Sadly it explains our times. I never watched the movie as stupid slapstick comedy is not my thing and right now I am so limited to what I can spend my time on. So enjoy.
Del. Danica Roem at a 2017 White House protestPhoto: Ted Eytan/via Wiki
Out transgender Virginia lawmaker Del. Danica Roem (D) shut down opponents of transgender students participating in school sports by calling out the hypocrisy of conservatives who say they want to protect girls’ sports.
“When we want to deal with the idea of how do we support women athletes, how about we show up to their games?” she said.
Roem was speaking against H.B. 1387, a Republican bill that would ban transgender students from participating in school sports as their authentic selves, effectively banning many of them from participating in school sports. Del. Karen Greenhalgh (R) said the bill is needed to “encourage” cisgender girls to participate in school sports.
Get the Daily Brief
The news you care about, reported on by the people who care about you.
“Similarly gifted and trained males will always have the physical advantage over females, which is the reason we have women’s sports,” she said, defending her bill.
Her rhetoric echoes that of Republicans across the country over the past several years: girls’ school sports need to be saved from transgender girls, and only transgender girls, not from a lack of interest from local communities, sexual predation, and harassment, or bullying girls face for participating in school sports.
Prominent Republican politicians have claimed to have saved girls’ sports, despite never showing any interest in girls’ or women’s sports except when they could attack transgender girls for wanting to participate.
Roem wasn’t having it.
“How about we pay them equally?” Roem said, calling out income inequality between women’s and men’s professional sports.
“How many times have any- any of you here gone to a girls’ basketball game followed by a boys’ basketball game where the girls’ game starts at 5 or 5:30 and the boys’ game starts at 7 or 7:30, and you saw the gym get packed right in the very end of the fourth quarter of the girls’ game because so many people were there excited for the boys’ game, regardless of how competitive, regardless of the skills, regardless of the rankings of the girls’ team?” Roem asked her colleagues.
“If we want to support female athletes, then show up to their games! Fight for equal pay for them! But at the same time, to beat up on trans kids because nine trans kids last year wanted to play sports, we’re now going to affect a policy for more than 1.2 million students?”
WATCH: Del. @pwcdanica's powerful statement on the House floor today, calling out the hypocrisy behind the anti-trans sports ban.
This is great. The short post details his upset and anger at a lot of religions being accepting of gay people. Many have come to the idea that the sin is the sex act not the person’s orientation, and some sects are allies and supportive of gay people and same sex relationships. But you see this interferes with their grift of raising money from bigots, mostly older religious people who are sure gays being allowed to exist in society will anger the god of all things to the point he will destroy or hurt the entire country including maybe them. If most churches catch up with the modern era, well the people won’t be told how bad and evil it is so they won’t give up their merger social security check or make the big donations these hate groups have come to depend on to keep them living well. Think of the fund raising pitches they have lost recently. They can not raise money on stopping abortion after the SCOTUS gave a completely religious ruling on the issue. They fund raised hard to stop same sex marriage before the congress and Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act with every pitch saying they could stop it if you gave just another donation. But of course, they failed again. Now Brian Brown has another pitch about the gays he is pushing to grift more money. That is not to say these people are not dangerous and that they don’t still have a lot of inflance on the right with the republican leaders. Bigotry and fear raise a lot of cash and gets votes. And both the republicans and the fundamentalists / evangelical religious groups do want to wipe the LGBTQ+ out of society to install their religious doctrines into laws to regress the US society back to the past and keep it there. Simply put their comfort zones and what they can deal with is 70 or 80 years old, and their holy book is stuck in the deep past of 2,500 years ago. They can not accept the modern age when their all knowing god only knew what was accepted by a minority 2,500 years ago. Hugs.
We are constantly being lied to by people online. These people are not your friends. Do not trust someone just because they claim to belong to your political “team”. The lying has become endemic. By design it has caused us to hate, fear, and fragment.
Price gouging to the max. Yet republicans wanted to stop Biden from being able to lower gas prices by releasing oil on to the market from the strategic reserve. The republicans campaigned on lowering gas prices yet are focused on cutting Social Security / Medicare and investigating Hunter Bidens dick pics. Yet people vote for these corporate culture war toadies. Hugs
The White House on Tuesday expressed outrage on Tuesday at Exxon Mobil Corp’s record net profit in 2022 of $56 billion, a historical high not just for the company but for the entire Western oil industry.
Oil majors are expected to break their own annual records due to high prices and soaring demand, pushing their combined take to near $200 billion. The scale has brought renewed criticism of the oil industry and sparked calls for more countries to levy windfall profit taxes on the companies.
A White House statement said Exxon’s (XOM.N) profit margin was particularly galling as Americans paid record high prices at the pump. It criticized attempts by Republicans in the House of Representatives to push policies aimed at supporting the oil industry.
“The latest earnings reports make clear that oil companies have everything they need, including record profits and thousands of unused but approved permits, to increase production, but they’re instead choosing to plow those profits into padding the pockets of executives and shareholders while House Republicans manufacture excuse after excuse to shield them from any accountability,” the White House said.
President Joe Biden has blasted oil companies and refiners for much of the last year for enjoying surging profits as gasoline prices soared. In June, he Biden wrote to executives of major oil refiners and complained they had cut back on production to pad profits, according to a copy of a letter seen by Reuters.
Exxon’s CFO Kathryn Mikells responded to growing criticism over the industry’s windfall profits and suggested the answer is not increased taxes.
“We look at the EU tax on the energy sector, and you know, it’s just unlawful and bad policy trying to tax something, when what you actually need is for it to increase,” Mikells said. “It has the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve.”
I regret I am so far behind. It is too hard to sit at my desk, every 15 minutes or so I have to get up and walk around, but then after a few minutes have to sit. If I have a task I need to do standing for more than 15 minutes I have to take more medication to stop my back from giving out. I managed to get my MRI I needed this morning, came home ate and went right to bed. I got up at 2:30 as my back was not getting better. I see my pain doctor on the 6th of Feb. Hopefully I can quickly schedule some shots to my spine. I was getting them regularly to keep the pain down but I got hit with a couple very expensive bills from the spine shots and decided to see if I could handle the pain with muscle shots and pills. Turns out that won’t work. I have already had to take more medication than I like to take. If this doesn’t work I will go to the next level of pain medications. In the state of Florida it is hard now to get the drugs that caused such problems which can be managed but they want to force everyone to fentanyl even as the republicans scream about how deadly it is. The clips below are pure republican hate, making it so poor people on snap cannot buy any affordable foods not even can soup. No meats no matter the kind, no canned vegetables and so much more. And the continued attacks by republicans and DeathSantis on the idea of inclusion and anything LGBTQ+. I again today wont be able to catch up but there is always tomorrow I guess. Hugs
The right is so desperate to have a white straight homogenous country that they claim reading to children with parents present while dressed in costume is porn and “adult” entertainment. WTF. I wonder if the people ever wonder if they can openly lie and make one group illegal will they next make your group illegal using lies? Hugs
A drag queen who goes by the name Flame reads stories to children and their caretakers during a Drag Story Hour at a public library in New York, Friday, June 17, 2022.
An Oklahoma bill would make it a felony punishable by a $20,000 fine for drag artists to perform in front of minors.
The bill by GOP Rep. Kevin West would also make it a misdemeanor for one to organize drag performances in public.
At least ten states have proposed legislation that targets drag performances, including drag queen story hours.
An Oklahoma bill would make it a felony punishable by up to a $20,000 fine for drag artists to perform in front of minors.
The bill would make it “unlawful for a person to engage in an adult cabaret performance” in public before a minor. The fine may fall in the range of $500 to $20,000, and it may also incur a prison sentence from 30 days to two years, according to the bill’s text.
State GOP Rep. Kevin West, who filed House Bill 2186 on January 19, told Insider that the bill is intended to limit performances “in a public place.”
“But if you have a private venue and parents want to take their children there, then that would not be affected by this bill,” West told Insider. “It wouldn’t be allowed where just the general public would be able to see the performance. So like a library or a school or something like that would fall into being under the jurisdiction of this bill.”
West’s bill specifically named drag queen story hours as events that would be considered unlawful, as well as other forms of “adult cabaret” performances. It would also create a misdemeanor for anyone who organizes or authorizes such performances in public or in view of minors, threatening a fine of $500 to $1,000 and a maximum of a year in county jail.
The bill compared drag performers to strippers and topless dancers, defining “drag queen” as a “male or female performer who adopts a flamboyant or parodic feminine persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup.”
One activist on Twitter also suggested that the wording may criminalize a woman displaying a “feminine persona” with heavy makeup around children, per Newsweek.
But West, in a statement to Insider, disagreed.
“I’ve gotten emails and seen stuff online where I’m trying to ban the drag queen shows. Well, clearly nothing in the bill says that those are being banned. It’s just making sure that they’re done in the location where it’s intended,” West told Insider.
“I think that it really just comes to some of those boundaries. We have a lot of laws on the books that prohibit certain activities in public spaces and with everything that we’ve been seeing for the last few years on this subject, I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of bills like this.”
The bill is scheduled to have its first reading in the Oklahoma House on February 6, per the Oklahoma legislature’s website.
It follows a trend of similar legislation gaining traction nationwide to limit drag performances, such as in Arizona, Texas, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, Missouri, Tennessee, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia, according to reporting by Newsweek and the ACLU. Drag story hours in California and North Carolina, and other states, have also been targeted by the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, over the past year.
In October, a coalition of Republicans in the US House introduced a bill to “Stop the Sexualization of Children,” specifically targeting drag queen story hours as “sexually-oriented events,” Insider previously reported. The bill would give parents grounds to sue public entities that use federal tax dollars, such as public libraries, for “sexually explicit materials or programs.”