This is a political talking point maneuver. It won’t become law as longs the Democrats stay in charge. Should the republicans win any or all branches of government they will try to make it the law. Notice they again equate drag queens reading stories as a sexual event. The bill says sexual orientated material by which they want to target books with LGBTQ+ characters or story lines. But it also means everything. Last I checked if a book with a gay character is sexually oriented then so is a book with straight characters. If gay is sexual so is straight, if same sex marriage / couples are sexual then so is opposite sex couples. This is what the right seems to forget is kids see gender all around them in every person / couple they see. Hugs
More than 30 House Republicans have signed on to a bill to prohibit federal dollars from being used to make “sexually-oriented” materials available to children under the age of 10.
The measure introduced Tuesday by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) would prohibit the use of federal funds to develop and host programs or events for children younger than 10 that contain “sexually-oriented material,” such as drag queen story hours that have recently drawn the ire of conservative politicians and right-wing groups.
Johnson’s bill, titled the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” claims that state and federal agencies including the Department of Defense have in the past used federal funds to promote and host “sexually-oriented events” like drag queen story hours or burlesque shows for children and families.
In 2015 as a Louisiana state rep, Johnson introduced an ultimately failed anti-marriage equality bill patterned after Indiana’s infamous and similarly failed bill. In 2018, Johnson joined with anti-LGBTQ evangelical Kirk Cameron in an attempt to allow Christian prayer in Louisiana’s public schools. Johnson is a freshman in the US House.
Universities, public schools, hospitals, medical clinics, etc. could all be defunded if they host any event discussing LGBTQ people and children could be present. The way they define "sexually oriented material" simply includes anything about LGBTQ people.
It includes a private right of action against any government official AND private entity for a violation. This is SB8 style bounty lawsuits against anyone accepting federal funds. This will be a ban on all discussion of LGBTQ people in any entity that received federal funds. pic.twitter.com/ABndE60wxV
This is the American version of Russia's gay propaganda law passed in 2013. This is their end game. To censor and ban LGBTQ from all public life and force them back into the closet.
The pretext in this bill is clear. They will troll the media about the bill being about "stripping" or drag queen story hour. In reality, the way the law is defined, it could apply to a school that has a screening of Buzz Lightyear.
I can't overstate how radical the private right of action portion is. The bill is so broadly defined that a pediatric hospital could be sued for having a pride flag or a medical pamphlet about gender dysphoria. It deputizes anti-LGBTQ bigots to engage in bounty lawsuits.
As we've seen with SB8, the lawsuits are rarely actually filed. Simply the threat of litigation is enough to create a chilling effect. Any federally funded entity will remove all references to LGBTQ people as a precaution, just as schools in Florida have done.
The press don’t bother to point out that ‘sexually-oriented material’ just means ‘acknowledgement of the existence of people who aren’t cis-het.’ Because that would be editorialising.
“any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects” It sure will be fun learning which “related subjects” to our existence will be criminalized. Not to worry, the media will breathlessly cover the “controversy”.
It amazes me that this is a focus for them. Meanwhile, they are against lowering drug prices, trying to stop inflation, helping veterans, etc. They just want to stir up their base voters with this type of rhetoric.
How are Drag Queens any different than any other entertainer that dresses up for an act? Ban the characters at Disney World and in Times Square. Let’s just ban the Arts and Entertainment.
It has long been know that the we need higher prices to find or develop new drugs has been a dodge and a ruse. It is entirely for profit. Katie Porter showed that on during a House of Rep. hearing with a Pharma CEO and with his own testimony showed it was about personal profit for the company / himself / the investors. Hugs
A new study finds no correlation between R&D spending and outlandish drug prices.
At the end of September, a spot of good news: Relyvrio, a new drug for treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—or ALS, a neurological disorder without a cure—was approved in the United States. The ALS community rejoiced; the drug’s authorization was described as a “long-sought victory for patients.”
But the next day, the price of the medicine was revealed: $158,000 a year. This was far higher than what the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, an independent nonprofit that analyzes health care costs, had estimated would be a reasonable price, which it deemed to be between $9,100 and $30,700.
Americans, though, probably weren’t shocked. Prescription drugs in the US cost about 2.5 times what they do in other countries, and a quarter of Americans find it difficult to afford them. Almost every new cancer drug starts at over $100,000 a year. And a 2022 study found that every year, the average price of newly released drugs is 20 percent higher.
How drug prices are set in the US is a mysterious black box. When rationalizing their lofty price tags, one of the most common reasons pharmaceutical companies will cite is that a high price is needed to makegoodon the money invested in research and development.
But is that true? “You hear it so much,” says Olivier Wouters, an assistant professor of health policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “That’s why I was like, well, let’s get some data, because I don’t believe it. I don’t think anyone believes it.”
So Wouters did just that. In September 2022, he and his colleagues published a new paper in JAMA that took this simple argument and put it to the test. In the study, they looked at the 60 drugs that had been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 2009 and 2018 for which there was publicly available information about both R&D spending and pricing. And then they matched up the figures. “Essentially, it was like investigative journalism—check all the receipts, trace back in time on what they spend,” he says. If it were the case that R&D spending was the reason behind high drug prices, you’d expect to see a high correlation between the two. Instead, they found no correlation.
Wouters acknowledges that the sample size in the research is small, but this is because pharmaceutical companies keep most of their financial data under lock and key. If the industry wants to refute the conclusion reached in his paper, then pharmaceutical companies need to make more data available, he says.
To anybody in the field, the response to the paper’s finding is: Well, duh. We know what drives drug pricing, says Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s, ‘How far can I go? What will the market bear?’” Still, Emanuel says, it’s important to have empirical data like this study to refute the industry’s claim.
Intuitively, it feels plausible that a drug’s price would be linked to its R&D costs—the risky biz of innovation is super expensive, right? It turns out even this is highly contested. In 2020, Wouters published another paper in JAMA that dug into how much it actually costs to bring a new medicine to market, something experts have been trying to work out for decades. The number thrown around the most comes from one paper, which relied on confidential data provided by pharmaceutical companies, estimating that it takes around $2.8 billion. “These estimates are sort of shrouded in secrecy. There’s a lot of controversy around them,” says Wouters. He and his colleagues instead found the number shook out at closer to $1.3 billion, less than half the commonly held estimate. Substantially lower R&D costs would suggest that this spending shouldn’t have such a big bearing on drug pricing.
Every so often, there are small glimpses behind the curtains into how pharmaceutical companies actually decide on a drug price. An example of this is the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, which was put on the market in 2013 for a steep $84,000 per 12-week course. In 2015, an 18-month-long US government investigation that reviewed some 20,000 pages of internal company documents revealed that Gilead, the company that owned the drug, had set the high price as a way “to ensure its drugs had the greatest share of the market, for the highest price, for the longest period of time”—in essence, that it was prioritizing profit. In response Gilead said it “stand[s] behind the pricing of our therapies because of the benefit they bring to patients and the significant value they represent to payers, providers, and our entire healthcare system by reducing the long-term costs associated with managing chronic [hepatitis C virus].”
In other countries, the price paid for a drug is decided by bodies that look at the value the drug provides. In the United Kingdom, for example, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) lands on the value of a new medicine by working out how much it costs to give a patient an extra year of “quality life” in comparison to current treatments on offer. If the drug offers too little value, NICE won’t recommend it to the National Health Service. Countries like France and Germany negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to land on a price determined by the clinical benefits a drug provides compared to others on the market.
In the US, things may be beginning to slowly move in this direction. Under the new Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare will be allowed to negotiate prices for a small selection of drugs. However, Emanuel is skeptical it will actually have a big impact on drug price regulation, given the way that law was designed—too many loopholes, he says.
As for holding pharmaceutical companies to account, it shouldn’t fall to academics to do this, says Tahir Amin, founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit that addresses inequities in how medicines are developed and distributed. “We need the government authorities and bodies to be doing this work,” he says of the analysis by Wouters’ team. “How are they setting policy when they do not have this information?”
Wouters doesn’t see his paper as a game changer, but it’s another weapon in the arsenal of those with power to refute excuses made by pharmaceutical companies. “I never thought this was a gotcha,” he says. “No, we always expected this to be the case. But I’m a firm believer that we need some evidence to point to.”
This is another example of superstition being more important than facts. These people protesting are hung up on the name and won’t even bother to learn or find out that the Satanic Temple doesn’t believe in Satan, nor do they worship Satan. The prefer their ignorance. Even if you tell them the truth they still wouldn’t want the group in schools because that name scares / terrifies them. The Satanic Temple is about science, learning, and being a really decent nice person. The Superintendent seems to think the money has cooties or is cursed somehow. The Superintendent wanted the money run through a Christian organization to clean it somehow. That is superstition over facts, hurting kids for no reason. Something an educator should know better than do. Hugs
THERE ARE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL TENETS
I
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V
Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI
People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Superintendent Steve Kirkpatrick suggested the Satanists donate the money to a Christian non-profit instead
The Satanic Temple’s donation was rejected by the Northern York County School District in Pennsylvania (screenshot via FOX43)
Reading Time: 5MINUTES
Adonation by Satanists to the Northern York County School District in Pennsylvania to help purchase school supplies for kids was rejected by the superintendent, who told them to donate the money to a Christian organization instead.
It’s utter stupidity from a district official who seems to think donations from The Satanic Temple are somehow tainted.
All of this began last month. It’s no secret that Christian churches frequently rent out space at public schools in order to hold services on weekends. That’s perfectly legal as long as they’re paying the rental fee and obeying district rules. Under those same guidelines, The Satanic Temple held a fundraising event last month at Northern York High School in Pennsylvania.
While the school board’s decision to approve the rental was followed by a lengthier explanation that they were just following the law, the event itself wasn’t controversial. In fact, it was family friendly:
“The Back-to-School Community Celebration & Fundraiser hosted by The Satanic Temple of Philadelphia & Eastern PA will be various stations of arts & crafts, science experiments, live demos, refreshments, and fun for the entire family,” said June Everett, the campaign director, After School Satan Club (ASSC) and an ordained minister of The Satanic Temple.
As expected, though, the three-hour event was met with protests from right-wing Catholics who have no understanding of how public space works.
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“They’re giving them access to our children,” said John Ritchie. “They should be nowhere near any schools.”
John Ritchie is part of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property. He says he’s outraged the event was allowed to go on, and says his organization is working to get Satan out of schools.
“We are here to say that America is one nation under God; we don’t want Satanism in our schools and we need to do something about it,” said Ritchie.
Ritchie seems to think only the people who belong to the child sex abuse ring known as the Catholic Church should have access to kids. That’s not how anything works. So his protests were meaningless.
While the Catholics were complaining about the evilness of the Satanists, the Satanists were inside the school raising money for children, ultimately collecting $578. (Everett’s emails say they raised $578 in one spot and $587 in another. I’m not sure which one is the typo. News reports are citing the former amount. I’ll use that. It’s not a huge difference either way.)
On a side note, the Satanists paid $1,185 to rent the space. Is that weird? Couldn’t they have just offered to donate that amount instead? Maybe. But sometimes, the publicity is part of the goal since it allows them to raise bigger issues about religious neutrality and church/state separation.
Whatever the case, The Satanic Temple wanted to donate their proceeds to the district and asked administrators for a list of supplies that they could purchase for students.
That’s when things took a weird turn.
Superintendent Steve Kirkpatrick responded to June Everett, telling her the district didn’t want her money. He even suggested she give it to a religious group instead:
Screenshot of the email from Kirkpatrick to Everett
Ms. Everett,
I respectfully decline your offer of a direct donation to the school district and suggest that you instead send your donation to New Hope Ministries or another local social service organization. These organizations are best equipped to effectively distribute supplies and goods to families in our school community that are most in need.
Mr. Kirkpatrick
If there’s some kind of rule prohibiting direct donations, he didn’t point to it. Instead, Kirkpatrick told them to give their money to a Christian non-profit because they are “best equipped” to distribute supplies. But how hard it is, really, to purchase a bulk order of supplies that all teachers can use? It’s a few hundred bucks, not some distribution that requires massive coordination. It’s either religious bigotry or a stunning level of tone deafness.
“I can’t help but wonder if teachers in the community who continually have to dip into their own personal finances for supplies would be frustrated to know that their superintendent can’t get past his own personal bias and bigotry to benefit the children in the district he was appointed to serve.”
In case that wasn’t enough, Everett added a mic drop moment in which she laid out what $587 could purchase:
22,800 sheets of construction paper
543 spiral notebooks
3,410 ballpoint pens
13,152 No. 2 pencils
10,894 crayons
963 erasers
2,018 markers
1,239 highlighters
987 rulers
126 compass/protractors
6,518 sticks of chalk
825,227 staples
36,442 paper clips
31 copies of A Boy Called Bat, Northern York’s “One Book One District” selection
The point is that there are plenty of things here that teachers use all the time. The district could easily make use of the donation.
And yet when the local news spoke with some parents in the community, there were some adults celebrating the decision to reject the Satanists’ donation:
“I am very proud of the school board and district officials for declining that money,” said Amanda, a parent of a child in the Northern York County School District. “I think the taxpayers, who are the community members, have raised their voices saying that we don’t want anything like that in our school district.”
They don’t want… staples and paper clips? Amanda’s bigotry makes no sense whatsoever.
Again, if there’s a policy forbidding donations from outsiders, it should be easy to point to it and suggest a different secular way for the Satanists to help kids. There’s no excuse for rejecting the cash and pointing to a Christian non-profit instead. In a subsequent email Everett offered to donate the money to “the local teachers’ union as well as to individual principals and teachers in your district. The first one to accept will receive it.”
Here’s the bigger concern: Last year, the same district denied the Satanists from starting an After School Satan Club even though they met all the criteria for an extracurricular group. There’s a clear pattern of discrimination that could lead to a possible lawsuit, and it’s hard to see how the Satanists would lose that case.
If that happens, the district would have gone from possibly accepting a donation of nearly $600… to having to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees. All because they didn’t want to accept money from The Satanic Temple. How is any of this better for students?
In a statement to me last night, The Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves couldn’t believe the district’s position:
Does Kirkpatrick himself understand if his way of handling this is legal? I highly doubt it.
Does he care if litigation against his irresponsibility will cost the school district exorbitant sums? Clearly not.
Does he have the answers to basic operations questions that naturally arise from his thoughtless answers to basic questions? It does not appear so, but if he does, he is clearly unwilling to provide them.
This should not be a controversial issue, and for the most part, it isn’t. What we’re seeing here is best understood as the byproduct of a grossly incompetent and unqualified superintendent, and the school district deserves better.
There was no indication yet if the group plans to file a lawsuit.
Right now, they’re just trying to give away this cash.
The DOJ filed a motion for summary judgment in its lawsuit for replevin (return of property) against former Top Trump aide Peter Navarro who use a private server to send government emails and refuses to return the emails to the government.
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