(l to r) Rome Pride, Sabastion Mikel and son Jaxen, and Justin Deal. Photos by Ivan Felipe and Lee Jones.
There’s Atlanta, and then there’s Georgia.
My photographer and I, firmly in the former category, were clear about this as we loaded his camera equipment onto my backseat before pulling out of his driveway on an unusually cool October morning en route to Rome, Georgia.
We were two Black gay men leaving behind the safety and inclusiveness — both actual and perceived — that we sometimes take for granted living in Georgia’s most populated city. And unlike many other cities in Georgia, Rome’s national reputation had already been shaped in our consciousness before we entered the city’s downtown area.
Before the 2020 election of Marjorie Taylor Greene to the U.S. House of Representatives, the city of Rome, a small, picturesque southern town an hour north of Atlanta, flew under the national political radar.
Rome, Georgia, October 10, 2022. Photo by Lee Jones Photography for Queerty.
Today, it’s nearly impossible for the 14th Congressional District, home to over 700,000, predominately white (73%) Georgia citizens, and ranking as the 28th most Republican district nationally, to avoid the national spotlight.
Largely because of Greene, Rome reaches beyond its seven hills and three rivers onto the national stage. With every tweet, election denial lie, and QAnon conspiracy theory amplified, Greene simultaneously energizes her supporters and humiliates a minority of the district’s residents in favor of her political agenda.
In February 2021, Greene drew applause from supporters for her opposition to The Equality Act — a long-stalled bill first that would extend civil rights protections to the queer community. But it was Rep. Marie Newman’s (D-IL) decision to erect a trans flag in support of her trans daughter outside her congressional office that provoked Greene to erect an opposing sign declaring “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS: MALE & FEMALE,” thereby erasing non-binary and trans people while inspiring supporters to echo her anti-trans rhetoric on Twitter.
A sign hangs on the wall outside the office of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as a Transgender Pride flag hangs outside the office of Rep. Marie Newman (D-IL) (R) in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill, on February 25, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images.
While Greene and other Republican leaders deploy fear tactics to rile up their base, her actions continue to have real-life consequences for her constituents in Rome, especially for the parents of trans children who believe Greene’s anti-trans rhetoric creates an environment in Rome where their children are less safe.
Rome resident Lynn Green is president of Rome, Georgia’s PFLAG chapter and mother of 15-year-old trans son Ashby. After living a quiet, mostly apolitical life for nearly two decades, she founded a local PFLAG chapter after her son came out as trans three years ago and discovered that she was not the only mother of a trans or gay child in Rome.
“A lot of straight cisgendered families don’t talk about it, so it’s not well known,” she says. “But I guarantee that the family sitting next to you in church or the guy at the restaurant at the next table either has a queer immediate family member, cousin, or friend. But we don’t talk about it. And so, nobody knows here.”
Green tells Queerty that living in the district can be scary. More than 73% of residents voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, and families like hers are constantly on the receiving end of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s rhetorical blows.
Our society is sick. Mothers are mutilating and murdering their babies through transgenderism and abortion. Meanwhile, society sits back and allows men to destroy women’s sports.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 8, 2022
Twitter says this tweet violated rules about hateful conduct.
I can’t imagine anything more hateful than promoting “gender reassignment” surgeries for children. https://t.co/65LHtYXbGw
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) July 18, 2022
Only one day each year, we honor military members who died serving our country for ALL of us to be free.
An entire #PrideMonth and millions in spending through corporations & our government on LGBTQ sexual identity needs to end.
The movements goals were achieved, were they not?
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) June 1, 2022
And with the Republican stronghold on the district and Marjorie Taylor Greene campaign signs on almost every block, it’s a constant reminder that queer people in Rome are not only in the minority but the fodder for political attacks that only threaten to get worse in a Republican Congressional majority. In addition, residents across the state face the continued advancement of anti-LGBTQ legislation, including Georgia House Bill 1084, which created an athletic committee with the power to ban transgender youth from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill into law this April and remains ahead in the polls in his reelection campaign again LGBTQ stalwart Stacy Abrams.
The fight for trans equality
Sabastion Mikel, 29, is a trans father and birth parent of two boys, Jaxen, 6, and Colin, 3.
A Locust Grove, Georgia native, Mikel is approaching his second year as a Rome resident. He began transitioning at 18 after a tumultuous coming out that led him to escape during his senior year to a now-closed safe house for trans people in Arizona. While he prefers small-town life, Mikel says living in the conservative area as a trans person comes at a price.
Sabastion Mikel with son Jaxen, October 10, 2022. Photo by Lee Jones Photography for Queerty.
“Being an out queer person is kind of scary here. I have concerns about going to the doctor sometimes. I have been turned down in the past for medical care because I am trans,” he says.
In August, Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, a bill that would make providing gender-affirming care to a minor a felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison with a maximum fine of $25,000.
Access to affirming trans healthcare is also a concern for Green and her trans son, who have witnessed trans adults in Rome drive as far as 200 miles to Augusta, Georgia, to receive appropriate medical care.
“One of the good things to come out of the pandemic is we’re able to see a doctor in Decatur [Georgia], virtually,” Green says. “My child won’t go to the doctor here. My child wouldn’t go to immediate care even when he had COVID because all his charts say F for female.”
In Georgia, trans individuals must undergo sex reassignment surgery (SRS) before legally amending the gender marker on their birth certificate. Some jurisdictions, however, permit a gender marker change if the individual is undergoing hormone therapy. Green says her son’s legal name change now appears on his birth and medical records. And at 15, he has also begun hormone therapy, a medical decision Green says was necessary for his mental health.
“I know my child, and they were not okay,” she says. “This is not a decision that me and his dad made on a whim. Through conversations with therapists and the doctor, we learned that we could try very small increments of things. And if it’s working, then we know we’re on the right track. And if it’s not working, then we stop. No harm, no foul. No permanent changes,” she says.
Rome resident Lynn Green, October 10, 2022. Photo by Lee Jones Photography for Queerty.
The American Medical Association (AMA) supports Green’s claims and issued a formal recommendation to the National Governors Association in April 2021, urging member governors to oppose state legislation prohibiting medically necessary gender transition-related care to minors.
AMA chief executive officer Dr. James L. Madara wrote that “mental health counseling, non-medical social transition, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and/or gender-affirming surgeries” were medically accepted standards of care, concluding that “it is imperative that transgender minors be given the opportunity to explore their gender identity under the safe and supportive care of a physician.”
In Rome, Green has become a surrogate mother, and her home a safe place for other trans kids who have experienced rejection or been denied medical care — scenarios that Green struggles to accept.
“Why would you not accept your child? I can’t imagine acting any other way or making any other decisions,” she says. “I wish that more people would be open to at least considering [hormone therapy] and having the conversation. It might not be right for every child, but if it’s right for yours, it’ll save their life.”
Green says her entire family is prepared with passports if the proposed bill prohibiting gender-affirming care ever becomes law.
“Who would’ve ever thought I’d have a conversation with my 15-year-old child about what country would you want to live in if we had to leave?” she says. “I never in my life would have predicted those conversations.”
Pride comes in all shapes and sizes
Like Green, Justin Deal, 36, is a Rome activist out of necessity. Deal identifies as pansexual and is the driving force behind the city’s inaugural Rome Pride. The event drew hundreds of people to Heritage Park in June. A few weeks prior, Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly called for an end to Pride Month while citing the “possible extinction of straight people within 150 years.”
Rome Pride celebration in Heritage Park, June 25, 2022. Photo by Ivan Felipe Photography.
“When I think about her [Greene], she’s the epitome and kind of a microcosm of the problems in this area,” Deal says. “And she’s exacerbated those and made them worse.”
According to Deal, Greene’s rhetoric has trickled down into the community, saying it’s not uncommon for Rome Pride to receive emails with profanity and anti-gay slurs. But the unwanted coverage on Greene’s weekly Facebook live show featuring drag performer Benjamin Gentry’s (aka Courtney Chanel Stratton) scheduled appearance during drag queen story time spurred death threats. Gentry subsequently withdrew from the event out of safety concerns.
Gentry accuses Greene of attempting to dox him.
“You can hear her say during the live stream, ‘Do we know where — does he live in Rome?’ She was trying to find my home address to give it out,” he says.
Rome Pride, June 25, 2022. Photo by Ivan Felipe Photography.
Gentry and Pride organizers secretly relocated drag queen story time and notified registered attendees of the new location.
“All these people who were supposedly going to stop drag queen story time showed up to the gazebo to nothing,” Gentry says through laughter. “We had even more people come to see it because of her free advertising.”
“She was poking the bear,” Deal explains. “And at that point, we were just a small-town Pride. We weren’t looking for that kind of coverage.”
Then like clockwork, Greene published a tweet in June threatening to introduce legislation to make it illegal for children to be exposed to drag performances.
I’m introducing a bill to make it illegal for children to be exposed to Drag Queen performances.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) June 15, 2022
The uphill battle to unseat Marjorie Taylor Greene
Marcus Flowers, an army veteran and former official for the Department of Defense, is Greene’s Democratic opponent in the 14th Congressional District seat race.
His surprise appearance donning his signature Black cowboy hat in the Rome Pride Parade and his willingness to listen to their concerns amid Greene’s chaos has endeared him to the local queer community.
Marcus Flowers, running against U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), is seen outside of an America First Rally on May 27, 2021, in Dalton, Georgia. Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images.
“As a member of Congress, you represent all of the constituents of your district, no matter race, creed, religion, or sexual preference,” Flowers tells Queerty. “And that’s what members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene are forgetting.”
It was was a pleasure marching alongside my fellow Georgians in today’s Pride parade in Rome!🏳️🌈 pic.twitter.com/sRpDsoPezF
Wendy Davis, who lost the Democratic primary election to Flowers but served two terms as Rome’s city commissioner, says that while Greene’s conspiracy theories have gotten most of the attention, she’s actually remained focused on the bread-and-butter of the GOP base.
“How we get here wasn’t because everybody around here went QAnon cuckoo,” Davis told The Guardian. “We got here because she loved Trump, she loved guns, she hated socialism, she hated abortion and that won that primary and it’s a Republican district.”
Will slow and steady win the race?
Justin Deal, October 10, 2022. Photo by Lee Jones Photography for Queerty.
For Deal, Greene’s actions are the fuel that ignites their activism in Rome and keeps Deal from fleeing to a more progressive city. Deal tells Queerty that many residents react positively to the growing visibility of the LGBTQ community in the conservative town. And despite the lack of gay bars or businesses, unexpected allies are creating space.
“There’s never really been an establishment. We have a few spots that’ll do an LGBTQ night. We now have drag shows at least once a month at Peaches,” Deal says, referencing the nightclub venue in Rome that has provided space for local drag queens to perform.
Peaches, Rome, Georgia, October 10, 2022. Photo by Lee Jones Photography for Queerty.
Surprisingly, many local businesses jumped at the opportunity to sponsor Rome Pride.
“We were blown away,” Green says. “Come to find out, they all have a connection, a child, a brother, or a sister that’s part of the community. And so it was important for them to support. But you wouldn’t know that by walking down the street.”
Because of Deal and Green’s organizing, the city of Rome has officially recognized June as LGBTQ Pride Month, a process that only requires approval from the city clerk’s office after citizen request, according to Kristi Kent, communications director for the City of Rome.
Rome Pride, June 25, 2022. Photo by Ivan Felipe Photography.
The proclamation request received little pushback.
That’s not to say the district will become more accepting any time soon. Flowers faces an uphill battle unseating Greene in November, given Greene’s commanding lead in the polls.
But for Gentry, who references one of Greene’s most widely derided conspiracy theories with the wit of his drag persona, the choice is clear.
“The b*tch believes in space lasers,” he says of Greene’s rant about the cause of California’s 2018 wildfires. “How can you vote for someone that thinks Jewish space lasers are turning people gay and liberal?”
Despite her antics and the inhospitality of some residents, the LGBTQ community in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District isn’t going anywhere.
Pfizer is planning on raising the cost of a single COVID vaccine dose by 100 times what it costs to manufacture the drug. Brett Erlich and John Iadarola discuss on The Young Turks. Watch LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live
“Vaccine equity campaigners on Friday condemned Pfizer for announcing that it will soon raise the price of its publicly funded Covid-19 shot to between $110 and $130 per dose in the U.S., a move that comes as the Biden administration is preparing to end the nation’s free coronavirus vaccine program as pandemic response funding runs dry.
Reuters reported late Thursday that Angela Lukin, an executive at Pfizer, said the New York-based pharmaceutical giant “expects” that the vaccine “will be made available at no cost to people who have private insurance or government-paid insurance.
” The outlet noted that Lukin did not say whether the company will make any accommodations for the tens of millions of people in the U.S. without any health insurance.”
Law enforcement officials Texas are saying a new law that allows people to carry handguns without a permit has led to more spontaneous shootings. John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur and Jessica Burbank discuss on The Young Turks. Watch LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live
These are just some of the ways critics are describing Texas’ new law allowing people to carry handguns in public without a permit—a Republican achievement that many local officials say has already led to a spike in spontaneous shootings in highly populated parts of the state.
“It seems like now there’s been a tipping point where just everybody is armed.”
In one high-profile case earlier this year, Tony Earls “pulled out his handgun and opened fire, hoping to strike a man who had just robbed him and his wife at an A.T.M. in Houston,” The New York Times reported Wednesday.
“Instead, he struck Arlene Alvarez, a 9-year-old girl seated in a passing pickup, killing her.” A grand jury declined to indict Earls, agreeing with his lawyer that “everything about that situation, we believe and contend, was justified under Texas law.” *
I am so ill. I got two injections yesterday afternoon. I got both my second shingle shot and my latest Covid booster. I was up all night, and both Ron and I got up at 2 AM. I went back to bed at 6 AM for an hour, but couldn’t sleep. So got up. But 9 I was shaking, running a high fever, aches over top of my normal pain levels. I went back to bed. I just got up at 3 PM and wish I had not. Ron has gone back to bed. I have been taking Tylenol to handle the fever and my pain pills for the aches and pains. However one side point. It is not much importance but James found a suspicious program, a key stroke logger on Ron’s I phone. So we are all dumping our devices in a couple days and doing a hard reset, but in the meanwhile I dumped both computers this morning before crashing after I backed the files up. I was far enough along that I can post and watch videos but I have hours of updates and fixes to do. If not days. Plus most of my security programs are not on there. One last thing. I was proudly on day 7 of comments I was answering and was doing that this morning before getting so ill. However I won’t be answering comments until the fever comes down and stays there. One other note I looked it up and a high level response like this to a Covid shot means that your immune system is running really well and already sees Covid as a virus threat that it responds against. Thank you. Hugs to all.
These people vote and right wing media promotes them. Reality means nothing to these people. But why kill the babies, just milk the blood in regular donations keeps the blood fresh and coming in. These people don’t think through things very well. 🙄 Hugs
Just banned by Newsmax, Lara Logan has some thoughts:
The reason I believe that people reacted that way is it’s all about the children. The question they don’t want us asking is where are all the missing children?
What happens to these children? How can hundreds of thousands of kids go missing in the United States every year and nobody knows where they are?
They just vanish? I don’t think so. Every sex trafficking ring worldwide knows, bring the kids to the United States that this administration is participating in the trafficking of kids.
They’re paying companies, LLCs and non-profits and church groups. They’re paying them to take these kids and disappear them.
The report that you showed have talked about the blood of young children being the secret to anti-aging. And why does nobody ask where does blood come from?
How do you get the blood of young children? And does it matter if the children are younger and younger and younger? So now you’re talk — are you talking about the blood of babies now? Is that what you’re talking about?
Logan may be too fucking crazy even for Newsmax, but not for Mike Lindell’s Frank Speech platform.
After getting banned from Fox for saying Fauci is Mengele, then from Newsmax for saying Satanist elites drink the blood of children, Lara Logan doubles down and says hundreds of thousands of kids in the US are being kidnapped so elites can drink their blood to fight aging. pic.twitter.com/Wh1WHiX0U3
According to our research and experience, out of the half a million children that go missing every year in the United States, nearly all of them are found. That’s 97.8%. So, half a million children go missing, but nearly all of them are also found.
When most people think about missing children, they imagine children being lured into white vans. But if a father or mother takes a child without permission, and they don’t have custody, that’s considered a missing child, and the vast majority of missing kids are due to family abductions. There are more than 3,000 attempted snatchings per year, and more than 90% of those are runaways or parental abductions.
Amateur! I reach into their bodies and pull their hearts out, leaving them alive while I lower them into a fiery hell-like pit. As documented in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The term blood libel refers to the false allegation that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian children, for ritual purposes. The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews, with Julius Steicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer making frequent use of ritual murder imagery in its antisemitic propaganda.
The rise in working-age mortality rates in the United States in recent decades largely reflects stalled declines in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality alongside rising mortality from alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning; and it has been especially severe in some U.S. states.
Building on recent work, this study examined whether U.S. state policy contexts may be a central explanation. We modeled the associations between working-age mortality rates and state policies during 1999 to 2019.
We used annual data from the 1999–2019 National Vital Statistics System to calculate state-level age-adjusted mortality rates for deaths from all causes and from CVD, alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning among adults ages 25–64 years.
We merged that data with annual state-level data on eight policy domains, such as labor and taxes, where each domain was scored on a 0–1 conservative-to-liberal continuum. Results show that the policy domains were associated with working-age mortality
Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labor domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD mortality.
Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.
“If a state policy maker were to say to me, ‘it’s unfair to criticize my state because I have a low-educated, low income population,’ I would ask them, ‘why do you have a low-educated, low-income population?’ It’s because of your policy.” https://t.co/xWfZDkPUzw@AdriannaUSAT
Over four years ago, Brian protested with March For Our Lives to demand action on gun violence in our schools and communities.
This week, he was shot in both hands and through his neck by an AR-15 at his school in St. Louis. He jumped out of a window to save his life. pic.twitter.com/NADUYNRhjg
Both their senators and all their Republican representatives in the House voted against aid for the last hurricane. They shouldn’t get any then. If they don’t like that, then they should vote for representatives who agree with them. They shouldn’t get to vote against funding, then take the funding, then brag about getting the funding for their constituents. I feel like I have walked through the looking glass. I can’t believe this is what our country is now and all of it aided and abetted by the media, even the “liberal” outlets.
I just read a report that proved that many people would rather die “free” than wear a mask. Many people would prefer go without health care and die than obtain universal health care “because I don’t want my tax dollars going to welfare queens and mexicans.” Many people would prefer dying early of a heart attack than not eat meat.
I was shocked/not shocked to read this. This shows a severe mental illness among people who believe their lives are worth less than their ideology and their imaginary notion of freedom.
Related: Donald Trump is, literally, a mass-murderer.
Medical experts have carefully studied the data and have concluded that had Trump, in 2020, urged people to take the Covid-prevention steps urged by the CDC and others, countless thousands of American lives could have been saved. Instead, the monster downplayed or ignored vaccinations, face masks and social distancing.
I remember having a discussion online with a self proclaimed right to life Christian, who objected to any and all Covid restrictions. As far as he was concerned, if people would get sick and die, that was their look out, not his. He had money to make.
“It was cold-blooded what he did,” Mueller said. “While he may have been dealt a bad set of cards with the parents, it’s still a choice that he made to do the harm and bring the tragedy to Oxford.”
I have mentioned on my other blog about after having been raped violently with no chance to get lube because my sibling from hell of my adoptive parents wanted me to feel as much pain as possible because I was not a real member of his family. He then did something that to this day hurts more than the rape, after he was done and got what he wanted he rolled over in my tiny bed and fell asleep. He slept in my own bed! (Later he claimed the excuse he had been drinking and I should just forget it) Something broke in me. I did something I never did before. Looking back, I am not sure what I felt, but I got up out of the bed and went through the mobile home to the adoptive parent’s room and took the 30 30 gun off the rack and opened the drawer in the bedroom I knew the bullets were in and left. Unlike the other hell spawn, I never had gotten to use or learn the guns, but I understood enough from watching the others. I never woke anyone. I loaded the gun on the way back to my room. I went back to my room and put that gun to that male sibling’s head and went to pull the trigger, his goading words ringing in my head as the pain from what he did rang though my body making every step a fresh prodding of the wound. To this day even as an atheist / nonbeliever in the supernatural I will swear under oath what happened next is true. I am not saying it is supernatural, but I am saying this is my memory of the event.
As I put the gun barrel to his head and prepared to take my revenge on that drunken asshole who had just gloated as he hurt raped me, I heard a voice. I think all the things the voice said I don’t remember clearly these days. But the voice started with a strong “No, Don’t! Stop”! Then continued with “This is not who you are, not what you will be”! “Don’t let them make you what they are, be the person you can be”! There were more words in my head and to tell the truth at my age they are tending to blur out. But the voice was pleading with me to not pull the trigger and to not be what these hateful bastards wanted to make me.
I made a decision that night that I have never regretted. I put the gun back after emptying the bullets, put everything back and vowed I would never be like the vindictive hurtful people who adopted me. I would take everything they forced on me and I would still become the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of person I respected. I tell this story because we really don’t know what the full story is of Ethan Crumbley and why he felt such a need to take others’ lives. Was he also being hurt raped? Was he being kept hungry while others ate? Looking at my own life I could have been him, as if I had pulled that trigger that night why would I have stopped at just the one in my bed, why wouldn’t I have gone after all of them. Do you see why I have sympathy for this kid? We don’t know what was going on in his life. We do know what his parents did, they lied, ran and tried to escape justice by hiding.
OK I have to get away from this and from these thoughts. I have decided to make a red sauce for spaghetti tonight. Ron has tried to help direct me toward that and I will do so as it is a good Idea. The combination of my old memories (for those that think the pain or humiliation fades, for me it doesn’t. In my nightmares that Ron tries to wake me from they are as fresh as the times it happened) and the loops in my head are threatening to bring the vortex in, something I really cannot afford. So Ron will make a pork loin to go with the stuff I make. Hugs, loves, and so many thanks to everyone.
Ethan Crumbley, who 11 months ago penned in his journal “I will cause the biggest school shooting in Michigan’s history. I have fully mentally lost it,” pleaded guilty Monday to first-degree murder and terrorism charges for the bloodshed he vowed to carry out at Oxford High School four days after his parents bought him a gun.
In a packed courtroom filled with the victims’ grieving families, Crumbley, 16, took responsibility for the murders of his classmates, Tate Myre, 16, Madisyn Baldwin, 17, Hana St. Juliana, 14, and Justin Shilling, 17, and the injuries he caused to seven others who were struck by his bullets.
In entering his guilty plea, Ethan dropped a bombshell that may hurt his parents in their separate criminal case, telling the judge that the gun he used in the shooting was easily accessible. “It was not locked,” Ethan said in court, contradicting his parents’ claims that the gun was properly stored in a secure area.
Read the full article. Crumbley’s parents, you will recall, let authorities on a manhunt after the shooting.
Ethan Crumbley admits guilt to murder in Oxford High School shooting https://t.co/Y6jO14n7hg
In my last post I wrote about watching this video, yet I was so upset I forgot to include the link. Here is the link and story. Damn he looks so young to me, how can he understand what life in prison means? His world view and education seem so limited, and his answers while looking down seem to me he is drugged. Well in his position I would need to be highly drugged to even stand there.
My heart is breaking. My thoughts on his future, the pain in his life now. I am not talking just emotional pain because I know the families that lost their children are going through that also. I am talking the physical / emotional pain of being raped and being scared every day of your life of being attacked. The parents of the murdered kids won’t face that and damn it that is not what a justice system in an advanced first world country should be about. There is a reason the US has a large recidivism rate and countries like Norway don’t. They treat their criminals like people, they treat their prisoners with respect as they do the entire population of their country. They make sure to understand the reason why the prisoner did what they did and tailor the sentence to fix that. The US has become a very vengeful sadistic place. Even our congressional republican office holders want to hurt the others, they brag about humiliating and harming them. My Dogs That Love Gravy, how does that make us a better country? It drives us to the level of Afghanistan and Iran with the Taliban / moral police. I stopped throwing up and Ron went to take a nap. But I am still so upset and my mind won’t stop or settle, I keep reliving the abuse I took for 17 years on a loop, while thinking I got paroled / released after 17 years but Ethan has his entire life to suffer it, no matter how long he lives. I cannot deal with that; I cannot imagine my life if my abuse and fears had continued until today or I died. I would beg for death. Death would be a mercy. Go to go my stomach starting to roil writing this and if I start throwing up again Ron will unplug the computers. Hugs
(l to r) Rome Pride, Sabastion Mikel and son Jaxen, and Justin Deal. Photos by Ivan Felipe and Lee Jones.
Scottie's Playtime 