The right is so desperate to have a white straight homogenous country that they claim reading to children with parents present while dressed in costume is porn and “adult” entertainment. WTF. I wonder if the people ever wonder if they can openly lie and make one group illegal will they next make your group illegal using lies? Hugs
A drag queen who goes by the name Flame reads stories to children and their caretakers during a Drag Story Hour at a public library in New York, Friday, June 17, 2022.
An Oklahoma bill would make it a felony punishable by a $20,000 fine for drag artists to perform in front of minors.
The bill by GOP Rep. Kevin West would also make it a misdemeanor for one to organize drag performances in public.
At least ten states have proposed legislation that targets drag performances, including drag queen story hours.
An Oklahoma bill would make it a felony punishable by up to a $20,000 fine for drag artists to perform in front of minors.
The bill would make it “unlawful for a person to engage in an adult cabaret performance” in public before a minor. The fine may fall in the range of $500 to $20,000, and it may also incur a prison sentence from 30 days to two years, according to the bill’s text.
State GOP Rep. Kevin West, who filed House Bill 2186 on January 19, told Insider that the bill is intended to limit performances “in a public place.”
“But if you have a private venue and parents want to take their children there, then that would not be affected by this bill,” West told Insider. “It wouldn’t be allowed where just the general public would be able to see the performance. So like a library or a school or something like that would fall into being under the jurisdiction of this bill.”
West’s bill specifically named drag queen story hours as events that would be considered unlawful, as well as other forms of “adult cabaret” performances. It would also create a misdemeanor for anyone who organizes or authorizes such performances in public or in view of minors, threatening a fine of $500 to $1,000 and a maximum of a year in county jail.
The bill compared drag performers to strippers and topless dancers, defining “drag queen” as a “male or female performer who adopts a flamboyant or parodic feminine persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup.”
One activist on Twitter also suggested that the wording may criminalize a woman displaying a “feminine persona” with heavy makeup around children, per Newsweek.
But West, in a statement to Insider, disagreed.
“I’ve gotten emails and seen stuff online where I’m trying to ban the drag queen shows. Well, clearly nothing in the bill says that those are being banned. It’s just making sure that they’re done in the location where it’s intended,” West told Insider.
“I think that it really just comes to some of those boundaries. We have a lot of laws on the books that prohibit certain activities in public spaces and with everything that we’ve been seeing for the last few years on this subject, I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of bills like this.”
The bill is scheduled to have its first reading in the Oklahoma House on February 6, per the Oklahoma legislature’s website.
It follows a trend of similar legislation gaining traction nationwide to limit drag performances, such as in Arizona, Texas, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, Missouri, Tennessee, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia, according to reporting by Newsweek and the ACLU. Drag story hours in California and North Carolina, and other states, have also been targeted by the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, over the past year.
In October, a coalition of Republicans in the US House introduced a bill to “Stop the Sexualization of Children,” specifically targeting drag queen story hours as “sexually-oriented events,” Insider previously reported. The bill would give parents grounds to sue public entities that use federal tax dollars, such as public libraries, for “sexually explicit materials or programs.”
From curricula to library books to teachers themselves, queer expression and education in U.S. public schools are being slowly but surely outlawed. One of the most severe cases of this degeneration of rights is in Florida under the rule of perennial messRon DeSantis.
The governor signed what’s likely the country’s most notorious anti-LGBTQ curriculum bill into law last year, commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
This week, he doubled down on his disdain for LGBTQ+ education of any sort, referring to its inclusion as “indoctrination” and “a political agenda”.
This latest denouncement came after being asked why his administration had rejected the curriculum for an advanced placement African American Studies course.
The offending material? A section on “queer theory”:
When asked about the AP African American studies course that was banned in Florida, Ron DeSantis goes in a homophobic rant that includes railing against intersectionality while doing his best Trump impression. This is about banning ideas he doesn’t like, plain and simple. pic.twitter.com/3PCVwctHPY
“This course on Black History, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory!” he exclaims. “Queer theory” is the widely accepted academic name for the field of LGBTQ+ studies, so the way he managed to make it still sound like a slur is kind of amazing.
His next question to the room proved his lack of understanding of both Black and LGBTQ+ people, ignoring the existence of a whole category of humans in one sentence:
“Now who would say that an important part of Black History is ‘queer theory’?” he asks incredulously.
Let’s think for a moment! Would Martin Luther King Jr.’s close advisor Bayard Rustin say so? How about women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith who helped create the genre of blues music? Do James Baldwin and Audre Lorde not exist in Black History to Florida?
This examination of the intersection of identities and how they interplay in culture and history is exactly the kind of knowledge DeSantis and co. want to keep from the nation’s youth.
“That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids,” he rails. “When you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons — that’s a political agenda. That’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards.”
Discussing Black history without discussing the way Black people continue to be disproportionately incarcerated seems to also be a big no-no to the governor. Makes sense coming from the governor of the state with the third highest number of inmates in the country.
“When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory,” he continues, “you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”
Throughout all this attempting to cover up historical figures and contributions, he firmly asserts that he’s still here for “cut-and-dry history”.
“You learn all the basics, you learn about the great figures,” he contradicts. “I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history. We have history of a lot of different shapes and sizes.”
He closes by very vaguely advocating for the teaching of “people that have participated to make the country great and people that have stood up when it wasn’t easy.” The unabridged facts of who stood up and against what aren’t as important to him as making sure the LGBTQ+ community isn’t among them.
A person holds up a sign that reads “Trans athletes belong in sports” during a demonstration. (Getty/Michael M Santiago)
A new report has found trans women do not have any advantages over any other women, when competing in elite sport, if existing rules are followed.
Findings from a report, which was commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, clarified that biomedical factors do not pose an advantage, but suggests social factors – like nutrition and training quality – do.
The new reportis an in-depth review of all scientific literature published between 2011 and 2021 in English regarding trans women and their participation in elite-level sports.
These studies show there is little evidence to show that factors relating to male puberty – such as lung size and bone density – produce an advantage for trans athletes.
Existing rules regarding trans women in sport most often relate to the suppression of testosterone to certain low levels.
The report concluded that trans women that have begun testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantage.
“There is not one discrete biomarker that allows easy comparison of athletes’ bodies to each other in terms of performance,” thereport reads.
Trans people, especially trans women, have been unfairly targeted in the elite and grass-roots sports worlds, with some even being banned entirely from competing due to anti-trans rhetoric.
Thereport found“strong evidence” that “elite sport policy is made within transmisogynist, misogynoir, racist, geopolitical cultural norms”.
These ‘norms’ are the outcome of a long history of exclusion of women in sports, especially women whose bodies did not conform to standards of femininity.
British Cycling suspended its trans and non-binary participation policy. It comes after trans cyclist Emily Bridges (pictured) was banned from participating in a top women’s event. It is still being updated. (YouTube/Sky News)
Bridges, whocame out publicly as trans in October 2020, was due to compete against some of the top female cyclists in what would have been her first women’s event on 2 April (2021).
British Cycling said it was informed shortly before the event by the UCI that Bridges was not eligible to compete under its guidelines at the time.
Despite new evidence proving that biological traits from trans people pose no real threat to cisgender men and women, the community is still vilified and barred from competitive sports.
After CPAC Leader Matt Schlapp was accused of sexual assault of a male Herschel Walker staffer, both the CPAC organization and Matt Schlapp’s wife, Mercedes Schlapp, have decided to blame…liberals. Texas Paul reacts.
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More than 100 laws targeting LGBTQ+ communities have been filed across the US as attacks persist
New York City Pride March on 26 June 2022. Photograph: Milo Hess/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
Several anti-LGBTQ+ laws are being passed or proposed across the US as political attacks against the communities continue.
In North Dakota, conservative lawmakers have introduced at least eight laws targeting LGBTQ+ communities, many of which target transgender people.
Republican legislators introduce new laws to crack down on drag shows
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One bill, rejected on Friday, mandated people affiliated with schools or institutions receiving public funding having to pay a $1,500 fine for using gender pronouns other than those assigned at birth for themselves or others, the Grand Forks Herald reported.
Many in the state’s senate judiciary committee that voted down the bill noted that they agreed with the bill’s intention to limit transgender rights, but they felt that the bill was poorly written and difficult to enforce, according to ABC News.
Christina Sambor of the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition testified against the bill on Wednesday, noting that “its very purpose is gender-based discrimination”, ABC reported.
In a separate proposal, Republicans lawmakers introduced a bill to ban “sexually explicit” materials from libraries, with possible jail time for librarians that do not comply.
Under house bill 1205, public libraries could no longer provide books on a range of topics, including any on “sexual identity”, and/or “gender identity”, the LGBTQ+ magazine Them reported.
North Dakota has long been problematic to LGBTQ+ communities. The state was among the last torecognizesame-sex marriage.
In the US, several states have filed over 100 laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, NBC News reported. Such bills have targeted almost all aspects of life, ranging from sports to healthcare to education.
Texas has filed the most anti-LGBTQ+ laws, a total of 36. Missouri has introduced or passed 26 bills, followed by North Dakota, and Oklahoma with six.
Several states have attempted to limit gender-affirmative healthcare options for transgender people.
West Virginia lawmakers advanced a bill last Thursday that would ban doctors from performing gender-affirmative surgery on transgender youth, a proposal that many in the medical community and advocates have decried as transphobic and unnecessary.
“This doesn’t help anybody,” the Democratic representative Mike Pushkin said to West Virginia’s state house health and human resources committee. “This is just an insult to people who are already marginalized.”
In Mississippi, state house legislators passed a bill that bans physicians from administering gender-affirmative care to people under 18, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal reported.
Last year, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, faced nationwide outrage after instructing the state’s child protection services to investigate any parents providing their children with gender-affirming care, accusing them of “abuse”.
Florida has initiated a number of anti-LGBTQ+ laws since the passage of what has been coined as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.
That state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has targeted gender-affirmative healthcare at Florida universities. The DeSantis administration issued a blanket request to 12 Florida universities, asking for information on the number of students diagnosed with gender dysphoria or receiving on-campus treatments, Politico reported.
His office has not elaborated on what will be done with the collected data but noted that it was for “governing institutional resources and protecting the public interest”.
Lawmakers in at least eight states have taken steps to either restrict or ban drag shows, with at least 14 states introducing such bills.
Drag show performances across the country have faced increasing violence from anti-drag protests. In December, an anti-drag protest with 500 participants targeted a public library in the Queens borough where drag queens were reading books to children,NBC Newsreported.
Cities in Illinois and California reported protests, with participants shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs at drag queens participating in similar story times,according to the Associated Press.
Republicans continue to spread lies regarding the funding of the IRS, and have now announced that their very first bill in the newly Republican-controlled House will make it more difficult for working class families to get tax refunds while providing cover for their billionaire friends to cheat on their taxes. Texas Paul explains.
After Marjorie Taylor Greene backed Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House, MAGA influencers quickly turned on Greene. Stop The Steal organizer Ali Alexander even threatened to expose crimes allegedly committed by Greene. Meidas contributor Texas Paul basks in the MAGA infighting.
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