Category: Political / Governments / Nations / Countries /
Just some things I found this morning
Some innocent Palestinians:
The Birthing Persons SAGA will never end (Ana Kasparian on PBD podcast)
This is again another video on Anna’s hard right turn on trans people, which I guess is only to get her a better gig else where. She keeps going on that she objects to doctors forms or offices calling pregnant trans males birthing persons. But Anna has fervently claimed she doesn’t want kids and won’t have them. So the term doesn’t apply to her at all. She tries to claim the term is the same as the N word, but that is not used in any medical setting or forms at all. She is tilting at windmills here. She says she wants to be called a woman, and yes that is her right. And if she was ever pregnant her doctor would honor that. So why is she against what other people want to be called. Her stance makes no sense when you look at it. She got her plastic surgery nose out of joint and is making that the hill to die on. Again the question is why? But it is getting her a lot of attention and air time play on right wing podcasts / blogs. So you ask why she has gone so far out on this that no one is calling her and making it her claim to fame? Is she the new Riley Gaines, who made an entire media career over complaining she tied with a trans woman for fourth place! Hugs.
Before he became a politician, House Speaker Mike Johnson partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/01/politics/mike-johnson-kfile-invs/index.html
Every major medical association affirm that conversion therapy is torture and not medically sound. It doesn’t work and creates lifelong issues and problems. It is abuse. Sexual orientation is something one is born with. No matter who you find sexually attractive, ask your self when you choose that? Who sits down with a bunch of different pictures of men and women and says you know I think I will be sexually attracted to these. It is a body reaction, not a mental one. My dogs that love gravy these people understand that because they use torture methods including some put electrodes on kid’s scrotum to shock them if they get excited over male nudes. WTF, no one chooses and these people did not choose who they are attracted to and get the tingles from. The fact is they demand we all ignore reason and medical science so their holy book written 2,500 years ago when people were ignorant even of germs that caused sickness is correct. Yes they tell us, just ignore everything that makes sense and the medical people are telling us to that the desert nomads of 2,500 years ago are correct. The want an old dusty geopolitical warlord text to relate to our modern life. Why did their god not know about cell phones? Why wait to give life-saving health information to the people. Because their god only knew what the people 2,500 knew. Do they really want to claim that is the highest pinnacle of human knowledge? But what is telling is his organization tells kids / teens they don’t need to accept kids who are different. He is telling kids to not be tolerant or even accepting of LGBTQIA kids in schools. Just like he doesn’t want to accept or tolerate that there are LGBTQIA people in society he has to accept are there. Kill them all, or if you can not do that, just make don’t say gay laws that erase them from society. Hugs. Scottie
5 minute readNewly elected Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) in the House chamber after his election at the US Capitol on October 25, 2023 in Washington, DC.Speaker of the House Mike Johnson closely collaborated with a group in the mid-to-late 2000s that promoted “conversion therapy,” a discredited practice that asserted it could change the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian individuals.
Prior to launching his political career, Johnson, a lawyer, gave legal advice to an organization called Exodus International and partnered with the group to put on an annual anti-gay event aimed at teens, according to a CNN KFile review of more than a dozen of Johnson’s media appearances from that timespan.
Founded in 1976, Exodus International was a leader in the so-called “ex-gay” movement, which aimed to make gay individuals straight through conversion therapy programs using religious and counseling methods. Exodus International connected ministries across the world using these controversial approaches.
The group shut down in 2013, with its founder posting a public apology for the “pain and hurt” his organization caused. Conversion therapy has been widely condemned by most major medical institutions and has been shown to be harmful to struggling LGBTQ people.
At the time, Johnson worked as an attorney for the socially conservative legal advocacy group, Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). He and his group collaborated with Exodus from 2006 to 2010.
For years, Johnson and Exodus worked on an event started by ADF in 2005 known as the “Day of Truth” – a counterprotest to the “Day of Silence,” a day in schools in which students stayed silent to bring awareness to bullying faced by LGBTQ youth.
The Day of Truth sought to counter that silence by distributing information about what Johnson described as the “dangerous” gay lifestyle.
“I mean, our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and we cannot change,” Johnson told one radio host in 2008 promoting the event. “What these adult advocacy groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network are promoting is a type of behavior. Homosexual behavior is something you do, it’s not something that you are.”
In print, radio and on television, Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, frequently disparaged homosexuality, according to KFile’s review. He advocated for the criminalization of gay sex and went so far as to partially blame it for the fall of the Roman Empire.
“Some credit to the fall of Rome to not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008.
Johnson’s office did not respond to a CNN request for comment asking about his work with Exodus.
A close collaboration
Exodus International joined ADF’s Day of Truth event in 2006 and the groups worked together on promotional material for the event, including a standalone website which pointed users to Exodus’ conversion ministries. Documents on that website cited the since-repudiated academic work in support of conversion therapy. Exodus Youth, the group’s youth wing, promoted the event within its blogs.
Videos put out by Exodus and ADF on their standalone Day of Truth website featured two Exodus staffers speaking about how teens didn’t need to “accept” or “embrace” their homosexuality. The videos featured testimonials of a “former-homosexual” and “former lesbian.”
Documents on the website were not archived online but were saved by anti-conversion therapy groups such as Truth Wins Out in 2007 and 2008. The website featured a FAQ on homosexuality provided by Exodus and sold t-shirts saying, “the Truth cannot be silenced.”
One video featured Johnson, who was later quoted in a press release on Exodus International’s website ahead of the event, saying, “An open, honest discussion allows truth to rise to the surface.”
Johnson promoted the event heavily in the media – through radio interviews, comments in newspapers, and an editorial. In interviews, he repeatedly cited the case of a teen who went to school after the Day of Silence wearing a shirt that read, “Be ashamed. Our school has embraced what God has condemned” and “Homosexuality is shameful.” The teen was suspended and ADF represented him in legal action over the incident. The case was dismissed because the teen graduated, and the court found he no longer had standing to challenge the dress code.
“Day of Truth was really established to counter the promotion of the homosexual agenda in public schools,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008.
Those who worked to counter ADF and Exodus at the time, said the event was dangerous to confused youth.
“This directly harmed LGBTQ youth,” Wayne Besen, the executive director of Truth Wins Out and an expert on the ex-gay industry, told CNN. “This is someone whose core was promoting anti-gay and ex-gay viewpoints. He wouldn’t pander to anti-gay advocates, he was the anti-gay and ex-gay advocate.”
Randy Scobey, a former executive vice president at Exodus, who worked on the Day of Truth in the organization’s collaboration with ADF, called the event one of his biggest regrets.
“It was bullying those who were trying to not be bullied,” said Scobey, who now lives openly as a gay man. “That was one of the public ways that the Alliance Defense Fund worked with us.”
Ties between Exodus and ADF extended beyond the event.
ADF, which has since changed its name to the Alliance Defending Freedom, touted Exodus International in promotional brochures in 2004, crediting it as an organization that “played an instrumental role in helping thousands of individuals come out of homosexual behavior.”
Scobey recalled Johnson as quiet, but firm in his beliefs that homosexuality was wrong. He said Johnson and ADF provided crucial legal advice to Exodus and its “member ministries.”
“We worked with them behind the scenes a lot,” Scobey told CNN, saying the group offered them legal guidance over their ex-gay counseling. “They were very important to us as far as helping us to feel more secure legally and politically.”
Exodus International stopped sponsoring the Day of Truth event in 2010, saying it became adversarial and counterproductive.
As I previously reported, Johnson and Alliance Defending Freedom helped create the so-called Day Of Truth as an on-campus Christian counter protest to GLSEN’s annual anti-bullying Day Of Silence.
Per CNN’s new reporting, Mike Johnson collaborated with Exodus for years on the Day Of Truth.
When Exodus finally collapsed in 2013, founder Alan Chambers issued a lengthy apology and admitted on CNN that ex-gay torture had never turned any of his thousands of victims heterosexual. Not a single one. Video below.
Exodus was a steaming pile of self hating homos hitting on each other. If Johnson was working with them, he was likely fucking around with one or more of them. There is tea that needs to be spilled.
A Netflix documentary call Pray Away dropped earlier this year. Tip of the iceberg stuff. There is another (now out) gay man that spent his professional life working for the LDS church and living a lie. He is now speaking his truth. Johnson has got gay face to the level that breaks my gaydar machine to a smoking ruin. I grew up among people just like him.
Exodus is an example of that fine xstian love bullshit. This presumably straight guy and his ilk should be forced into homosexual conversion, although, I suspect that they are, in reality, self-hating (for whatever reason) Gays who tried to convince themselves and the desperate Gays and/or their families who attended conversion camps that it could be done. If by some chance you have not seen “Boy Erased” I highly recommend it. It’s a very well done feature film on this very subject. IMHO it’s a 5 star winner. “Fair Haven” is another good one. There are a number of films on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
In the Netflix documentary, Pray Away, your assertions are confirmed. There wouldn’t need to be any homosexual conversion because most of them were gayer than geese the entire time. Imagine that. Several of the leaders admit to the lie. Boy Erased was heartbreaking, and Fair Haven really drove home the isolation and self hatred that many of us have been forced to carry.
I hope his “adopted” African American son steps forward with clarification on their relationship. I have a strong suspicion Johnson does not want that to happen.
I think he’s 40/in his 40s now? The article I read said he went into Johnson’s “custody” when he was 14 and Johnson was something like 27. Or maybe younger. It was before he was married. Strong “Nestor” vibes there.
That’s not to say that a young, single man can’t adopt a teenager he wants to help, just that it’s unusual enough that there should maybe be some extra scrutiny of the situation.
Republicans were actually really smart about how they slipped this guy in under the radar. People actually believed that the chair would remain vacant because the GOP couldn’t get their shit together… but in fact, they were just holding out for a true Nazi to install.
There’s a couple of TikTok videos going around in which Louisiana locals claim that Johnson was once a well-known patron at the Baton Rouge gay bar Central Station. I’ve found no reputable reporting on this, but nothing would be surprising when it comes to closeted Republicans.
Here’s one of those TikTok clips: https://www.tiktok.com/@mam…
Methinks He Doth Protest Too Much is entirely a thing.
maybe that is why he has a covenant marriage, so he can’t get out of it.
The Apache Drive-In over in Tyler, Texas is closer. It’s long been a hookup spot for the sexually frustrated from East Texas and northwest Louisiana.
As someone pointed out he adopted a 14yo boy when he was 25 or 26 and then married a conversion therapist 2 years later.
Hmmm. Wonder how long it took him to seek out the therapy?
You seem to think he sought therapy, instead of the obvious, got a beard
Biden Is CRUSHING His Chances At Re-Election
A Return to Morality
Wonderful comic on the religious rights new golden child’s take over of the house. Be afraid, be very afraid but more importantly fight back and stop this return to the 18th century. Hugs
True Facts: Incredible Crab Stories
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson Hates Nearly All of Us
https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2023/10/speaker-of-house-mike-johnson-hates.html
I want to thank Ten Bears for the link to this web site. I am going to do the non-WordPress version of follow on it. Here is the link from Ten bears’ page with the links. https://homelessonthehighdesert.com/2023/10/29/last-week-in-god-33/ Hugs. Scottie
Liquor laws in Louisiana are a clusterfuck. Because of a state supreme court decision decades ago, they are subject to the whims of a community vote whenever someone can get it on the ballot. So a town can allow alcohol sales in, say, restaurants for a while and then, whenever some opportunistic Christian dickflea gets enough people itching, they can vote to overturn the law and go back to being a dry town or county. Or, you know, parish, as they call counties in the state because Catholicism.
The decent-sized, if generally shitty, town of Minden in the generally shitty Webster Parish was dry in 2003. Minden is 30 miles from Shreveport, which is a decent-sized, if generally shitty, city. The economy of Minden was not doing great 20 years ago, so a group of business owners, with the support of the Chamber of Commerce, wanted to have another vote on allowing alcohol sales in restaurants, hoping that it would attract some chains to town or at least provide a new tax revenue stream. Minden had been dry since a vote in 1974, but after a contentious city council meeting in August 2003, it was decided that the restaurant alcohol sales law would be decided in a special election just a couple of months later.
The people against allowing alcohol sales were straight out of a 1980s movie about tight-ass evangelicals refusing to allow anyone to have fun. Their warnings were like the lyrics of The Music Man song “Ya Got Trouble.” According to one local columnist, “They expanded from simply claiming this was a back-door was to bring about bars and package sales to more extreme connections. They alleged this was an ‘end-around’ to bring sexually oriented businesses, such as strip clubs to Minden. They also pointed out it could be an attempt to bring legalized gambling into Minden.” Churches went into overdrive, with prayer services just to try to get their invisible sky wizard to intervene. They even had round-the-clock prayers just before the election date.
The anti-fun forces, led by five plaintiffs, tried to sue to stop the election, but they filed their lawsuit too late for it to be heard. Their lawyer was a Shreveport attorney who was making a name for himself as a supporter of nutzoid right-wing Christiand causes. And since you read the title of this piece, you already know that it was Mike Johnson, who is now Speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency. That’s right. Two decades ago, he was trying to stop alcohol sales in a town.
The voting occurred that November and over half the registered voters went out to the polls. That’s how much this meant in an off-year election. And, Lord have mercy, they voted 57-43% in favor of alcohol sales in restaurants in Minden. Johnson’s clients considered another lawsuit to question the elections results, but they decided against it, and Minden restaurants and now bars and, yes, casinos can serve alcohol. The nearest strip joint is still about 15 miles away, in the next parish over.
For years, Mike Johnson represented the shittiest fucking people in trying to halt others from having rights or enjoying life in a way that harmed no one. As a dick lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom (motto: “‘Freedom’ should probably be in quotation marks in our name”), Johnson was on the fucked up side of issue after issue in our bullshit culture war. He fought the city of New Orleans to stop it from offering domestic partnership benefits in the pre-Obergefell days. The law had been in place since 1999, and they sued in 2003 in a case they lost in 2005. He opposed the Obama abortion pill mandate, he sued in favor of various school prayer cases, and more. When it comes to abortion and LGBTQ rights, Johnson is the hardest of the hardcore opposing both. And when he was a state representative, in the panicked days before the Obergefell same-sex marriage decision in 2015, Johnson sponsored legislation that would allow businesses to refuse to serve same-sex couples and, going back to his earlier case, would allow a business to deny benefits to same-sex couples because of “religious” reasons.
And perhaps it’s here that we need to pause for a moment and say that Mike Johnson loves God. His version of God, I mean, since, you know, God is made up. But he fuckin’ loves God as intensely and loudly as a newly-out Omaha lesbian loves pussy. He leans Christian dominionist, which is as weird and insidious as it sounds. He says that the United States is a “biblical republic,” whatever the fuck that means. He told Sean Hannity, “Someone asked me today in the media, they said people are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun? I said, Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview, that’s what I believe.” I wonder if that includes all the rules in Leviticus, but I don’t want to ask about beard-shaving regimen.
In his speech before being sworn in as Speaker of the House, he said, “I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night. I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a manner like this. I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us, and I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time.”
I know they don’t give a shit what heathens like me think, but that shit sounds creepy as fuck. You’re telling me that your imaginary invisible sky wizard contorted all time and space and made everything in the universe move in such a way that you could become the leader of one house of the American Congress. That’s fucking insane because, see, first, you believe in an invisible sky wizard, and, even worse, you have no problem telling me what your invisible sky wizard is doing and saying, and, even worser, you demand that I follow what your invisible sky wizard says. You can say that there are lots of people who believe in your invisible sky wizard, but that doesn’t make it less creepy. In fact, it makes it way creepier.
While Johnson talks a lot about “consensus” and shit, he sure has spent his career, including trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, approaching every issue with the clear-eyed resolution of someone who just loves to make shit worse for everyone except those who also hate nearly all of us. It won’t be some god who ruins the nation. It’ll be a very weird man.
(Quick note about Minden, Louisiana: It sucks as a town. But, man, there are awesome soul food joints there.)
