Miss Majesty Divine, a drag performer, collects tips and dances among the crowd at Phat Sammy’s tiki bar in Huntsville, Ala.Credit…D’Angelo Lovell Williams for The New York Times
It was an unusually chilly Thursday night in December, and a drag queen named Miss Majesty Divine was putting the final touches on her show makeup. She was about to go onstage for her regular gig at a basement tiki bar, one of the last performances before Christmas.
Up at street level, two unwelcome guests had arrived. They were not fans. They were men with bushy beards, one holding a bullhorn, the other a placard that depicted a drag queen holding a screaming baby and the hashtag #stopdragqueenstoryhour.
“Repent, you filthy dog! You are going to burn in hell!” the one with the bullhorn shouted. “God sent AIDS to deal with people like you!”
Madge, as she is known to her friends and adoring fans, was unfazed.
“I teach math to middle schoolers,” Madge deadpanned. “You think I haven’t been called some things?”
By the end of the next workday, Madge, who in the classroom was known as Mr. James Miller, would call himself something new: retired. In the middle of the school year, the teacher, 52 years old, abruptly put in his papers. His career was over.
“It’s funny — all these people who complain about cancel culture, and now they are trying to cancel my whole existence,” Madge told me.
Miller’s troubles began on Oct. 12, when the conservative social media account known as Libs of TikTok, which specializes in finding and spreading videos, often out of context, of supposedly outrageous liberal behavior, posted an edited video of him performing in drag as Madge at charity events, some of which had children in attendance.
The video went viral, landing Miller on The Daily Mail’s website and many conservative news sites, falsely portraying his tame performances as lewd and overtly sexual. An avalanche of hate came down on Miller. Amid the maelstrom he realized that he could not continue teaching in Alabama. He had already been thinking of retiring soon, and this cataclysm prompted him to accelerate his plans.
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Miss Majesty Divine applies her makeup backstage before her performance, transforming from middle school math teacher to drag queen.
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Miss Majesty Divine struts to her last number, a Tina Turner mix that ends with “Proud Mary.”
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Kirstin Orlando, a drag performer, dances onstage in a dominatrix-themed outfit, complete with a riding crop.
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Tsunami Rayne, a drag performer, does a final check of her outfit backstage at Phat Sammy’s.
I traveled to Alabama last month to try to understand the state of queer America today, to try to understand this unsettling whiplash I’ve been feeling lately as a queer person. The world watched a gay congressman lead the vote to codify national recognition of same-sex and interracial marriage, and the grandees of the L.G.B.T.Q. community gathered at the White House to watch President Biden sign that bill into law and to listen to Cyndi Lauper croon “True Colors.”
At the same time, queer people are being hounded by vigilantes and targeted by bigoted laws. On TV I watch queer people as protagonists but also hear them vilified as groomers and child molesters by right-wing news organizations and lawmakers. A web designer would rather go all the way to the Supreme Court than make a wedding website for a theoretical queer couple. Queer spaces, from clinics serving transgender youth to nightclubs, are under attack. These past few years have been a time of head-spinning backlash.
I chose to come here not because Alabama has one of the strongest records of homophobic legislation in the country or because it is one of the few states where less than half of the population supports federal protections for gay marriage. I came here because the last time I was in Alabama, in 2017, I had one of the best nights of my life, at a gay bar with a bunch of queer people I had just met.
At the time, I was the editor of HuffPost, and I was in town with a group of colleagues as part of a cross-country bus tour we did, interviewing people about the state of America along the way. We met and interviewed a man named Michael Meadows who had just been named Mr. Leather Birmingham. He invited us back to the local leather bar, Spike’s. It is hard to explain how good it feels to walk into a queer space when you are a queer person in a strange place — the warm embrace and recognition of a shared experience, no matter how different our lives might be. A night of karaoke, dancing in faux cages and rounds of shots ensued. My memories are hazy, but the pictures and videos on our phones don’t lie: We had a blast.
When I went to Birmingham in 2017, we were less than a year into the Trump administration. It was long before the phrase “don’t say gay” entered the popular vernacular and before the word “groomer” came roaring back into circulation as a slur hurled at queer people. It was before the tsunami of book bans and, Lord help us, long before Libs of TikTok.
It was a time when major TV shows featuring transgender actors were started. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” had become a cultural phenomenon, and drag performances drew wider audiences. Gay bars had become prime destinations for straight bachelorette parties, much to the chagrin of many gay patrons.
And it wasn’t just media and society. Supreme Court decisions affirming the right to same-sex marriage seemed to have paved the way to mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians. Polling showed consistent majority support for same-sex marriage. Some of the hottest debates within the queer community every June were over whether Pride had become too mainstream and corporate.
That year Alabama, a blood-red state, stunned the nation by electing a Democrat to the Senate, choosing Doug Jones, a former prosecutor who had brought two of the Klan bombers of the 16th Street Baptist Church to justice, over the right-wing Republican Roy Moore. Jones spoke proudly of having a gay son.
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Miss Majesty Divine, Kirstin Orlando and Tsunami Rayne before going onstage at Phat Sammy’s.
The late 2010s were a pivotal time in James Miller’s life, too. He was interviewing for a teaching job at Mountain Gap Middle School in Huntsville.
“When I was interviewing, I said to myself: I don’t want to spend another 20 years in the closet,” Miller told me as he got ready for the drag show. So when he got the job offer, he pointedly told the hiring committee that he would need to discuss it with his husband and son. It was a test, and the school passed, welcoming him with open arms.
“I thought, ‘I found where I want to be,’” Miller said.
At that point, Miller had also been performing as a drag queen for roughly two decades, though like any good teacher, he kept a strict divide between his classroom and his life outside of school. He said he got his start in drag performing at a charity event to raise money for an AIDS hospice.
“A friend of mine said, ‘Why don’t you do drag? You’ve got a big mouth and a bad attitude,’” Miller said.
Over time, he built a loyal following, performing at local nightclubs and at charitable events. As drag grew more popular with broader audiences, he started performing at story hours for kids. He said he took care to tailor his performance to the audience, keeping it PG whenever children were around, though like any kids’ entertainer, he said he liked to slip in double entendres that would fly over children’s heads but give the grown-ups a chuckle. It was a fun side hustle.
Until now. After Libs of TikTok released the video of him performing, he was placed on paid leave from his job. His email inbox filled with hateful messages.
“People said things like, ‘Why are they letting this thing breathe?’” he told me. Other messages called for him to be prosecuted for child abuse.
But he also got warm and supportive messages from parents and students.
“I heard today about the stupid issue happening, and I just wanted to say as a parent that has had three of their own children in your classroom, we fully support you,” said one such message Miller showed me.
The crowd at the tiki bar that December night whooped when Majesty Divine finally pranced onstage, lip-syncing along to Lizzo.
“It’s bad bitch o’clock. Yeah, it’s thick-thirty,” she sang, thrusting out an ample hip and tossing a bewigged shrug. “I’ve been through a lot, but I’m still flirty.”
Then Madge shared some news.
“Y’all keep up with the news? Well, don’t. It’s too depressing,” she said. “Tomorrow at 3:15 is the end of 30 years of teaching for me. I’m retiring.”
The crowd let out a cacophony of supportive boos and cheers.
“I love you all so much,” Madge purred. She brought down the house with a Tina Turner mash-up that ended in a barn-burning rendition of “Proud Mary.”
Amber Portwood, the manager of the bar, said it was a huge loss for the children of Huntsville.
“Madge is such a wonderful teacher and community person,” she said. “Her students were the first to come to her defense. It is absolutely shameful what happened.”
Asked about Miller, Huntsville City Schools sent this statement: “The district addressed a personnel matter several months ago following viral posts on social media involving a teacher. While we are limited in what we can share for privacy reasons, this was not a school-related event, it did not take place on school property, it did not occur during school hours, and it has no connection to any instruction that occurs in our classrooms.”
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Lauren Jacobs, the assistant director of the Magic City Acceptance Center, in the center’s library. It stocks L.G.B.T.Q. books, which are banned in many Alabama schools.
How did we get here? Looking back, I cannot help wondering now whether what looked in the 2010s like an unstoppable march toward mainstream acceptance of gay and lesbian people was perhaps more of a wobble. Perhaps the wanton cruelty of the Trump era uncorked something that was there all along. Right-wing, nativist parties espousing what they describe as traditional values have made electoral gains across many continents, and almost all of them have found queer people an easy target to use to whip up support for their agenda.
What looked in American polls like widespread acceptance of gay and lesbian people came in large part from a highly effective campaign to show that gay people are just like everyone else, save one small difference that likely was genetic and immutable, and that we wanted the same things: the American dream of marriage, conventional career success, military service.
But like all liberation movements, the fight for queer liberation contained multitudes of different people with different beliefs, including those who wanted revolution — to overthrow the entire heteronormative patriarchal system built around monogamy and the nuclear family within capitalism. They saw that system as the root of oppression not just of queer people but also of women and all kinds of marginalized people.
But the vanguard’s demand for revolution inevitably runs up against the majority’s urgent need for safety and basic rights. Much of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement’s efforts moved toward reforming rather than remaking. And so we have decriminalized gay sex, legalized gay marriage and allowed gay people to serve openly in the military. And a lot of us slipped into a kind of complacency. We once chanted, “Silence equals death.” Now we cooed, “Love is love.”
As many more queer people have come out into the light, parts of the community that were more hidden from the mainstream are demanding their visibility, too, especially transgender and nonbinary people, among them many children and teenagers who in previous generations would not have dreamed of coming out. And that has made a lot of people of many different political stripes very uncomfortable.
“A lot of the improvements in L.G.B.T.Q. life that the pollsters point to and on which we base our conclusion that there has been significant progress — they don’t really tell us much about what people are privately feeling,” said Martin Duberman, a leading historian of the gay rights movement who, at 92, has some long-term perspective on this issue. “And I think what we are seeing now is those private feelings coming out again.”
For much of modern history in the United States, queerness had to be carefully hidden to avoid police harassment and violence. Eventually queerness came to be tolerated if it emulated heterosexual norms — gender appropriate, couple-focused, monogamous. Now the insistence on recognition from queer people who don’t conform to expectations about gender seems to have been a bridge too far.
We’ve been here before. Urvashi Vaid, the lionhearted activist who tragically died at the age of 63 last year, wrote about this in her prescient book, “Virtual Equality,” which was published in 1995. As a candidate, Bill Clinton had courted the gay vote, but he ultimately triangulated his way to the Defense of Marriage Act and the abominable “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military.
In a 1994 speech Vaid warned us, “By aspiring to join the mainstream rather than continuing to figure out the ways we need to change it, we risk losing our gay and lesbian souls in order to gain the world.”
Years of effective activism culminated with the dismantling of the Defense of Marriage Act by the Supreme Court. But as supporters of voting and abortion rights will tell you, a Supreme Court decision turns out to be a flimsy scaffold on which to build your freedom. The court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and overturned Roe. The battles for the ballot and bodily autonomy have moved mostly to the state and local levels. It is clear that queer people will receive a frosty reception from the emboldened majority of the highest court in the land.
So what now? I posed this question to the organizer and writer Dean Spade, who has worked relentlessly as an advocate for queer and trans people.
“The only social movements that have ever won any liberation or even reduced the conditions of harm were made up of millions of ordinary people, gumming up the works, throwing wrenches into the machines of oppression and then helping each other survive the systems along the way so that they could keep organizing,” he told me.
Queer people have never sat around and waited for rights and dignity to be handed to them — from the first stirrings of gay resistance in the early 20th century to the Stonewall uprising to the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, we have built our own systems of mutual aid and care. In Alabama, that spirit and the people who carry it refuse to give in to the backlash.
I saw that spirit at the Magic City Acceptance Center, an organization that provides a safe space and supportive programming for queer youth in Birmingham. There I met a 31-year-old queer Black woman named Lauren Jacobs, who was born and raised in Birmingham. When she was trying to decide where to go to college, she could have done what generations of young queer people have done: Get a one-way ticket out of Alabama, head for one of the meccas on the coasts and never look back.
But she didn’t. After checking to make sure it had an L.G.B.T.Q. student organization, she chose to attend the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and joined the vibrant queer community there.
“We have a long, long track record of activism here,” Jacobs told me.
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Elizabeth Danielle Marceille Allen, a transgender woman who found shelter and support at TAKE.
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Daroneshia Duncan-Boyd, TAKE’s founder and director, with her husband, Logan Boyd, a transgender man, who helps run the center’s programming.
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Aniya Nicole, a member of the TAKE community, outside the center.
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Corey Oden, the program coordinator for the health program at TAKE, which helps transgender people get H.I.V. prevention, treatment information and medication and other medical care.
After graduation she decided to move back home to Birmingham, roll up her sleeves and fight for queer people in her home state.
“It felt like there was so much work to do in Alabama,” she said. “There is so much I like about how we organize in Alabama.”
The center now serves hundreds of queer youth in Birmingham and across the state. It offers space for them to hang out, play video games and be with their peers. Every year, the center holds a prom for queer kids; they can dress as they like and bring a date of whatever gender they prefer. Jacobs was among a couple of dozen attendees at the first one in 2014. Around 200 kids attended the most recent one.
The work of the center could not be more urgent. According to the Trevor Project, a mental health and suicide prevention organization focused on L.G.B.T.Q. youth, 47 percent of Alabama’s queer kids seriously considered suicide in the past year, and 20 percent of transgender kids attempted suicide.
“For young people who feel that Alabama doesn’t have spaces like this, for them to be able to walk into a place like this and feel they deserve it — that is always a joy,” Jacobs said.
I found another answer at the TAKE Resource Center, an organization in Birmingham’s East Lake neighborhood supporting transgender people of color. It was started by a transgender woman, Daroneshia Duncan-Boyd, who felt that too many trans people were suffering from poverty, homelessness and violence. She built TAKE in the mold of queer mutual aid organizations throughout history, with the knowledge that a hostile society would do little to save them.
“We started TAKE with sex-work dollars and unemployment checks,” Duncan-Boyd told me with a chuckle. Now the organization operates an emergency shelter, life-skills classes, legal clinics and a drop-in center.
“Other organizations provide surface-level services, but we get down into the nitty-gritty,” said Logan Boyd, a transgender man who works at the center. He moved to Alabama in 2017, and the following year he and Duncan-Boyd married. They are now trying to have a baby, a head-spinning but enticing prospect for Boyd.
“We’re trying to change the image of what the American dream can be,” he said. “I’ll have to wrap my head around being a pregnant man, I guess.”
Reimagining what life could be for transgender people in the South is central to TAKE’s mission. But first, it must attend to the most basic, urgent needs. I met one of TAKE’s clients, a 41-year-old trans woman named Marcy Allen. In November she had found herself penniless and homeless on the streets of southern Alabama after a string of bad luck.
“It was getting colder, so I needed somewhere indoors to sleep,” Allen told me. “I was doing things I didn’t want to do to pay for hotel rooms.”
News of her plight made its way to Duncan-Boyd, who leaped into action.
“The next thing I know, I am on a bus headed here,” Allen said. She told me she had been living in the group’s emergency shelter and was looking for a job. She had already made an appointment at the local gender clinic to begin her long-sought medical transition.
“March 4,” she said. “I have been on bootleg hormones, and now I can finally get the real thing.”
She attended a legal workshop to begin the process of changing her name. She said Marcy was a temporary name, a place holder. Now she is known as Elizabeth Danielle Marceille Allen.
“It suits me, don’t you think?” she asked, with a flick of her blond hair.
On my last night in Birmingham, I was invited to a party by the Magic City Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. They are a charitable organization that raises money for mostly queer causes. The Sisters have their roots in a raucous and raunchy group of queer activists in San Francisco who dressed in nuns’ habits and behaved outrageously.
Birmingham’s Sisters throw elaborate parties every year, and this one, the Fire and Ice Red Dress Party, was to raise money for the Gender Health Clinic in Birmingham, which provides care for transgender and nonbinary people. They also give out awards to people who have done great service to the queer community.
“The Sisters promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt,” the group’s leader, or abbess, Robert King Dodge, told me, decked out in a dazzling red frock and a bejeweled top hat.
It was held at an Arts and Crafts mansion in a fancy part of Birmingham, and all the grandees of the local gay community turned out in force. I thought about that carefree Birmingham night in 2017 and how different things felt now. Everyone I talked to was worried — about the terrible laws that would oppress queer people and the hateful message that sends to queer kids. They all thanked me for coming to Alabama to write about what’s happening.
As the award ceremony wound down, I was surprised to hear my name over the loudspeaker. King Dodge beckoned me up, a wrapped gift in his hand.
“Open it,” he urged.
It was a framed certificate naming me an honorary Sister of Perpetual Indulgence in the house of the Magic City Sisters of Birmingham.
I didn’t quite know what to say. My eyes filled with tears as I looked around the room, filled with people who were proud of all our community has accomplished but terrified of the gathering threats.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s an honor to be your sister.”
I am so fortunate to have lived in a time and place that permitted me to live my whole adult life out and to be proud of being a lesbian. Increased visibility was supposed to make queer people more recognizable and accepted, and there is no question that it did. But I now wonder if, for some, the sheer volume and range of people coming out have had the opposite effect: making it seem that queer people are omnipresent and a threat.
I get it. When people who are alien to you tell you that deep down, they are just like you, it saves you from having to confront how you might actually be like them. How you might envy their freedom, the strength of their communities. As any decent psychoanalyst will tell you: The flip side of fear is desire.
As I left Birmingham the next morning, I thought about the extraordinary people I had met and the fights they were waging for the lives of queer people in their communities. I knew that this era’s slogan, that wan tautology “Love is love,” was no match for resurgent bigots reclaiming hateful chants about AIDS ridding the world of the homosexual scourge. We need to reach into our past as well and remember the time we chanted, “Silence equals death.” And an old favorite, a mantra for all time: “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”
And the erasing of gays from society continues in Florida. The don’t say gay law is working just the way the republican’s hoped it would. It is a fact that some kids have two dads or two moms, yet the republicans inred states want to outlaw anyone knowing about them. They are demanding those families are not real families, that those kids are dirty somehow. They want them ostracized and targeted for bullying. They want the fact that being gay is normal and shared widely in the animal kingdom. Kids will be forced into a heterosexual mode of acting only. Hugs
Schools are banning innocuous books about LGBTQ+ people to comply with the anti-LGBTQ+ law.
In the wake of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law, schools in the state are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, including And Tango Makes Three, a book about a baby penguin named Tango who has two dads.
The Don’t Say Gay law, also known as the Parental Rights in Education Act, was signed into law last year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and bans discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K through 3 and restricts such discussions in older grades.
Conservatives said the bill was necessary to stop sexual discussions in schools as well as instruction about sex and that the law wasn’t anti-LGBTQ+. The DeSantis administration called opponents of the bill “groomers,” another word for child sex abusers.
But it turns out that the bill is doing what opponents said it would do: making LGBTQ+ people a taboo topic in schools.
Popular Information reports that Lake County’s school district banned three books in grades K-3: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (about a gay bunny who likes hula hooping), And Tango Makes Three, and In our Mothers’ House (about three kids with two moms).
A statement says that the books were “administratively removed due to content regarding sexual orientation/gender identification prohibited in HB 1557.” H.B. 1557 is the Don’t Say Gay law.
Seminole County Public Schools banned three books citing the Don’t Say Gay law. The books were 10,000 Dresses (about a boy with a dream of making dresses), I am Jazz (about the experiences of trans activist Jazz Jennings), and Jacob’s New Dress (about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school).
None of the books contain sexual content, but the district said they, “pursuant to the aforementioned statute [the Don’t Say Gay law], would be deemed as not being age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in kindergarten through grade 3.” They were removed from district libraries and “will only be available for check-out to a student in grade 4 or 5 when the parent has provided written consent and picks up the book from the principal or designee at the school.”
The DeSantis administration said in response to one of the legal challenges against the Don’t Say Gay law that it only applies to classroom instruction and not library books, but the Florida Department of Education is telling school librarians that “there is some overlap between the selection criteria for instructional and library materials” in its training materials for the Don’t Say Gay law and they should be “avoiding unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination.” The materials tell librarians to “err on the side of caution.”
Opponents of the Don’t Say Gay law cited high suicide rates among LGBTQ+ youth and argued that erasing LGBTQ+ identities from school will make them feel more alone and isolated.
“42% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide last year,” Chasten Buttigieg said of the bill last year. “Now they can’t talk to their teachers?”
This man who authored the bill felt his religion and his opinion was more valid than all the science and medical data that shows he is wrong. He claims that identifying as a different gender than assigned at birth is a temporary problem, giving the idea it is a phase people go through like adolescence or acme. That was what people tried to claim about gay people in the past, that it was a phase young adults would grow out of, or it was done as rebellion against parents. That was wrong then and it is wrong about trans people now. These right wing people are just recycling all the old tropes against gay people to use against trans people. The goal is to destroy all the social advances in the US society and return to a past that was regressive and oppressive before equality and civil rights for minorities. Please understand that for trans people to wait that late in life until 26 means not only living as the wrong gender all that time but also the human body has by then been set into the mold of the wrong gender for the person. During puberty so many changes happen to create a male or female body that simply by looks is a lifetime sentence of being in the wrong body. If you are one gender imagine looking like the other all your life because someone said you couldn’t have the medical treatment needed to help you live as you really are. Hugs
The bill’s author said he did not speak to a single transgender person before writing it.
Oklahoma State Sen. David Bullard (R)Photo: Oklahoma Senate
In Oklahoma, a new bill called the “Millstone Act of 2023” has been proposed that would ban gender-affirming care in all forms for anyone under 26 years old. The bill targets healthcare providers and says anyone who violates the rule could face felony charges and have their medical license revoked.
The bill’s name reportedly refers to a passage in the Bible that says it is better to tie a large stone to your neck and drown than to cause harm to a child. It was introduced by state Sen. David Bullard (R), who was also behind a state law that passed last year banning trans youth from using school bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.
In a statement to The Oklahoman, Bullard said gender-affirming surgery is “a permanent solution to a temporary problem” and called it a violation of doctors’ Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.
“We want to make sure that if we’re going to do a procedure like this that is irreversible, then we want to make sure an individual is at their full maturity when it comes to cognitive development,” he said.
He also explained why he wanted to restrict gender-affirming care to such a late age.
“At the age of 18, you can vote, but a vote is not a permanent change in your body that cannot be reversed. At the age of 21 you can drink, but at the end of the day if you decide to put the alcohol down, you can put the alcohol down. But with this surgery, there is no going back. We just want to make sure that the brain is fully developed before we allow this kind of surgery, permanent thing to happen.”
He also said he did not speak to a single transgender person before writing the bill.
Oklahoma has passed a slew of anti-trans legislation as of late.
The Millstone Act is also one of multiple bills that have been proposed targeting gender-affirming care for trans adults as Republicans continue to expand their crusade against trans people. Bills targeting medical care for trans adults have recently been proposed in South Carolina and New Hampshire as well.
“We have been saying a slow moving genocide targeted at eliminating transgender people through eliminating gender affirming care is happening,” wrote activist Erin Reed in December. “It continues.”
DeathSantis spokesperson says that they want to eliminate “political ideology” from public higher education. Yet Rufo is one of the most ideology driven people I have ever seen. He is a die hard far right to the point of being racist and virulently anti-LGBTQ+. Seriously he wants to roll back every social advance since 1855. Look at what DeathSantis says is a bad thing in education, he DeSantis admin plans to weed out concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory (CRT). Hugs
Gov. Ron DeSantis has appointed conservative activist Christopher Rufo and five others to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees in his continuing move to eliminate “political ideology” from public higher education.
With the six new members of the school’s Board of Trustees, the DeSantis admin plans to weed out concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory (CRT). The move comes amid low student enrollment at the New College of Florida and as DeSantis ramps up his second term.
In a statement Friday, DeSantis Communications Director Taryn Fenske said New College has been “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”
DeSantis appoints anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo to New College of Florida Board of Trustees; Rufo is known for his attacks on CRT and spreading the “groomer” slur against gay and trans people https://t.co/cqz6BCnYtC
Rufo to the NY Times: “It’s wrong, factually and morally, to accuse someone of being a groomer with no basis and evidence. It’s become a powerful word that should be used with great responsibility." https://t.co/1Mpv5T72Lj Rufo in real life: pic.twitter.com/z9oLcXYyGk
As I noted to the NY Times, it's the same Rufo strategy between the CRT and groomer labels: take down policies or institutions that have popular support by rebranding them in a negative and misleading way. https://t.co/KxhCqoskLNpic.twitter.com/gYBfCcakdb
The same person who started the CRT panic also created the groomer lie. Christopher Rufo is nothing short of evil. “We are building a new model of conservative activism” with the grooming messaging, argues Christopher Rufo, a leading anti-critical race theory activist.” ~ Rufo
Christopher Rufo bitching about fact checking after he lied about CRT and groomer theory is just… So quintessentially 2022 it hurts. https://t.co/vEVFn5INEB
— Unironic Lesbian Dance Theorist, Doer of Jew Magic (@hamilcarenina) May 5, 2022
So Chris Rufo deceptively said the exec "wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities" in the leaked video — though she doesn't say that.
Sandra Smith now says Disney wants 50% of their characters to be gay.
Exactly! Note the things he pointed out as “political ideology” are all progressive causes. Pushing right-wing ideology is going to be fine I guess. White nationalism, anti-gay/trans propaganda, misogyny and a white-washed US history will be back on the menu boys!
Nearly every single prominent anti-gay figure has sooner or later turned out to be a closet case. Case in point this week: Matt Schlapp. They’re all working out their own internalized homophobia and self-hatred by trying to hurt other people.
And I think every single leader that the so-called “ex-gays” have had later turned out to be still totally gay. To their credit, several of them later came clean and apologized for their actions.
Before it merged with USF in 2001, New College was the toughest Florida college to get into. It was a big deal when I was in high school. Since the merger with a public university, enrollment has plummeted to around 700.
I don’t care if you watch it, but I want to make a point about the resurgence of bathroom bills. You know those bills that say trans people must use the bathroom of their assigned sex at birth. Mostly because cis women have been told that trans women or women who do not look feminine enough will violate and hurt them. Yes we must judge everyone by their looks so we can tell who fits the girl enough or the boy enough categories. We already know that the idea that a person will go to the effort to claim to be trans to assault women in a bathroom is debunked and stupid. If a guy wants to assault women they are not going to change their entire life to do it in a woman’s bathroom, they will just charge into one and do it, or do it when the woman comes out or a dozen other ways. It simply is not reasonable. But let’s go back to comfort. A cis female person I respect said she would be uncomfortable in a bathroom with a “manly looking woman”. OK please look at this person in the video that says they are trans. That means if these “go to the toilet of your assigned birth” laws are enforced this person would be forced by law to use a female’s bathroom no matter how uncomfortable for them or the women. This is the stupidity of these laws and the people pushing the bigotry. Look at this guy, what bathroom does he belong in? These bathroom laws are based in bigotry and made up fears. What are you people doing in the bathroom, holding a social gathering? We have to understand what is driving these bathroom bill laws is an attempt to stop societal change and progression by the groups that are scared of the new ways. The die hard religious groups, the traditionalist who say it was not done this way when I was growing up, and the people that just simply feel the need to control society to make sure it stays the same so they feel comfortable. Hugs
Burried in the story is what I think it clearly amounts to, forcing a change of religion for the child. The Marine claimed that taking the girl amounted to Christian love and that his family was raising the girl as a Christian in a good Christian home, despite the family she was with being devote Muslims who was raising the girl in the Muslim faith. What I don’t understand is this is a simple case of kidnapping and religious bigotry of a adoption court that ruled for the Marine even though other courts and the government had ruled that the little girl belong with the Muslim family. if you read the story the court not only had to skip my of the required procedures in order to let the Marine adopt the child he kidnaped, but they flat out broke the law to do it. I can not understand why this is being allowed. Is it religious bigotry, political, or the fact that he is a Marine that keeps the police from taking the child from the kidnapper and returning her to her real family. Even the US government who said the Marine broke several laws by taking the child has not ordered him to return the child. Weird. Hugs
By MARTHA MENDOZA, CLAIRE GALOFARO and JULIET LINDERMANyesterday
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FILE – A Qatar Airways aircraft takes off with foreigners from the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Sept. 9, 2021, as some 200 foreigners, including Americans, flew out of the country, the first such large-scale departure since U.S and foreign forces concluded their frantic withdrawal at the end of the previous month. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue, File)
The Afghan woman ran down the street towards her friend’s apartment as soon as she heard the news: the White House had publicly weighed in on her family’s case.
Surely her child, who she says was abducted by a U.S. Marine more than a year ago, would now be returned, she thought. She was so excited that it was only after she’d arrived that she realized she wasn’t wearing any shoes.
“We thought within one week she’d be back to us,” the woman told The Associated Press.
Yet two months after an AP report on the high-stakes legal fight over the child raised alarms at the highest levels of government, from the White House to the Taliban, the baby remains with U.S. Marine Corps Major Joshua Mast and his family. The Masts claim in court documents that they legally adopted the child and that the Afghan couple’s accusations are “outrageous” and “unmerited.”
“We are all concerned with the well being of this child who is at the heart of this matter,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre after the AP detailed the child’s plight in October.
Last month, the U.S. Justice Department filed a motion to intervene in the legal wrangling over the fate of the child, arguing that Mast’s adoption should never have been granted. The government has said Mast’s attempts to take the child directly conflicted with a U.S. foreign policy decision to reunite the orphan with her Afghan family. They asked that the case be moved from a rural Virginia court to federal court, but were denied by Presiding Circuit Court Judge Richard E. Moore.
Additionally, federal authorities say multiple investigations are underway.
“We all just want resolution for this child, whatever it’s going to be, so her childhood doesn’t continue to be in limbo,” said Samantha Freed, a court-appointed attorney assigned to look after the best interests of the child. “We need to get this right now. There are no do-overs.”
The legal fight has taken more than a year, and Freed is worried it could take months — maybe even years — more. The child is now 3 ½ years old. The Afghan family spoke with the AP on condition of remaining anonymous out of fear for their safety and concerns for their relatives back in Afghanistan.
Mast became enchanted with the child while on temporary assignment in Afghanistan in late 2019. Just a few months old, the infant had survived a Special Operations raid that killed her parents and five siblings, according to court records.
As she recovered from injuries in a U.S. military hospital, the Afghan government and the International Committee of the Red Cross identified her relatives, and through meetings with the State Department, arranged for their reunification. The child’s cousin and his wife — young newlyweds without children yet of their own — wept when they first saw her, they said: Taking her in and raising her was the greatest honor of their lives.
Nonetheless, Mast — in spite of orders from military officials to stop intervening — was determined to take her home to the United States. He used his status in the military, appealed to political connections in the Trump administration and convinced the small-town Virginia court to skip some of the usual safeguards that govern international adoptions.
Finally, when the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan last summer, he helped the family get to the United States. After they arrived, they say, he took their baby from them at the Fort Pickett Virginia Army National Guard base. They haven’t seen her since and are suing to get her back.
The Afghan woman gave birth to a daughter just weeks after the girl they’d been raising was taken from them. Every time they buy an outfit or a present for their daughter, they buy a second matching one for the child they pray will come back to them soon.
The Masts did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. Stepping out from a recent hearing, Joshua Mast told AP they’ve been advised not to speak publicly.
In court filings, Mast says he acted “admirably” to bring the child to the United States and care for her with his wife. They say they’ve given her “a loving home” and have “done nothing but ensure she receives the medical care she requires, at great personal expense and sacrifice.” Mast celebrated his adoption of the child, whose Afghan family is Muslim, as an act of Christian faith.
The toddler’s future is now set to be decided in a sealed, secret court case in rural Virginia — in the same courthouse that granted Mast custody. The federal government has described that custody order as “unlawful,” “improper” and “deeply flawed and incorrect” because it was based on a promise that Afghanistan would waive jurisdiction over the child, which never happened.
The day Mast and his wife Stephanie Mast were granted a final adoption, the child was 7,000 miles away with the Afghan couple who knew nothing about it.
In court, Mast, still an active duty Marine, cast doubt on whether the Afghan couple is related to her at all. They argue that the little girl is “ an orphan of war and a victim of terrorism, rescued under tragic circumstances from the battlefield.” They say she is a “stateless minor” because she was recovered from a compound Mast says was used by foreign fighters not from Afghanistan.
The case has been consumed by a procedural question: Does the Afghan family — who raised the child for a year and a half — have a right under Virginia law to even challenge the adoption?
Judge Moore ruled in November that the Afghan family does have legal standing; the Masts’ appeal is under review.
The child’s Afghan relatives, currently in Texas, believe the U.S. government should be doing more to help them, because numerous federal agencies were involved in the ordeal.
“The government is not doing their job as they should,” said the Afghan woman. “And in this process, we are suffering.”
A State Department official said one of the agency’s own social workers stood with Mast when he took the baby at Fort Pickett, but “had no awareness of the U.S. Embassy’s previous involvement in reuniting the child with her next of kin in Afghanistan.” The official described how the U.S. had worked hard in Afghanistan to unite the child with her relatives.
“We recognize the human dimension of this situation,” said the official.
The Department of Defense said in a statement that the decision to reunite the child with her family was in keeping with the U.S. government’s foreign obligations, as well as international law principles that mandate family reunification of children displaced in war. The Defense Department said it is aware that Mast “took custody” of the child but declined to comment further.
The Afghan couple pleaded for help from the tangle of agencies at Fort Pickett: the military, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the police. Some didn’t believe them, some said there was nothing they could do, some tried to intervene to no avail.
The couple eventually reached Martha Jenkins, an attorney volunteering at the base.
“When I first heard their story, I thought there must be something lost in translation — how could this be true?” said Jenkins. She contacted authorities.
Almost two months after they lost the child, Virginia State Police dispatch records obtained by the AP show “an advocate” called to report what had happened.
“The family is on Fort Pickett, they are requesting an investigation to the validity of the adoption and if it was done under false pretenses,” wrote the dispatcher. The record notes that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were involved.
Jenkins, who was in Virginia temporarily, called every Virginia adoption attorney she could find until she reached Elizabeth Vaughan.
“It was very surprising to me that no one helped them,” said Vaughan, who offered to represent the Afghan couple for free. “I don’t think they had a lot of the paperwork Americans like to see when someone’s proving that they have custody. But there are laws about people, trusted adults, who arrive with a child. So much more investigating should have been done.”
A Marine Corps spokesperson wrote in a statement that they are fully cooperating with federal law enforcement investigations, including at least one focused on the alleged unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. In emails Mast sent asking for help bringing the child from Afghanistan, now submitted as exhibitions in court, he referenced reading classified documents about the raid that killed the girl’s family.
Investigators and prosecutors declined to comment, citing the ongoing inquiries.
On the other side of the globe, the Taliban issued a statement saying it “will seriously pursue this issue with American authorities so that the said child is returned to her relatives.”
Now every night before bed, the Afghan couple scroll through an album of 117 photos of the year and half they spent raising her — a sassy child with big bright eyes, who loved to dress up in shiny colors and gold bangle bracelets. There’s a photo of the child wearing a black and green tunic and tiny gold sandals, nestled on the young Afghan man’s lap, smiling mischievously at the camera. In one video, she runs alongside the man, bouncing down the sidewalk to keep up with his stride.
They’ll soon be moving to a new two-bedroom apartment. There, they say, the little girl’s room will be ready for her, whenever she comes home.
Conservative writer Matthew Lewis has apparently had enough of Donald Trump, Jr.’s attitude, and he called out the former President’s son in a recent column. Lewis referred to Junior as a “trust fund nepo baby” after Junior went off the rails about the United States sending aid and money to Ukraine. Junior has no room to talk about people getting a helping hand, as his entire life was built around having his dad’s name. Farron Cousins discusses this.
This story was in a news article how Mark Meadows a high ranking republican / Christian dominionist who did voter fraud in NC. But while like always republicans who scream about all the voter fraud but they excuse it as they keep getting caught doing it. Again I am so sick of the double standard. Here in Florida DeathSantis got a lot of press by going after former felons who were told they could vote with his election police, yet they never go after the known republicans who have been found guilty of voter fraud who live in the Villages. DeathSantis and the local press never mention them and that they are republicans, while screaming about the democrats trying to steal the elections. Hugs
Pamela Moses at home in Memphis. Photograph: Andrea Morales/The Guardian
The case of Pamela Moses sparked a national outcry – but newly uncovered documents reveal the extent of its injustice
It was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.
All summer, the outspoken activist had been feuding with election officials in Memphis, Tennessee. She wanted to get her name on the ballot for Memphis’s 2019 mayoral election, even gathering enough signatures to do so. But officials said she could not run – a prior felony conviction made her ineligible to seek office.
Now, there was a new problem. In late August, the local elections commission sent her a letter saying they were going to cancel her voter registration. Moses was confused – she had been voting for years. That day, she was determined to sort it out.
But what unfolded over just a few hours that day on 3 September 2019 would upend her life. It would lead to a sudden arrest months later at O’Hare airport in Chicago and culminate in a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud.
Her case would go on to touch a nerve in the US and cause a national outcry. While there’s no comprehensive data on voter fraud prosecutions based on race, it was one of several recent examples in which Black defendants like Moses have faced long criminal sentences for voting errors, while white people have faced little punishment for more fraud. Long after the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans still face significant scrutiny for trying to exercise their right to vote.
To make matters worse there is a byzantine bureaucracy in Tennessee and other US states, which can make it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to vote again. The system has allowed officials to block people from voting for owing small sums of money and prosecutors to bring charges against others who make good-faith mistakes about their voting eligibility.
But at the center of the Moses case was a relatively simple question: should someone who makes a voting mistake face serious criminal charges?
Nearly everyone in Memphis seems to know Moses, 45, or has heard ofher.
She’s a self-taught student of the law – the librarians in the county law library know her by name – and has sued many of the top officials in Memphis, frequently representing herself in court. She’s appeared in local papers over the years. She’s had disagreements with other local activists and founded her own non-profit.
“If she sees something that she feels is unjust, she’s going to say something about it,” said Dawn Harrington, who has been friends with Moses for over two decades and is the executive director of Free Hearts, a criminal justice non-profit. “She’s not going to be afraid of the backlash that might happen.”
“She’ll always take you to the limit,” said Michael Working, a criminal defense attorney in Memphis who has represented Moses and known her for a decade. “She’s willing very often to be publicly flogged by the government on principle.”
In person, Moses is at times mercurial, but often charming. She can rattle off the history of Memphis neighborhoods, the names of local judges, lawyers and statutes that she’s researched, sprinkling in bits of hip-hop history (she also writes and produces her own music). She is fiercely protective of Taj, her teenage son.
Few officials attracted Moses’s ire as much as Amy Weirich, a Republican who served as the district attorney in Shelby county, which includes Memphis. Several years ago, Moses made local headlines when Weirich prosecuted her for stalking and harassing a local judge, tampering with evidence and forgery.
In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to those charges and was sentenced to several years of probation. Years later, she would say that pleading guilty and not fighting the case “was the worst mistake of my life”. She believed she was innocent, but the conviction led people to think she was guilty.
Harrington, her longtime friend, said that the case cemented her status as someone who was disliked by people in high office in Memphis. “She had been on the bad side of the powers that be there,” she said.
When Moses pleaded guilty, there was a hearing in which a judge questioned her and made sure she understood the consequences of her decision. But there was one ramification that neither the judge nor any of the lawyers present brought up: Moses would lose the right to vote for life.
To understand Moses’s case, one needs to know that America has long stripped people convicted of felonies of the vote.
After constitutional amendments in the 19th century expanded the franchise to Black Americans, many states passed felon disenfranchisement laws as a way to continue to keep African Americans from the ballot box and therefore prevent them from wielding political power, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the topic closely. He suggested the laws had persisted because people with criminal convictions are stigmatized, and so seeking redress for them is politically fraught.
Today, the laws continue to heavily affect Black Americans – 5.3% of the adult Black population is disenfranchised because of a felony, compared to 1.5% of the non-Black adult population. Overall, an estimated 4.6 million people can’t vote because of a felony conviction in the US.
Moses’s home state of Tennessee strips any person convicted of a felony of the right to vote. Nearly 472,000 people of voting age can’t vote in Tennessee because of a felony conviction, the vast majority of whom have completed their sentence, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. It’s estimated that more than one in five Black people of voting age in the state can’t vote because of a felony.
In Tennessee, it is also extremely difficult for these people to get their voting rights back once they complete their sentences. There are three different sets of rules, depending on when the person was convicted. A request to even just fill out the state’s required application for the restoration of voting rights can be rejected for any reason – without explanation.
Tennessee’s confusing system isn’t unusual. Many US states, particularly in the south, require anyone with a felony conviction to go through a bureaucratic process if they want to vote again.
In Mississippi, people with certain felony convictions have to petition the legislature to restore their voting rights individually – and hardly anyone makes it through.
In Florida, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to repeal the state’s lifetime voting ban for most people with felonies. But the Florida legislature quickly stepped in and passed a measure that said completing a sentence meant paying all outstanding fines and court fees, which put voting again out of reach for many. Even if people can afford to pay, it’s extremely difficult to figure out how much they owe since the state has no centralized way of keeping track.
That uncertainty is the point of these laws, said Nicole Porter, the senior director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project.
“I think there is intentionality behind the complications,” she said. “It’s about chilling or minimizing participation in the electorate by certain constituencies. It’s the modern-day manifestation of very hard policies that dominated the Jim Crow era.”
This was the tangled web Moses stepped into just after Labor Day in 2019.
Because she didn’t realize she had lost her voting rights, she had been voting regularly until the summer of 2019. When she was informed that her voter registration was about to be canceled, Moses called the elections commission and asked what to do. She said a staffer advised her to go through the restoration process. (The elections commission declined to say to the Guardian whether it had ever advised her to do so.)
The next step Moses took was the one on which her conviction – and its reversal – rested.
One of the people required to fill out the form for her voting rights restoration was a probation officer, who had to confirm that Moses’s criminal sentence had concluded. When Moses showed up at the probation office on 3 September, she met with the manager on duty, named Kristoffer Billington, who had worked for the probation office for five years. He had never filled out the form before, he would later testify in court.
Moses told him her probation was finished, and he went to the back of the office to research her case. Billington called a colleague in a different office for help. They both looked at Moses’s file in the computer system.
According to the information they saw, it looked like Moses had finished her probation in 2018. But there was a problem – Moses’s computer file still showed she was on unsupervised probation. Billington thought this was a bureaucratic error and believed someone had forgotten to close out her file.
As he was examining the case, the receptionist repeatedly called Billington’s office to tell him Moses was growing impatient and wanted to turn in the form to the election office, he would later testify. After about an hour of research, he wrote on the form that Moses had completed her probation, signed it and returned it to her.
Billington had made a mistake. Unbeknown to him, there were more case files that showed Moses’s felony probation wouldn’t expire until the following year, 2020. In parallel, Moses had been fighting in court that summer to have a judge declare that her sentence was over because she wanted to run for mayor. In court filings, she argued that her probation had expired. But courts disagreed. Moses didn’t think those rulings were correct and thought Billington and the probation office would be able to give her a more definitive answer.
It might seem hard to believe that there was a dispute about something as basic as when Moses’s sentence ended. But those kinds of ambiguities are actually quite common, Uggen said.
“People who aren’t subject to supervision don’t really understand how fuzzy things like release and supervision dates are,” he said. “Anybody inside the system or across jurisdictions knows that what’s written on this piece of paper might be very different than that other piece of paper.”
And these bureaucratic mistakes can land people in prison.
Just 30 minutes after Moses left his office, Billington got a call from someone in the Tennessee attorney general’s office telling him he made a mistake on the form. And after Moses turned in the form, the elections office quickly caught the mistake too. A few days earlier, they had referred her to prosecutors for potential voter fraud, owing to the fact they had learned she had been regularly voting while on probation.
“Isn’t whether or not she completed the required probationary period for the 2015 felonies the subject of the [ongoing court case],” Pablo Varela, an attorney for the elections commission, emailed Kirby May, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office shortly after Moses turned in the form. “How can the Court Clerk issue this attached document stating she has been granted final release from incarceration or supervision?”
May responded later that afternoon and attached a copy of a July court order saying Moses was still on probation. She was still ineligible to vote, he said.
Vicki Collins, a staffer at the elections commission, forwarded Moses’s application to the Tennessee secretary of state’s office to review. “The Shelby County Election Commission has been in an ongoing lawsuit with Ms. Moses. She has been denied the right to be on the ballot for Mayor because she is still on probation until 2020,” wrote Collins, who specialized in helping people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. A little over an hour later, a lawyer with the secretary of state’s office wrote back. She agreed Moses was ineligible to vote, but offered a new reason for why.
In 2015, one of the crimes Moses pleaded guilty to was tampering with evidence, which causes a permanent loss of voting rights in Tennessee. All of the research Billington had done at the probation office was irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether she was on probation or not.
The next morning, Collins, the elections staffer, appeared happy to learn Moses was permanently barred from voting. “LOOK AT HER STATUS!!! PERMANENTLY INELIGIBLE,” she wrote in an email, including a smiley face.
The same day, the elections office also received a letter from the Tennessee department of corrections alerting them to Billington’s error. The letter didn’t say that Moses was to blame or that Billington was deceived.
The elections office quickly wrote to Moses explaining she was permanently banned. “Absent a change in state law, future attempts to register to vote anywhere in Tennessee may be considered a class D felony,” read the letter from Linda Phillips, the election administrator in Shelby county.
Later that evening, Phillips expressed concern that she hadn’t received a reply from Moses. “I am a bit concerned that Pamela Moses did not respond to my email telling her she would never be able to register to vote.” She hinted at concerns for her own safety over the issue, writing “I do have a concealed carry permit,” in an email to a member of the election commission.
In a response to questions from the Guardian, Phillips said: “If incorrect information is provided to our office, intentionally or unintentionally, the state of Tennessee alerts us about the inaccuracies. That’s what happened in Ms Moses’s case.”
She also defended the emails she and Collins sent after learning Moses was ineligible to vote.
“Any email exchanges within [the elections commission] regarding announcements of Ms Moses’s ineligibility to vote should be perceived as urgent notice to ensure staff awareness, considering Ms Moses’s frequent and sometimes harassing visits to our offices,” she said.
Two months later, prosecutors filed a 14-count indictment, charging Moses with illegally voting nearly a dozen times after her 2015 guilty plea. She was arrested at O’Hare airport while returning to the US from a trip abroad.
Later, prosecutors offered her a deal, saying if she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge she would get six months of unsupervised probation and no additional prison time. She refused.
“It was about the principle to me,” Moses said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I did was try to get my right to vote back and you don’t like me,” she said. “I was OK with going to jail if people could understand what this is really about. I don’t regret making that decision.”
Just before the trial began, prosecutors dropped 12 of the 14 charges, declining to prosecute her for illegally voting. There was no evidence that anyone had told Moses she was ineligible to vote, and the fact that the elections office had sent her voter information made it harder to prove she knew.
The trial began on 3 November 2021 and lasted just two days. A single question remained: did Moses knowingly trick Billington to falsely say she was off probation when he filled out the form?
May, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, zeroed in on the numerous times after 2015 that Moses had asked courts to declare she was off probation and judges had rejected her requests.
“It’s like a child going up to both her parents, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme’ … They make the mistake and give it, even though they’d told no, no, no. It’s the same thing, she knew what she was doing on September 3rd,” he said at the trial. “She was desperate to try to get her rights restored, she wanted to run for mayor, whatever, she was desperate. She didn’t care, she was going to try anyway. This was her last stitch [sic] effort.”
When Billington testified, he owned up to his mistake. But May argued Moses had deceived him, even though she was not in the room when he did his research and signed off on the form. Billington said Moses had told him she was off probation when she walked into the office and was acting impatient as he researched her case.
Ferguson, Moses’s lawyer, argued that the state was punishing Moses for its own mistake. “If they can’t get it right, we can’t convict her for not getting it right,” he said in his closing argument.
Ultimately the jurors found Moses guilty. In late January, W Mark Ward, the judge overseeing the case, sentenced Moses to six years in prison. Weirich, the prosecutor, said Moses had brought a trial and any harsh punishment on herself by refusing to take the plea.
“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time. She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her,” she said at the time.
Local reporters had been following Moses’s case, but in early February, it started to receive national attention. The Guardian published a story highlighting Moses’s punishment. The next evening, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Moses’s case, comparing her six-year sentence to those of white Trump supporters who had received lesser sentences for intentional acts of voting fraud. The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press, among other outlets, followed. Moses, detained in prison, didn’t know her case was getting more attention.
Then, a few weeks later, new information came to light.
Through a public records request, the Guardian obtained the result of an internal investigation from the Tennessee department of corrections looking into why Billington had signed off on Moses’s voting eligibility. The supervisors who had investigated squarely placed the blame on Billington for the error, undercutting the prosecution’s idea that Moses had deceived him into signing off on the form.
Perhaps most significantly, Moses’s lawyers had never seen the document before – prosecutors hadn’t turned it over with all of the other evidence in the case. That lack of disclosure was potentially unconstitutional and entitled Moses to a new trial.
The day after the Guardian published the document, Moses had a previously scheduled hearing to request a fresh trial. Judges rarely granted such requests – the hearing was supposed to be a formality on the way to an appeal. At any rate, that morning, Moses’s lawyer submitted the missing document to the court.
Remarkably, Ward unexpectedly granted Moses’s request for a new trial. He said that the document should have been turned over to Moses’s lawyers before the initial trial and that he had erroneously allowed certain other evidence to be admitted. Moses, who had been in jail, broke down in tears in the courtroom.
It wasn’t the first time Weirich’s office has come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant. A 2014 study by the Fair Punishment Project found her office ranked first in Tennessee in prosecutorial misconduct. Weirich sought to distance herself from the error. The department of corrections, not her office, was to blame for not turning over the missing document, she said.
Two months later, Weirich announced she would drop all charges against Moses. “She has spent 82 days in custody on this case, which is sufficient,” she said in a statement, also noting Moses remained permanently barred from voting. “In the interest of judicial economy, we are dismissing her illegal registration case and her violation of probation.”
Both Weirich and Ward would go on to lose their re-election bids in August.
Moses’s case may have prompted a national outpouring of disapproval, but tendentious-seeming voter fraud charges have not disappeared.
In August, for instance, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, announced the state was prosecuting 19 people with prior criminal records for voter fraud. Many of the people charged said they were confused about their eligibility and that no one had told them they couldn’t vote.
Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, is still appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for a federal felony. Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible, and the ballot had even been rejected.
Moses, as well as those who have followed her case, doubt that it will be one of the last.
Both the Shelby county elections commission and the Tennessee department of corrections declined to say whether they had changed their processes for helping people determine their voting eligibility in the wake of Moses’s case. “Any changes in that process would be done at the state level,” Phillips said.
One morning at the end of April, just after the charges were dropped against her, Moses held a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She was there to speak publicly for the first time about Weirich’s decisions to drop the charges against her.
‘When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it’, said Moses. Photograph: Andrea Morales/The Guardian
“When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it,” she said. “If there was a white person and I got treated the way I did, I would be just as upset. But you don’t see white people getting treated like that.”
Since her case was dropped Moses has been working on an album and documentary, and she’s continued to push to be able to vote again.
She’s still seeking a gubernatorial pardon from her 2015 conviction and is suing Tennessee to try to get the state’s felon disenfranchisement law declared unconstitutional. She’s also suing local officials for damages in her voter fraud case. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know I will get to vote again,” she said.
“I want people to take away that it’s not over just because Pamela is free,” said Dawn Harrington, Moses’s friend.” Because there are so many other Pamelas all across the state.”
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Scottie's Playtime 