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.
Category: LGBTQ+ / Gay / Trans / Gender
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.
Tucker Carlson Says Marjorie Greene’s Trans Ban Must be a Litmus Test for Republicans
The Far Right’s Hateful Anti-LGBTQ Rhetoric Has Become Genocidal
Right Wing Lunatic Accidentally Makes A Sexual Reference While Spewing Hatred
It is hard for me to accept this guy is serious and not a troll. He is so over the top anti-trans anti-LGBTQ+ that he seems to be mocking the very things he is shouting. However there are people on the right now that act like this and are this delusional. He talked about the LGBTQ mafia. Cenk explains how they are a minority trying to force the majority to do as they demand. Cenk explains also that in some places dominated by the right the 40% of the kids seriously think of committing sucide due to the harrasment of these people. Yet some thing kids are gay and trans because it is cool. LGBTQ+ ki Hugs
A dad in Dallas was attacking the LGBT community at a school board meeting when he made a strange vow. Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks. Read more HERE: https://www.texasobserver.org/gcisd-g… “Immediately outside the building entrance, a handful of students from the district held protest signs. “Our existence is not a controversy,” one sign read. “Let trans kids live, we aren’t threats,” said another.”
Tucker Carlson Uses Listeria Outbreak To Attack LGBTQ Community
“The Fox host expressed sympathy during his show for an Amish farmer named Amos Miller who has run into legal trouble over food safety issues identified by the Food and Drug Administration dating back to 2016. The government is seeking $305,065 in fines, and, according to a legal update on the farm website dated last September, has put meat production on hold.”
“Separate But Equal” Except It’s For LGBT Students
GOP candidate said it’s “totally just” to stone gay people to death
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/08/gop-candidate-said-totally-just-stone-gay-people-death/
Understand these people put their religion first and they are running for elected office that will allow them to craft laws based on their religious views that the rest of us must follow. He is a republican candidate that thinks being gay is an “insidious addiction” and that homosexuals are such an affront to his god they need to be put to death. What kind of laws do you think he will champion? Do you think he could fairly judge anti-discrimination laws? How about the don’t say gay bills for schools, will he agree with science or his bible? These hyper religious people are not running for office because they have nothing else to do, they are trying to get into positions to enforce their church doctrines and make the rest of the nation follow their religion. They are trying to make a theocracy, trying to reduce the rights for women and minorities. Here in Florida they are trying to take over school boards as they did in Texas. You know the kinds of things that they tried to insist kids be taught there, things like the constitution was written by god and Moses, that slaves were unpaid workers or simply forced to relocation, that science / biology are suspect but intelligent design is possible. They snuck as much disinformation and American exceptionalism along with teaching the nation was founded on the Christian religion as possible. If we don’t stop them now, we won’t have a democracy. Hugs
Scott EskPhoto: Campaign Facebook pageA GOP candidate in Oklahoma is getting attention for comments he made several years ago when he justified the death penalty by stoning for gay people. When asked recently about it, he didn’t disavow his previous comments.
Scott Esk, 56, is running in the Republican primary runoff election tomorrow for a seat in the state house, and local media is bringing up some extreme comments he made in the past. He’s not handling them well.
In 2013, Esk was commenting in a Facebook conversation about the Pope saying that he couldn’t judge gay people. Esk posted some Bible quotations, including the part of Romans 1 where the Bible says that a long list of people who sinned is “worthy of death.”
Another person asked him: “So, just to be clear, you think we should execute homosexuals (presumably by stoning)?”
Esk responded: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it… Ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.”
A year later, a journalist asked him about those comments. He said it was “totally just” to kill gay people.
“What I will tell you right now is that that was done in the Old Testament under a law that came directly from God,” he said at the time. “And in that time, there was, it was, totally just came directly from God.”
After those comments, he put out a long video where he claimed he “sets the record straight.” In those videos, he claimed he has “compassion on anybody in the grips of an insidious addiction, such as homosexuality.”
“Any Christian should be in the position to say that this is sin or this is good. If we don’t make that distinction, we’re not going to help people,” he said in the first video published in 2015.
In the another video, which was from earlier this year, Esk called a local TV news report on his comments a “hit piece on the fact that I had an opinion against homosexuality.”
“Well, does that make me a homophobe? Maybe some people think it does,” he said. “But as far as I and many of the people, the voters of House District A7 are concerned, it simply makes me a Christian. Christians believe in biblical morality, kind of by definition, or they should.”
He said that he is not in favor of “expanding the death penalty in Oklahoma for homosexuality,” he just wants everyone to know that gay people are so offensive to his god that his religion wants them dead.
“The fact is, that it’s much more offensive knowing what obscene things homosexuals do with each other than it is for somebody to hold the view that it is indecent,” he said in the second video.
Now that the runoff election is tomorrow, The Oklahoman asked Esk about those comments to see if his opinion has changed at all.
He refused to do an interview and pointed The Oklahoman to the two videos.
“I’ve stood up for what is right in the past, and I intend to in the future and I am right now,” he stated. “That’s got me in trouble. The media are not my friends, as far as I’m concerned.”
Earlier today, Esk posted a video to his YouTube channel entitled “Scott Esk sets the record straight for the 3rd time,” in which he calls The Oklahoman piece and a piece by News 4 “hit pieces” and says that the media is against him because they want his opponent Gloria Banister to win.
He also responded to being fired from his job as a data manager in 2011 because he was arrested after he allegedly threatened and harassed the leadership of his church. In the video, he calls those church leaders “snakes” and makes some opaque references to the divorce and custody battle he was going through at the time.
Whoever wins the primary tomorrow will run against the Democratic winner in November. The seat is currently held by state Rep. Collin Walke (D), who is retiring.
Judge throws out parents’ lawsuit over school policy to not out trans kids to their parents
Finally a judge that uses common sense and gives a win for child safety. The only reason these parents are demanding to know if their child is not being a “traditional good cis straight kid” is so they can fix them. If the kid thinks they will be unsafe or their parents would react badly they are in the best position to know. If they tell a teacher that their parents would freak out, that they are anti-trans anti-gay, if they tell the teacher the parents are highly religious the chances are the kids will be in trouble and or forced into conversion therapy or isolated from friends and support. Why else would it be so critically important for a parent to know? It is not dangerous or harmful for a kid to be gay / lesbian or use a different pronoun than the cis ones. If the parents wanted to be supportive, they would let the child know that and would wait for the child to feel comfortable to come out to them. No this is about parents who want to stop the child from being who they are. These are parents who think that the kids are making a lifestyle choice rather than that they are born this way. So they will demand the kids not chose to be what they really are. If they must punish a kid to be straight or punish a kid to be cis, they will do so. Hard and to the extreme! That is why they are going to such lengths to know what the kids are doing / saying at school. The decision to come out or be public about one’s sexual orientation or gender identity is a very personal one that should be up to the person entirely. If they are not yet comfortable with being out / open why would anyone think it is OK to force that on them, especially kids? Hugs
Photo: ShutterstockFederal Judge Paul Grimm from the District of Maryland has thrown out a lawsuit from parents who opposed a school district’s plan to support its transgender students.
Three unidentified parents filed the lawsuit in October 2021 against Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Education. The parents said the district’s guidelines on student gender identity violated state laws and the U.S. Constitution by encouraging school staff to keep a child’s chosen gender identity hidden from parents.
The guidelines state that students can disclose their gender identity to school staff as well as the level of support they anticipate receiving from their caretakers at home. However, the guidelines also state that school staff members aren’t required to disclose a student’s gender identity to a child’s parents unless they are legally required or authorized by the student.
The suing parents said that the guidelines violated the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a 1974 law that gives parents the right to access their children’s educational records.
The parents also said the guidelines violate the Maryland Declaration of Rights provision allowing adults to “direct the care, custody, education, welfare, safety, and control of their minor children” as well as the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment Due Process clause.
In their lawsuit, the parents said the guidelines are “expressly designed to circumvent parental involvement in a pivotal decision affecting [their children’s] care, health education, and future,” The Washington Times reported.
The parents also claimed that the policy would allow children “to transition socially to a different gender identity at school without parental notice or consent”. While the district policy allows students to use the pronouns and gendered facilities of their choosing, it doesn’t authorize the school to provide any other sorts of gender affirming medical or mental health care.
Grimm disagreed with the parents’ arguments. In his decision, the judge wrote that the guidelines are meant to be flexible and don’t necessarily instruct school staff to hide such information from parents.
In fact, in a statement hailing Grimm’s ruling, the Montgomery County Board of Education wrote, “The Court rightly found that our Guidelines for Gender Identity actively encourage familial involvement in developing and implementing a transgender or gender nonconforming student’s ‘Gender Support Plan’ whenever possible.”
The parents’ attorney Rick Claybrook said his clients are considering an appeal to Grimm’s ruling.
Mark Eckstein, chair of the Montgomery County Council of Parent Teacher Associations’ LGBTQ subcommittee, said that some parents are opposed to the guidelines because there isn’t a lot of case law on the subject, Bethesda Magazine wrote.
“The ideal situation is to get the parents and child together and get everyone on the same page, but when that doesn’t happen, for whatever reason, it creates conflict,” Eckstein told the magazine. “But you do have a lot of instances where a child is out at school, but not at home. It’s not easy whatever way you cut it. Even if everyone is at their best, it’s a complicated situation.”
This isn’t the first time parents have sued over such a law.
In August, the right-leaning group Parents Defending Education (PDE) sued the Linn-Mar Community School District of Iowa over a similar policy using similar legal reasoning.
