“I think there’s two things that are happening at once: one, there absolutely is an unprecedented abuse of power, destruction of norms, erosion of our government and our democracy in order to prop up an authoritarian style of governance however, they are weaker than they look, and it is important that we remember that because what they rely on is the impression of power, the perception of inevitability in us giving up in advance. Donald Trump is at record levels of unpopularity in his tenure. the Republican house is at record levels of unpopularity. they are underwater across the board and they know it. and that is causing them to double down in public. but it is backfiring. that is why whether it’s a shutdown, whether it’s all of this, they want us to blink first and we have too much to save.”
I know that the Christian religion has been on a push for forcing the US to be a theocracy run by their personal church doctrines. Why I don’t understand? Do they think that will earn them favor with their god? Is it simply a way for the leaders of the movement to gain more power / wealth? Is it simply they are terrified of after they die and are convinced that their forcing others to follow their church doctrines will get their god to give them more benefits in heaven. The religious strictures on sex and sexual stuff is rooted in an ancient not correct misunderstand of life and sexuality. I still do not understand why others watching porn upsets Christian republicans. I really don’t get it. Is it because they are afraid the people watching will masturbate? Is it because sexual arousal is fearful to them? I really wish someone could explain it to me. Even in the church boarding school I went to my senior year of high school they did not push that no sex stuff very hard, instead they occasionally reminded us not to touch ourselves. They need not have worried, in the boy’s dorm we were touching each other which in our kid brains got around the entire sin of jerking off thing. Hugs.
Michigan lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make it illegal to distribute pornography via the internet in the state.
HB 4938, introduced last week by six Republican members of the state House of Representatives, would “prohibit the distribution of certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals.”
Pornography is the principal target, though the bill also seeks to criminalize depictions of transgender people.
The bill defines “pornographic material” broadly, to include “any content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”
The bill appears to exempt from the ban material protected by the First Amendment. Since pornography is constitutionally protected speech, this makes it unclear how the legislation could actually work.
According to the law, “prohibited material” means “material that at common law was not protected by adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting laws abridging freedom of speech or of the press.”
XBIZ spoke with adult industry attorney and First Amendment expert Corey D. Silverstein to attempt to explain what this meant.
“I think they are trying to say that it would not be applicable to content not deemed as obscene under the Miller test,” he said. “But it is written so poorly that there is some uncertainty as to their angle, which also makes the proposal both vague and ambiguous.
“At the same time, it could be another attempt to undercut and soften the Miller test, which we have been seeing in various other states throughout the country,” he added.
The proposed penalties in the bill are severe, including up to 20 years in prison or a fine of up to $100,000, or both. It also allows for civil fines of up to $500,000 per violation.
The bill would require internet service providers to implement “mandatory filtering technology” to prevent Michigan residents from accessing “prohibited material” as defined in the bill, to “actively monitor and block known circumvention tools,” and to block access to specific websites on receipt of a court order.
The bill calls for the state attorney general to establish “a special internet content enforcement division” staffed with “digital forensics analysts, legal experts, cybersecurity specialists, and investigators” to enforce the proposed law.
Silverstein added that he doesn’t believe the bill has much of a chance at being adopted.
“This bill has virtually no chance of going anywhere, given the current makeup of the Michigan legislature and its far-left Democrat governor,” he said. “The bill is unconstitutional at every turn. Regardless, it is alarming that this type of thinking and government waste continues to occur.”
The bill was referred to the Committee on Judiciary.
Talk of porn bans has increased in recent months. Earlier this year, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced federal legislation that would redefine almost all visual depictions of sex as obscene and therefore illegal, a goal that was also laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, which has heavily guided the Trump administration’s agenda.
Update, Sept. 19: The bill’s reference to “known circumvention tools” includes VPNs, proxy servers and encrypted tunneling methods, which would make it nearly impossible to access adult content online within the state.
I just read how Pete Hegseth has decided that the best military in the world is “too woke and not male enough to have the warrior ethos”. He wants a military modeled off the 1940 model with all male white straight cis people. A few women in the offices are OK but none of that integrated military that Eisenhower did, whites and blacks serve in different military units and of course now being Christian is going to be a new requirement. I don’t know if Hegseth is paid by Russians or if his Christian nationalism is causing him to idealize the very Russian military propaganda of a male only hyper aggressive military … the same military that has been getting its ass kicked in the Russian war against Ukraine. We are witnessing the dismantling of 80 plus years of integration and what made the US military so powerful. Think of how warfare is done today. With drones and weapons that reach targets over the horizons. You don’t need to be a Rambo for those tasks. I worked in a satellite intel unit. We were not really soldiers. When I was in the Navy we did not have the requirements for PT that the Army did, but we were still as deadly or even more so. This fixation of purging the military of the LGBTQ+ and female members is destroying what makes our military so great. Ask countries that have those people in their military like Israel! Their LGBTQ+ and female members are just effective as the men. But it doesn’t fit with the Christian Nationalist identity that Hegseth and his ilk are trying to push the US into.
Recently the heritage foundation pushed the idea of a trans terrorist idealization that was behind the public shootings and they used faked data that they created to prove their point. It is all to further the push of theirs to make the US a Christian Theocracy where only the biblical pairings they consider hole to be accepted. But in truth the bible allows for a male to have as many sexual partners as he wishes and only constrains the females from having sex with anyone but their husbands or their owners. The entire Christian teachings these people push is constriction for females and complete freedom for males on the issue of sex and marriage. Hugs
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly preparing to categorize transgender people as “violent extremists,” a categorization supported by organizations affiliated with Project 2025.
The most important LGBTQ+ news and politics stories delivered straight to your inbox
According to a September 18 report by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, two anonymous national security officials said that the Bureau is discussing treating trans subjects as a subset of its new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs), which was created earlier this year. The Bureau defines “Nihilistic Violent Extremism” as “criminal conduct… in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos.”
Officials said that such a classification would give the Trump administration “political (and media) cover” as they escalate their anti-trans campaign in the aftermath of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death.
“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” an unnamed senior intelligence official told Klippenstein. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”
Last week, the false claim that there were “transgender” engravings on the bullets that suspect Tyler Robinson allegedly used to shoot Kirk began circulating widely, boosted by anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives like Rep. Nancy Mace and Steven Crowder. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox later confirmed that there was “no indication that the ammunition included transgender references.” On Sunday, Cox told Meet the Press that Robinson was allegedly in a romantic relationship with a roommate who is trans, providing no additional public corroborating data or information of the roommate’s gender. The authorities have stipulated the roommate has been cooperating with the investigation and was not aware of the shooting prior to its occurrence.
Despite no evidence linking an alleged trans roommate to Robinson’s motivation for shooting Kirk, right-wingers are nevertheless attempting to use this detail to push an anti-trans agenda. In a petition launched on Thursday, the Heritage Foundation — the far-right think tank behind the derided and controversial Project 2025 — and its spin-off group, the Oversight Project, asked the FBI to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE) as a domestic terrorism threat category.
The group defines “TIVE” as “the belief that violence is justified against people who oppose [the trans community],” as well as the belief that opposing trans rights “itself constitutes a form of violence towards people who identify as [trans or gender nonconforming]… or poses an imminent threat to such persons’ emotional, psychological, or physical safety, including through self-harm or suicide.”
As The Independent noted, if such a category is adopted by the FBI, it could be applied to rhetoric used by activists, writers, and allies speaking out against anti-trans policies and rhetoric.
At least a dozen hoaxes have claimed trans people were responsible for mass shootings and other incidents since 2012.In reality, there is no evidence suggesting significant patterns of violence committed by trans people. In 2024, The Gun Violence Archive’s Executive Director, Mark Bryant, said that out of 5,000 mass shootings tracked by the archive, the number of trans or LGBTQ+ suspects is in “the single digit numbers.”
This is what the culture hate warriors want here in the US. They saw what Putin did in Russia and what Victor Orbán did in Hungary. They used the idea of protecting children to limit representation of LGBTQ+ people in society, then they moved it up the war against that community to erase it based on it was an attack on families. The question you need to ask why is family threatened by including same-sex couples as a family? What makes that family unit an attack on families? In their mind it is twofold, one in their mind it doesn’t produce its own offspring and also it offends tradition / religious tradition. We must never change what was done in the past forever in the minds of those who preach the way to live from a book written centuries ago as they read it on their new smartphone. We must find a way to stop this big money steam rolling over personal civil rights to install fundamental religious dictates on how everyone lives in the US. There are those who believe just admitting and allowing LGBTQ+ people to exist is promoting it. Is admitting and showing red hair people exist promoting red hair? Hugs
The council claimed the content “promotes homosexuality,” “disregards family values,” and “conflicts with the shared values of society.”
A scene from “Cobalt Blue”
Turkey’s media regulator has imposed fines on five international streaming platforms and ordered the removal of several films and series, citing violations of “national and moral values.”
The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) announced the penalties following inspections conducted under the government’s “Year of the Family” initiative. According to the regulator, the inspections aimed to “protect children from harmful content” and “combat productions that threaten the Turkish family structure and shared societal values.”
RTÜK fined the platforms the maximum penalty allowed, amounting to 3% of their annual revenues in Turkey. The decision affects Disney+, Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, and MUBI.
Among the targeted content are All of Us Strangers on Disney+, Those About To Die on Prime Video, Cobalt Blue on Netflix, Looking: The Movie on HBO Max, and Benedetta on MUBI.
The council claimed the content “promotes homosexuality,” “disregards family values,” and “conflicts with the shared values of society.” It did not elaborate on the specific scenes or themes that led to the sanctions.
Under Article 32 of Law No. 6112, RTÜK is authorized to impose several administrative measures on broadcasting entities. These include warnings, suspension of programming, and fines. The council can also enforce temporary broadcast bans and revoke broadcasting licenses. (HA/VK)
Increase in violence since 2019 is linked to online campaigns seeking to sow disinformation and fuel hatred
A Malta Pride participant carries a giant rainbow flag during the parade in Valletta. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters
Europeans who do not fit the typical definition of male or female are grappling with an “alarming” rise in violence, the EU’s leading rights agency has said, as concerted campaigns seek to sow disinformation and fuel hatred towards them.
The findings from the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, published on Tuesday, were based on responses from 1,920 people in 30 countries across Europe. All of them identified as intersex, an umbrella term referring to those with innate variations of sex characteristics and which can also include people who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse.
It found that since 2019, the rates of violence and harassment against intersex people have sharply increased – particularly among those who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse – far outpacing the increases reported by others in the LGBTQ+ community.
One in three surveyed, 34%, said they had been physically or sexually assaulted in the five years prior to the survey, up from 22% in 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, the rate of reported hate-motivated harassment had almost doubled, from 42% to 74%.
The survey also found that more than half, 57%, of respondents said they had been subjected “without their informed consent” to surgery or other medical treatment to modify their sex characteristics, while 39% said they were put through so-called conversion practices aimed at changing their sexual orientation or gender, compared with a rate of 25% among all LGBTQ+ groups.
The Vienna-based agency linked the rise to a wider climate of “increasing or persisting intolerance and bigotry, as well as intense online hatred campaigns” that had “instrumentalised” the LGBT+ community.
“Disinformation campaigns fomenting intolerance and prejudice are often waged by foreign and domestic actors acting to undermine European and western democracies and core values, such as dignity, equality and diversity,” the agency noted.
The result was a “weaponising” of the fact that many people know little about those who identify as intersex, trans, non-binary and gender diverse, allowing these campaigns to spread disinformation and “fuel hatred and violence against them”, it said.
The report echoes organisations across Europe, who have long warned of politicians using parliament, political rallies and media interviews to fuel anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and normalise discrimination across the continent.
In its findings this week, the EU agency warned that the impact of this discrimination was far-reaching for those who identify as intersex. “Their repeated victimisation and the multiple and compounded challenges they face can lead to severe exclusion and critical life situations such as homelessness, suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts.”
More than half of the intersex people surveyed, 53%, said they had contemplated suicide in the prior year. The figure was notably higher than the overall rate of 37% reported across all LGBTIQ groups.
The EU agency called on countries to add sex characteristics to the protected grounds in anti-discrimination legislation and do more to combat hate crimes and hate speech aimed at intersex people.
Their struggle requires an urgent response, said Sirpa Rautio, the director of the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights. “Intersex people in the EU experience alarming levels of exclusion, discrimination and violence,” she said in a statement. “They must be provided with targeted support that addresses their specific needs to ensure they can enjoy their fundamental rights and live in dignity.”
A Malta Pride participant carries a giant rainbow flag during the parade in Valletta. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters
Scottie's Playtime 