be able to switch open tabs from one computer to the other to clean them. I will try this but it may not last.
Here are the open Joe My God posts I wanted to share before this all happened. Enjoy.
Read the full article. Earlier this week and this morning it was reported that Florida educators are receiving state training on teaching Christian nationalism and teaching that genocides such as the one committed by Joseph Stalin are examples of cancel culture.
Read the full platform [PDF]. The 2024 platform echoes many of the anti-LGBTQ items seen in the 2022 platform. The platform also contains the many attacks on trans youth now codified into law in nearly two dozen states. Photo: Newly elected Texas GOP chairman Abraham George.
And it total partisan Christian Nationalist news ….
And in bigotry thuggish maga right wing behavior wins news … But think about this. We have normalized and now accept that people going into a store and destroying the merchandise and attacking the staff is OK as long as it fits our religious or political beliefs. Is this what a civilized society is or has become?
Cultists are also raging in the comments of Walmart’s Instagram post. Sample reply: “Walmart and Pride whatever it is, I hate all this because you glorify everything in this world except what God has created to be from the beginning, which is a family, man married to a woman and their children!! Why don’t you give a true family unit a special month??? This evil agenda to shove all that’s unnatural down our throat will be your downfall one day!! God will not be mocked!! Yes, everyone has a right to choose how you live but why does it have to be glorified for a month??? Just wrong!!!”
The horror of the illegal Israeli strike in refuge camp Rafah, where Israel kept insisting all Palestinians MUST go to be SAFE, Israel has now been attacking. After Joe Biden, Mr lets play nice and get the Israeli’s to not do it, and the rest of the world body said stop the illegal action now, Israel has committed another war crime.
These people are trapped in a burning tent caused by the strikes, the injured / death toll is still coming but it is catastrophic because … Israel told these people to go there and they would be safe. Israel is shooting fish in a barrow, but these fish are humans, Palestinians, and Israel does not count them as human! Understand what Israel is doing and realize what the end goal always was. They want the eradication of Palestinian people and the land they are on. They have killed tens of thousands of them, and they want to kill the rest. Israel wants Gaza land for itself as even Jared Kushner tRump’s Middle East envoy said the land would make beautiful sea side resorts. In recent reports we learned Israel military were told to target aid workers and that they deliberately targeted medical people in any role. The goal was according to the military to stop, prevent, and keep others from helping Palestinians! When they tell you who they are, believe them the first time. Hugs. Scottie
In just two days following the International Court of Justice’s order for Israel to end its offensive in Rafah, the Netanyahu government is openly defying it in extreme fashion.
Photo: Shutterstock
Scottie's Playtime 
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!