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.
Reality means nothing to him and his cult. He says three different contradictory things before breakfast and his cult buys into each one. When it is said about him though … no way … and they scream violence and hate on everyone. They are a cult. The republican party is no more. It is the cult of tRump party, and his people control all the party apparatus. They are in charge of the most important thing in that former party, the money and the base. So the rest bow down, do what is demanded / needed kiss what he tells them too, and they get to stay in their office. Why is that so important. Don’t the public realize, a seat in federal, and even some what to a smaller degree, a seat in federal congress is the the golden ticket to wealth and fame. Republicans don’t give a shit about governing, most of them hate it and don’t know how to do it. To them it is the way to riches and power. That is their turn on, their goal in life. As it is their god they follow, the Dear Leader tRump. Hugs. Scottie
I just posted a video by Jon Stewart talking about this subject. The next comment I read was by Susan, her link below, who reminded me of a post she made on this same subject. I am going to repost it because I think it will help all of us dealing with the tRump supporters, the Covid deniers, the people who simply can not accept or see reality. Hugs. Scottie
A theory regarding the continued disconnect between Trump objectors and Trump supporters: the divide occurs between those who believe words have meaning and those who do not.
We can trace the beginning of this divide to the moment Trump first announced his candidacy when he famously said of immigrants, “They’re rapists, they’re murderers, and some, I assume, are good people.” Those of us who believe words have meaning interpreted that to mean “They’re rapists, they’re murderers, and some, I assume, and good people.”
Those who would go on to support Trump heard those words differently. They heard some version of “immigrants are bad.” The distinction is important because it highlights the problem with covering this candidate. When somebody deploys weapons with the carelessness and frequency of Donald Trump, it makes it impossible to analyze his every bizarre utterance. How does one separate the bull from the shit?
The Tower of Babel by Peter Bruegel
But the Trump supporter listens to the diarrhetic stream-of-conscious ramblings of their champion and hears soaring rhetoric. The lies, the exaggerations, the threats, the cruelty. They don’t hear any of it. They hear notions: strength, greatness, power. For them, every time he walks out onto a stage double-dick-sucking to the strains of YMCA, it’s Lincoln at Gettysburg. Only better, because Lincoln only spoke for a few minutes, whereas Trump rambles on for ninety minutes at a go.
I really think we’re hearing two different speeches. His supporters are taking in one set of cogent, well-prepared remarks and we’re hearing, well, we’re hearing what he’s actually saying, in all of its crackpot lunacy.
If words have meaning, and Trump’s speaks his words truthfully, then Trump is the greatest president in American history, done more for American Black people than Abraham Lincoln, is a genius – and a stable one at that, his inauguration was the most highly watched inauguration in history, he won California in 2016, as well as the national popular vote, and he won the entire election in 2020. But that’s only if words have meaning.
If words don’t have meaning, we could interpret those same remarks any way we want. We can take him literally or seriously, or literally but not seriously, or seriously but not literally, or we can just assign any random meaning to his words the way the government assigns meaningless code words when naming secret operations so that anybody who hears those words would have no idea what they’re supposed to mean. If words have no meaning, why should anybody get upset when you call their nation a “shithole country” or you call one of The Apprentice contestants “a n—”? Why should anybody disbelieve anything you say when you haven’t said anything to begin with?
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Michael Cohen was probably both correct and incorrect when he discussed the way Trump talks “in code,” but that people close to him understand what he’s saying. No doubt Trump talks in mob-influenced patois: “Our friend David is taking care of it,” because that sort of vaguery relieves Trump of responsibility from a misinterpretation of his intentions. When somebody screws up, it’s never Trump’s fault. How could it be? If they had only listened to what he said, they would have done the job right the first time. Of course, they had listened to what he said but didn’t understand what he meant because it’s unlikely Trump knew what he meant.
Because – and this is the key point – Donald Trump is dumb.
We know this because people who both know the man and believe that words have meaning have said he’s dumb. One of his professors at Wharton, William Kelly, called Trump “the dumbest goddamned student I ever had.” His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, called Trump a “fucking moron.” General John Hyten said about Trump, “the president is an idiot.” His first Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, said Trump is “like a fifth of sixth grader.” I’m sure he didn’t mean it as an insult to fifth or sixth graders.
Dumb people don’t read. They don’t speak with precision. They don’t understand nuance. They have no sense of humor. They often an exaggerated sense of self. They possess unearned confidence. Does this sound like anybody you know?
Which isn’t to say Trump isn’t also a genius. He is. That’s what makes him a unique American figure. Trump understands the dark side of human nature better than most. He understands fear and greed, and mines his own fear and greed to inspire others to feel as bleakly about humanity as he feels about himself. The words don’t matter because the sentiment is so powerful.
Rhetoric fails in his firehose of emotion. It’s the great gift of the autocrat, to inject words with the same shit they put under the skin of supermarket rotisserie chickens to make them so delicious. We know it’s bad for us, but we choose to ignore it because it tastes so good. Trump knows he’s injecting poison into the bloodstream of the American body politic but doesn’t care. Worse, he celebrates it because bile is his mother’s milk.
I apologize for all the Trump stuff lately. As the election nears, it’ll probably continue. But maybe you like it, in which case, toss a little sub my way? As my hero once asked, “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Subscribe
The Trump voter is unreachable because the words one would use to convince the Trump voter are words that voter has already rejected. Words like “election,” “flag,” “nation,” “citizen,” “immigrant.” These, and probably hundreds of other words, no longer mean the same thing to me as they do the Trump voter because Trump himself has twisted them into levers of governmental oppression. Even the word “guilty,” repeated 34 times this week, now means something other than what it means.
I worry we’ve lost America, not because of any single candidate, but because the language itself has been cleaved in two. The language itself has become so politicized that we can no longer even understand each other. We’ve made a Babel of America, and I don’t know how we learn to understand each other again.
Jon Stewart breaks down the response to Trump’s guilty verdict from Joe Biden and the media, as well as the GOP’s vow for revenge and hypocritical complaint about Democrats pursuing “political prosecutions.” Plus, Jon pleads with the media to act a little more like the court system and examine evidence and reach conclusions, instead of wildly speculating on future realities. #DailyShow#JonStewart#Trump
The good people are fighting back now. DeathSantis and his fundamentalist minority have pushed decent people too far. But look for a response from the right wing shock troops, the Proud Boys, the militias, the other right wing gang thugs. Hugs. Scottie
Several Tampa Bay area cities have raised the LGBTQ Pride flags over city buildings this weekend. But that would have been illegal if a bill that died in this year’s Florida Legislature had instead become law.
On Saturday morning the city of Gulfport in south Pinellas County raised the Pride flag over its public library. It came after a short ceremony of speeches honoring the city’s commitment to equality and before a day-long block party celebration of Pride.
The nearby City of St. Petersburg raised its LGBTQ Pride flag over City Hall on Friday. Meanwhile, the City of Clearwater will host Pride events but will not fly the Pride flag at a city building.
Also raising the Pride flag over their city halls this weekend were Tampa, Wilton Manors, Miami, and Orlando. If you know of any others, let us know in the comments.
The Republican bill to ban Pride flags at government buildings passed earlier this year in the Florida House, but died when the state Senate ran out of time to vote on the issue before the session ended for the year.
Of note, an amendment to the Senate version of the bill would have allowed the Confederate flag, something its sponsor later claimed was as “error.”
— Whitney Fox for Congress (FL-13) (@whitfox) June 2, 2024
The vibrant streets of Gulfport were illuminated in the colors of the rainbow on Saturday as neighbors, business owners and city leaders welcomed people from across Tampa Bay at their fourth annual Gulfport Pride Festival. https://t.co/GkSqEJhIN4
Happy Pride Month, Wilton Manors! No matter how you show up, we'll always celebrate that you've found your home here in the Island City. pic.twitter.com/51NouvUEj8
— WiltonManorsOfficial (@WiltonManorsCty) June 1, 2024
The colors of love and progress are flying high in Orlando as we raise the Progress Pride Flag at Orlando City Hall in celebration of our LGBTQ+ community and their ongoing fight for equality. https://t.co/XJTIK6GB10
Funny how the party that’s always going on about the First Amendment and free speech is always trying to ban speech they don’t like, in this case flying a flag.
This is vivid example of what I said yesterday about opposing a gay tourism boycott of Florida. Aside from the fact that countless of our people make their money that way, the major cities in Florida, most of which are run by Democrats, are overwhelmingly on our side.
AND you (and all of us) can be refused medical care. What if I get food poisoning, have car accident? And gay-bashed. I won’t want someone’s ‘sincere’ religious beliefs to interfere with my ‘sincere’ desire to stay alive and healthy.
I was just in a Tires Plus shop to replace a tire. I had to use the bathroom, so I asked where it was. The guy at the desk pointed to it, and said it was the door to the left. It was marked Ladies!!! The men’s bathroom was out of order, and the guy told me that it was “Uni-sex”!!!
I replied, that I am glad for the Democracy and Equaiity!!!
I was in the Eureka/Arcata/McKinleyvillle area of northern California last weekend and every restaurant bathroom I went into was M/F/Who Cares? As they should be.
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.
If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!
Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at an elementary school in Florida, where teachers’ salaries are now the lowest in the nation.
Six states have now passed universal school choice programs, but Florida has been singularly effective at accomplishing what Republicans have had near the top of their agenda for decades: destroying public education.
As The Hill reports, public schools in Florida are shutting down in multiple districts due to a rapid loss of students. Meanwhile, private school enrollment is up by more than 50,000 students, and charter schools have picked up 68,000. Homeschooling has increased by 58.6%, which would likely be even higher if parents weren’t competing for a limited number of available homeschool vouchers. Despite those vouchers expanding by 40,000 a year, they still can’t keep up with demand.
No other state has seen anything even close to this vast shift away from public education.
So why are Florida Republicans so successful in reducing public school enrollment? Because they did their homework. They spent decades draining public school funding, making them poorly staffed, poorly run, and an overall miserable place to get an education. Then they created a voucher system that offers parents unmatched goodies for joining in the enterprise of keeping children ignorant while making right-wing “education” providers rich.
The reason that Republicans want to destroy public education has never been much of a mystery. As Barbara Miner at Rethinking Schools puts it:
Education is a multibillion-dollar market, and the private sector is eager to get its hands on those dollars.
Conservatives are devoted to the free market and believe that private is inherently superior to public.
Shrinking public education furthers the Republican Party goal of drastically reducing the public sector.
Privatization undermines teacher unions, a key base of support for the Democratic Party.
Privatization rhetoric can be used to woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party.
Few states have matched Florida when it comes to undermining public schools to make the alternatives look better.
In 2007, Florida’s investment in public education was about average. The state had one of the worst high school graduation rates in the nation and poor student performance in science, but those numbers were improving. But they didn’t keep improving.
The state did institute a funding program that rewards businesses with tax breaks for educational investments—so long as those investments go tovoucher programs. As a result, the program simultaneously feeds private schools by directly putting money in their pockets and starves public schools through loss of tax funding.
The combination of low teacher pay, poor student investment, harsh state oversight, and a restrictive curriculum that cripples students’ ability to learn has all but destroyed Florida’s public schools. It’s not hard to understand why parents and students would want something better. They deserve something better.
This is exactly how Florida created unprecedented demand for alternatives.
As a bonus for parents who choose to homeschool their children, the state is willing to coverDisney passes and giant televisions. No questions asked. So it’s absolutely no surprise that Florida’s available homeschool vouchers were all snatched up for this school year and areexpected to double next year.
But Florida isn’t the only state that has caught onto the make-it-terrible-and-they-will-leave system of driving kids to private schools. Tennessee now comes in just ahead of Florida on spending per student, and ranks No. 44 on teacher pay. Tennessee’s Republican legislature is considering the unprecedented step of turning down federal funding for education in hope of evading federal requirements on education. Not even Florida went that far.
Fortunately for Tennessee children, the legislature broke into factions and failed to pass Gov. Bill Lee’s voucher plan this year. But it will surely try again next year.
And Tennessee can always look to Florida as its model.
Photo: Shutterstock
Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking at an elementary school in Florida, where teachers’ salaries are now the lowest in the nation.
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!