Let’s talk about 3 developments with Russia….

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signs transgender bathroom ban bill into law

I am sorry but how does this protect any student or adult … it also includes higher education.  Notice this part … About 3% of high school students identify as transgender, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  That is in a country of 337 million people. 

This is only a hate bill based on the absurd idea that trans women want to assault girls.  Notice it is always trans girls / women they talk about never trans boys or trans men.  It is a made up problem that never happened so they have to destroy a small minority of people’s lives to prove a point of their bigotry.  I am so sick of this posturing on the part of republicans trying to do to trans what they couldn’t do to the gays 30 years ago.  It is the same tactics and hate they promote.  If you want to know the real cost listen to the trans students who quit school because they had nowhere to go to the bathroom, or the trans students who were given approved bathrooms so far from their classes that they missed some and got bad marks for simply needing to pee before the class started.  These bills have real world consequences for young people in every state.  It is not just the bathroom issue but it makes a trans person a target even if there is a “trans bathroom” assigned.  It means any student using it is outing themselves to the ones that want to target them for abuse.   

Again this solves no problem but does promote hate and bigotry … and it is driven by religious bigotry because of the fundamentalist belief that their god created them male and female only.  They are demanding we run our society, or 2024 understands on the book written by religious leaders 2,500 years ago.  Think about it, these people had no idea of everything we take for granted today, yet the fundamentalist who demand we ;deny rights to trans people do it based on that book of people who did not even understand germs!  These bills are designed to promote a religion and a religious view of life / morality in the public life.   I am an old gay man, this still affects me.  Because bigotry against one group’s rights is bigotry against all people’s rights!  If these people get the right to exclude trans people from bathrooms what is next?  Gay people on the same idea that we are a threat?  Or hell watch about the old segregation idea that blacks are a threat to whites in bathrooms?  See this is the same playbook.  This is not different from black people shouldn’t be in white people’s bathrooms.   Hugs

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Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a bill into law banning transgender students from using school bathrooms and locker rooms that match up with their gender identity.

The law requires people at Ohio K-12 schools and universities use the restroom that aligns with their gender assigned at birth. It also bans students from sharing overnight accommodations with people of the opposite sex from their assigned sex at birth at K-12 schools.  

This does not prevent a school from having single-occupancy facilities and does not apply to someone helping a person with a disability or a child younger than 10 years old being assisted by a parent, guardian or family member. 

The law will take effect 90 days after DeWine signed the bill.

A lawsuit is expected to be filed against this. The Ohio Capital Journal interviewed a Cleveland attorney over the summer about potential legal challenges with the bill, such as who would police such a policy? 

Several transgender Ohioans, allies and educators called on DeWine to veto the bill. The Ohio Capital Journal recently talked to a family who plans on moving out of Ohio because of anti-transgender legislation at the Statehouse. 

The bathroom ban (House Bill 183) was added to a bill that revises College Credit Plus (Senate Bill 104) in the eleventh hour of a House Session at the end of June before the lawmakers went on an extended break.

The Ohio Senate concurred with the changes made to S.B. 104 during their first session back from break. 

State Reps. Beth Lear, R-Galena, and Adam Bird, R-New Richmond, introduced H.B. 183. State Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, introduced S.B. 104. 

About 3% of high school students identify as transgender, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The American Medical Association officially opposes policies preventing transgender individuals from accessing basic human services and public facilities consistent with gender identity.

Slightly more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth in Ohio considered suicide in 2022, according to the Trevor Project. 

About a third of LGBTQ+ students were prevented from using the bathroom that aligned with their gender and slightly more than a quarter were stopped from using the locker room that aligned with their gender, according to Ohio’s 2021 state snapshot by GLSEN, which examines the school experiences of LGBTQ middle and high school students.

 Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine gives his 2024 State of the State address in the Ohio House chambers at the Ohio Statehouse on Wednesday afternoon. (Pool photo by Barbara J. Perenic, Columbus Dispatch.)

 

Forty-two percent of transgender and nonbinary students were unable to use the bathroom that aligned with their gender and 36% couldn’t use the locker room that aligned with their gender, according to the Ohio GLSEN report. 

Transgender youth who can’t use the bathroom that aligns with their gender are at a greater risk of sexual violence, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Pediatrics.  

Other states with transgender bathroom bans

Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Florida, and Utah have laws that ban transgender people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity in schools. 

Florida, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Tennessee’s laws have all been challenged. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit blocked Idaho’s law last year.  

North Carolina made history in 2016 by becoming the first state to ban bathroom access to transgender people. The law was quickly appealed in 2017 and settled in federal court in 2019, but the state ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars as the NBA All-Star Game and NCAA events were moved out of state. 

Follow OCJ Reporter Megan Henry on X.

 

Texas Board Won’t Review Pregnancy-Related Deaths

 

The Washington Post reports:

The Texas committee that examines all pregnancy-related deaths in the state will not review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after Texas’s near-total abortion ban took effect, leaving any potential deaths related to abortion bans during those years uninvestigated by the 23 doctors, medical professionals and other specialists who make up the group.

Leaders of the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee said the change was made to “be more contemporary” — allowing them to skip over a backlog of older cases and review deaths closer to the date when they occurred, and therefore offer more relevant recommendations to policymakers. At least three women have died in Texas because of delays in care related to the abortion bans, according to reporting from ProPublica.

Read the full article.

Peace & Justice History for 11/27

November 27, 1095
Pope Urban II called on all Christians to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims and reclaim the Holy Land: “Deus vult (God wills it)!” What is currently called the Middle East was then in control of the Turks who frequently barred Christian pilgrims entrance to the city.
At the Council of Clermont in France, the pope promised absolution and remission of sins for all who died in the service of Christ. The mobilization of 60,000 to 100,000 Christians throughout Europe in this effort became known as the First Crusade.
 
November 27, 1914
The No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF) was founded by two English pacifists, Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway. They opposed the Military Service Act which introduced conscription, and then mounted a vigorous campaign against the punishment and imprisonment of conscientious objectors.
They were consistently opposed to the war in Europe.


Early Fellowship members 

Fellowship members at a recent protest

Read more about Clifford Allen, Fenner Brockway and No-Conscription Fellowship 
More on the No-Conscription Fellowship from the Swarthmore College Peace Collection 
November 27, 1957
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, made an impassioned speech appealing to the United States and the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) to end testing and begin nuclear disarmament. The two superpowers were the only nations with atomic weapons at the time.
Nehru had fought to free his country from British colonial authority through acts of nonviolent passive resistance with Ghandi, and they achieved independence. He stressed the urgency for the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to “save humanity from the ultimate disaster.”Nehru’s Congress Party government nevertheless pursued an aggressive nuclear program, starting in 1948, publicly committed to peaceful purposes exclusively. Nehru acknowledged that the possession of fissionable materials and growing expertise could readily be directed toward production of such weapons. In the absence of universal nuclear disarmament, he feared acquisition of such weapons by potential adversaries. In particular for India, this meant Pakistan or China.


India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru
Nuclear India – a short history 
November 27, 1965
In Washington D.C., 35,000 anti-war protesters circled the White House then marched on to the Washington Monument for a rally against the war in Vietnam.
November 27, 1967
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign, a movement to broadly address economic inequalities with nonviolent direct action. “It must not be just black people,” argued King, “it must be all poor people. We must include American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and even poor whites.”

Why a Poor People’s Campaign? 
November 27, 1969
Over one hundred members of the U.S. 71st Evacuation Hospital and the 44th Medical Detachment at Pleiku, Vietnam, organized a Thanksgiving protest fast called the “John Turkey movement.” In Home before Morning, nurse Lynda Van Devanter recalled her change in attitude.

Nurse Lynda Van Devanter
“Earlier in my tour, when I had heard about the war protesters, I had felt angry at them for not supporting us.  Now I wished I could march with them . . . Most others in Pleiku felt the same way . . . We even held our own Thanksgiving Day fast—the John Turkey movement — as a show of support for those who were trying to end the war through protests and moratoriums. We heard that the fast had spread to units all over Vietnam.” The fast received considerable media coverage when Denise Murray, a nurse at Pleiku and daughter of a distinguished admiral, made antiwar statements to the press.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november27

Peace & Justice History for 11/23

November 23, 1170 BCE
 
The first recorded strike took place in Egypt when necropolis workers who had not been paid for their work in more than two months sat down and refused to work until they were paid and able to eat.
More about this 1st strike 
November 23, 1887
Black Louisiana sugarcane workers, in cooperation with the racially integrated Knights of Labor, had gone on strike at the beginning of the month over their meager pay issued in script (not cash). The script was redeemable only at the company store where excessive prices were charged. When the first freeze of the season arrived and damaged the crop, the plantation owners were angered. The Louisiana Militia, aided by bands of “prominent citizens,” shot and killed at least 35 unarmed black sugar workers striking to gain a dollar-per-day wage, and lynched two strike leaders in what became known as the Thibodaux Massacre.
More on the Thibodaux Massacre
November 23, 1981
President Ronald Reagan signed off on a top secret document, National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), which gave the Central Intelligence Agency a budget of $19 million to recruit and support a 500-man force of Nicaraguan insurgents to conduct covert actions against the leftist Sandinista elected government. This marked the beginning of official U.S. support for the so-called contras in their war against the Nicaraguans.

Read (most of) the memo 
More on the Reagan policy 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november23

Vladimir Shklyarov, Ballet Star, Dead at 39 – by Lique

Read on Substack

Russian ballet star Vladimir Shklyarov is dead after falling from the fifth-floor balcony of a building.

(snip)

(I’ll say it; it is to wonder how someone capable of his work could simply fall out of a window. Some of the comments on Lique’s Substack go there, as well.)

Peace & Justice History for 11/22:

November 22, 1909

In New York City, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union went on strike against sweatshop conditions in what became known as the “Uprising of the 20,000” and the “Girl’s Revolt.”
The strikers won the support of other workers and the women’s suffrage movement for their persistence and unity in the face of police brutality and biased courts. A judge told arrested pickets: “You are on strike against God.” This was the first mass strike by women in the U.S.

ILGWU timeline 
November 22, 1963
President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas during a motorcade.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president within hours.
November 22, 1968

What is believed to be the first interracial kiss on U.S. broadcast television occurred in an episode of Star Trek between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols.
More about this kiss 
November 22, 1998
7,000 marched on the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, outside Columbus, Georgia.They were protesting the school’s training of Latin American soldiers and other security personnel who return to their countries and are involved in violence and oppression of their populations. 2,319 people were arrested for trespassing.
Protests at the School of the Americas, organized by SOA Watch, occur every November. The school is now known by the U.S. Army as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.


2002 protest at SOA
Visit School of the Americas watch.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november22

NoVember 20, 2024

I have only a little to add to Janet’s eloquent observance post. But I want to say, especially to those who believe that people would not die if they kept “their business” to themselves, that these people were doing no more than any person does: they were just trying to get by. Every human bleeds the same color blood as every other human, and all of us humans are the same: human. It is way past time for people to be treating every other human as they themselves want to be treated.

Peace & Justice History for 11/20:

November 20, 1816
The term “scab” was first used in print by the Albany (N.Y.) Typographical Society.
A scab is someone who crosses a union’s picket line and takes the job of a striking worker.

 
Read The Scab by Jack London 
November 20, 1945
The International War Crimes Tribunal began in Nuremberg, Germany, and continued until October 1, 1946, establishing that military and political subordinates are responsible for their own actions even if ordered by their superiors.Twenty-four high-ranking Nazis were on trial for atrocities committed during World War II, ranging from crimes against peace to crimes of war, to crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by judges from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain.The Nuremberg defendants
Read more 
November 20, 1959
The United Nations proclaimed “The Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” because “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth.”
Read the text of the Declaration 
November 20, 1962
President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in public housing.
November 20, 1969
Eighty-nine American Indians seized Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, offering to buy the island from the federal government for $24 worth of beads (the alleged price paid to the Canarsee Delaware Indians for Manhattan Island; it was actually 60 Dutch guilders).
Their numbers swelled into the hundreds at times; the General Services Administration, which had responsibility for the site of the former federal prison, and Coast Guard gave them the opportunity to leave the island peacefully.They were reclaiming it as Indian land by right of discovery, and demanding fairness and respect for native peoples. The occupation lasted for more than a year. Said Richard Oakes, a Mohawk from New York, “We hold The Rock.”

Indian people and their supporters wait for the ferry.
Photo/Ilka Hartmann
 
a new entrance to Alcatraz; Photo/Michelle Vignes 
Read more about the occupation 

LaNada Boyer (formerly Means) inside one of the Alcatraz guard barracks where occupiers lived from 1969-71. Much of the graffiti from 30 years ago remains throughout the island today. Photo by Linda Sue Scott.
November 20, 1977

Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset (parliament).
“I come to you today on solid ground to shape a new life and to establish peace. “But to be absolutely frank with you, I took this decision after long thought, knowing that it constitutes a great risk….”
Text of Sadat’s speech to the Israeli Knesset 
Listen to the speech 
November 20, 1987
SANE (The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and FREEZE (the campaign to freeze all testing of nuclear weapons) merged at their first combined convention in Cleveland, Ohio, becoming the largest U.S. peace organization.
Peace Action today 
November 20, 1993
The U.S. Senate approved the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), creating the world’s largest trade area covering Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november20

Trump Acts Cordial With Biden While Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegseth Score Nominations | The Daily Show

It is OK and great to stop the video at the 8:30 mark.  After that it gets seriously stupid.  But before that it has a lot to say that is true and said in a semi comedic way.  Hugs