Notice at about 3:11 the police detain / arrest and take a 13 year old girl with out telling anyone why including the child or her mother that was right there. Even when asked the police refused to talk to the mother. The police questioned this child with out a parent or lawyer present according to the mother. Police just rounding up kids wearing pride flags protesting for the right of control over their own body? Notice also that the police did not arrest, detain, nor remove anyone else or any adult. They took the kid wearing the pride flag. What does that tell you? Hugs
The video, filmed and shared on social media by Rain Johnson’s mother Lauren Johnson, shows the teen draped in a bisexual Pride flag and holding a megaphone being led away by two uniformed police officers and loaded into a police vehicle. Lauren can be heard telling her child not to resist and assuring her that “mom’s right behind you.”
In the video, Lauren can also be heard demanding to know why the officers are arresting her child. According to NBC 6 South Florida, Rain was charged with a second-degree misdemeanor for a noise ordinance violation related to a new law that went into effect on July 1.
“She had a bullhorn, and she was screaming ‘my body my choice,’” Johnson explained in a TikTok video posted after Rain’s release. “When [the officers] came around the corner, they decided that they were going to, I guess, make her their target and arrest her.”
“It was very evident that I was her parent,” Johnson says in the video. “They could have easily handed me the [megaphone]. Instead, they chose to terrorize a 13-year-old.”
Attorney David Haas, who is representing the Johnsons, said that Rain was held for over an hour and was not allowed to see her mother. Johnson claims her daughter was questioned without a parent present.
“We don’t think that the megaphone is applicable to the ordinance and so we’ll be looking into that, about whether or not it was even appropriate for the arrest,” said Haas.
In a Monday Twitter post, Florida gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried posted video of the arrest. “I need everyone to see what Ron DeSantis’ Florida really looks like,” Fried wrote. “13 year olds being arrested for protesting for their own freedom.”
According to The Ledger, Rain rejoined the protest in Lakeland’s Munn Park soon after her release. In her TikTok video, Johnson says she and her child will plan to attend another demonstration today. “We will be at the protest Thursday with a new bullhorn.”
This is long but describes an incredible intertwining of the religious fanatic justices with the religious legal hate group arguing cases in front of them to restrict rights for others and expand them for religion. Things the court then did. Also when the court has refused to restrict protesting at abortion clinics they did severely limit demonstrations at their court establishing an exclusion zone that this religious group had headquarters with in. This is where the long game came in, the religious right just kept working their way in until they won. Hugs
A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade
Peggy Nienaber, left, the vice president of the Faith & Liberty evangelical group, prays outside the Supreme Court in 2009. Next to her is the Rev. Rob Schenck, who led the group’s predecessor organization, Faith and Action, for years before leaving in 2018.
Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.
This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.
In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.
Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.
The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”
But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.
Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”
Peggy Nienaber, right, at an event outside the Supreme Court led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama’s health care legislation in 2012.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images
In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as “Ministry Row.” The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes — and, most of all, reverse Roe v. Wade. The street view offers few clues as to what transpires behind the painted brick facades, save for a granite slab inscribed with the Ten Commandments planted in the grassy patch before a modest cream-colored Victorian with maroon trim.
The home serves as Faith & Liberty’s headquarters. The Ten Commandments statue had been placed there by Schenck, an evangelical minister famous for orchestrating high-profile anti-abortion stunts, such as shoving an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Schenck had opened the ministry in the 1990s as Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, a nonprofit dedicated to ending federal abortion rights. The organization operated on a “utopian ‘trickle-up’ theory” of influence: building access “higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target — members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices — even presidents,” Schenck wrote in his 2018 autobiography.
The group established a strong foothold in both chambers of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But Faith and Action ultimately directed its energies toward the judicial branch. “There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices, who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions,” Schenck wrote. “We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench — they were appointed for life — so why not convert them while in office?” (Schenck has since reversed course: He is now a fierce critic of evangelical politicking and says Liberty Counsel assumed Faith and Action’s operations in 2018. He says he has no knowledge of the group’s inner workings after he left.)
At first, the high court regarded Faith and Action and its peer organizations as nuisances, according to Schenck. “Justice Thomas would say to me, ‘You know those groups outside? Are they crazy or are they good people?’” Schenck recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone. When Schenck first began his approach in 1994, prayer activities on the Supreme Court’s property was considered an act of demonstration, and therefore illegal. Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)
To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.
Sometimes the prayers would be general; other times, on specific subjects, such as ending abortion, according to Schenck. He says Faith and Action took assiduous care to avoid speaking blatantly about cases in the Supreme Court’s pipeline, discussing the political agenda only in broad strokes. Even so, under the time period Schenck describes, prayers with the justices occurred as Faith and Action signed onto several amicus briefs for landmark SCOTUS cases such as Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which ultimately upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
Schenck walked away from his life on the Hill after receiving a late-career doctorate on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who questioned the collaborative relationship between Adolf Hitler and 1930s German evangelicals. He drew parallels between the Republican Party and American evangelicalism, concerned that he’d weaponized worship to fuel a hate-filled agenda. No longer an anti-abortion activist, Schenck views his past efforts with regret. “Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.
“I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck says. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.”
When Liberty Counsel absorbed Faith and Action in 2018, Peggy Nienaber, who had worked alongside Schenck since at least 2005, continued with the group. In a July 2021 conversation with Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder, Nienaber described the group’s new incarnation as similar to Faith and Action’s mission. It’s “the ministry right here on Capitol Hill,” she said, devoted to “changing the hearts and minds of not only our elected officials, but the staffers all the way down.” Nienaber highlighted Faith & Liberty’s proximity to the court by pointing to the window of the conference room where the justices decide their cases. ”When you’re sitting in that conference room, you cannot miss those Ten Commandments,” she said. (Faith & Liberty sits so close to the Supreme Court, in fact, that it has been included in the “buffer zone” surrounding the high court, shut off to protesters and the public. There’s irony here, given that Liberty Counsel has for decades litigated to abolish buffer zones near abortion clinics.)
“There’s a lot of things that Faith & Liberty does — and that you do — that obviously we can’t put in an email, can’t put in a newsletter, can’t put in a press release,” Staver said to Nienaber during their chat, “because it’s private relationships that are spiritually transformative.” Nienaber’s social media accounts show her hobnobbing with high-profile Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and former Vice President Mike Pence. She hung close to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018: She posted photographs from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, as well as a screenshot of her invitation to Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony.
Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”
In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coach who recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”
Nienaber was recorded telling the livestreamer that she prayed with Supreme Court justices on June 27, the Monday after the high court issued the Dobbs ruling. She was at a celebration she helped organize with Sean Feucht, a prominent Christian-worship musician. Nienaber identifies herself only as “Peggy” in the footage, but she references the ministry she runs behind the court and its 850-pound replica of the Ten Commandments. For most of the interview, Nienaber is not on camera. But when the video pans on her briefly, she can be seen wearing the same dress and necklace she has on in a selfie with Feucht posted to Faith & Liberty’s website.
Last week, Rolling Stone spoke to Patty Bills, the director of constituency affairs at Faith & Liberty. Bills did not want to discuss Faith & Liberty’s ministry practices, citing privacy concerns. Bills would not, however, deny that Faith & Liberty ministers to Supreme Court justices. “I never said we didn’t — I just said we provide privacy,” she said.
Staver, in denying that members of Faith & Liberty prayed with Supreme Court justices, says that such prayers would have been inappropriate, especially given Liberty Counsel’s litigation efforts. “That’s why we wouldn’t do that,” he says. “And especially on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, we would make a very clear firewall. We just would never do something like that.”
In a written statement to Rolling Stone, Nienaber says of her hot-mic comments: “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” She adds that Covid restrictions have limited public access to the Supreme Court: “The public has not been allowed access, and I am no different.” When she has had access to public areas of the court, she says, “I will generally silently pray for the justices, their staff, and the Court.”
But after this story was published, Nienaber acknowledged her remarks and conceded she has prayed personally with Supreme Court justices. Despite speaking in the present tense on the livestream, Nienaber asserted, “My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years.” Nienaber added: “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer. Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID. It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”
Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by Staver. The organization is an uncommon hybrid of religious ministry and legal practice, dedicated to “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family through strategic litigation.” Staver is the organization’s senior pastor as well as its top litigator. This mix of law and religion is central to Staver’s career; he previously served as dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Staver has argued numerous cases in front of the Supreme Court. He started in 1994 in a case that struck a blow against protest-limiting buffer zones near abortion clinics. In the court’s most recent term, Staver argued and won a 9-0 judgment in Shurtleff v. Boston, a case in which the court ruled a Christian flag couldn’t be excluded from a public flagpole that displayed a rotating assortment of secular flags.
Staver also wrote an amicus brief in the Dobbs case that purports to tie abortion and birth control to eugenics. Calling Roe “the low watermark in this Court’s history,” it argued that Dobbs was ”an ideal vehicle for the Court to finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny, which have constitutionalized eugenic abortions as a fundamental right.”
In the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he cited this brief to impugn the motives of pro-abortion-rights advocates, arguing that “some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” adding, “it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” because “a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.”
When Roe v. Wade was reversed, Staver was triumphant: “I have dedicated my life to defend life and overturn the bloody decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he wrote. “This global earthquake will impact the world.”
Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith & Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.
But even among legal experts troubled by the court’s ties, they acknowledge there are few remedies to address ethical conflicts. A federal statute governs when judges and justices should step away from cases, but the Constitution leaves questions of partiality to the justices themselves. Their general unwillingness to step aside isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Virelli, the Stetson law professor, says: When justices recuse themselves from a case, no one replaces them, a scenario that can create more problems than it solves. “The court changes shape,” he explains. “That makes the decision to recuse difficult.”
That the justices are their own keepers in regard to those rules creates complications, however, says Steve Vladeck, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Texas Law School. The relationship between Faith & Liberty and Liberty Counsel, as described by Rolling Stone, “could make a reasonable observer worry about the appearance of partiality,” he says. But the concerns the scenario raised shouldn’t be about recusal. “What that really reveals is how problematic it is that there isn’t an objective mechanism to resolve these sorts of questions.”
For Winkler, the greater concern is not prayers, but the “religious-themed” decisions he’s seen come down from the high court this term, pointing to not only the Roe reversal but also opinions that permit unchecked free exercise of First Amendment rights. “The problematic aspect isn’t whether they’re praying,” Winkler says, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”
Let’s just get one thing straight: there are 5 rogue SCOTUS justices and 1 more not too far behind them. They are going to take power away from state courts next year and that will be the end of democracy. And nothing is going to be done about it. So plan accordingly.
Distractions are working but more importantly the gravity of the situation either hasn’t hit with the right people or they don’t care/are in on it (Manchinema).
This is the result of the Republicans unwarranted attacks on gay people / the LGBTQ+. This is what they want, gay people especially kids too scared and afraid to come out of get found out as gay. They want it to be terrifying. It doesn’t make more kids straight, but it does make gay kids / people stay in the closet. To hide and not be visible. And the Republicans and religious leaders know this, they understand what they are doing. DeathSantis understands he is making LGBTQ+ kids targets, the writer of the don’t say gay bill admitted that was what he wanted when he wrote it, and erasing LGBTQ+ people from the public view. Out of sight out of mind. Hugs
Police said the teens had been talking on social media since February when they agreed to meet in person for the first time.
A 19-year-old Florida man has been arrested after police say he shot and killed his online boyfriend because the victim might reveal he is gay.
Jakari Webb was taken into custody Tuesday night by the Daytona Beach Police and charged with fatally shooting Telan Mann, also 19, who was gunned down just before 2 a.m. on June 23.
Police said the teens had been talking on social media since February when they agreed to meet in person for the first time at the spot where Webb allegedly pulled out a gun and shot Mann multiple times.
Officers were patrolling in the vicinity when the shooting took place and heard the gunshots. They arrived to find Mann “in a pool of blood with multiple bullet wounds on his body,” according to a statement from police. Mann died at the scene.
A neighbor in the vicinity said she heard at least seven gunshots.
Jakari Webb Daytona Beach Police
Police arrested Webb Tuesday while executing a search warrant at a home on Garden Street, where they also found a handgun. Webb was charged with first-degree murder and is being held without bond at Volusia County jail.
“Our homicide unit has been working this case non-stop since Telan was fatally shot,” DBPD Police Chief Jakari Young said in the statement. “I commend them for a job well done and for providing Telan’s family some closure. It doesn’t replace his life, but I hope it does give his loved ones some measure of peace moving forward.”
On Wednesday, police revealed they have evidence showing Webb and Mann, who was out, were involved in the online relationship for about four months, and that Webb was fearful Mann would expose their relationship and out Webb as gay on social media.
“There was some concern that Telan either had or was going to post something on social media kind of outing the suspect,” Young said.
Mann’s grandmother, Deborah Mann, posted pictures of Webb to social media, asking for the public’s help finding her grandson’s killer.
According to Chief Young, investigators scoured Mann’s text and social media messages and viewed over 120 hours of security cam videos to track Webb’s movements.
In addition to first-degree murder, Webb has been charged with a probation violation and resisting arrest after he tried to flee from SWAT and K-9 officers. Young said officials are exploring additional hate-crime charges in the case.
Friends and neighbors of the victim said Mann was a joyful person.
“He always wanted everybody to be on good terms,” said one friend who requested anonymity. “He always was the positive one around the group. He never wanted any bad energy at all.”
“It just breaks your heart to see things happen because that’s two lives gone. Not just one, so I don’t understand,” said Eula Hicks, a neighbor.
At Wednesday’s press conference, Chief Young called the crime senseless. “It’s extremely tragic and it’s just completely unnecessary.”
In Lansing, MI early Tuesday morning, a man was caught on surveillance video setting a Pride flag display on fire.
Security cameras recorded the man approaching the “Welcome to Lansing’s Eastside Neighborhoods” sign near the corner of East Michigan Avenue and South Mifflin Avenue. The sign is flanked to one side by a large American flag and on the other by a Pride flag. Smaller flags decorate the sign itself.
The perpetrator douses the Pride flag with a liquid substance then reaches into his pocket for a lighter and ignites it. He jumps back from the fireball and leaves the scene.
It’s the sixth incident of vandalism at the same site. Five Pride flags have been stolen and replaced at the location over the course of Pride month.
“I am beside myself,” said Ryan Kost, a candidate for the 1st Ward seat on the Lansing City Council in the Aug. 2 primary election. “The level of hate demonstrated by setting it on fire is incomprehensible.”
Openly gay At-Large Councilmember Peter Spadafore agreed. “I find it appalling and disgusting that someone would resort to using this sort of tactic to intimidate. I hope we are doing everything we can to find this perpetrator of hate.”
“Lansing doesn’t tolerate hate, and I hope this person is identified quickly,” said Lansing Mayor Andy Schor. “I am angry that someone would do this. This is not who we are as a community.”
Kost has filed a criminal report with the Lansing Police over the incidents. Mayor Schor got backup from the chief of police.
“The Lansing Police Department strives for every citizen to feel safe in the city of Lansing,” said Chief Ellery Sosebee. “Our goal is to assure the City of Lansing is a safe place to live work and visit for everyone, including the LGBTQ+ community. The Lansing Police Department will not tolerate any act of hate and intimidation and will seek the appropriate prosecution for any of these crimes.”
The charred Pride flag at the site has been replaced — for the sixth time.
GLAAD released an alarming report on Wednesday about LGBTQ Americans who feel they still face discrimination in their daily lives. Seven out of 10 LGBTQ Americans state they face discrimination when interacting with their local community. That is up 11 percent from GLAAD’s report last year.
During a year when anti-transgender sports and bathroom bills are sweeping the nation, along with bills such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, it’s hard to argue with these statistics. Right now, LGBTQ people are facing some of the worst discrimination in recent history. And unfortunately, this representation is spilling over into how the public view LGBTQ people.
Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s President & CEO, issued a statement on Wednesday regarding the findings. She found the statistics “distressing, but not surprising.”
“Legislation targeting LGBTQ people and youth, including censorship in classrooms, book bans, bans on evidence-based healthcare and access to school sports, has ballooned since 2020 to nearly 250 bills introduced in statehouses across the nation,” Ellis said.
Ellis mentioned anti-LGBTQ legislation, like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill that prohibits students and teachers to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity in school. These bills decrease LGBTQ representation and opponents argue that they give a blanket statement to people across the nation that LGBTQ people are second-class citizens due to misinformation and lack of support.
“Misinformation and false rhetoric from anti-LGBTQ lawmakers have real-life consequences,” Ellis said Wednesday, “and gives a permission slip to discriminate against LGBTQ people and target them.”
When looking at the subgroups of LGBTQ people, there are some parts of the community that face more discrimination than others.
More than half of transgender and nonbinary people face harsher discrimination and feel less safe in their neighborhoods and communities versus 36 percent of other LGBTQ people.
LGBTQ people of color also face higher rates of discrimination compared to white LGBTQ people. These individuals felt that they were discriminated against not only because of their race but also because of their sexuality or gender identity.
“Every LGBTQ person and ally must use this information to speak up and hold elected officials, news media, and social media platforms accountable to actions and rhetoric that make everyone less safe,” Ellis said.
Nearly 80 percent of LGBTQ people feel that they need better legal protections and federal legislation to combat the discrimination they face on a daily basis.
And a lot of that is contributed to feeling better represented in media and the public eye, including public officials who represent them. 75 percent of LGBTQ respondents feel that representation is “essential to equality and acceptance.” LGBTQ respondents also feel “proud and supported” when they feel represented by public officials or in a positive way in the media.
A group of Proud Boys stormed a public library in Indiana to shut down a children’s reading event called “Rainbow Storytime.” Richard Ojeda breaks it down on Rebel HQ.
Hello Everyone. I have not been able to face comments and using my reasoning part of my brain today after I read that story of the abused kids. But let me backtrack a few days.
My back has been really bad since Friday and I didn’t do anything to hurt it more, it is just gotten to a point where my medication is not covering the damage that keeps growing in my spine and the increasing muscle spasms. The steroid injections are / have worn off. I have been trying to walk (and Ron goes with me and then when I stop at home he keeps walking) in the morning around phase 1 of our development.
So far on days I can I have worked myself up to this route. We leave our home at 39 and walk to Jackson, then down to Geronimo to No Name, turn up Sam Houston, then down Jim Bowie back to No Name, going up to Church Drive, head back to Andrew Jackson to our home. Here is the entire park, which after making sure I am in the house Ron goes further into get his exercise. The map is not quite accurate as the church is directly behind our home.
I have better more detailed maps but this was the first one in my saved files that came up. So as I said Ron goes on after he makes sure I am in the house. So on Friday my back total went in to super bitch mode from normal bitch mode, and I was in extreme pain. My back has been really bad since I tried to carry those bags of soda three months ago. And so as the pain built higher and higher I needed more medication and my thinking got harder and harder. So I missed the comments.
Then I was wakened on Saturday morning by my Apple watch going off on my wrist crazy with a big red screen which had a heart on it saying my heart rate was dangerous at a sustained 133 and had been up and down all night. Ron said I had been upset in my sleep and rather active as I get when I am having a flashback nightmare.
So Saturday I felt like crap, Ron wouldn’t let me walk but we worked at getting my heart rate down which we did. But I was not feeling up to handling much. Sunday I was feeling better and during / after the Sunday News Shows I was answering comments and doing posts. Then came today where the vortex found me.
The Vortex. Some of the long time readers know what the vortex is for me and how scary it can be. The vortex is the thing that takes me to the void, the place my memories suck me into and take me that I struggle to leave, mostly losing for long period of time, sometimes weeks or more. It takes over my mind and body, I can not function, I cannot deal with life, I can not shut off my mind or the memories that are on a constant loop complete with all the feelings of pain / anger / despair & hopelessness / and deep frustrations. All the emotions and feelings that I felt when the bad stuff was happening to me as I relive it all over and over and over … The vortex in my mind is a huge tornado that catches me and tries to suck me in, I can feel / hear it coming and I am terrified of the place it will take me if it can …
Sorry had to take a break.
So with therapy and help I have learned to form in my mind handles to grab onto when the vortex starts to draw me in. Those handles can save me depending on how bad the shock / memories are in my mind. One of those handles was Randy. Back in 2014 when I started self harming again Randy my wonderful online brother who while working 12 hour shifts would watch my posts carefully for any signs of distress and either call me or take calls and talk to me for hours trying to fight off the vortex / memories. He lost a lot of sleep back in those years, but he kept me from a lot of new scars and possible suicide. I admire and love him far more than I can ever say.
That was when Ron set up the candle making stuff in my bedroom and I would stay in the bedroom for weeks make candles day and night. I never knew until later that Ron would box them up and store them because the doctor had told him to keep me focused on making the candles. Our bedroom has a bathroom and Ron would bring me stuff to eat and I just stayed in there making candles and sleeping. It was a dark time in my life, I was desperate to avoid / stop the memories.
So I have learned to develop handles to grab onto, to hold my mind / emotions from being sucked into the vortex. That is what I used today. Ron seen my distress after I read that article and he knew I was upset and struggling. So we went for our morning walk even though he was worried about my heart rate. James set my phone to contact his phone if my heart rate gets too crazy. After our walk I forced myself to stay busy which helps, I helped Ron with our 4th of July lunch which was typical hamburgers, hot dogs, and french fries. I even managed to eat well which is hard for me to do when the vortex takes me too far into the void. Then all day I immersed myself in videos and laundry. Ron asked me to lay down for a while with him as I was getting a bit manic and over wrought. I tried but it was a no go and making things worse for me so I got up.
Between loads of laundry I watched videos and read news sites while posting like there was a reward for the most posts. I had to do that to keep my mind focused on anything but the vortex and the kids I read about this morning. I watched, read, posted with all my mind, and when I went to deal with the laundry I kept my computer headphones on or my phone earbuds in. Ron understood. But by about 4 PM after even two early sets of medications my back gave out entirely. I could hardly walk yet still felt driven to move or I would jump out of my skin. So Ron seeing I was still agitated and getting worse tried to distract me, tried to keep my mind on computer stuff, even recommended I take one of the mood stabilizer meds I hate so much. I don’t react well on them, I have had several doctors try to put me on them. Now Valium is called Diazepam and it is one the doctors have tried to put me on and I refuse to let any doctor prescribe them to me. I disassociate while on them.
The problem is they make me slow down to where I can not function. Now as an adult everything moves too fast when I am on them. It is like I am in a deep fog, moving so slow like I am wading through chest high water, and everyone is talking too fast for me to understand or deal with. I hate it, I am like in super slow motion while the world seems on speed.
In my childhood I was put on heavy doses of Valium to keep me compliant with my abuse because the adoptive parents insisted and the doctors complied, no one looked into the medical history of abuse I had, the broken bones or other things. I would be given the first dose in the morning, go to school and after an hour or two I would either fall asleep at my desk or tell the teacher I needed to lay down. There was a cot setup behind the library shelves where I would go and sleep, at lunch time I would be wakened if still sleeping and taken to lunch then be given my pills by a teacher after eating, and after a hour or two I would go back to lay down behind the shelves. I spent most of my 2rd to 6th grade school years that way. I missed so much schooling. It was accepted but I still don’t know why. Only one person tried to get me to tell them what was going on at home and help me. He even befriend my adoptive parents to do as much for me as he could. But in those days a school employee did not have the authority they do now. On days the police picked me up to take me the ordered medical people I wouldn’t be given my pills so I would be awake and active, even hyperactive so they wouldn’t suspect abuse or blame the bruises on normal hyperactive child behavior. But my mind was still confused and even with what I could hazily remember I knew not to tell. Oh shit, Crap.
Sorry see I told you about the vortex, it sucks you in and keeps your mind and memories lock in the past, in the bad times. I only realized where I was in my mind and what I was writing when I got up to get another soda. Damn, it is insidious. I don’t want to think of those days, I don’t want to go back there, I did not want to write about it. Yet I did because that is where my mind is. Shit, I have to reread this to see where I was in my writing on what I wanted to say. The meds are starting to take effect and things are starting to move faster than I can deal / function with them.
So I have kept myself busy and as focused as possible, and another day has gone by without me answering the comments. Sorry I like the comments, but when I am as upset as I have been I just can not focus enough to reply to them, if I try to do them my mind wanders too much. But now with my mind slowing down I am going to try to get to some of the older ones.
Sorry to bring everyone down on a holiday weekend. I hope everyone has had a great 4th of July and remembers all the great things in their life. I wanted to tell everyone something else but I can not remember what it is. Hugs and loves. Scottie
Sorry but I just realized at least 2 hours have gone by since I wrote this and proofread it. I have been sitting here at my desk staring at my other monitor and it just went off. I have no idea what it was showing let me look. Oh it is something I want to post. I have to watch it again, I don’t remember much of it. Hugs
Is this the future? Police empowered with religious powers to detain and force baptize the public? Will we have competing sects kidnaping the others to force them in to their church? I am worried about the religious take over of the republican party. Hugs
Staff Photo / Former Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Daniel Wilkey, 26, sits in Judge Barry Steelman’s courtroom Friday morning, Dec. 20, 2019.
A U.S. District Court judge gave the go-ahead Thursday to a lawsuit against a former Hamilton County deputy accused of baptizing a woman against her will after a 2019 traffic stop.
In addition to ruling that the suit against Daniel Wilkey, 28, may proceed, Tennessee Eastern District Court Judge Travis R. McDonough ruled that several aspects of the complaint against former deputy Jacob Goforth could not continue. Wilkey allegedly called Goforth to witness the baptism and Goforth recorded the incident on his cellphone.
While excluding Goforth from most complaints in the lawsuit, the judge did say the former deputy had failed to protect the woman from Wilkey’s use of excessive force.
“Goforth is qualified for reasonable immunity and summary judgment on this claim,” the judgment said. However, the ruling also found that Goforth had ample time to stop Wilkey from committing an unreasonable seizure.
“And, if anything, the truly bizarre nature of these facts should have put Goforth further on notice that the seizure was inappropriate,” the judge wrote.
Goforth had said he believed the woman to not be under police custody because she arrived at Soddy Lake in her own vehicle, but the judge stressed in his ruling that the woman might not have thought she was free to go until she was baptized by Wilkey.
McDonough went on to say that “in view of all of the circumstances surrounding the incident, a reasonable person would have believed he was not free to leave” or “would feel free to decline the officers’ requests or otherwise terminate the encounter.
“There are genuine disputes of material fact concerning whether [the woman] was coerced into the baptism, whether she would have faced harsher penalties had she refused to be baptized, and whether Goforth should have known that [the woman] was being coerced,” the judgment said.
Contributed Photo / Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office / Daniel Wilkey
The lawsuit against Wilkey and Goforth accused both men of excessive force, assault and intimidation, among other charges.
Ultimately “claims against [Goforth] individually for unreasonable search, failure to protect and render aid, negligence, battery, assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress” were dismissed in the judgment.
On Wilkey’s baptizing of the woman, McDonough said it violated the woman’s choice of religion as well as violating the state’s own duty to respect the persons’ choice.
“If citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the state disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people,” the ruling said. “Baptism of detainees by law-enforcement officers runs directly counter to the government’s substantial interest in guaranteeing the free exercise of religion without government intervention. Any seizure for the purpose of conducting a baptism intruded upon [the woman’s] liberty without furthering any government interest and was therefore unreasonable.”
On Feb. 6, 2019, shortly after 9 p.m. Wilkey stopped the woman who was driving through the Soddy-Daisy area. After Wilkey asked her what she had in her car, the woman admitted to having a marijuana cigarette in her pack. Wilkey instructed her to exit her car and he searched her twice.
The woman claims Wilkey inappropriately touched her crotch, where he found a “marijuana roach.” Wilkey told the woman that if she allowed him to baptize her, he would let her go with just a citation.
It was then that Wilkey called Goforth to witness the baptism.
According to Hamilton County Court documents, Wilkey has been indicted on 44 charges, including six counts of sexual battery, two counts of rape, nine counts of official oppression, extortion, stalking and assault, among others.
Wilkey faces multiple other lawsuits, including for allegedly groping female minors and for using excessive force. The 2020 video below details the many other charges against him.
I read the article. Appears that he had her drive her own car to a lake where he baptized her in the presence of the other cop.
“Wilkey faces numerous lawsuits in several cases involving alleged excessive use of force, including the alleged unlawful body cavity search of a man while performing a traffic stop and the alleged groping of female minors. The requested damages in the lawsuits total around $11 million.
According to Hamilton County Court documents, Wilkey has been indicted on 44 charges, including six counts of sexual battery, two counts of rape, nine counts of official oppression, extortion, stalking and assault, among others.”
This does nothing to repair/restore my faith in policing.
In civilized countries, police have to get the equivalent of a bachelors degree, with several years of courses on the law, de-escalation, first aid, crisis intervention, and so on. In the US, the typical police training program is a few week, often shorter than an academic quarter.
Photo: Screenshot
Telan MannPhoto: Daytona Beach Police
Photo: Shutterstock
Staff Photo / Former Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Daniel Wilkey, 26, sits in Judge Barry Steelman’s courtroom Friday morning, Dec. 20, 2019.
Scottie's Playtime 