Category: LGBTQ+ / Gay / Trans / Gender
GOP lieutenant governor wants to ban social studies & science in elementary schools
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 RobinsonPhoto: Anthony Crider/via FlickrNorth 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.”
Protesters demand school district change Pride flag removal policy
This is not about the teachers pushing their personal feeling / opinions, these flag stickers / signs let LGBTQ+ kids know that classroom is a welcoming safe space and the teacher is not going to hate them. It is symbol to the gay, lesbian, and trans kids that they are welcome also. In the environment in schools today it is even more important these rainbow flags be allowed to stand. It was not too long ago that the school used to put up posters of inclusion, tolerance, and acceptance. Now they are removing anything that shows anything different than the white cis straight majority. Hugs
Photo: ShutterstockDemonstrators gathered outside a Springfield, Missouri high school on Monday to protest a school board policy that has resulted in the removal of Pride flags from classrooms.
Among the protesters outside Kickapoo High School holding signs that said “Acceptance Saves Lives” and “Hate Has No Home Here,” was Brett Baxley, a local drag performer and alum of the Springfield Public School district.
“Issues in Springfield Public Schools are really close to my heart. As an existing queer person in SPS, I know how difficult it can be in this area,” said Baxley, who organized the protest. “I know that teachers who were allies were one of the only reasons that I was able to make it through my high school experience.”
In an email last week, Kickapoo High School principal Bill Powers instructed “a handful” of teachers at the city’s largest high school to remove the rainbow flags from their classrooms in order to be in compliance with the school board’s staff conduct policy. The policy, which was adopted in 2014 and revised in 2019, does not explicitly ban Pride flags.
“I’m writing today in regards to the Pride flag each of you has in your classroom,” Powers wrote in the email. “It was recently brought to my attention that we should not be displaying the flags.”
When asked about the flags, Springfield Public School chief communications officer Stephen Hall noted that the staff conduct policy states that “employees will not represent their personal opinions as the opinion of the district.”
“This applies to speech and to the use of district property, including the classroom. When employee conduct does not align with this policy, it is the district’s expectation that supervisors hold team members accountable for maintaining a professional standard,” Hall wrote in a statement.
“It was really disheartening to hear that the administration was fighting against the few teachers who were making an effort to make queer people feel more accepted in the classroom,” said Baxley.
State Rep. Crystal Quade (D) was on hand and spoke to the protesters. “I came out today to show support for our LGBTQ students and faculty,” she said. She noted that the issue was “a districtwide conversation about policy” and that she did not want to single out Powers.
In an interview with the Springfield News-Leader, Missouri State University assistant professor of sociology Kyler Sherman-Wilkins called the protest a way to “call attention to a particular issue and to highlight the fact that people are energized and mobilized.”
Sherman-Wilkins has been addressing the school board for over a year, advocating for diversity training, inclusive curriculum, and support for children and staff from underrepresented backgrounds. Along with the protesters he supports challenging the board policy that resulted in the removal of Pride flags.
PFLAG Springfield board president Aaron Schekorra said that the issue is bigger than the board policy or the flag removal at one high school.
“We’re not interested as an organization in making this about one administrator, or one teacher, or a handful of individuals,” he said. “This is about our school district and what it means for our community. And we are interested in looking at the bigger picture, how our district as a whole, from the top-down, can be a better place for all students.”
Rightwing journalist uses Nazi book-burning picture while calling LGBTQ books “filth”
The fascist maga brownshirt thugs of the right have long targeting the LGBTQ+ and other minorities they can make the boogeyman. Hugs
OAN’s Kara McKinney and the Hitler Youth image Photo: ScreenshotOne 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.”
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.
Arizona MAGA Governor Candidate Kari Lake EXPOSED saying ‘women are not equal’
Now Christians are targeting women who wear pants
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/08/now-christians-targeting-women-wear-pants/
These people will not stop until the US looks like the Handmaids tale, or the Amish community, the Puritans from the 1600s. The won’t stop until they get control over women as chattel slaves like their bible claims they should be, owners of the women. The don’t want females to have rights, to have agency, and to have worth other than as property to men. To me they are disgusting and more like Incels who think women exist only for men’s pleasure. How horrible but this is where they are driving the country. They want a world where cis white straight Christian males have the only rights with automatic authority / privilege, women exist as property of men, blacks are workers and unpaid labor, and the LGBTQ+ are not heard of being too scared of the punishments of being known. That is the world of the Islamic Taliban that the white Christians want to make here in the US. Hugs
Photo: ShutterstockThe religious right has celebrated the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but their obsession with controlling women’s bodies knows no satisfaction.
Now a far-right preacher known for his vile rants about the LGBTQ community is calling for men to burn their wives’ pants because, he says, it’s just a form of crossdressing.
Brother Duncan Urbanek spread the love of God by using anti-gay slurs and encouraging men to destroy their spouses’ possessions. Urbanek is a member of the Stedfast Baptist Church, one of the most vicious anti-LGBTQ hate groups in the nation. Church leaders have called for the execution of gay men and publicly celebrated tragedies that killed members of the LGBTQ community.
“People want to get so riled up… Yeah! F*gs are an abomination. God hates ’em,” he begins. “Well, didn’t it just say if you’re a crossdresser, you’re an abomination too?”
“Now obviously it’s not as bad as being a fa***t,” he continued, “But God is still very upset with your sin.”
“No what should we do about that, knowing this as Christians? If you’re a woman and you own any pants, throw them away. Light them on fire. If you’re a man and your wife has pants, throw them away. And if she yells at you, so be it. Throw them away. That’s a good fight to be in.”
“If I was caught wearing a dress and that was online,” he said as his strange rant continued, “I would do everything in my power to get rid of that picture. Like, man, I gotta find the owner of it and persuade him. I gotta pay him off. Like, man, please delete that picture.”
“You know, there is no picture of me wearing a dress,” he added quickly with a nervous chuckle, “because I’m never going to put one on. I don’t own any and I don’t want to wear any. And women should have that same standard.”
There is no Biblical injunction that’s specifically about women and pants. At the time the Bible was written, trousers weren’t part of the Jewish wardrobe and men wore tunics and robes.
6 LGBTQ candidates won their Florida primaries. They all oppose the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law
State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith & his husband Jerick Mediavilla NegronPhoto: Campaign websiteSix out, Democratic LGBTQ candidates running for the Florida state legislature all won their primaries this Tuesday. All of them oppose the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
At least 20 states have introduced “Don’t Say Gay” laws this year. The candidates worry that, if left unopposed, Republicans will spread harm queer youth and families nationwide with their newfound brand of queerphobia.
Adam Gentle and state Reps. Carlos Guillermo Smith and Michele Rayner are all running for the State House. Eunic Ortiz and Janelle Perez are running for the State Senate. State Sen. Shevrin Jones won his re-election campaign this week. Because he has no Republican competitor, he will retain his Senate seat.
Jones became the first openly LGBTQ Black person elected to the Florida legislature when he was elected in 2020.
On the campaign trail, he shared how publicly coming out as gay at age 30 caused members to leave the south Florida church where his father preaches. Friends stopped talking to Jones, families began making jokes about him behind his back, and even his own father expressed disappointment in his sexuality, he said.
So when he spoke out against the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law — which forbids discussing LGBTQ issues in kindergarten through third-grade classes — Jones noted that it takes courage for young people to be themselves. He also said that LGBTQ issues aren’t being taught in the aforementioned grades, and that state Republicans only passed the law to rally their voting base.
“It’s discriminatory on the surface,” Jones said in an interview. “The problem is coming when young people are being treated in a manner that they now have to question who they are, knowing that they already come from households who do not support them… I think that’s the dangerous part, because LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to commit suicide.”
“I think that this is the time for the LGBTQ+ community to see we’re under attack,” he added. “I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s Black people, I don’t care if it’s Indigenous people, I don’t care if it’s the LGBTQ+ community, because we live amongst each other and I feel that when you come for one, you come for all.”
When Michele Rayner first won her election to the state House in 2020, she became the first openly Black queer woman ever elected in Florida at any level.
“I didn’t run for office just to make history,” she said in a video. “I ran because I wanted to make a difference for people.”
“The way that I show up — I’m a Black, gay woman so I think that inspires a lot of folks,” she added in a May 2022 interview.
While she acknowledges that supporters of “Don’t Say Gay” claim it protects children from age-inappropriate discussions of sex, she said, “I don’t want my child not to be able to say that my moms and I went to Disney World or my moms and I went to the beach.”
Meanwhile, Eunic Ortiz, who is running for a state Senate seat, said the ramifications of “Don’t Say Gay” are detrimental to LGBTQ youth.
“We need to be creating solutions for the issues that everyday folks are actually facing,” she said. “Not playing political theater to try to appease a few wealthy donors in the Republican movement that, frankly, are homophobic and hate the LGBTQ community.”
Her district houses St. Petersburg, a city that has received a perfect score for eight years on Human Rights Campaign’s annual Municipal Equality Index for LGBTQ inclusive.
“We have people in the LGBTQ community living in every single county in the state. They are our neighbors and they are our community leaders…. LGBTQ people are the workers that are making our counties and communities run,” she said. “[Floridians] are tired of seeing them take on this cultural war, instead of addressing real issues,” like the environment or rising rents.
Adam Gentle spoke against the law at a political event in early March. At the event, he began his two-minute speech by announcing, “I’m gay.” He then said that schools are often the only safe spaces where LGBTQ youths feel they can safely discuss their queer identities with others.
“Their ability to talk with trusted teachers and administrators is being ripped away from them,” he said.
Rep. Carlos Smith has used his political office to oppose the law. When he debated against the bill in February, he wore a face mask with the word “gay” printed on it in large letters.
In his remarks, he said the bill was “deeply personal” to him as a queer Latino, especially since the law would prevent teachers from discussing important events, like the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting which mostly harmed other queer Latinos.
“A majority of Floridians oppose this proposal that seeks to censor conversations about LGBTQ people in our schools,” he said.
“This bill goes way beyond the text on the page,” he noted. “It sends a terrible message to our youth, that there is something so wrong, so inappropriate, so dangerous about this topic that we have to censor it from classroom discussion…. To all LGBTQ youth — we see you, you’re loved and your lives are worth fighting for!”
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) press secretary Christina Pushaw defended the law by calling its opponents pedophilic “groomers,” Smith responded, “Bigoted attacks like this against LGBTQ people are the worst of the worst…. Literally, it’s the oldest trick in the book against LGBTQ people.”
Smith said that DeSantis only signed the law to advance his political ambitions. He worries about DeSantis’ likelihood of running for president in 2024. “My concern is that he is much smarter and much more calculating than Donald Trump ever was,” he said.
Janelle Perez agrees with Smith. She’s a mother of two, married to a woman, and, if elected, she would be the first LGBTQ parent and the first queer Latina or queer woman ever elected to the Senate.
She worries that the law will subject her own daughter to bullying and prevent her from discussing her own family in school. But even worse, she worries what will happen to when DeSantis runs for president.
“When people in Hollywood, and New York, and in California are looking at the things that Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida, what they need to understand is that Florida is Ron DeSantis’s guinea pig,” she said.
“He is going to run for president in 2024,” she continued. “So if you don’t like what’s happening in Florida, and you don’t want this rhetoric to become the national conversation in 2024, then you need to help us stop it, now. Because it’s going to come after you, and the rest of the country.”
Although DeSantis and other supporters of the law say that it protects parents’ rights to control what their kids are exposed to in schools, Perez said it basically erases queer parents from schools and tells their children to feel ashamed of their families.
“LGBTQ families aren’t going anywhere,” Perez told The Washington Post. “We want to just receive the same rights as every other parent.”
“Republicans in Tallahassee have failed our state and I cannot sit idly by as they make us less safe, restrict our rights and hurt our children,” she added.
Hate preacher warns congregation that gays will get you drunk & “into some weird junk”
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/08/hate-preacher-warns-congregation-gays-will-get-drunk-weird-junk/
People ask me why I post stuff said by these hate preachers. Well I just posted about a school that shut down a student newspaper and ended the journalism courses simply because the paper respected the pronouns and asked for name of a trans person which got them punished, punished for being respectful, and in the last issue reported on the history of the LGBTQ+ people. Simply having a story about the history of a group of people caused them to be canceled and the entire course of study removed! Think about that. The school administrators believe that just the mention of gay, lesbian, or trans people is so inappropriate that it must never be mentioned. Being respectful used to be something people were proud of in young people, now if they are not mean and targeting of LGBTQ+ for abuse they are being too nice and must be punished. It is because the school administrators believe most of what people like these hate preachers are saying, they believe the garbage that red state governors spout about how the LGBTQ+ are pedophiles and forcing kids to be gay or transition. Teachers and other LGBTQ+ are forcing kids to be a different gender and sexual orientation even though we are the ones who use science to show that it is something we are born with and can’t be changed. But these religious hate preachers say it, and the red state maga armed gang thugs enforce it. That is why I post what they say and why I fight back against it. If you cannot see how flawed and wrong what they are saying is, then they are reaching you and those around you. It must be combated and fought against. This guy has been banned from other countries because what he says is not acceptable in a civil society yet he is celebrated in the land of the free. Hugs
Steven Anderson Photo: screenshotA preacher known for his hatred of LGBTQ people warned his congregation that gays and lesbians want to get them drunk and then make them do “some weird junk that you have no desire to get into.”
“These people are going to take you down a dark path,” said Steven Anderson, founder of the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement and pastor at the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. He has been banned from 34 countries because of his hate speech.
“You start hanging around with a bunch of fa***ts and lesbians, you know what they’re gonna do?” he continued. “They’re gonna ply you with alcohol or ply you with drugs and they’re going to abuse you.”
“They’re going to molest you. They are going to get you into some weird junk that you have no desire to get into.”
“Stay away from them! They are evil, they are freaks, they are predators, they’re not reproducers they are recruiters, they are molesters, they are predators. Stay away from them.”
Anderson earned himself the reputation as one of the most anti-LGBTQ preachers in the country after he praised the Pulse nightclub shooter, calling the victims “a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles” and “disgusting homosexuals who the Bible says were worthy of death.”
In the past, Anderson has encouraged his congregants to kill all gay people, calling it a “cure for AIDS.” He has also advocated for world governments to execute gay people.
His extreme hate speech has gotten him banned from dozens of countries, including all 26 of Europe’s Schengen states, Botswana, Jamaica, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Australia banned him in 2020. In response, Anderson claimed that God punished Australia with wildfires because they were “banning and deporting preachers of the Gospel” so they were facing “the judgment of God.”
High school ends its school newspaper after it published LGBTQ articles
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/08/high-school-ends-school-newspaper-published-lgbtq-articles/
There must be no mention of the LGBTQ+ what so ever, especially in a positive way. This is not about protecting little kids, that should be clear now. The history of the LGBTQ+ people is inappropriate for the public to see. Those people are diseased evil baby rapiers that eat human flesh, they are an abomination god wants killed. What group will be next after they get rid of us? Respecting someone enough to use the name and pronouns they ask is not to be tolerated, we must punish and destroy anyone different from the Christian ideal. This is an open attempt to roll back the public acceptance and tolerance that the LGBTQ+ have earned over the decades, and return the country to before there was equal rights for minorities. We need the entire voting public to understand what these people really want and will do. As I will post in a few minutes, some of these people now want to forbid girls / women from wearing pants claiming that is crossdressing. How much control do they want over every aspect of other people’s lives? All of it. They want to mandate acceptable clothing like the Amish or the Puritans, they want to make the handmaids tale a real thing. This attacks on one group making them a scape goat has been done in recent history, 1930s Germany, we seen where that led to. Hugs
The final issue of the Viking SagaPhoto: ScreenshotA Nebraska high school has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
School administrators eliminated both the high school newspaper and its journalism program following publication of the school’s year-end issue in May, which featured a story on the history of LGBTQ rights and editorials on LGBTQ topics.
Three days after distribution of Northwest High School’s Viking Saga, staff and students were notified of the paper and program’s elimination. Shortly after, the newspaper’s printing service and advertising contracts with the nearby Grand Island Independent were cancelled.
“The very last issue that came out this year, there was… a little bit of hostility amongst some,” Northwest Public Schools board Vice President Zach Mader said. “There were editorials that were essentially, I guess what I would say, LGBTQ.”
“There have been talks of doing away with our newspaper if we were not going to be able to control content that we saw [as] inappropriate,” Mader told the Independent.
“There [were] some things that were…” he said, referring to the final issue of the Viking Saga. “If [taxpayers] read that [issue], they would have been like, ‘Holy cow. What is going on at our school?’”
Board President San Leiser claimed that “most people were upset they were written,” referring to the articles about LGBTQ rights.
In addition to the controversy surrounding content, according to students, Saga staff was reprimanded in April after using preferred names and pronouns in the paper, and was advised by district officials to use only birth names.
Students defied the order for the final issue. They were censored and at least one trans student’s preferred name was replaced with his deadname before publication in the byline of his story.
“The [name] thing was the first big blow,” the trans student, Marcus Pennell, said. “It was the first time that the school had officially been, like, ‘We don’t really want you here.”
The school hasn’t provided an official explanation for the paper and program’s cancellation. Northwest’s 2021-2022 journalism teacher has remained silent.
Students and free speech advocates say the paper getting cancelled is a violation of First Amendment rights.
Hadar Harris, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, points to the 1969 Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, when the school argued a 13-year-old student could not wear a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.
“In the Tinker case, the Supreme Court said that students and teachers don’t lose their First Amendment and freedom of expression rights at the schoolhouse gates,” said Harris. “We believe that that should apply to student journalists as well.”
“By far, the number one thing that will get student media censored is a story that criticizes the school or that administrators somehow think makes them look bad,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Center.
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