Hi all. Remember that I said that as they age some people couldn’t accept the changes in society, so long for a prior time when they felt more comfortable with the way things were. I got some push back on that. Well Beau explains that phenomena far better than I did. He says that the republicans base their policies on the core age group of the party’s memories growing up of TV shows from 10 to 15 years before. He also shows how the attempt to return to a fictitious past won’t work, and that the rights attempt to deny the rights / existence of the LGBTQIA simply is doomed even as they try ever harder. Please watch the video, I watched it three times. Got more out of it each time. Hugs. Scottie
What is it with this time in history that we have such a hard push by one political party to remove rights and remove protections from individuals. For most of this country’s history, we moved toward expanding rights, to removing barriers and expanding opportunities for oppressed people. Now the right / republicans are all about denying healthcare rights for women and trans people, denying the right to equal treatment in services, public spaces, housing, and even in expressing publicly support for the oppressed. For example, taking away reproductive rights from women, and making illegal medically approved gender affirming best practices promoted by all the major medical associations. Allowing public businesses to refuse services to anyone they think is gay or trans or has a religion the businesses disagree with, such as wedding planners, restaurants, home renters, adoption services, and even restricting movies / books based on dislike for LGBTQIA characters or plots. Why do the republicans need to promote hate, why not just live and let live? Hugs. Scottie
Iowa Republican lawmakers have again proposed removing protections against discrimination for transgender people from the Iowa Civil Rights Act — and this time a key committee chair says he’s open to the conversation.
GOP lawmakers, who hold majorities in the Iowa House and Senate, have filed several bills over the past few years seeking to remove gender identity as one of the protected classes in the state’s civil rights law. But those bills have not received hearings.
This year, Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison, has scheduled a subcommittee hearing on House File 2082, which would remove gender identity protections from the civil rights law and add gender dysphoria “or any condition related to a gender identity disorder” to the definition of a disability that would be protected under the law.
“I just want to hear a conversation about it,” Holt said. “I want to have a subcommittee and hear a conversation about it.”
In 2020, Holt used his position as Judiciary Committee chair to kill a similar bill that would have removed gender identity protections from the civil rights law.
The hearing, where the public can speak to lawmakers about the bill, will be held Wednesday at noon in room 102 of the Iowa State Capitol.
Keenan Crow, the policy and advocacy director for One Iowa, a group that advocates for LGBTQ rights, called Holt’s position “alarming.”
“Whenever you have somebody who’s willing to have a conversation about removing the civil rights of an entire class of people, that’s not a good conversation to be having,” Crow said. “Those rights should not be up for debate. Transgender people should be able to rent houses, get credit cards, get loans, go buy a sandwich, rent a hotel room, just like anybody else should be able to.”
The Iowa Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, ancestry, disability and gender identity. Lawmakers added the protections for gender identity in 2007 when Democrats held the Iowa Legislature and governor’s office.
People who fall under one of the protected classes in the civil rights law are protected from discrimination in employment, wages, public accommodations, housing, education and credit practices.
Holt said he believes transgender people would still have protections under Iowa and federal law even if lawmakers stripped gender identity out of the civil rights act.
“I think there’s plenty of other places in federal and in state law that would prevent discrimination,” he said. “Because I think we should all be opposed to discrimination based upon someone’s skin color or gender identity or whatever the case may be.”
Holt called it “an interesting concept” to look at specifying that gender dysphoria could qualify as a disability that merits protection. He pointed to a U.S. Supreme Court decision last summer that found people with gender dysphoria are protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Crow said because that court decision is already on the books, adding gender dysphoria as a disability wouldn’t provide any additional protections. But it could harm low-income transgender Iowans who can’t afford to go to the doctor to receive a diagnosis, they said.
“Now they don’t have any housing protections and a landlord can literally just say, ‘no, I don’t want you in my space, you’re transgender,'” they said. “And there’s nothing that that person can do about it. So this is an extremely dangerous, extremely harmful bill.”
Holt didn’t guarantee that the bill would advance beyond the subcommittee hearing, but said he believes it’s time to have a conversation.
“I still have concerns about this, but I at least want to have the conversation and see where it goes,” Holt said.
Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.
Same here. Ever since a black man became president I’ve seen nothing but an escalation in hate in this country. It’s like a huge swath of this country decided that anyone who is not white, straight, male and Christian is subhuman and need to have their rights taken away. I am disgusted with my country.
Welcome to the white fundamentalist maga paradise, Florida. The purge is well on the way. Again the goal is to remove / wipe out all representation of LGBTQIA from public society. Also part of the goal is to return black / brown people to a lower stature and keep them there. To stop any integration or upward movement of the minority groups. These people demand a return to the time whenwhite males were automatically in charge, Christianity was the assumed only real religion and all things Christian were good, women were subservient to males and functioned to do for men in the home / public / bedroom, blacks knew their place and stayed there, and the LGBTQIA were not seen or heard of terrified of being found out. That is the world these people are fighting to have. Florida is well on the way. They have basically outlawed the teaching of acceptance or inclusion of any group not dedicated to white people or Christianity. They have removed any representation of LGBTQIA or racism from schools. They have rewritten history, legislated being cis, being straight until adult, legislated having a small groups of bigoted racist parents over ruling all other parents on what school age kids can do, read, see, say, and do medically. They call anything not right wing fundamentalist maga is indoctrination. Welcome to Florida, a state run by Christian Taliban with help from the moral police. Hugs. Scottie
The Florida Board of Governors voted to prohibit using state funding for public university programs or activities that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Students at the University of North Florida protested the imminent closing of the school’s four diversity centers, including the campus LGBTQ center, on Wednesday.
The protest took place the day the Florida Board of Governors, the governing body of the State University System of Florida, voted to prohibit funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and activities at the state’s public universities. The vote comes several months after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a measure into law banning all of the state’s public higher education institutions from using state or federal funding for diversity programs.
UNF, in Jacksonville, will close its Office of Diversity and Inclusion — and, with it, its interfaith, intercultural, women’s and LGBTQ centers — to comply with the new law, President Moaz Limayem said in a letter to the university community Wednesday night.
Limayem said the four university centers will be “phased out” immediately but added that registered student organizations that aim to promote diversity will remain active on the university’s campus and that no staffers will lose their jobs. He did not weigh in on student protests or on his views about the state policy.
“We want UNF to be a place where all people feel safe and welcome, and where there is no place for hate,” Limayem said. “This semester, we will begin seeking ways to reinforce UNF’s values in everything we do, and we will review and expand resources as necessary to ensure success for all members of our campus community.”
Cassandra Edwards, a spokesperson for the university system, said in an email Thursday that Florida “will remain focused on high-quality education for our students and not allow indoctrination.”
UNF student Lissie Morales was among the protesters, many of whom were waving rainbow Pride flags and shouting: “What do we do? Stand up, fight back!”
“The center provided me friends; it provided me education to learn more about my gender and sexual orientation,” Morales told NBC affiliate WTLV of Jacksonville. “In regard to the turnout, it warms my heart to see people care about something as much as I do, especially when it comes to the LGBT center, because it was one of the reasons why I came to UNF in the first place.”
In 2022, UNF was among 40 institutions on Campus Pride’s list of best universities for LGBTQ students.
Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former Florida House Democrat who is a policy adviser at the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida, called the new state law “a rubber stamp for Ron DeSantis’s agenda of censorship and surveillance.”
“The Board of Governors had the opportunity to hit the brakes, but instead, shamefully followed their censorship agenda off a cliff in service to DeSantis’s failed political ambitions,” Smith said in a statement Wednesday.
A representative for DeSantis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The regulation comes as Florida continues to build on its reputation for enacting anti-LGBTQ laws and legislation aimed at limiting diversity initiatives.
Dozens of UNF students attend a rally in support of the school’s LGBTQ center. WTLV
Florida made national headlines when it enacted what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law in 2022, which limited the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools in kindergarten through third grade. DeSantis signed a bill last year that expanded the law to apply to students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Last year, Florida lawmakers prompted outcry for blocking an Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in high schools.
Since the start of the year, Florida lawmakers have introduced roughly a dozen anti-LGBTQ bills. They include a sweeping measure that would force Floridians to sign an affidavit when they apply for new driver’s licenses and state IDs to certify that the gender markers on their birth certificates will match their new IDs. Another bill would allow some published accusations of homophobia and transphobia to be considered “defamation per se.”
Student protests over Florida’s policies about LGBTQ issues have also become common. In November, students at a high school in Coconut Creek, about 15 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, staged a walkout after their principal and other school staffers were reprimanded for letting a transgender girl compete on the school’s girls volleyball team.
Students at the University of North Florida protested the imminent closing of the school’s four diversity centers, including the campus LGBTQ center. https://t.co/gt8e8q3kS4
Exactly! My whole youth was steeped in the straight world, I knew not one gay person and had zero history of the gay movement, yet I still turned out gay.
Same for the rest of us. This is how we can tell that the evangelicals are completely, utterly delusional; and why they’re a minority now in the US. Dems need to vote them out. If they refuse the evangelicals will begin their new Spanish Inquisition.
The War on Women’s Rights The War on LGBT Rights The War on Voting Rights The War on Oversight The War on Accountability The War on the Elderly The War on The Arts
From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling cast, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.
They forget about that whole pesky “separation of church and state”. If the Roberts court is a “traditionalist” court, more states should be challenging the unconstitutional legislation passed in many States (esp the Federal Gov as this is setting up a State vs Federal legal battle), otherwise the Supreme Court will have to justify their reason for overturning Roe and much more. Not that it matters but it’s important for the public to understand.
In this video you will see the photos of a kid, yes a young teen who to me looks 13, just home from Israeli detention after being held and beaten for four hours, he was then charged and released for a later court date where he will be found guilty. Once found guilty, the kid will be taken to a prison in side Israel where his family and any friends are not allowed to see him. He will have no rights, and no one to help him.
Picked up off the street, he was then beaten and abused. Israeli spokes people are on every major news network claiming how brutal Hamas is, how they must be destroyed even if that means killing every Palestinian, man, women, and child. Right now the confirmed totals are over 24,000 dead, 10,000 are children. The estimated total is around 32,000 dead, another 64,000 injured and maimed. This is the way Israel has long treated Palestinian children in detention, the Palestinians have long asked the international community for help in stopping it. But no one could, because Israel treats Palestinians as bad or worse than black in apartheid South African and almost as bad as black slaves in the US. Listen to how many Palestinian kids, minors from the West Bank where there is no Hamas in charge are taken in to custody and tried by military courts, they have no rights in these courts, nor does their families. This is why there is no peace, why Hamas attacks Israelis. Yet Netanyahu brags about denying the Palestinians a state and calls them animals. Hugs. Scottie
Hundreds of Palestinian children are arrested by the Israeli military every year for throwing rocks at occupying forces. They are tried in Israeli Military Courts and human Rights organisations say the trials lack due process and are against international law. Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford reports from Abu Dis in the occupied West Bank.
Below there is another short video. Please notice the date on this one. It was ten years ago. This is how they treated Palestinians ten years ago, how much worse do they treat them now! This time of the Israeli military detaining, taking a five year old because he was throwing stones, they go collect the boy’s father. Notice the video of the father and boy in custody, the father is bound and blindfolded. He can not help his five year old son, and neither have rights under the military occupation. While this is illegal internation Israel claims the child, a five year old, was a threat. While they claim he was not arrested, think of the lifelong trauma of being taken, his father humiliated and unable to even comfort him. Think he grew up to support Israel, or be another Hamas soldier? Hugs. Scottie
Jul 12, 2013
Video footage has emerged of a 5-year-old Palestinian child being detained by the Israeli army.
Below in another video only one year ago, a 7 year old boy dies from fear while being chased by Israeli soldiers. Children so scared of soldiers they fear them to death. Why would a 7 yr old be so scared? This was the West bank, not even Gaza, and again no Hamas. Think to the many stories of abuse that are and have been coming out that Israel has long denied. Seems they were true. What other horrors is Israel lying about. The people there claim the main goal of the army is to cause this fear and maintain complete control. These are an occupied people in an open air prison. No wonder they fight back, wouldn’t you? Hugs. Scottie
Thousands of Palestinians have taken part in the funeral of seven-year-old Rayyan Sulaiman in the village of Tuqu near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank. His family says he died out of fear after Israeli soldiers chased children in the village. The Palestinian Health Ministry says efforts to resuscitate him failed. Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim reports from the occupied West Bank.
The mistreatment continues. This video was only 7 months ago, at the start of last summer. By that time Israeli soldiers had already killed 155 Palestinians in the West Bank. Remember the US military sniper that loved to kill little brown children in Afghanistan, he murdered detained prisoners by knifing them, he was brought up on charged yet tRump as commander in chief made the military give him back his awards and pardoned him. Well Israel has lots of soldiers like him that feel that way towards the Palestinians. They are nothing, they are simply fun targets to hurt, kill, torture, and destroy. Like a live action video game. Below the Israeli solders shoot a car with a man and a toddler … because they can. Hugs. Scottie.
188,662 views Jun 6, 2023
Two-year-old Mohammad Tamimi — who was injured along with his father after being shot by Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank — has died. Though the Israeli army says the toddler was mistakenly shot, the child’s father has denied the narrative
Just five days ago this inexcusable horror happened, Israeli soldiers stormed a building and in front of the family members stripped, tortured and beat the men, then executed them. Like a gang of thugs on prey. Then they left and knowing the women and children were still in there, Israeli solders shelled the building. Horrible. Hugs. Scottie
A Palestinian family in Gaza says they witnessed the summary execution of 15 men when Israeli soldiers raided their apartment last month.
Again please look at the date. A year ago. Two crying terrified children, not even teenagers. Their crime, being Palestinian. This is why there is no peace for Israel! This is why there is anger. The story says the soldiers arrested the kids, that means they did not go home, but instead into detention for processing. Reports say this can take a day to four months, and the child has no rights, no legal council, even their family is often not notified. It is complete terrorism. It is designed to harass and break the Palestinian people, to try to get them to self deport to where they will have a chance for a decent life. This short clip says it all. A 6 or 7 year old kid begging and crying out “What will happen to us” and “What are they going to do to us”. What are they going to do to us … if that was your child would you like the people / government that did that? Or would you want to hurt them back. Hugs.
An Israeli soldier appears to arrest two frightened Palestinian children in occupied East Jerusalem
There are more, it seems an unending amount of these videos. Going back decades. Now that I have watched a few, the grand YouTube pusher wants me to view them all. I can not. I have done my part. I just beg that others who can do more not only stop Israel, but punish them for what they are doing. Hugs. Scottie
A new rule proposed by the Biden Administration would protect LGBTQ+ youth in the foster care system by requiring adoption agencies to place them in homes that affirm their sexual orientations and gender identities. Republicans, however, have come out in opposition to the change.
This is the most important issue the republicans think they have to deal with. Trans and gay people / kids. Not kids being hungry, not schools shootings, not educations test scores or financing. Nope what bathroom a person can use and what medical treatment is available.
The republicans think they have a winning issue with their base because these are hate bills, socially regressive bills. But these are a driven minority fueled either by hate or driven by religious beliefs, possibly both. The majority rejects that hate, that bigotry, that demand to control how others live. These anti-trans bills mirror the anti-gay bills of the 1970s, and that mirrored the anti-race integration. It is all about resisting changes in society and inclusion of those who are different. It is about not progressing, instead wanting things to never change. But look at history, every generation advances society in some way, with causing more friction with the older generations, that forget they changed society of their elders also. Think of the bathroom bills and then think how white people did not want to share bathrooms or any place with black people. The bathroom bills trying to keep trans kids from public bathrooms and out of locker rooms is the same bullshit that I faced as a gay man, these same people wanted to keep me from using bathrooms, using locker rooms claiming gay men would sexually attack straight men. Sounds just like trans women would attack cis women. The bills about keep trans people out of sports are very like the racial segregated sports teams in the 1950, claiming first black people were inferior then also saying that black men would take over the sports winning over the whites. Does it all sound so familiar. It is the same hate, same bigotry, just repackaged to use against a new group for these people to hate.
Also these people just refuse to accept well known documented medical science / studies that show people are not made gay or trans, but born that way. You cannot force a straight person to be gay, and you can not force a gay person to be straight. Also while these bills forbid any mention of a non-cisgender or non-straight orientation, that requires the forced reinforcement of cis heterosexuality. Hugs. Scottie
The state is considering 41 other bills attacking transgender rights this year.
An opponent of one of several anti-trans bills testifies before the Missouri House Emerging Issues Committee.Photo: Screenshot
Lawmakers in both the Missouri House of Representatives and Senate debated a total of eight anti-transgender bills in a single day this week.
The measures, affecting trans people’s ability to access healthcare, bathrooms, and other facilities, and legal recognition of their gender identity, represent just a fraction of the 49 anti-trans bills Missouri Republicans have already introduced this month. Trans journalist Erin Reed described the latest wave of proposed laws as “a firehose of legislation that touches every aspect of trans people’s lives.”
State law allows the university to provide gender-affirming care, but it still refuses to do so.
On Wednesday, Missouri’s Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee heard testimony on S.B. 728, one of two bills, which would establish a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” in the state. Among other provisions affecting school curriculum, S.B. 728 “prohibits public school officials from encouraging a student under the age of eighteen years old to adopt a gender identity or sexual orientation.” It also requires school officials to “inform a student’s parent within twenty-four hours if the student expresses confusion about their documented identity or requests to use personal pronouns that differ from their documented identity” and to “obtain written parental consent before allowing a student to use a name other than the name provided by the parent when registering the student for school and before encouraging a student to wear certain items of clothing.”
Effectively, the bill requires schools to out suspected trans and nonbinary students to their parents.
The committee was also scheduled to hear S.B. 770, another “Parents’ Bill of Rights” measure that included a ban on transgender girls participating in school-sponsored girls’ athletic teams. The hearing on S.B. 770 was canceled, however.
Meanwhile, in a nine-hour hearing, the state’s House Emerging Issues Committee took up seven separate anti-trans measures.
Two bills sponsored by Missouri state Rep. Brad Hudson (R) target access to gender-affirming healthcare. H.B. 1519 would allow healthcare professionals—including, as Reed noted, pharmacists, desk workers, and nurses—to refuse to treat trans people receiving gender-affirming care. During public testimony, opponents of the bill noted that it would not only legalize discrimination but could also result in cisgender, nonbinary, and intersex people being denied medication by providers who mistakenly assume they are trying to access gender-affirming treatment.
This witness talks about how the same medications given to them (they didn't give pronouns, genderfluid) for their transition are the same ones given to cis men for hair loss, talks about the hatred the laws create. pic.twitter.com/3EH1eS9MLm
Hudson’s H.B. 1520, meanwhile, aims to strengthen and extend Missouri’s “Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act.” Signed by Gov. Mike Parson (R) last June, the law banned all gender-affirming care for minors but included an exception for trans young people who are already receiving such care, as well as a sunset provision, causing the law to expire in August 2027. H.B. 1520 would remove those provisions, forcing trans minors who are currently receiving gender-affirming care to detransition and extending the law beyond the 2027 expiration date.
State Rep. Ashley Aune (D) noted that the sunset provision was included in the SAFE Act so that lawmakers could assess the law’s “unintended consequences.” Hudson responded that there is already “enough evidence out there” and that he knows “these drugs are not good for kids.”
In fact, every major American medical association has acknowledged that gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, is evidence-based, safe, and effective for the treatment of gender dysphoria.
The committee also heard testimony on four bills aimed at banning transgender Missourians from using bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their gender identity. Proponents of such laws almost universally focus, without evidence, on the supposed threat transgender women pose to cis women in public restrooms. But during Wednesday’s hearing, opponents noted that, far from alleviating any discomfort, the bills would force masculine-presenting trans men to use women’s restrooms and also endanger trans women forced to use men’s facilities while doing nothing to prevent actual predators from accessing women’s bathrooms.
"Did you get this language from the Heritage foundation?"
Also, if you force trans men into women's bathrooms, you force people like this into women's bathrooms. A person could just as easily, if they want to use the "Wrong bathroom," claim they are a trans man if this bill passes. pic.twitter.com/sMBhYtFXg9
Rep Aune: "In a situation where you are in public, if a law went into place that required you to use the restroom as defined in this bill, would that leave you using women's restrooms?"
Additionally, one of the bathroom bills introduced by state Rep. Adam Schnelting (R), H.B. 2308, would legally define the terms “male” and “female” according to a person’s reproductive biology.
Similarly, H.B. 2309, also introduced by Schnelting, aims to legally redefine “gender” as synonymous with biological sex. According to Reed, the bill would end any legal recognition of transgender people in the state and would likely affect the gender markers on their birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and other forms of ID.
Schnelting testified that his bills would affect “bathrooms, dorms, shelters, everything” and might even “nullify sex-specific scholarships” given to trans individuals.
Democrats on the committee blasted their Republican colleagues’ seemingly single-minded focus on limiting the rights of transgender Missourians. State Rep. David Tyson Smith (D), who noted that Republicans make up 40 percent of his constituents, argued that people want lawmakers to address “inflation, grocery store prices.”
“People are wondering why we are spending time on this,” Smith said.
State Rep. Doug Mann (D) sounded an even more urgent alarm. “When it became no longer acceptable to be anti-gay in public, people moved to being anti-trans,” he said. “When you start to attack an already vulnerable group of people, you do not stop with that already vulnerable group of people.”
“I’m going to be honest, I do not trust that this is the end,” Mann said of the anti-trans bills. “Everything I have seen as a student of history, as a student from politics, as a student of government, tells me that it is going to go farther. Things are going to get worse, not better.”
The right lives on hate, racism, and bigotry. They can not allow other religions, minorities, people different from them to have the same rights and opportunities. For some reason they feel that others having the same rights they have makes them less than, makes them lessor as people. They take no joy in the happiness and success of others. They hate the inclusion of anyone slightly different from them, and they react with temper tantrums. Look at the meanness towards and smug superiority they think they have over others. Instead of admiring the skill of the flight crew, the pilots and the plane stewards that saved lives, these people mock and slur others. Hugs. Scottie
They’re blaming airline safety issues on disabled people, Black people, women, and drag queens to gin up anti-diversity sentiment.
Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock
Conservatives are angry that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been, for at least a decade, trying to expand the diversity of its workforce, and they’re blaming gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
A terrifying video of a door blowing off Alaska Airlines flight 1282 went viral earlier this month. No one died, but the Boeing 737 Max 9 was forced to return to the airport and make an emergency landing. Some loose bolts around doors were found when other planes of the same type were later inspected.
She didn’t hesitate to launch homophobic attacks on the out Transportation Secretary and his husband, but now that she wants some of that cash for her district, she’s trying to play nice.
“The FAA is the latest victim of the radical [diversity, equity, and inclusion] agenda,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on social media this week. “Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with ‘severe intellectual disabilities.’ How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being hired based on DEI rather than qualifications for the position?”
DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” workplace policies that seek to hire and support candidates from diverse backgrounds. Right-wingers have increasingly targeted these policies as a “woke” form of “identity politics” while ignoring the workplace disparities that they seek to address.
The FAA is the latest victim of the radical DEI agenda.
Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with 'severe intellectual disabilities.'
How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being…
Boebert was likely referring to a story that spread like wildfire on conservative media. The conservative New York Post ran a story about the FAA policy – which the Post stressed is “overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation” – with the headline, “FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities.”
The story noted that the FAA has a diversity statement on its site that says it recruits people with disabilities, including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
X CEO Elon Musk shared the Post’s story and wrote: “Just had a conversation with some smart people could not believe this is happening.” He also shared a post that claimed that Black airline employees lower the “average IQ of US Air Force pilots.”
The problem with their explanation? The policy has been on the FAA since at least 2013, during the Obama administration, and the Trump administration didn’t do anything to remove it. The Post’s story didn’t mention the fact that the policy is from 2013 and instead just noted that the FAA’s website was updated in 2022, which isn’t a relevant fact to the story but may have been intended to imply that the policy was put in place during Buttigieg’s tenure.
“The FAA employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions,” the FAA said in a statement. The FAA has 45,000 employees. “Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that, of course, will vary by position.”
Snopes noted that the rightwing “media coverage provided no evidence linking any DEI initiative with the Alaska Airlines incident” and that the investigation into the Alaska Airlines flight is still ongoing.
But disabled and Black people aren’t the only group that conservatives are blaming for the incident. Hate influencer and former realtor Chaya Raichik – whose Libs of TikTok account has been massively influential in spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and has led to hospitals getting bomb threats and queer and trans teachers getting death threats – decided it was women’s fault.
That’s because Southwest Airlines made an innocuous post about an all-women flight crew shortly after the Alaska Airlines incident.
“All female flight crew? Go off, queens!” the Southwest Airlines’s X post read. The post included a picture of six smiling women in a plane.
“They’re openly mocking us,” Raichik wrote, sharing the post. “They know what they’re doing.” The implication was that supporting women in the workplace was somehow inappropriate following the incident in the Alaska Airlines flight.
Her post was viewed around 300,000 times and widely shared on the platform. Southwest later deleted their post celebrating the women.
Later in the week, Raichik raged at United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby doing drag at a Halloween party in 2011. Kirby is married to a woman and has seven children with her, but being a stereotypically masculine, straight, cisgender white man wasn’t enough to protect him from the right’s grievances about diversity in the workforce.
“This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of United. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into United,” Raichik wrote. “This video should tell you everything you need to know.”
This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of @united. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into @united.
Anti-trans activist and fifth-place swimmer Riley Gaines responded to the video, writing, “It’s time to bring back shame.” She also wrote that people “fly United at your own risk,” not explaining exactly how she connected the video to flight safety.
Cisgender, heterosexual white men on the right have donned drag in the past without controversy, including Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) boyfriend, rightwing media personality Brian Glenn. Greene, who has protested drag queen shows in the past, laughed off claims that there was anything inappropriate about her boyfriend doing drag because it happened “years ago.” The same grace, though, apparently doesn’t apply to CEOs of airlines that support diversity in the workplace.
Buttigieg, for his part, assured travelers that he has confidence in the FAA’s ability to keep flights safe, noting that they grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets for further inspection following the Alaska Airlines incident. He explained that FAA staff is putting in extra hours to get to the root of the problem.
“I have confidence in any aircraft cleared by the FAA,” he told reporters last week. “The FAA’s doing a great job and [FAA Administrator] Mike Whitaker’s doing a great job.”
He added that, as a father, the images of the plane with the door blown out affected him.
“Anybody looking at those pictures has to be thinking about what you’d do in that situation,” he said, explaining that he was just on a flight with one of his children. “That is what’s on our mind.”
Stephen Gruber-Miller
Des Moines Register
An opponent of one of several anti-trans bills testifies before the Missouri House Emerging Issues Committee.Photo: Screenshot
Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock
Scottie's Playtime 