Agin an entitled Christian that not only is forcing his religion on his own children but demands to force it on all young people including your child. Please notice how this judge feels he needs to rule based on his right wing ideology including undoing or standing against anything Biden tried to enact. He felt that he could take the authority of the president to set border police from Biden when Biden ordered a change to a trump policy. His feeling was trump had the authority but Biden did not. The SC over ruled him but allowed his right wing ruling with no grounding in the law to stand for nearly a year. You have to ask why? About teens and sex. It is going to happen no matter if young people understand everything they are doing or just stumbling into what feels good. It is going to happen regardless of understanding parents and no matter how religious kids are. I attended a SDA Christian boarding school, the kids most into drugs and sex were the preachers’ sons. At this school boys and girls were not allowed to touch, hold hands, nor even to be within about a foot of each other. But the kids found ways and often snuck out even after lights out to meet and have sex. That doesn’t count the sex boys were having in the dorm. Dorm rooms and even pockets were searched for condoms and yet used ones were found in corners or out of the way places. So lets be real, by 16 most teens are sure what they want and able to consent, and teens should have control over their reproductive rights especially to get and use contraceptives. I used to hear the conservatives complain about underage girls have babies (mostly the complains claimed that black girls were encouraged to have babies so they could get welfare) So why not let young people have contraceptives? Hugs
In retrospect, it was inevitable that this particular judge would come for contraception.
A protester dressed as birth control pills rallies outside the Supreme Court in 2014. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.
A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”
So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.
Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”
The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.
This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.
And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”
Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.
Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.
Kacsmaryk’s opinion is incompetently drafted and makes several obvious legal errors
Kacsmaryk’s opinion makes a number of legal errors, some of them egregious.
The Constitution, for example, does not permit litigants to file federal lawsuits challenging a government program unless they’ve been injured in some way by that program — a requirement known as “standing.” But Alexander Deanda, the father in this case seeking to stop Title X-funded programs from offering contraception to minors, does not claim that he has ever sought Title X-funded care. He does not allege that his daughters have ever sought Title X-funded care. And he does not even allege that they intend to seek Title X-funded care in the future.
Thus, this case should have been dismissed for lack of standing. As the Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit must show that they’ve been injured in a manner that is “actual or imminent” and not “conjectural” or “hypothetical.” But Deanda has offered nothing more than conjecture that, if Title X continues to operate as it has for decades, one of his daughters might, at some point in the future, obtain contraception. Kacsmaryk nevertheless allowed his suit to proceed.
Additionally, Kacsmaryk places an astonishing amount of weight on a Texas state law which provides that parents have a right to consent to their child’s “medical and dental care.” But the Constitution states explicitly that federal law is “the supreme Law of the Land,” and when state laws prevent a federal law from operating as Congress intended — including the federal law creating the Title X program — then the state law must yield.
If the law worked any other way, then states would have the power to fundamentally alter federal welfare programs. Republican state lawmakers who believe that the Medicare or Social Security eligibility age should be 75 — or 125, for that matter — could pass a law imposing this new age requirement, thus destroying Congress’s power to create universal programs that benefit all Americans regardless of whether they live in a red state or a blue state.
Kacsmaryk attempts to weaponize the Constitution against birth control
The idea that parents have a constitutional right to shape their child’s upbringing — and that this right undermines government-funded contraceptive care — has been around for nearly half a century. It’s just never gained any real traction in federal court.
In Doe v. Irwin(1980), a federal appeals court case, the plaintiffs brought a similar challenge as Deanda against a state-operated family planning clinic that served both adults and teenagers. Doe acknowledged that a line of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to the 1920s establish that parents have a limited constitutional right “to the care, custody and nurture of their children.” At the same time, however, Doe held that “as with adults, the minor’s right of privacy includes the right to obtain contraceptives.” And so the plaintiffs’ claims in Doe placed these two constitutional rights in tension.
But the court found an easy way to relieve this tension. In each of the Supreme Court’s previous parental rights cases, “the state was either requiring or prohibiting some activity” — that is, the government used its coercive power to either require a child to take an action their parents did not like, or forbid the child from taking an action their parents wanted the child to take.
A program like Title X cannot violate this rule against coercion because there is nothing coercive about it. The federal government provides grants to health providers who voluntarily offer family planning services to their patients. And those providers, in turn, offer their services to patients who voluntarily seek out contraceptive care. No one is required to receive reproductive health care services funded by Title X.
This distinction between coercive government programs which compel certain behaviors, and welfare programs which merely fund voluntary activity, is implicit in the Constitution’s text. The Supreme Court (somewhat controversially) found the right of parents to shape their children’s upbringing in the Constitution’s due process clause, which provides that no one may be deprived of “liberty” without “due process of law.” But it’s impossible to deprive someone of liberty by creating a voluntary program that no one is required to participate in. “Liberty,” by definition, means the freedom to do as you choose.
To all of this, Kacsmaryk offers a hodgepodge of half-formed arguments that layer several additional pages onto his opinion without presenting much legal reasoning. One of his primary arguments rebutting Doe, for example, relies on the fact that the Supreme Court’s parental rights decision in Troxel v. Granville (2000) “does not rely on a heavy distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘compulsory’ programs.” But Troxel involved a coercive state law governing who is allowed to interact with a child against their parents’ wishes — so there was no reason for Troxel to discuss voluntary programs because such a program was not before the Court.
Similarly, he claims that “the common law held minors were incapable of giving consent to make important life decisions.” But English and early American law permitted minors to consent to sex as early as age 12, a fact that is simultaneously deeply upsetting and completely inconsistent with Kacsmaryk’s implication that 17-year-olds historically did not have control over their sexuality.
That leaves him with a policy argument against the rule announced in Doe. Kacsmaryk claims that limiting the scope of parents’ constitutional rights to cases involving actual coercion would lead to “absurd results,” such as preventing “parents from becoming aware of what books their children are reading in school and deny[ing] them the right to exempt their children from an offensive reading curriculum,” or preventing parents from intervening if a doctor provides care that is genuinely harmful.
But even if you assume that parents have a right to exempt their children from public school curriculums, a mandatory school assignment is a coercive act — so decisions like Doe are consistent with a rule allowing parents to exempt their children from certain school assignments.
Similarly, Kacsmaryk’s decision reaches far beyond the unlikely circumstances when a family planning clinic prescribes medically harmful treatments to teenagers. According to Kacsmaryk, “parental consent does not depend on the particular form of contraception or the environment in which the contraception is distributed.” So his decision would even prevent a public university from leaving out a basket of free condoms that anyone, including students who are not yet 18, can take from as they choose.
Obviously, questions about teenage sexuality are fraught. But the bottom line is that the people’s elected representatives in Congress debated these difficult issues, and they chose to enact a Title X program that provides funding that Kacsmaryk finds objectionable. It is simply not a judge’s job to short-circuit this democratic process of determining how the law should approach teenage sexuality. Nor is it Kacsmaryk’s job to impose his own well-documented prudishness on a federal program like Title X.
So what happens to Title X now?
Although Kacsmaryk claims that Title X “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” he has not yet ordered the federal government to halt the program. His opinion concludes by requiring the parties in Deanda to submit proposals by this Thursday laying out just what action Kacsmaryk should take against the federal government.
But Deanda’s lawyers have already signaled that they want an aggressive injunction that could temporarily shut down Title X, and permanently harm teenagers’ ability to obtain reproductive care.
In their complaint, these lawyers ask Kacsmaryk to prohibit the federal government from “funding any family-planning project in the United States that fails to obtain parental consent before distributing prescription contraception or other family-planning services to minors.” Should Kacsmaryk issue a such a sweeping order, which he could very well do given his past record, that could force the federal government to hit pause on the entire Title X program. To comply with such an order, Title X could have to build systems to determine which reproductive health providers give parents a veto power over medical care provided to their teenaged children.
There is a decent chance that Kacsmaryk will eventually be reversed by the Supreme Court — among other things, the standing problem in this case is so glaring that it may be hard for Deanda’s lawyers to convince five justices that they are allowed to bring this case in the first place. But it may be a while before that happens. Kacsmaryk’s decision will appeal first to the exceedingly conservative Fifth Circuit, which has a history of rubber-stamping outlandish decisions handed down by Kacsmaryk and similarly minded judges.
In the short term, in other words, Kacsmaryk could create a great deal of chaos for reproductive health clinics, which may lose an important source of funding for months or longer.
My dogs that love gravy these people are driven. They are loving the authority DeathSantis and the republicans have given them. It is not enough for them to keep their children from reading these books, they don’t want any kid to read them at any age. The guy has a 15 year old son and he comments he wants the boy to attend public school and not be destroyed by these books. I can assure him if the boy has a phone or other boys as friends he has heard and learned far more than a book with an LGBTQ+ character. I love how he is against any book that mentions boys holding hands or dating calling that promoting sex when he wants them to push abstinence but he is OK with books that have boy / girl dating, holding hands and so on. He is only against it when it is same gender / same sex. Plus he made them get rid of a book that told the story of a boy who wanted to dress up as a mermaid and go to a mermaid parade. He admitted there was no sex at all in the book but felt the message of the book was too dangerous for students. The message he claims is that you can be anything you want to be, and that is a dangerous thing to tell kids. Read through his objects and you see he is a bigot and a racist. He wants a nice “Leave It To Beaver” fantasy world for kids and schools. Again he is trying to force all the schools to revert to a 1950s mind set. I love that he claims he has nothing against gay people saying he can tolerate them unless they are the sexually aggressive type of homosexual. Really unlike himself who seems a sexually aggressive type of straight pushing a culture of straightness on everyone. . I know how important it is to find gay characters in a book or to be able to read up on subjects dealing with being LGBTQI+ as a kid. Think about what it would be like if you thought you were the only straight kid growing up, that all the books, movies, magazines, couples … the entire world around you were made up of gay and lesbian people. But you could go to the library and find books about being straight, how it was OK and normal for some people. Imagine reading about other straight people that were not the monsters that some people claimed they were. I was a gay kid and I needed those books. I was an abused kid who needed some comprehensive sex education classes also. The guy wanted one book removed because it was about a girl having romantic feelings for other girls and she holds hands with a girl and shares a kiss. That was it, but he made it seem like a sex manual for creating better lesbians. According to Friedman, the book promotes “promiscuity” and “pre-marital sex” when “we are supposed to be promoting abstinence.” He believes the library should carry books that “support sturdy nuclear families.” A story about a girl holding hands with another girl. But he wouldn’t have a problem with it had it been a boy the girl held hands with. He admits he doesn’t even read most of the books he tries to have removed. He wanted a book removed that told of a black persons struggle with racists and racism, and this guy wanted it removed because he claimed it supported BLM movement. Friedman says the book should be removed because it promotes “the Black Lives Matter movement” and “a sense of white guilt in its musings about ‘micro-aggressions’ as elsewhere defined in Critical Race Theory.” Anyway I will try to post the article, please read it, and understand the attack on our society, the entire LGBTQI+ community, and our education system. This guy is saying that just reading about and seeing gays, lesbians, or trans people is harmful and destroys kids. If anyone gets in his way, Friedman vowed to “run over them like a dead body.” Hugs
Bruce Friedman speaks at a June 30 meeting of the Clay County School Board
This year, at least 102 books have been removed from the shelves of school libraries in Clay County, Florida. Many of these books were pulled at the request of one man: Bruce Friedman. A conservative activist and longtime resident of New York, Friedman moved to Clay County this May.
And Friedman says he is just getting started. During a November 28 meeting of the Florida Department of Education Library Media Working Group, Friedman said he had compiled “a list of over 3,600 titles that I believe have concerning content,” including “porn, critical race theory, social-emotional learning, [and] fluid gender.” He said this list proves that “libraries have more than a little poison in them.” Friedman demanded that the Department of Education “clean up this mess.” If not, Friedman threatened to “perform 3,600 challenges and overwhelm your awful, awful procedures and policies.”
One of the books pulled from the shelves of school libraries this year in Clay County is The Girl From The Sea, an award-winning graphic novel. The book is about a 15-year-old girl who develops romantic feelings for another girl. The two girls hold hands and, at one point, share a kiss. There is no sex, no swearing, and no nudity.
In an interview with Popular Information, Friedman described The Girl From The Sea as a book for “slightly post-pubescent little lesbians.” Friedman says he objects to the book being available in Clay County libraries because students are “not in school to learn how to be better lesbians.” The book exposes students to “a land of girls making out with great illustrations.” According to Friedman, students should not be “focused on kissing, or petting or anything else in that general territory.”
The Girl From The Sea has been removed from Clay County school libraries because of a new policy, implemented in July, that requires books to be pulled as soon as a challenge has been properly filed. The books remain unavailable to students while the challenge is being considered by a District Curriculum Council.
Friedman has exploited this policy by flooding the district with challenges. Friedman told Popular Information that, since June 30, he has “investigated between 5 and 10 thousand” books available in Clay County school libraries on “a very cursory level.”
Popular Information has obtained dozens of Friedman’s challenge forms through public information requests. Friedman, and a few others he recruited to assist him, filled out these forms identically. The reason for the request is to “PROTECT CHILDREN,” the objectionable material is “INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT,” and the impact of a student using the material is “DAMAGED SOULS.” The answer to most other questions is “N/A.”
Friedman is the president and founder of the Florida chapter of No Left Turn in Education, a right-wing educational group. He continues to play a similar role for the group in New York. No Left Turn in Education was founded in 2020 by Elana Yaron Fishbein. “Public schools are starting to resemble re-education camps and our cities have turned into the killing fields,” the group wrote on Facebook. “It’s beginning to feel like Pol Pot’s Cambodia.” Fishbein says there are evil forces focused on “getting to our kids, brainwashing them, indoctrinating them, and making them [a] brownshirt.” Friedman said he learned about Fishbein when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show.
Friedman gained some notoriety himself when he attempted to read aloud a rape scene from the book Lucky by Alice Sebold during a June 30 Clay County school board meeting. His mic was cut off. Friedman told Fox News he wants “his 15-year-old son to be in the public school system and come home unharmed.”
Friedman acknowledged that he filed challenges over the summer without reading the challenged books. Initially, Clay County accepted many of these challenges. But Friedman said he has already filed more than 350 challenges. Eventually, Clay County began to reject Freidman’s challenges as incomplete because they do not include any real explanation of the objection.
But Friedman is undeterred and, in the hopes of getting more challenges accepted, said he has changed his approach. According to Friedman, he has read “25 books in the last 10 days.” Friedman identified books to challenge by “scouring the internet” for lists of books that have been challenged elsewhere, including “a very conservative community” in Texas that “met with their superintendent” about “a couple of hundred books that concern them.”
Friedman acknowledged he is not aware of any children who were exposed to objectionable content at a school library and had it negatively impact their lives. But he claims that is irrelevant. “I don’t have to know them,” Friedman said. “It’s all of them. Any poor kid who had the misfortune of coming across this material.”
Stephana Ferrell, the co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, blasted Clay County’s policy of removing books from the library before any review. Ferrell told Popular Information that the procedure allowed a “singular viewpoint” to “control over what can and cannot be accessed or learned in the library.”
Legal confusion
According to Friedman, his challenges to books like The Girl from the Sea, are justified because it violates Florida law for the book to be available in school libraries. The relevant law is HB 1467, which was signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) last March.
The revised Clay County Procedures Manual for Library Media Services lays out the legal standard for library books under HB 1467:
● Free of pornography and material prohibited under s. 847.012
● Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented
● Appropriate for the grade level and age group for which the materials are used or made available
Friedman said he did not believe The Girl From The Sea is pornographic. But, according to Friedman, it should be removed from the school library because it is “in very poor taste” and “sets a terrible example for our children, straight or gay.” According to Friedman, the book promotes “promiscuity” and “pre-marital sex” when “we are supposed to be promoting abstinence.”
Several of the books challenged by Friedman and others include LGBTQ themes but no sexual content. The Prince And The Dressmaker, for example, is about “a prince who likes to wear dresses.” The Prince falls in love with a young woman. The book features one kiss.
Friedman cited the “Parental Rights Act,” also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, to justify these objections. “You don’t want little children questioning their budding little bodies.” Friedman said. He says that the inclusion of these books is part of an effort by librarians to encourage children to get “surgery and hormones.” The Parental Rights Act, however, prohibits classroom instruction of elementary students about sexuality and gender. It does not apply to library books.
In the interview, Friedman said he is comfortable with “gay people” and “recognizes that they exist.” Friedman said he lived for years in New York City, and “on very rare occasions, I would meet a sexually aggressive homosexual person and have words with them.” But, for the most part, Friedman said he “got along fabulously with everyone.”
Friedman said he doesn’t have a problem with a book that has “gay characters” but “if the focus of the book is gayness, and it is still nonsexual, then I’d have to take it on a case-by-case basis.” He believes the library should carry books that “support sturdy nuclear families.”
Friedman also challenged Dear Martin, citing the Parental Rights Act. But Dear Martin does not have any LGBTQ content. Dear Martin is about “the story of an Ivy League-bound African American student named Justyce who becomes a victim of racial profiling.” Friedman says the book should be removed because it promotes “the Black Lives Matter movement” and “a sense of white guilt in its musings about ‘micro-aggressions’ as elsewhere defined in Critical Race Theory.”
Friedman may have been referring to the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits instruction on Critical Race Theory in Florida classrooms. But, like the Parental Rights Act, the Stop WOKE Act applies to classroom instruction, not library books.
Despite this confusion about the legal standard, Friedman and others have already been able to permanently remove dozens of books from Clay County school libraries.
Tightening the screws on school librarians
Julie Miller, the chair of the Clay County Education Association Media Committee, has been the librarian for Ridgeview High School in Clay County for nine years. Miller told Popular Information she did not encounter a single challenge to a library book until November 2021.
Starting this year, groups like No Left Turn in Education began challenging library material en masse. School officials are fearful. Since March, Miller and other Clay County librarians have been prohibited from purchasing any new books or even new copies of books that are already on the shelves. According to Miller, no official explanation has been provided for the purchasing freeze.
Under Clay County’s July 2022 policy, any challenge should be reviewed by a District Curriculum Council, a rotating panel of school officials. But when the challenges from Friedman and others started flooding in, the leadership of Clay County schools handled things differently.
Before the District Curriculum Council considered a challenge, Miller and her colleagues were pressured to determine if the books were eligible to be “weeded” or “deselected.” Weeding and deselection are the standard processes that librarians use to remove books that are not in use, outdated, damaged, or not appropriate for students. The librarians were also reminded that, under Florida law, they could potentially be held personally liable for making “pornographic” material available to minors.
This process resulted in Clay County librarians agreeing to weed or deselect 52 books from school libraries. These included acclaimed titles like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Clay County schools have published a list of filed challenges, including those that librarians agreed to weed/deselect.
But it soon became clear that the challenges from Friedman and other activists were just getting started. As the challenges rolled in, Miller said she wanted to change her mind and put several books she previously agreed to remove back into circulation. Typically, a decision to weed a book is not irreversible. A damaged book, for example, could be replaced by a new copy. But she was told by district officials that challenged books that librarians agreed to remove were permanently banned from all libraries in the district.
In response, Miller and some of her colleagues resolved not to weed out or deselect any additional challenged books in Clay County because they believe the system is being abused.
Thus far, five challenges have been reviewed by a District Curriculum Council. These panels voted to keep four of the books in schools. One panel voted to remove Julian Is A Mermaid from all schools. Julian Is A Mermaid is about a little boy who wants to dress up as a mermaid and go and see a Mermaid Parade. The council wrote that the message of the book is that “you can be whatever you want to be.” According to the council, this is a “good message,” but they voted to remove the book because it is “maybe not the best way to do it.”
The council rejected Friedman’s challenge to Dear Martin, voting unanimously to allow the book to remain available in high school libraries. While the book does contain some coarse language, it was “realistic” and appropriate for teenagers.
Friedman has vowed to appeal all rejections to the district superintendent and, if necessary, to the Clay County School Board. He has reason to believe that his appeal may be successful. Friedman says that, during November’s election, we “got rid of two people” who opposed his efforts. He was “extremely supportive of two newly elected board members that I think sufficiently leaned towards protecting children.”
The goal, according to Friedman, is to use Clay County library to “set a good example for what a clean library looks like” for Florida and the country. If anyone gets in his way, Friedman vowed to “run over them like a dead body.”
1. This man moved from New York to Florida a few months ago
Now he wants to ban 3600 BOOKS from the school libraries
“She was playing to the crowd. But what she is basically saying is what we’ve been pointing out: without accountability, failed insurrections are just practice.
“She’s saying they would have succeeded, and they would have come armed. And that’s a statement with real weight if you’re a member of Congress.
“That’s an endorsement of violent sedition. Make no mistake about it.” – CNN host John Avlon, on MTG’s declaration that if she had planned the Capitol attack, “we would have won.”
CNN's John Avlon Calls Out Marjorie Taylor Greene for Endorsing 'Violent Sedition' in Speech to Young Republicans https://t.co/fXnZOgv1B6
The big take-away from this is that John Avlon will soon be looking for a job… this new CNN_v2.0 won’t tolerate objective criticism of Republicans irritating its 55+ demographic.
It dont matter… we wont do anything. Too political to hold the leader of the house GOP responsible for her calls to violence and to overthrow our republic. So they just keep on overthrowing, slowly and surely. Maybe they can get one of them thar special prosecutors to look into this as well
That is exactly what she has done. I thought this was illegal. So, why isn’t she being held accountable? Is the DoJ yet AGAIN afraid to act? Do we have to add this to Jack Smith’s plate, too?!
Sorry just got up at 4:30 PM. I slept most of the day. No I am not sure why I am so tired again. Ron is going to get me the B+ complex the endocrinologist said I need that I stopped taking. My next labs with him will check those levels. Just took my blood sugar to have supper, 283. No that is not good. yes it could explain why I was so sleepy. No it was not that high this morning. No I did not eat anything to do that (donuts, cakes, pies, sweets of any kinds are off limits to Scottie) Just had a small supper, but the insulin is surging through me and I want to go back to bed. And I am sweating. When the insulin and blood sugar are surging to battle in my body I sweat, and sweat, and sweat … regardless of the temp in the house. I am so sleepy again. Hugs
On to the story, why are the poor black kids being shoved into the J.R.O.T.C. programs? Really asking why poor kids, and black kids are being shoved without being asked or even allowed to get out of these military programs? Something really is wrong in the US. Hugs
J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines. But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.
A review of J.R.O.T.C. enrollment data collected from more than 200 public records requests showed that dozens of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75 percent of students in a single grade into the classes. A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households, The Times found.
So according to the right wing, it’s illegal for schools to teach Critical Race Theory (whatever that is), and universities may not use race as a criterion, not even to ensure a ethnically diverse student body.
It is nice to see the people turn out to support the LGBTQI+ youth. I know there are far more people that are accepting of the gay, lesbian, and trans people than there are of the haters. The haters are just louder and willing to use violence. They wanted to mark the books so it would be easy for others to identify the kids who checked them out. A big old scarlet letter. It is the same for putting them in a different section all by themselves, nice big scarlet letter to paste on any kid who checks them out. Look at the gay kid, attack him, hurt him, making her cry. It was one kids who took a book home that had some LGBTQI+ subject material and one set of parents that complained so vigorously that an entire community was made to suffer, to be denied access to not just those books but the entire library. The school stopped sending the kids to the library because of the complaint of one parents. The school punished an entire school and all the kids to deny acceptability of the LGBTQI+ as one parent demanded. Hugs
The Crook County Library Board of Trustees voted Thursday night not to label LGBTQ-friendly children’s books or segregate them into a separate section.
In an unusual sight, people packed into the Crook County Library on Thursday night for a meeting of its board.
The topic at hand had drawn the standing room crowd: namely, whether or not to segregate LGBTQ-friendly children’s books into a separate section.
The Crook County Library Board of Trustees voted Thursday night not to label LGBTQ-friendly children’s books or segregate them into a separate section.
Adrian Vamanu
By the end of the night, the crowd had spoken overwhelmingly in support of keeping the books where they are, and the board voted 4-1 to not place the books in a special section of the library.
Library Director April Witteveen said the debate started in May when a group of local elementary school children visited the library. One student took home one of the library’s LGBTQ books. Soon after, with little to no explanation, the school stopped sending children to the library during school hours. Witteveen said the school does not have a library and students haven’t returned since.
Speaking at Thursday night’s meeting, former library board member and president ZueAnne Neal said she had started falling for the rhetoric around the books, as some community members called them dangerous for children.
Neal, appearing to be on the verge of tears, apologized to the crowd for at one point recommending the books be marked with a sticker or other identifying mark as a way to compromise between the sides.
“That was a sad, sad day,” she said.
Neal noted that after she did more research on the books, she found them to be age-appropriate and that placing the books into a separate section could create stigma, as well as potentially cost the library through lost funding and First Amendment lawsuits.
Some speakers pushed back on the notion that marking the books would ostracize people who wanted to check them out, calling such descriptions “misinformation.” Supporters of the move said marking the books would make it more clear for people who wanted to view the material, as well as those who wanted to avoid it.
Crook County is just one of hundreds of libraries across the country that have been targeted for allegedly making available LGBTQ books that contain child pornography. It comes amid a broader national debate over what educational materials should be available to children, especially those discussing racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination.
Labeling queer people as pedophiles and dangers to children is a strategy used by anti-LGBTQ activists for decades.
One library in Jamestown, Michigan, found itself in a similar situation to Prineville in August, with residents there voting to block a tax levy on two separate occasions, meaning the small library lost 84% of its funding. The presence of LGBTQ books sparked the demand to cut the library’s funding, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Neal, the former library board president, said after looking into the issue, she ultimately came to see segregating books as a form of hate.
“If it roots here, it won’t end here,” she said. “It will just grow.”
The book issue in Crook County isn’t the first time Central Oregon has recently been roiled by misinformation involving LGBTQ people. In October, the Culver School District in nearby Jefferson County found itself in a controversy after pulling young students from a camp over false allegations about non-binary counselors.
Part I left out of this story was when one speaker read a Bible passage that described a man's genitals being like a donkey's, and then asked why that book was available in the library.
Shout out to that guy for doing homework for his testimony.
Just imagine being the poor kid that may have thought it was a good story, or that it applied to them. Then having your parents make such a fuss that your whole class can’t go back to the library. Religious indoctrination at it’s best.
This is gang rule. This is what the right wing / republicans are driving. Outrage against one segment of the population. We have seen this before, and it doesn’t end well. If they succeed in making the LGBTQI+ disappear who will be the next scapegoats? Who will be the next targets? The right wing groups that stoked this outrage and attack that could have caused death removed their inciting posts as soon as they got their way. Just like Fox news acts, drive outrage and then claim they did not do anything. Think of the preparations the shooter did, removing the license plate also wearing a mask and gloves. I wonder if the car was “borrowed”? Otherwise why wear gloves in your own car? And where are the police in all this, they set up cameras, for a masked person? Why not have increased patrols, why not have a news conference saying these acts of terrorism won’t be tolerated? Why don’t the police protect the attacked communities? Hugs
The conservative organization “Wake Up WA State” has removed posts from its Facebook page targeting the bar in the wake of the shooting.
A Seattle-area pub was hit by gunfire yesterday, days before a scheduled drag queen story hour and bingo night.
The Brewmaster’s Taproom in Renton, Washington, just south of Seattle, was hit a single gunshot to their front window in a drive-by shooting around noon on Wednesday. The pub’s monthly Drag Queen Storytime and Rainbow Bingo events will go on as planned on Saturday.
Brewmaster’s owner Marley Rall told LGBTQ Nation she was working at home when she got a text from an employee at the coffee stand next door to the pub. “They just texted me and said, ‘Hey, I just watched this.’”
Rall said the assailant had removed the license plates from the car and was wearing a mask and gloves.
Rall posted to Facebook: “So just an update for everyone. Our taproom was shot at today around noon. We believe it has to do with the people who are upset about our Drag Queen Story Time. We would like you to know we are still going to have drag queen storytime. But we also want to be transparent with parents. Renton PD is aware and has set up cameras.”
“Hatred isn’t pretty,” one commenter posted. “Hang in there. A lot of us will be there to support you! Grateful for your inclusion of all people.” Rall, who lives with her husband in Renton, calls herself a staunch ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
The shooting comes after plans for a protest at the event by right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ groups came to light. “We are aware of the chatter and threats,” Rall wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday. “Every month we get emails and phone calls about our Drag Queen Story Time. Never have we had issues, but this time feels different.”
The single gunshot came from a silver four-door sedan hours later.
Rall said she noticed unusual activity on the tap room’s Facebook page Monday night. “I get a notification,” Rall said, and a woman “had posted on our newsletter, ‘This is fucking disgusting,’ and ‘You’re fucking groomers and you’re pedophiles,’ and then had scrolled through our Facebook page to go find another post from the month before, specifically for our drag queen storytime and bingo.”
Rall was also made aware of a protest flyer originating with right-wing group Wake Up WA State that had spread across social media and was shared by advocacy group LGBTQIA+ Renton and a local councilwoman. Calls for protest also made their way to Reddit, where one poster suggested shooting up a transformer to deprive Brewmasters of power during the event.
“So I screenshot it and send it to the city,” Rall says. “This is a thing and somebody clearly wants to replicate what was going on in North Carolina.” She was referring to a
Following the shooting Wednesday, Wake Up WA State scrubbed their Facebook account of any reference to the event.
“Wake Up WA State is shutting its pages down at least for now,” wrote group organizer Justine Andrina. “We talked about it a lot and made this decision because the people running the groups are putting themselves at risk at this point and the benefit is outweighing the risks [sic].”
A deleted post archived by a Brewmaster supporter illustrated Wake Up WA State’s role in the protest and purported cancellation.
Andrina shared: “Per the organizer holding the protest: ‘Based on some recent developments we’ve decided to pull the plug on Saturday. Someone took a shot at the bar today.’ I don’t know if it was a false flag or a patriot who got too hotheaded. Either way, it now seems like a major security issue and since children will be present, we made the decision to cancel. If you are able to make a note of that on Wake Up WA FB, it would be appreciated. Thanks.”
“Whoever did this to Brewmasters,” Andrina wrote, “you’re sick in the head.”
Rall says both her parents lost family in the Holocaust, and they made sure she could recite the poem First They Came.
“Just because it doesn’t personally impact you, one day, you’re going to turn around and nobody’s going to be there, because it will,” she said. “This is about keeping everybody safe, and making sure that everybody continues to feel comfortable coming out and being their authentic self.”
I am so sick of the cries of fear and doom, of how their rights to discriminate against us gays are the only thing these Christians can see when it comes to same sex marriage. It has been the law of the land for over 7 years and no church has been forced to do a same sex marriage, no one has been jailed for refusing to enter into a same sex marriage, the sky has not fallen nor has their god rained fire and brimstone on the US. All that has happened is the same thing that happens when a marginalized minority gets their equality / civil rights entered into law in the US, more people are able to enjoy the rights the white Christians have always had. I am so tired of this shit. What this woman and those like her are demanding is follow my religion or Everything we love will be destroyed which is our right to deny you the same rights we have. We need that to feel superior to you, praise our god! Her own very cute nephew responded to this destroying her arguments here. Sadly this grand Christian woman is part of a family that told that nephew that he was no longer welcome to family holiday celebrations including Christmas because he has the dreaded gay disease. I will try to find the link and put it here. Love you all but this shit is getting really hard on me personally. The drive to make us conform to their straight is accepted only due to their religion lifestyle or they will kill us / drive us from society is too much now. It seems they are on a desperate push, and either make or break to drive the LGBTQI+ from society and install their own scriptures as the rules we must live by. Anyway. Hugs
Vicky Hartzler’s gay nephew Andrew posted about his aunt crying over gay marriage on the House floor pic.twitter.com/Kxwt4DLEnF
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Scottie's Playtime 