I love this. The hate preachers in the US desperately need to hear this message. He says spreading hate and inciting attacks on others is not the message Jesus wanted his people to spread, that is not freedom of religion. It is so refreshing and wonderful to hear the message that this Rev. is talking about. Makes me remember the Jesus I was once told about as a child. Hugs. Scottie
This is what all the republican hate driven political crap causes. Simply put it is the same tactic Hitler used. Vilify the people that you want to harm, so that they are less human and your followers feel entitled or allowed to harm them. I have faced / felt this all my life. I thought that with the advancements and acceptance going forward with the modern age all that abuse could change. Then came tRump and his maga, which gave them permission to unleash their worst demons on the LBGTQ+ at any age, especially the most young in schools. It seems the republican maga fundamentalist right thinks it is ok to beat the LGBTQ+ out of any kid. But if they grow up into an adult still being that way … well we have the right to kill them. Can everyone see how disgusting that is? Sadly, some days I feel so frustrated screaming into the wind. Hugs. Scottie
Hillsborough County prosecutors charged a man with murder Friday, alleging that the fatal shooting of a gay man last month at the West Dog Park in Tampa was a hate crime.
Gerald Declan Radford faces a second-degree murder charge in the Feb. 2 death of John Walter Lay. Friends of both men told the Tampa Bay Times that Radford had been harassing Lay for months, hurling homophobic slurs and threatening him. Radford claimed the shooting was self-defense.
The office of Hillsborough State Attorney Suzy Lopez announced Friday that they plan to seek an enhanced sentence against Radford under the state’s hate crime statute.
Investigators said they first came in contact with Radford after he called 911 about the shooting. He claimed he shot Lay in self-defense, and with no witnesses to the crime or evidence to prove otherwise, Radford wasn’t arrested.
Hillsborough State Attorney Suzy Lopez said her office is now preparing for Radford to attempt to use the “Stand Your Ground” defense. Lay’s sister, Sabrena Hughes, told FOX 13 that the shooting followed two years of harassment and homophobic slurs directed at her brother by Radford.
Authorities also found a video on Lay’s phone. The video was taken like a selfie of the victim as he detailed a threat that was made to him by Radford, according to deputies. Lay claimed in the video that Radford told him, “You’re going to die.”
Colonel Frank Losat with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said the cell phone video on the victim’s phone and character witnesses provided evidence that the suspect did not act in self-defense. Lay had been complaining to his friends about harassment from Radford at West Dog Park for months.
“Some time prior to the shooting, we’re not positive on a timeframe at this point, the suspect and the victim have an altercation over the victim’s sexual orientation,” said Losat. Radford remains in the Hillsborough County Jail.
I normally included the comments because the comments often have many very relevant and important ideas. But I am sorry I no longer strong enough to do that. I have a dozen more posts I want to make, but I no longer have the ability to do it they way I once did. Love and hugs to all. Scottie
So everything is basically reset back to where it was before this law. The only difference is teachers and schools will have to deal with fundamentalist Christian maga parents and wing nuts who don’t even live in those schools claiming that teachers are teaching gender or sexual orientation for allowing a rainbow sticker, that the schools are violating the law because the library returned the books with and about LGBTQIA characters / plots in them, and it will tie all schools up in lawsuits the state won’t help them with. DeathSantis is really just admitting he was wrong without saying it. Kaplan said that she was sure that the law would be ruled unconstitutional if they continue with the appeal, but that it would take at least two years of kids being bullied and the books out of the library. Of course DeathSantis is claiming a total win when it completely rolls back his law. Gay teachers can let the kids know they are gay, those married can talk about their spouses and post pictures. Anti-gay bullying programs are allowed again. Plus maybe the best thing, the gay straight alliance clubs are allowed again. The real thing you see is DeathSantis only pushed this as long as he was running for office, and once he was no longer needing to suck up to the fundamentalist Christians he backed down, and did not fight for it. I think he knew all along it was an illegal bill. Hugs. Scottie
*** Personal note. Was not feeling well all weekend and this morning I woke up at 4 am needing to throw up. But all I could bring up was air. Then after half a cup of coffee, I started to throw up last night’s meal. All morning I keep feeling dizzy and nauseous every 20 minutes or so. I have spent a lot of yesterday and so far today, in bed. Hugs. Scottie1`
Opponents said the law had created confusion about whether teachers could identity themselves as LGBTQ or if they even could have rainbow stickers in classrooms.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Students and teachers will be able to speak freely about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms, provided it’s not part of instruction, under a settlement reached Monday between Florida education officials and civil rights attorneys who had challenged a state law which critics dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.”
The settlement clarifies what is allowed in Florida classrooms following passage two years ago of the law prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. Opponents said the law had created confusion about whether teachers could identity themselves as LGBTQ or if they even could have rainbow stickers in classrooms.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attends the drivers meeting prior to the NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway, in Daytona Beach, Fla., on Feb. 19, 2024.Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images file
Other statesused the Florida law as a template to pass prohibitions on classroom instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and North Carolina are among the states with versions of the law.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Florida Board of Education will send instructions to every school district saying the Florida law doesn’t prohibit discussing LGBTQ people, nor prevent anti-bullying rules on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or disallow Gay-Straight Alliance groups. The settlement also spells out that the law is neutral — meaning what applies to LGBTQ people also applies to heterosexual people — and that it doesn’t apply to library books not being used in the classroom.
“What this settlement does, is, it re-establishes the fundamental principal, that I hope all Americans agree with, which is every kid in this country is entitled to an education at a public school where they feel safe, their dignity is respected and where their families and parents are welcomed,” Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview. “This shouldn’t be a controversial thing.”
In a statement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office described the deal as a “major win” with the law remaining intact.
“Today’s mutually agreed settlement ensures that the law will remain in effect and it is expected that the case will be dismissed by the Court imminently,” the statement said.
The law, formally known as the Parental Rights in Education Act, has been championed by the Republican governor since before its passage in 2022 by the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature. It barred instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, and it was expanded to all grades last year.
Republican lawmakers had argued that parents should broach these subjects with children and that the law protected children from being taught about inappropriate material.
But opponents of the law said it created a chilling effect in classrooms. Some teachers said they were unsure if they could mention or display a photo of their same-sex partner in the classroom. In some cases, books dealing with LGBTQ topics were removed from classrooms and lines mentioning sexual orientation were excised from school musicals. The Miami-Dade County School Board in 2022 decided not to adopt a resolution recognizing LGBTQ History Month, even though it had done so a year earlier.
The law also triggered the ongoing legal battles between DeSantis and Disney over control of the governing district for Walt Disney World in central Florida after DeSantis took control of the government in what the company described as retaliation for its opposition to the legislation. DeSantis touted the fight with Disney during his run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, which he ended earlier this year.
The civil rights attorneys sued Florida education officials on behalf of teachers, students and parents, claiming the law was unconstitutional, but the case was dismissed last year by a federal judge in Tallahassee who said they lacked standing to sue. The case was appealed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Kaplan said they believed the appellate court would have reversed the lower court’s decision, but continuing the lawsuit would have delayed any resolution for several more years.
“The last thing we wanted for the kids in Florida was more delay,” Kaplan said.
Of note, the lead attorney in the lawsuit is Roberta Kaplan, who is best known to most as E. Jean Carroll’s attorney. Kaplan was also Edith Windsor’s attorney in the landmark Supreme Court ruling on DOMA.
A settlement over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law will allow students and teachers to speak about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom, if it's not part of a lesson. https://t.co/FTg3TWJCyo
#Florida settles lawsuit over @GovRonDeSantis' controversial parental rights law & will clarify vague wording. Plaintiffs calling it the Don’t Say Gay law say the deal will stop school districts from “overreacting.” https://t.co/E4SQGjlUYQ via @JeffSolochek
Wow how clueless can some people be in following their god and right wing ideology? Seriously, does he realize that when women couldn’t vote, he was not covered by the civil rights laws and he wouldn’t be allowed to serve in such a high government position by the white people who think he shouldn’t be able to vote or speak up in public. Yes just as he looks down on women as inferior to him a man, the majority of whites then, and some now also, believe he as a black man is inferior to any white person. I don’t understand bigotry, no matter who it is against. See bigotry is counter to reason, it is irrational. Yet it is hard to use reason to combat it is difficult because bigotry is built on emotion. But this guy is out there as a bigot, hater, and just abusive to anyone who disagrees with him. Again how is this acceptable? What ever happened to decorum and civility from elected officials? Seriously what happened to being able to look up to elected federal and state legislators as the best of the public? Seriously when did being an internet troll be one of the qualifications for political office? When was being a vicious bully an admired trait? But this guy is both? Hugs. Scottie
“The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place, is a man who doesn’t know his,” he wrote on Facebook in December 2017.
In a newly unearthed video, North Carolina’s GOP nominee for governor says America was better then because Republicans “fought for real social change.”
On Tuesday, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson won the GOP primary to become his party’s nominee for North Carolina governor, presumably with the help of female voters.
But just four years ago, Robinson invoked a bizarre hypothetical in which he said he’d “absolutely” like to return to the days when the 19th Amendment didn’t exist ― when women didn’t have the right to vote.
“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” Robinson said in a newly resurfaced video of his remarks at a March 2020 event hosted by the Republican Women of Pitt County.
During this event, Robinson, who was running for lieutenant governor at the time, recalled someone recently asking conservative activist Candace Owens to pick which version of America would make America “great again,” one where “Black people were swinging from cheap trees” or one where women weren’t allowed to vote.
Robinson said he would definitely return to the days in America when women were denied the right to vote “because in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.”
This room full of women was quiet as he spoke, though a faint “That’s right” could be heard when Robinson later said Republicans ended Jim Crow laws. (In fact, lawmakers in both parties in Congress and President Lyndon Johnson ended Jim Crow laws by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)
You catch watch the full clip of Robinson’s remarks here:
Requests for comment from Robinson’s campaign and from his government office were not returned.
In still more Facebook posts, the GOP gubernatorial nominee strangely equated feminism with sexism and racism.
“If blacks should stand up against racism, and women should stand up against sexism….shouldn’t men stand up against feminism?” he posted on Sept. 20, 2016.
That same day, he also wrote, “I am REALLY sick of feminism and feminist. They are just as bad, if not worse, than racist.”
Robinson will go up against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein in November. North Carolina is a crucial swing state in the 2024 presidential election. Former President Donald Trump won North Carolina in 2020, but barely ― and that was before he tried to steal the election, incited an insurrection and was facing 91 felony charges.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who endorsed one of Robinson’s challengers in the GOP primary, said Wednesday that it’s up to the voters in his state to decide in November if they want him to be the governor.
Asked if he agrees with Robinson’s inflammatory rhetoric, Tillis told HuffPost, “Not at all.”
“Now that we’re past the primary … he just needs to go to the people in North Carolina, explain that and get their vote,” he said.
Back when women were property, “colored” folk like you were not allowed to eat at restaurants with white folk, were segregated in public venues(sitting in the shitty section at theaters and such), schools, hospitals, and even the men weren’t allowed to vote even though they had the right. Go back a little further and all black people were owned by white people in the slave states with absolutely no rights at all. And you, sir, are a fucking idiot. Go slap yourself silly.
For Republican women all that matters apparently is the “R” after his name. Of course why any woman would suppport the Republican Party is the obvious next question.
A lot of Republican women have been beaten, raped and otherwise abused into submission by the men in their lives; fathers, husbands, pastors, etc. to the point where they are brainwashed to vote how the men in their lives tell them to. A while back, I read an article about some fundie douchebag pastor preaching to a group of men how they really shouldn’t allow their wives to vote, but if their wives insist on voting, their husbands should make sure that their wives vote “correctly,” so their votes do not “cancel out” the husbands’ votes.
That reminded me of a story an ex-Mormon friend told me, about how before she went in to vote for the first time as a college freshman in 1992, her father handed her and her mother a list of candidates (all Republican) and said “This is how I expect you to vote, I’ll be watching.” Her father stood in the voting booth next to her, giving her the side eye the entire time she was casting her ballot. Even though she wanted to vote for Clinton, she voted for George Bush I instead, because dad was also an abusive asshole, and she feared what he might do if she didn’t vote as she was told. If the poll workers saw what her Dad was doing, they didn’t do anything. It was probably quite common in the shitty Mormon town she was raised in. And I doubt things have changed.
Back when women were property, “colored” folk like you were not allowed to eat at restaurants with white folk, were segregated in public venues(sitting in the shitty section at theaters and such), schools, hospitals, and even the men weren’t allowed to vote even though they had the right. Go back a little further and all black people were owned by white people in the slave states with absolutely no rights at all. And you, sir, are a fucking idiot. Go slap yourself silly.
The short clip is very important for all to hear. Thank you TG for posting it. I know many here also follow Mock Paper Scissors, but for those that do not or missed the post, this is great. It is about mistreating children, it is about Nex Benedict. Hugs. Scottie
Due to not feeling well and the number of videos, even though they are short so are in foreign languages so I had to use the CC for those, so it took almost a week and a half to watch these and post them. So I did not include because it caused me to trigger, like the ones where parents beat their gender nonconforming children, to make them be the gender they were assigned at birth. That is like trying to beat the gay out of a kid, you can scare them into hiding it but you can’t make it go way or change it. I simply wanted to give those that don’t understand trans kids or trans people a way to see what it is these people are dealing with. Maybe it will change some people from being haters to being trans supporters. It only take a few people to believe in a LGBTQIA persons worth to make a huge difference in their lives, maybe even save a life. I hope people will take their time and watch the videos as I did, a few at a time over how ever long you wish. If you watch only one, please watch the first one where a trans hater learns that the trans neighbor she like was trans, and well she learned and grew. Hugs. Scottie
Get Off My Turf! is a short film about a transgender woman who finds out that her neighbour is transphobic. The film delves into some of the modern depictions of transphobia and explores friendship, solidarity and conflict between two very different women.
SYNOPSIS: Clara is a girl who cannot show herself as she is. There is something that can control her, and forces her to live under a name and appearance that are not real. “I’m not him” will show the harsh reality to which transgender children like Clara are exposed, as well as the strength they have to move forward.
“A trans boy struggles with dysphoria and anxiety as he contemplates a night out with friends.”
So for my theater class, our final was to create a short film. I decided to do a film about a female to male transgender teen. I apologize for the binder, it’s really bad. I didn’t own a real binder. Ignore that please. I hope you enjoy it.
This short documentary about transgender ftm boys was created to bring more awareness to the transgender community. We don’t personally know any mtf transgender girls so please no controversy over the subject. We own all rights to this film except the music, the quote, and the statistic. This is the first film that we’ve produced and we plan on creating more shorts. We hope you enjoy it!! *** The music on this one got louder than the voices, so I turned the sound off and used the CC. Hugs. Scottie ***
A trans themed short film, created by an all trans cast production team. On remote northern Iceland two strangers connect and realize they have a lot more in common than previously assumed.
Young and Trans. Watch this powerful short film challenging the stigma of what it means to be trans today. Let’s come together for a brighter future.
We have been filming transgender boy Kai since he was 9 years old. In this film, Kai is 14 and reflects on coming out and taking hormone blockers. We also hear from Alex, 18 who is also trans and has started taking testosterone. Kai meets with Tayler, 19 and they both visit the Museum of Transology, where founder E-J Scott gives them a tour.
This is 5 years of a 10 year project, filming Kai, as part of a wave of trans youth, who have been given the best opportunity in life, never having to go through ‘the wrong puberty’.
My Genderation is an ongoing film project focusing on trans lives and trans experiences. All our content is created by trans people, about trans people, for a much wider audience. Currently run by Fox Fisher and Owl Fisher.
Come As You Are follows Theo, a transgender female in a conservative household. This film is dedicated to the God of love, regardless of who you are or where you come from
Featuring young trans actors in trans roles, ‘Listen’ honestly and frankly depicts some of the myriad struggles experienced daily by trans children and teenagers, giving a much needed voice to this often maligned section of the community.
It amazes me, but maybe it shouldn’t, that our community all reads the same blogs. Thank you Tengrian for posting this, It is such important information on who news media works for. The wealthy people in this story are arrested, yet all the blame From the media is placed on the poor people stealing the stuff for 7 to 10 cents on the dollar of what the wealthy people sold it for. Yes think on it. For at least four or more years, maybe for others the right has blamed the poor homeless people for shoplifting, but like a lot of stories on car thefts, the real money is not to the thieves doing the stealing, it is the resale of the items by wealthy people that were making the real profit. The poor people were as always being used as the villains when the wealthy people behind the entire operation but normally they don’t get mentioned or ever blamed. Right wing media has been going on for years about poor black neighborhoods and claiming that Target moved out of those areas due to theft even Target told their stockholders it was because the stores were underperforming on profit compared to the cost of the rent and they only moved a couple miles down the road. So that is what the right wing news is spewing and what garbage we have to debunk and correct.
That is like the republican State of the Union rebuttal. It was all a lie, but the right wing media will never tell their cult like followers of that. Not only did it happen when George Bush was president, it also did not happen in the US but in Mexico. So what is important is that the woman who is trafficked is now 32 years old, yet Katie Britt also claimed she went to the US southern border and talked to a 12 year old who suffered trafficking. What the fuck. But again their cult viewers won’t ever see the truth and will believe that is happening right now. Hugs. Scottie
Scottie's Playtime 