California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) donated $100,000 to the campaign of the opponent of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), the latest volley in the war between these two governors.
Newsom pledged the money to Rep. Charlie Crist’s (D) campaign, telling reporters that he doesn’t “like bullies.”
“I like Charlie Crist and I don’t like bullies,” Newsom said. “I don’t like people that demean people. I don’t like when people talk down to people.”
Newsom specifically brought up DeSantis’s call for violence against Chief Medical Advisor to the President Dr. Anthony Fauci, when DeSantis said earlier this week at a rally that “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.” DeSantis, like other conservatives, has been railing against Dr. Fauci for years because the medical advisor advocated masking, social distancing, and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“To call someone pejorative terms because they’re short – who the hell raised these guys?” Newsom said of DeSantis. “What kind of people are they? I know all of us had to sit there and suck it up and take Trump’s demonization but not everybody has to act like him.”
“I mean, literally, I remember growing up and folks would have their mouths washed out with soap if they talked like this. I got four kids; I don’t want these guys being models.”
“You’re attacking the LGBT community, you’re attacking women, I mean, this guy is so extreme, rape and incest… Ron DeSantis? Talks about freedom? And a young girl who is raped by her father doesn’t have a right to her own body to make her own decision? Spare me, freedom. There’s no freedom, there’s no choice.”
This isn’t the first time Newsom has attacked DeSantis. Newsom attacked DeSantis’s Don’t Say Gay law, comparing it to California’s Brigg’s Initiative from 1978.
Also in July, Newsom ran an ad trolling the state of Florida, telling them to stand up for their freedom.
“Your Republican leaders: they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors,” Newsom said in the ad.
We’re about to celebrate Independence Day — but Freedom is under attack by Republican leaders in states like Florida.
Banning books. Restricting speech. Making it harder to vote. Criminalizing women and doctors.
This is what the increasing toxic rhetoric spewed by the republicans and hate preachers produces. This week I have posted of people calling on the government and others to put the LGBTQ+ to death. Some of the rabid right thugs will do it. Hugs
The man allegedly threatened to “blow” a security guard’s “skull off” before getting tackled on a sidewalk.
D.C. police have arrested a man who allegedly used anti-gay slurs while threatening hotel workers with a gun.
Court documents describe how Dylan Nation, 21, was staying at the Carlyle Hotel near the LGBTQ neighborhood of Dupont Circle when he got into an argument with his girlfriend at 1:20 p.m. this past Wednesday. A hotel security worker saw them arguing and “stepped in,” the Washington Blade reports.
Nation allegedly told the security guard he needed to get his face wash from his car, but instead he went to his car to get his gun. The girlfriend told the guard that Nation had a gun in his car so the guard went out there to find Nation arguing with another hotel worker.
The security worker told Nation not to bring a gun into the hotel because it’s not allowed, and that’s then Nation allegedly pointed the gun at him and said he will “blow his skull off.” The security guard took away his gun and took out the bullets and told someone to call the police.
He argued trying to get his gun back, and court documents say that the audio was caught on security camera footage. He can allegedly be heard saying that the hotel workers are “not tough because they are from the fa***t part of D.C. and that his gun is only for fa***ts and pu***es,” the records say.
Then Nation tried to flee when he heard the police were coming but the security guard tackled him on a sidewalk.
Nation, who lives in Tennessee, has a preliminary hearing today. The incident is not being investigated as a hate crime.
Educators in our schools are among the most committed and passionate members of any profession in the United States. Nonetheless, they rank among the most underpaid and underappreciated members of any profession even though they must undergo extensive training, manage the ever-increasing bureaucratic procedures, and deal somehow with the increasing violence in schools and society.
Any good teacher knows that assigning and grading papers is far from the full measure of their actual responsibilities. Most educators serve as parents for students away from home, as counselors, and as conflict mediators, while they offer a kind shoulder on which to cry.
The day of the educator begins far before they arrive at school and extends long after the final bell. They prepare for classes, grade assignments, attend seemingly endless meetings and in-service trainings, read and memorize the newest state standards and updated curricular mandates, attend professional conferences, meet with parents and guardians, confer with administrators and colleagues, mentor student teachers and school volunteer aids, arrange for child care, put off purchasing items for themselves in order to buy essential resources for their classrooms, which fall outside the school budget.
And now, the National Rifle Association and some conservative members of Congress are asking them to consider taking up arms to protect their students if school shooters enter their buildings.
Quite frankly, our nation requires the impossible from our dedicated educators. We ask them to fill in all the gaps, fix the problems in students’ homes and communities, to function at the highest level within our increasingly dysfunctional society. And they are stretched to the point of breaking. Love and commitment to a profession can take an individual only so far.
A new study by the National Education Association found that fully 55% of current educators are considering leaving the profession earlier than they had planned. In addition, the study found that Black and Latinx educators, who are underrepresented in the field of teaching, are considering leaving at even higher rates of 62% and 59% respectively.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that approximately 10 million educators work in public education today, which is down by 600,000 from 10.6 million in January 2020.
Though the overwhelmingly stressful conditions brought on by the Corona pandemic account for several of the reasons teachers cite for leaving the profession, other factors have also eroded their once enthusiastic commitment to entering the classroom. These factors include the shocking budget cuts brought about by the 2009-2010 recession, some of which have not yet been restored.
Attacks on Teachers’ Curricular Options
Since January 2021, Education Week has found that 42 states have either introduced bills in their legislatures or have taken other actions that would restrict how educators discuss racism, sexism, and LGBTQ issues in the classroom. Sixteen states have already imposed these restrictions.
For example, the Florida House has imposed new restrictions on how race is discussed in schools, colleges, and workplaces. The bill went to Governor Ron DeSantis’ desk for approval. The state has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity with its so-called “Parental Rights in Education” law, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Currently, several states are proposing legislation to restrict transgender rights in athletics or in accessing some health services, and others limit overall LGBTQ protections, especially in schools. At least 12 other state legislatures are now appropriating the Florida model in considering similar “Don’t Say Gay” laws.
Before signing the bill, DeSantis stated at a press conference that teaching kindergarten-aged kids that “they can be whatever they want to be” was “inappropriate” for children. “It’s not something that’s appropriate for any place,” he said, “but especially not in Florida.”
He continued: “We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”
Banning Books
Books refresh our minds to a world of learning we could never imagine. They expose us to knowledge to develop understanding and empathy for people, communities, and concepts outside our lives.
Books challenge us to think outside the box. They continually expand our critical thinking skills, especially when combined in dialogue with others, to analyze our small piece of the world and envision how we can improve it.
Reading books and studying real history age-appropriately challenges the sterile whitewashed curriculum on which many students have been weaned. The curricular pablum many are fed is composed of non-nutritive hollow calories deadening creativity and critical thought, and potentially worst of all, a love of learning.
This, in turn, reduces students’ chances of bringing about systemic progressive change in themselves and in their social environments. Enhancing and expanding critical thinking generally stands as a chief reason why those in positions of power have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.
Texas state Rep. Matt Krause (R) has issued a statement asking schools throughout the state to report to him whether they currently hold approximately 850 books on a list he has compiled. Krause explained that he is directing his aim at curricular materials and school library collections that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”
Some of the books on his list include written and graphic novels, while the majority represent non-fiction historical materials in the categories of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender identity.
A brief sampling include: 2020 Black Lives Marches by Joyce Markovics; Life, Death, and Silence: Women and Family in the Holocaust, by Esther Hartzog; The Indian Removal Act and The Trail of Tears, by Susan Hamen; What Is White Privilege, by Leigh Ann Erickson.
Also included are: Beyond the Gender Binary, by Alok Vaid-Menon; Rainbow Revolutionaries: 50 LGBTQ+ People Who Made History, by Sarah Prager; and The Abortion Rights Movement, by Meghan Powers.
Some districts are attempting to ban materials from the 1619 Project (named after the year enslaved Africans were first ruthlessly brought and dumped onto what would be called the United States against their will).
Arizona: A Case Study
By comparison, is this different from the draconian practices enacted by Arizona state officials in 2010 to strip away the Mexican-American Studies programs from Tucson public schools? Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal, suspended the highly successful and student-empowering program.
In 2010 when the state legislature passed the measure, then-Arizona School Superintendent Tom Horn asserted that the law is necessary because Tucson’s Mexican-American, African-American, and Native American studies courses teach students that they are oppressed, encourage resentment toward white people, and promote “ethnic chauvinism” and “ethnic solidarity” instead of treating people as individuals.
Huppenthal released a list of books he had banned from classrooms throughout the state, including The Tempest by Shakespeare,Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998) by Bigelow and Peterson, The Latino Condition: A Critical Reader (1998) by Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) by Delgado and Stefancic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) by Freire, United States Government: Democracy in Action (2007) by Remy, Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006) by Rosales, and Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1990) by Zinn.
Anyone who believes in academic freedom and cultural liberty must find practices of censorship offensive. Students previously enrolled in the Mexican-American Studies program achieved a 94% high school graduation rate, up significantly from around 50% of Latino/a students not enrolled. The program had given students a sense of cultural pride, a passion and joy in the learning process, and a feeling of hope for their futures.
We as a nation have a responsibility to our youth and to the amazingly talented and vital heroes committed to their education. The time has long since passed when we must arm educators with higher sustainable salaries and benefits packages, in addition to fully resourced schools, and curricular options, rather than with firearms.
To rewrite the old expression: Those who can, do. Those who can do and share what they do, teach!
When they tell you who they are believe them the first time. This racist bigot also denies the accepted medical science that conversion therapy is a torture that never works. This type of therapy / actions to change sexual orientation / gender has been found to not only work but be very harmful to the people it is done to. Advanced countries around the world ban it. But notice what the candidate and the interviewer say about the LGBTQ+. They are confused, that they are not a community, the interviewer seems to think only ethnic groups are a community? Mastriano is more worried about the parents wishes not being followed but he has no concern about the child that will be abused by this. Another reason that teachers must not be made to tell the parents about out kids. But he made it clear way back in 2001 how he felt about gay people. He is one of these people who cannot accept the change in society and fights against the growth of understand the modern world has. Hugs
So-called conversion therapy has been denounced as harmful and ineffective by nearly every major U.S. medical and mental health association.
Doug MastrianoPhoto: Senator Doug Mastriano’s Facebook page
Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, a Christian nationalist, said that it’s “disgusting” that the state’s current Governor Tom Wolf issued an executive order against so-called conversion therapy, a widely discredited form of psychological torture that purports to change people’s sexual orientations and gender identities.
Speaking Thursday on 103.7 FM, a conservative talk radio station, Mastriano expressed anger at Wolf’s recent executive order directing state agencies to ensure that neither government workers nor taxpayer funds promote conversion therapy, The Huffington Post reported.
Mastriano also expressed anger that his Democratic political opponent, Josh Shapiro, has spoken out against conversion therapy too.
“This is disgusting to me, where bureaucrats and Tom Wolf — and Josh Shapiro — thinks it’s okay to come in and threaten parents and therapists because their kids might be confused,” Mastriano said in his radio interview.
The interviewer, Michele Jansen, said she also opposed Wolf’s executive order, adding “[the LGBTQ movement is] an activist, political, ideological group. They’re not an ethnicity. They’re not a community of people.”
To be clear, Wolf’s executive order doesn’t “threaten” parents. It contains no consequences for parents seeking conversion therapy for their kids. Wolf’s order merely ensures that state government resources don’t support a pseudoscience that has been disavowed as ineffective and harmful by the nation’s largest medical and mental health associations.
Also, Mastriano’s comment about kids just being “confused” echoes a popular right-wing talking point. Right-wingers claim that young people coming to terms with possible queer identities are actually just “confused” or have been “indoctrinated” by teachers, peers, and media that essentially pressure them into identifying as part of the LGBTQ community. These arguments have been used to claim that all LGBTQ content should be banned from schools.
During his interview, Mastriano blamed educators for confusing kids and said that schools “have graphic pornographic books laid out.” His latter claim is almost certainly untrue, as any school displaying explicit sexual images would have news and images of the content quickly go viral online, becoming a major news story as it outrages parents and community members across the political spectrum.
In truth, claims of in-school pornography have only been repeated by conservative activists looking to ban LGBTQ-themed books and sex educational materials from schools and local libraries.
Mastriano’s comments aren’t really surprising considering his numerous past actions against the queer community. As a state senator, he has supported anti-LGBTQ legislation including a bill that would ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ teams and a bill that would force trans people to use public bathrooms matching the gender they were assigned at birth. He has also endorsed legislation that would stop same-sex couples from adopting children.
Additionally, his 2001 college thesis expressed disgust for anyone who doesn’t hold the view that homosexuality is a form of “aberrant sexual conduct,” according to The Washington Post.
The true dangers of so-called conversion therapy
Wolf’s press release announcing his executive order mentioned a peer-reviewed study from The Trevor Project which showed that 13 percent of LGBTQ youth nationwide had reported being subjected to conversion therapy. Of those, 83 percent were subjected to it before reaching the age of 18. The study showed that young people who underwent conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide afterward.
The methods of so-called conversion therapists include encouraging queer people not to masturbate, redirecting their sexual energy into exercise, “covert aversion” (a fancy name for imagining possible negative consequences of being queer), Bible study, directing same-sex sexual desire onto opposite-sex partners, inflicting pain and humiliation anytime LGBTQ feelings arise, and forcing people to act out stereotypical gender roles in behavior and personal appearance.
“Researchers found that when they accounted for the harms caused by conversion therapy – including negative mental health outcomes and substance use – conversion therapy costs our nation $9.23 billion each year,” Wolf’s announcement said.
“Conversion therapy is a traumatic practice based on junk science that actively harms the people it supposedly seeks to treat,” Wolf noted. “This discriminatory practice is widely rejected by medical and scientific professionals and has been proven to lead to worse mental health outcomes for LGBTQIA+ youth subjected to it. This is about keeping our children safe from bullying and extreme practices that harm them.”
Twenty-nine U.S. states have either passed full or partial bans on conversion therapy for minors. In three of those states — Alabama, Georgia, and Florida — court injunctions have stopped the bans from going into effect while legal challenges to the bans proceed in court.
Scott Esk, a Republican candidate running for a seat in Oklahoma’s state House once said it is “totally just” to kill gay people in comments that have recently resurfaced amid his campaign. Meidas Contributor Texas Paul Reacts.
This is a tump judge. Even Scalia admitted that rules and regulations could be put on gun ownership. These people won’t be happy until grade school kids and hormonal teens are all strapped and carrying guns around. Hugs
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, who cited the Second Amendment in his decision, stayed the ruling pending appeal.
Texas law bars most 18- to 20-year-olds in the state from obtaining a license to carry a handgun or carrying a handgun for self-defense outside their homes. Credit: Callie Richmond for The Texas Tribune
A federal court in Fort Worth on Thursday struck down a Texas prohibition that limited adults under 21 from carrying handguns.
Texas law bars most 18- to 20-year-olds in the state from obtaining a license to carry a handgun or carrying a handgun for self-defense outside their homes. Two plaintiffs, who fall within that age range, and the Firearms Policy Coalition Inc., filed a lawsuit against the state to challenge the statute. The suit says the Texas law prevented the plaintiffs from traveling with a handgun between Parker, Fannin and Grayson counties, where they lived, worked and went to school.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman wrote that the Second Amendment does not specify an age limit and protects adults under 21 years old.
“Based on the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by Founding-Era history and tradition, the Court concludes that the Second Amendment protects against this prohibition,” Pittman wrote in the ruling.
The order will not go into immediate effect. Pittman stayed the ruling for 30 days pending appeal.
The decision comes just three months after an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the deadliest school shooting in Texas.
The Firearms Policy Coalition filed the lawsuit in November 2021. It came months after a legislative session in which lawmakers passed a law that allows Texans to carry handguns without a license or training, despite previous promises from Republican leaders to address gun safety following the 2019 El Paso and Midland-Odessa mass shootings.
Everyone thought I was over the top when I said the Christian nationalist were trying to destroy public education and to change what schools taught removing science and biology and instead pushing the Christian religion. Well here it is right from the republican Christian Taliban themselves. This hate preacher is the Lt Governor in NC, and recently attacked a fellow lawmaker who disagreed with what the Lt Governor was saying, the Lt governor threatened him publicly and refused to even admit he did wrong by threatening someone. He is a large bully, a thug and proud of it. He is the maga and wants to rule in a theocracy not a democracy. Hugs
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson said gay people go to elementary schools to “teach kids about what you do in the bedroom.” (We don’t.)
Lt. Gov. Mark RobinsonPhoto: Anthony Crider/via Flickr
North Carolina’s extremely anti-LGBTQ Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) is now calling for eliminating science and social studies education in elementary schools.
In his soon-to-be-released memoirs – entitled We Are the Majority: The Life and Passions of a Patriot – he railed against kids learning about history in first through fifth grade.
“In those grades, we don’t need to be teaching social studies,” Robinson wrote. “We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.”
Science classes should end because they’re teaching kids about climate change.
“Guess what? Most of the people of North Carolina know global warming is junk science,” he wrote. Whether or not most people in North Carolina believe it, there is scientific consensus that the planet is warming.
Robinson also attacked the state Board of Education, saying the state should “get rid of it.” He also said that “traditional public schools might be a thing of the past” because of charter schools.
“We need to build more, not limit them,” he wrote. “And if we find success along the way, we should bring it into the system. We might adopt charter school methods throughout the system.”
Robinson got national attention last year when his extreme anti-LGBTQ rhetoric during sermons at a local church were made public in online videos.
In one sermon, he compared gay people to maggots and said that maggots at least have a “purpose.”
“If homosexuality is of God, what purpose does it serve? What does it make? What does it create? It creates nothing,” Robinson said.
Robinson said he was once asked by a gay man: “So you think your wife and you, you think your heterosexual relationship is superior to my husband and my homosexual relationship?”
“Yes!” Robinson emphatically told the congregation.
“These people are superior because they can do something these people can’t do,” Robinson said, referencing having a child. “Because that’s the way God created it to be. And I’m tired of this society trying to tell me it’s not so.”
In another sermon, he called homosexuality and trans identity “filth.”
“I’m saying this now, and I’ve been saying it, and I don’t care who likes it: Those issues have no place in a school. There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth,” Robinson said, “and yes, I called it filth. And if you don’t like it that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you.”
And he didn’t back off of LGBTQ issues in his book, writing, “Gay marriage is not marriage either in the eyes of God or even by definition.”
“But I don’t believe you should come down to the school, most especially the elementary schoolhouse, and teach kids about what you do in the bedroom, as if your sexual preferences and practices ought to be celebrated and govern government approval and even support,” he wrote.
In another part of his upcoming book, Robinson attacked Pride and said that minors can’t be gay.
“Telling a child, ‘Oh, you’re gay,’ or dressing a kid up at the gay pride parade in a fairy costume with a pair of rainbow flags—using kids like that is demented,” he wrote. “You shouldn’t let them walk around seeing men with their butts hanging out.”
Robinson attacked transgender people: “Someone who is troubled in this way has something wrong with their brain.”
Robinson also opposed abortion. He went so far as to compare it to murder: “It’s no different than, for instance, me killing my neighbor because he’s standing in the way of me having a job that I want.”
He also wrote that Black people are trying to be “a victim forever.”
“Have you been a victim of wrongdoing?” he wrote. “Yes. But you were victorious over that. Somebody was victorious over that on your behalf. There’s no reason for you to look at yourself in the mirror and think you are a victim. You’re a receiver of benefits because of what people who came before you did. You should be a benefactor for others.”
OAN’s Kara McKinney and the Hitler Youth image Photo: Screenshot
One America News (OAN) reporter Kara McKinney used a photo of Nazis burning books while calling LGBTQ literature “filth” that deserved to be banned earlier this week on her show.
McKinney was ranting about how Democrats “use their outsize media influence” to trick voters into thinking that conservatives want to ban books
“It’s the [unintelligible] Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals tactic of accusing your political opponent of what you’re doing yourself,” McKinney insisted as she showed an image of the Hitler Youth burning books that were labeled “anti-German” in 1938.
But less than a minute later, she was arguing for banning books.
“I think banning pornographic books from school libraries was not only justifiable, it’s the only moral option,” she said.
Of course, no school libraries are handing out pornography to students. What she’s talking about is the presence of LGBTQ-themed books in school libraries, which conservatives have been calling “pornography” for the past year.
Massachusetts secretary of state candidate Rayla Campbell (R) last week even had the police called on her because she was waving around a book that she called “child pornography.” The police officer who responded determined that she was not in possession of child porn, that she was just holding the memoir of nonbinary and asexual author Maia Kobabe.
McKinney pressed on: “It’s our duty, in fact, to purge our schools of such filth.”
Yes, McKinney is using a photo of Nazi youth partaking in a book burning to argue that banning LGBTQ books in public schools is good. She says banning these books "is not only justifiable but the only moral option, it's our duty in fact to purge our schools of such filth" pic.twitter.com/TeLOxkngFW
If anything, McKinney’s use of the Hitler Youth image while talking about banning LGBTQ literature is apt; the Nazi Party destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology – which did pioneering work on understanding LGBTQ identities, including transgender people – in 1933, years before the onset of World War II.
The Institute of Sexology, founded in 1919, was a pioneering research institute on homosexuality and transgender identity. Hirschfield himself advocated for an end to Paragraph 175, the German law that criminalized homosexuality, which made him a target of the Nazis.
On May 6, 1933 — several months before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany — the Institute of Sexology was broken into and occupied by a Nazi student organization. Several days later, the contents of its library were moved to Bebelplatz Square in Berlin and burned, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Gov. Gavin NewsomPhoto: Screenshot
Photo: Shutterstock
Photo: Shutterstock
Doug MastrianoPhoto: Senator Doug Mastriano’s Facebook page/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/f1358a98a282a684559f78f8d0ecdcd5/Guns%20Gun%20Store%20CR%20TT.jpg)
Lt. Gov. Mark RobinsonPhoto: Anthony Crider/via Flickr
OAN’s Kara McKinney and the Hitler Youth image Photo: Screenshot
Scottie's Playtime 