ICYMI: Idaho Republican Rep. Jack Nelsen compares women to farm animals and says experience working with cattle has given him "ideas on repro and women's health thing" in his first-ever committee meeting. pic.twitter.com/Y4DSusQBAc
In this episode we chat with sexologist, author, social worker Dr Joe Kort about male sexuality and sex. We discuss – Gay sex – What is sexual fluidity? – What does non-binary mean? – Porn, good or bad? – The problem of men, sex & shame – Homosexual attractions in straight men – What does it mean to be gay & bi – What is sex therapy?
Republicans cannot seem to care how their smoking hurts others around them who don’t smoke. Sad that in 2023 with all the information around about how bad tobacco both smoked or chewed is for both those that do it and those around them. But again republicans have a real issue trying to care about anyone other than themselves. Hugs
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em.” That’s not just the name of a 2004 Cypress Hill EP but also apparently the new rule in the GOP-controlled House. Republican members are lighting up their cigars in Congressional offices — and driving members of the press corps “insane in the brain” with the smell.
An executive order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1997 banned smoking in many federal buildings, but only those under the control of the Executive Branch. The laws in Washington, D.C. similarly ban smoking in indoor spaces, but again, that does not apply to congressional offices.
Yuck, cigarette and cigar smoke stinks. Inside buildings it spreads through the HVAC system and permeates everything, everyone’s clothing. It becomes in escapable. People who smoke reek of it; you can smell the stench when they walk into a room.
Republicans have been making life worse for everyone since 1968.
It literally does not apply to Congress – perhaps we need a constitutional amendment requiring members of Congress to be held to the same legal standards as other Americans – and perhaps their salaries should be tied to median incomes in their districts, and they should not have any better medical coverage or retirement benefits than ordinary Americans.
why don’t we totally go back to the 1950s – old white guys smoking cigars in the back offices making deals. how progressive. i’m surprised if they do not allow drinking on the House floor – it’ll be just like bowling!
The GOP oft reminisce about the “good old days” of the 50s…a white man’s world, where the US dominated the world economy, while much of the world was still recovering from WWII.
They do conveniently forget the 90% tax rate on the wealthy & corporations…which helped the middle class to grow & prosper.
It seems republicans are intent on exerting their right to be rude assholes no matter the cost to themselves or others. Please keep it up until you have turned public opinion solidly against your party.
The only thing the GOP think of pregnant staffers is “you’d better have that baby or you’ll be going to jail for murder. And don’t expect any handouts or time off”
When the new Resucklicans said they need to tear down the establishment, that’s the establishment they’re talking about: considering other’s welfare. They want to be obnoxious assholes again! Make me King of Assholes again! Trump is our Assholiness!
I would refuse to work in a smoke-filled office. Hopefully many of the junior staff will quit (or sue) rather than elect to get cancer form secondhand smoke. .
OT. Lawyer said we need to prosecute Donald Trump immediately. Sitting next to his Passport? Sounds like he’s going to turn them into big $$$fortune by selling us to Putin when he needs to escape justice to Putin his protector.
AND tfg had top secret docs literally sitting in the same drawer as his PASSPORT.
Gross. I’d be pissed if I was a staffer who had to go home every day with my clothes reeking of smoke. Dry cleaning ain’t free. That’s minuscule to the effects that kind of enclosed environment can have on people with asthma and other respiratory ailments.
Plus, that nasty, greasy residue will be settling all over inside the Capitol. I guess lathering the place with that residue isn’t too unexpected from the party that smeared their own feces around the building.
*shakes head* If Biden was really as awful as the Republicans say he is, they sure have some bizarre priorities now that they control the House.
I don’t care what people do with their own lives, and it gives me some comfort knowing these assholes are opening themselves up to an old age of sickness and likely a miserable death (both my parents died of smoking-related illnesses, not pretty) but I feel sorry for the reporters and staffers who are subjected to their secondhand smoke
Monday I mentioned I was going to have testing done and said it was for heavy metal poisoning. That was a misunderstanding from the person who set up the appointment because Ron my spouse had that same testing a few months ago. My testing had to do with the different things in shampoos, lotions, soaps, and some minerals. They also want to start my allergy shots again. But that will involve doing this same kind of testing I think before they start. I am headed of to bed, I am very tired and my back hurts so bad I can hardly breathe. Oh and enjoy the meme I included. Best wishes and hugs.
Religious views should not and must not take priority over human rights or medical care. This must be stopped in the US as more states face the fact that all the hospitals are owned by the Catholic church and the church requires them to let people die rather than provide accepted needed medical care that goes against religious dogma. Hugs
A Catholic hospital discriminated against a transgender patient by refusing to provide him a hysterectomy, a federal judge ruled.
Jesse Hammons, a transgender man, sued the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, after he was denied the surgery, a gender-affirming procedure performed on many transgender men, in 2019, alleging that the hospital discriminated against him because of his gender identity.
St. Joseph Medical Center, a religious entity purchased by the University of Maryland Medical Center in 2012, argued that its doctors would not perform the surgery because doing so contradicts their religious beliefs.
The Friday ruling came as the LGBTQ community continues advocating for stronger legal protections against discrimination. Conservatives, on the other hand, have argued that strengthened anti-discrimination protections would violate their freedom of speech.
A person holds a transgender pride flag. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that a Catholic hospital violated anti-discrimination laws by denying a transgender men gender-affirming surgery, citing religious beliefs.CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES; DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
U.S. District Court Judge Deborah K. Chasanow ruled that the refusal by the hospital—which is part of the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS)—to perform the hysterectomy violated Maryland’s anti-discrimination laws and that UMMS is bound by Maryland law to “operate the medical system without discrimination based upon race, creed, sex, or national origin.”
Chasanow ruled that the hospital, which receives Medicare and Medicaid funding, violated Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits providers who receive public funding from discriminating “on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, or sex,” including gender identity.
In 2019, Hammons was set to receive the surgery as part of his gender-affirming plan, but the hospital canceled it only one week prior, citing religious reasons, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Hammons, in a statement released by the ACLU, which represented him in court, described the ruling as a “great win for myself and all transgender people denied equal treatment because of who they are.”
“All I wanted was for UMMS to treat my health care like anyone else’s, and I’m glad the court recognized how unfair it was to turn me away,” Hammons said. “I’m hopeful UMMS can change this harmful policy and help more transgender people access the care they need.”
In a statement forwarded to Newsweek on Monday, a UMMS spokesperson wrote that the medical system disputes “many of the conclusions that were reached in this decision and may be in a position to comment further after additional analysis of the ruling.”
“Legal disagreements aside, we sincerely wish the very best for Mr. Hammons and we support his efforts to seek the highest quality healthcare,” the statement reads. “We may disagree on certain technical, legal points but compassion for the patients we serve remains foundational to our work.”
My dogs that love gravy please make no mistake in thinking what these people are driving hard for. It is not the 1950s as most of us assume, but for these die hard Christian white male power nationalists the goal is the 1850s. Hugs
As of last week, Republican efforts to ban birth control in America have officially started, and teenagers in Texas are its first victims
To paraphrase Pastor Niemöller, first they came for our abortion rights. Now they’re coming for our birth control.
Psychologist Dr. Marty Klein notes at Psychology Today that there are typically only a few reasons why people oppose birth control. They are:
— Fundamentalist religions fear sexual pleasure, which birth control facilitates — Contraception effectively limits family size, empowering women — Contraception promotes personal autonomy [making women more likely to challenge male authority] — Birth control may make abortion more acceptable to society
As of last week, Republican efforts to ban birth control in America have officially started, and teenagers in Texas are its first victims.
When Clarence Thomas wrote in his Dobbs concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should next overturn the right to birth control in the United States, a lawyer and a judge in Texas were apparently listening.
Most Americans have no idea this high-stakes drama — heading toward the Supreme Court but already now law in Texas — is even going on.
Lost in the Christmas holiday chatter, a Trump-appointed federal district judge in Texas just a week ago put a stop to teenagers getting confidential access to federally-funded birth control pills and devices in that state.
He did it based on a lawsuit filed by attorney Jonathan Mitchell, the same man who co-authored the Texas “abortion vigilante” law. Everybody ridiculed that effort at first, you’ll recall, but the Supreme Court upheld it and today it’s Texas law and spreading across Red states like a fungus.
Mitchell is also known as the guy who supported the Mississippi abortion ban before the Supreme Court that led to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.
Perhaps anticipating Clarence Thomas’ later call to overturn Supreme Court decisions legalizing birth control, homosexual behavior, and gay marriage (Griswold v Connecticut, Lawrence v Texas, Obergefell v Hodges), Mitchell even wrote in his amicus brief for the Dobbs case an originalist reference similar to the argument the Texas judge would later make against birth control:
“The right to marry an opposite-sex spouse is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’; the right to marry a same-sex spouse obviously is not.”
In the Texas federal lawsuit Mitchell brought, Deanda v. Becerra, Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that teens between 15 and 18 shouldn’t be able to make birth control decisions independent of their parents because, he ruled, that had always been the law in the early years of America:
“For centuries, the common law held minors were incapable of giving consent to make important life decisions.”
Somehow, he managed to overlook the fact that the age of sexual consent “for centuries” was, in every American state from the founding of this nation in 1789, 10 to 12 years old. It wasn’t raised to 14, 15, or 16 in any US state until the 1930s.
But don’t try to argue facts with people running on religious or male-power arguments.
Although the fight for women’s bodily autonomy is as old as time, this part of the story begins in 1970.
Richard Nixon had a reputation as an awkward, bumbling prude when it came to sex, but even he knew that teenagers should be able to get birth control without their parents’ consent.
A teenage pregnancy could destroy a young woman’s life, and, at that time, over one-in-ten girls became pregnant between 15 and 19 years old. Fully 92 percent of those teenage pregnancies, according to research published in the following decade, were unintended and could have been prevented with access to birth control.
So, in 1970, President Nixon signed into law Title X, a federal grant program that included funds for confidential access to birth control for people across the nation regardless of their age.
Nonprofit agencies were formed in each state to receive the federal money and provide birth control (among other services): in Texas “Every Body Texas” is the group that administers Title X statewide through 32 agencies and 156 clinics.
The week of Christmas, because of Kacsmaryk’s Deanda v. Becerraruling, Texas agencies affiliated with Every Body Texas learned they had to start turning away teenagers, virtually all of them girls and women, who were seeking confidential birth control.
This is now the law in Texas.
Picking up the beat, Republican legislators in Missouri, Idaho, and Louisiana have introduced or are proposing birth control bans in those states, according to the Pew Trust. Expect Republicans in your state to soon try the same.
Lest you think that hyperbolic, consider how Republicans in the US House and Senate voted when Democrats introduced the Right to Contraception Actimmediatelyafter Clarence Thomas suggested the Court should overturn that right.
Fully 195 Republicans voted against the legislation in the House; only 8 supported it. And when it reached the Senate, it was killed by a Republican filibuster.
The Deanda v. Becerradecision in Texas banning confidential dispensing of contraception to teenagers will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, known across the nation as the place most likely to uphold crackpot rightwing rulings. From there it goes to the six crackpot rightwingers on the Supreme Court.
Republicans appear quite fixated on banning both abortion and birth control nationwide.
Authoritarian societies have a long history of trying to regulate women’s bodies.
The first books the Nazis burned in May of 1933 were birth control guides by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, shortly before Hitler banned birth control in that nation (soldiers were allowed to possess condoms “to maintain their good health”).
Birth control was similarly banned in Romania by Nicolae Ceaușescu, bringing that nation Europe’s highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy (particularly for women), a legacy which continues to this day even though Ceaușescu was overthrown and killed in 1989.
And now the GOP wants to ban birth control in the United States, starting with the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Authoritarians, after all, always first attack those least able to defend themselves before they climb the ladder of the society they intend to conquer.
This opening shot — coming out of Texas, just like the first ban on abortion (and from the same lawyer) — should make all Americans sit up and take notice.
An incredible video. One I hope no one ever has to make, and this young man is so brave to face his own death so well. At 11 years old and to understand your body is shutting down and you are going into and fighting organ failure. I know adults who do not face end of life with such dignity. Warning the video deals with a child struggling to live since birth and the pain and hardships in that struggle. Remember everyone who subscribed to his channel helped make his end of life wish come true. He also has been getting stuff off a wish list he has and the amazing thing is he asked for things for other sick kids and for the hospital where he was treated. Please click the link to go to YouTube and watch the video, his fight is not over yet. Hugs
A very real video about Koris journey. Viewer discretion is advised.
This man who authored the bill felt his religion and his opinion was more valid than all the science and medical data that shows he is wrong. He claims that identifying as a different gender than assigned at birth is a temporary problem, giving the idea it is a phase people go through like adolescence or acme. That was what people tried to claim about gay people in the past, that it was a phase young adults would grow out of, or it was done as rebellion against parents. That was wrong then and it is wrong about trans people now. These right wing people are just recycling all the old tropes against gay people to use against trans people. The goal is to destroy all the social advances in the US society and return to a past that was regressive and oppressive before equality and civil rights for minorities. Please understand that for trans people to wait that late in life until 26 means not only living as the wrong gender all that time but also the human body has by then been set into the mold of the wrong gender for the person. During puberty so many changes happen to create a male or female body that simply by looks is a lifetime sentence of being in the wrong body. If you are one gender imagine looking like the other all your life because someone said you couldn’t have the medical treatment needed to help you live as you really are. Hugs
The bill’s author said he did not speak to a single transgender person before writing it.
Oklahoma State Sen. David Bullard (R)Photo: Oklahoma Senate
In Oklahoma, a new bill called the “Millstone Act of 2023” has been proposed that would ban gender-affirming care in all forms for anyone under 26 years old. The bill targets healthcare providers and says anyone who violates the rule could face felony charges and have their medical license revoked.
The bill’s name reportedly refers to a passage in the Bible that says it is better to tie a large stone to your neck and drown than to cause harm to a child. It was introduced by state Sen. David Bullard (R), who was also behind a state law that passed last year banning trans youth from using school bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.
In a statement to The Oklahoman, Bullard said gender-affirming surgery is “a permanent solution to a temporary problem” and called it a violation of doctors’ Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.
“We want to make sure that if we’re going to do a procedure like this that is irreversible, then we want to make sure an individual is at their full maturity when it comes to cognitive development,” he said.
He also explained why he wanted to restrict gender-affirming care to such a late age.
“At the age of 18, you can vote, but a vote is not a permanent change in your body that cannot be reversed. At the age of 21 you can drink, but at the end of the day if you decide to put the alcohol down, you can put the alcohol down. But with this surgery, there is no going back. We just want to make sure that the brain is fully developed before we allow this kind of surgery, permanent thing to happen.”
He also said he did not speak to a single transgender person before writing the bill.
Oklahoma has passed a slew of anti-trans legislation as of late.
The Millstone Act is also one of multiple bills that have been proposed targeting gender-affirming care for trans adults as Republicans continue to expand their crusade against trans people. Bills targeting medical care for trans adults have recently been proposed in South Carolina and New Hampshire as well.
“We have been saying a slow moving genocide targeted at eliminating transgender people through eliminating gender affirming care is happening,” wrote activist Erin Reed in December. “It continues.”
Funny and informative without being overly science heavy. I doubt I will post more today, I had planned to do comments but spent most of the day in bed where my back feels the best. That new bed is really good on my back. I don’t intend to post much news until I can get to the old comments but right now videos are the most I can really deal with. I will soon go back to bed and finish watching “The Fifth Element”. Randy has suggested a bed setup for me to work from but the best position for me to slow down the pain is lying flat on one of my sides. I will get the epidural after the MRI and if that doesn’t fix the pain issues then I will switch to fentanyl. Hugs
Oklahoma State Sen. David Bullard (R)Photo: Oklahoma Senate
Scottie's Playtime 