WATCH: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”🤔😳
Desantis/FLORIDA’s Ed Dept approved Prager U indoctrination videos to be taught (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens as narrators) which teach kids slavery was better than the alternative: https://t.co/cJWcVLiiUWpic.twitter.com/Hng5fsg8r8
Florida’s latest curriculum—featuring cartoon Christopher Columbus explaining, “being taken as a slave is better than being killed!” and telling time-traveling kids that slavery was “no big deal.”
This is the kind of propaganda DeSantis and his friends at PragerU are teaching… pic.twitter.com/wPY8USFzhQ
Weird. Why are these white supremacist fascists upset about being identified as white supremacist fascists. No white fascist pride? Patriot Front members sue activist who infiltrated, identified them. Kudos to the activist who infiltrated them! https://t.co/fZq3PxFkpv
Ali sent us the link and as she mentions the state is trying to have it both ways, the fetus is a person from conception for forcing the pregnant person to carry even dead or dying fetuses to term, pay the costs for all the medical care along with funeral / burial costs as added punishment. But when it comes to hardship for the state, costing the state money, or putting requirements on republicans they claim that personhood from conception is stupid and not legally recognized. Hugs
DALLAS (AP) — The state of Texas is questioning the legal rights of an “unborn child” in arguing against a lawsuit brought by a prison guard who says she had a stillborn baby because prison officials refused to let her leave work for more than two hours after she began feeling intense pains similar to contractions.
The argument from the Texas attorney general’s office appears to be in tension with positions it has previously taken in defending abortion restrictions, contending all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court that “unborn children” should be recognized as people with legal rights.
It also contrasts with statements by Texas’ Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who has touted the state’s abortion ban as protecting “every unborn child with a heartbeat.”
The state attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to questions about its argument in a court filing that an “unborn child” may not have rights under the U.S. Constitution. In March, lawyers for the state argued that the guard’s suit “conflates” how a fetus is treated under state law and the Constitution.
“Just because several statutes define an individual to include an unborn child does not mean that the Fourteenth Amendment does the same,” they wrote in legal filing that noted that the guard lost her baby before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion established under its landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
That claim came in response to a federal lawsuit brought last year by Salia Issa, who alleges that hospital staff told her they could have saved her baby had she arrived sooner. Issa was seven months’ pregnant in 2021, when she reported for work at a state prison in the West Texas city of Abilene and began having a pregnancy emergency.
Her attorney, Ross Brennan, did not immediately offer any comment. He wrote in a court filing that the state’s argument is “nothing more than an attempt to say — without explicitly saying — that an unborn child at seven months gestation is not a person.”
While working at the prison, Issa began feeling pains “similar to a contraction” but when she asked to be relived from her post to go to the hospital her supervisors refused and accused her of lying, according to the complaint she filed along with her husband. It says the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s policy states that a corrections officer can be fired for leaving their post before being relived by another guard.
Issa was eventually relieved and drove herself to the hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery, the suit says.
Issa, whose suit was first reported by The Texas Tribune, is seeking monetary damages to cover her medical bills, pain and suffering, and other things, including the funeral expenses of the unborn child. The state attorney general’s office and prison system have asked a judge to dismiss the case.
Laura Hermer, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, described Texas’ legal posture as “seeking to have their cake and eat it too.”
“This would not be the first time that the state has sought to claim to support the right to life of all fetuses, yet to act quite differently when it comes to protecting the health and safety of such fetuses other than in the very narrow area of prohibiting abortions,” Hermer said.
Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower recommended that the case be allowed to proceed, in part, without addressing the arguments over the rights of the fetus.
00:00 Introduction 2:22 Sodom (Genesis 19) 7:48 (NEW) Sodom Additional Commentary 10:20 Romans1:26-27 16:00 Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 21:06 (NEW) Fourth theory on Leviticus 23:22 First Timothy 1:9-11 // First Corinthians 6:9-10 28:41 Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve
During the Fall of 2020, my college course on the “Theologies of Gender and Identity” was forced to go virtual. This video is one of the pre-recorded lectures from that course that I would like to share with a larger audience. Feel free to respectfully comment and question and I will respond in kind.
This lecture explores the traditional “texts of terror” or “clobber passages” that have been used to justify the marginalization of the LGBTQ people — namely Genesis 19 (Sodom); Romans 1:26-27; Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; 1 Timothy 1:9-11 // 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; and Genesis 1-2 (Adam and Eve). For each passage, we’ll apply exegetical tools to determine whether or not this marginalization is justified.
The format of this lecture features a compilation of previous videos from this channel’s Queer Theology series. Most of these videos have been updated and include an additional commentary in between each topic.
Recommended Reading: “Misguided Love: Christians and the Rupture of LGBTQI2+ People” by Charles Fensham; Chapter 4.
A growing network of foreign organisations are pouring hundreds of millions of euros into “culture war” groups campaigning to roll back LGBTQ+ rights across Europe, European lawmakers have warned.
In a resolution published earlier this month, the European Parliament raised the alarm about foreign interference in all democratic processes in Europe,pointing out that most of the foreign funding originates from Russia and the US.
This foreign interference, coupled with disinformation and numerous attacks perpetrated by malicious foreign actors, is predicted to increase in the lead-up to the European Parliament elections in 2024, becoming more sophisticated in nature.
MEPs flagged that at least 50 organisations now fund anti-gender activities — opposing what they call gender ideology.
“Europe is seeing a growing number of anti-gender movements, specifically targeting sexual and reproductive health, women’s rights and LGBTIQ+ people,” the EU parliamentary report read.
“Such movements proliferate disinformation in order to reverse progress in women’s rights and gender equality. These movements have been reported to receive millions of euros in foreign funding, either public or private, including from Russia and the US.”
Funding and modus operandi
The strategies employed by these foreign actors have evolved over time, due to increasing funding and intensifying disinformation campaigns, human rights observers have warned.
Members of the US far-right and the Russian Orthodox Church, two major players of the anti-gender movement, have joined forces to ramp up funding to Europe-based ultra-traditionalist actors with a specific focus on targeting LGBTQ+ rights, according to sources who agreed to speak to Euronews on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Over the past decade, key Christian right organisations, usually funded by private individuals linked to far-right and libertarian causes in the US, and Russian oligarchs have established a network of agencies set up in human rights institutions across Europe to carry out anti-gender diplomacy and infiltrate positions of power in member states.
Other tactics include abusive lawsuits intended to suppress, intimidate and silence critics (SLAPPS), money and reputational laundering, physical harassment, sending paid fight squads to LGBTQ+ marches or drag stores, hacking journalists’ devices with the Pegasus software and using troll farms spreading disinformation against LGBTQ+ activists.
And the movement is gaining momentum with more organisations from other countries, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Vatican City, closing ranks in their anti-LGBTQ+ lobbying and funding.
Their usual targets include minorities in unstable countries where they can exploit polarisation to radicalise the political debate and fuel violence, sources said.
Undermining the case for EU membership
Georgia’s gay pride festival on 8 July is the latest LGBTQ+ event to have fallen victim to foreign interference.
A mob of up to 2,000 anti-LGBTQ+ protestersfrom the Russian-affiliated group Alt Info, stormed Tbilisi’s festival in an attack described by Pride’s director Mariam Kvaratskhelia as “pre-planned”.
“I definitely think this [disruption] was a pre-planned, coordinated action between the government and the radical groups … We think this operation was planned in order to sabotage the EU candidacy of Georgia,” she told Reuters.
Members of Alt-Info, an ultra-conservative TV broadcaster with close ties to the Georgian Orthodox Church, had already disrupted Tbilisi Pride in 2021. Since its foundation as a conservative media platform in 2019, the group has tried to expand its political influence by creating an alternative party to both the governing Georgian Dream and opposition United National Movement. Among its stated goals is pursuing closer relations with Russia.
The former Soviet republic’s path to EU candidacy has been slowed by deeply polarised politics and the excessive influence of vested interests in economic, political and public life, alongside its territorial dispute with Russia in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions.
And the cancellation of its Pride festival could deal yet another blow to its EU aspiration.
Roberta Metsola, the President of the European Parliament, condemned the “violent disruptions”, saying “anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric, disinformation and violence have no place in these debates”. The counter-protests represented a violation to the EU’s freedom of expression and right to peaceful assembly, the EU Ambassador for Gender & Diversity tweeted.
Divide and conquer
The same tension has broken out across Western Balkan countries where leaders have struggled to walk a fine identity and political line between anti-LGBTQ+ religious nationalist movements and pro-LGBTQ+ Europeanising public opinion.
While these countries generally have high levels of political and public support for joining the EU, their progress towards membership has stagnated over the past decade.
Religious nationalism has posed a significant challenge, as leaders from the Serbian Orthodox church, the Catholic church, and Islamic authorities have rallied behind their targeting of LGBTQ+ rights and formed coalitions with conservative political parties.
In recent years, anti-LGBTQ+ actions have turned more violent, with physical assaults by ultranationalist protesters on attendees of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pride in March of this year, the Belgrade Pride in 2022 and the Zagreb Pride in 2021.
The controversy surrounding a veto that would have recognised same-sex unions in Serbia in 2021 is just another example of the growing conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ rights taking hold in Western Balkan countries.
‘The tip of the iceberg’
Yet, this trend is not unique to Western Balkan countries.
In 2021, the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) unearthed more than $707.2 million (€600 million) worth of anti-gender funding from the United States, the Russian Federation, and Europe, specifically targeting LGBTQ+ rights across Europe between 2009 and 2018.
The wide-ranging report, which examined 117 anti-gender funding actors active in Europe, insisted the findings were only the “tip of the iceberg” as half of them — 63 — had no existing financial data.
“Of course there are enormous data gaps that cannot be filled at the moment, so $700 million is really the tip of the iceberg of how big this anti-gender movement is,” said EPF’s secretary Neil Datta.
According to Evelyne Paradis, executive director of ILGA-Europe, the anti-gender movement’s efforts to further polarise public discourse is dragging pro-democracy governments into fuelling prejudice and hatred towards LGBTQ+ people.
“The practice of scapegoating LGBTQ+ people is starting to be instrumentalised by both the pro-democracy and the anti-democracy sides. If you make it a marker of how good you are, then you’re creating this divide,” she told Euronews.
“This [growing polarisation] is not helping what should be a healthier, calmer conversation. What’s happening at the moment is the complete opposite.”
Instead, Paradis said pro-democracy governments need to move forward with their progressive agenda and steer clear of the perverse effects of foreign-funded polarisation.
“We’re all in reaction mode and it’s very hard to resist and be in a pro-active mode. Governments need to pass through the anti-gender movement’s negative agenda and keep on pushing our positive agenda. That’s where the strategy of the opposition is working – it’s really pushing everybody in the reactive mode.”
Oh clutch my pearls, classical literature is not as pure as today’s fundamentalist Christian nationalist who just don’t want their children to get an education but they demand the right to stop your child or anyone from getting one. This is not about parental control, it is about one minor fundamentalist religious group having complete control over the education of all the children in the entire state. But only for public schools. The schools paid for with tax dollars and that educate the lower incomes. The private schools do not have to follow these stupid bigoted rules. My dogs that love gravy, this has been a Christian Taliban moral police take over. Next girls will only be allowed to attend school until the 8th grade and must wear ankle length dresses, and everyone will be in drab colors. Hugs
School district officials in Hillsborough County, Fla., have implemented a newly designed curriculum guide for English teachers that will see students reading only selections from William Shakespeare plays.
“There’s some raunchiness in Shakespeare. Because that’s what sold tickets during his time,” said Joseph Cool, a reading teacher at Gaither High School.
“I think the rest of the nation — no, the world, is laughing us,” he added. “Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.”
Schools in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa Bay and the surrounding area, are mostly assigning excerpts by the English language’s most famous writer. The schools previously required students to read two of Shakespeare’s novels or plays, in their entirety, per year.
The decision comes as educators must prepare students for a new set of state exams that cover a wide variety of subject matter, and also, “in consideration of the law,” according to a school district spokesperson, which means teaching it could open educators up to disciplinary measures if a parent were to file a complaint.
The “law” in question is the new Parental Rights in Education Act, which prohibits teaching any content that is sexual in nature.
Florida high schools are now removing Shakespeare, including the full text of “Romeo and Juliet,” to comply with Republicans’ new law restricting “sexual content.”
“I think the rest of the nation — no, the world, is laughing at us,” a teacher said.
If your kids are go to school in Tampa, thanks to bigly failing @GovRonDeSantis, they will read Shakespeare "while avoiding anything racy or sexual," i.e. "excerpts" from "Romeo & Juliet," "Othello," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Macbeth" not full plays https://t.co/jETfpNm6Vy
[Jerusalem] saw this, yet she was more corrupt than [Samaria] in her lusting and in her prostitutions, which were worse than those of her sister. She lusted after the Assyrians, governors and commanders, warriors clothed in full armor, mounted horsemen, all of them handsome young men. And I saw that she was defiled; they both took the same way. But she carried her prostitutions further; she saw male figures carved on the wall, images of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion, with belts around their waists, with flowing turbans on their heads, all of them looking like officers—a picture of Babylonians whose native land was Chaldea. When she saw them she lusted after them and sent messengers to them in Chaldea. And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their lust, and after she defiled herself with them, she turned from them in disgust. When she carried on her prostitutions so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned from her sister. Yet she increased her prostitutions, remembering the days of her youth, when she prostituted herself in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians fondled your bosom and caressed your young breasts. – Ezekiel 23:11-2
It is happening in Sarasota County too: “Teachers offloading books in DeSantis’ Florida, resellers say,” Aug. 4.
I work in a Sarasota County thrift store. This summer, the store has received thousands of books from schools and classroom libraries. They are marked with the names of teachers or schools.
It is clear from the wide variety of titles that teachers work hard to help every student feel validated and included in a diverse classroom.
I literally cried in the store when I saw the titles: Newbery Award and Honor Books, the highest award a children’s book can receive from the American Library Association, no longer available to children in their schools. Most of the books depict characters from minority and vulnerable populations.
Reading novels with characters that face struggles the reader does not experience develops empathy for others. Perhaps our governor could read a few and develop a little empathy himself.
I feel sorry for all the youngsters in Florida who are being deprived of everything except a selective education which intentionally leaves gigantic holes in their curriculum.
Those who go off to college (esp. out of state) are going to find out they’re years behind their classmates.
Only the public schools. The elite private schools are not bound by the state curriculum and will be able to teach real history, literature, art, etc. Rhonda’s children go to private school.
The ones who are exceptionally smart will find a way to get educated. I’m concerned about the others. Not every child is going to be able to do what Tara Westover did.
I am running out of words to describe how fucked up and out of touch with reality the fundamentalist Christian nationalist racist dictatorship of DeathSantis Florida kingdom. They are so scared of not following 1950s gender stereotypes and the social acceptance of LGBTQ+ kids that even nicknames must now get a parent’s approval / permission slip. I can see that teacher phone call “Mrs Bigot your 8 your son Theodore wants to be called Teddy and your 10 year old son Harold wishes to be called Skip, I need to inform you of this in case it is a gender sexual orientation thing and get you to write your formal approval”! WTF It is nutz. What about kids calling each other names? What about the mean names the bigots kids are taught to call the gay or trans kids, do the teachers need to get permission for that? They are not allowed to stop it anymore in the bigoted kingdom of DeathSantis. Hugs
Students who attend school in Florida will now need parental permission to use a nickname or preferred name in school, thanks to a law put in place by the state’s governor, Ronald Dion DeSantis, who famously goes by a nickname — Ron.
The rule will soon hit all Florida districts and follows new legislation that was adopted in July that aims to “strengthen the rights of parents and safeguard their child’s educational record to ensure the use of the child’s legal name in school or a parent-approved nickname,” according to Florida’s Department of Education.
Students who wish to be called anything other than their legal name in school will need their parents to sign off, according to memos sent to parents by Orange County Public Schools and Seminole County Public Schools. Marion County Schools and Volusia County Schools confirmed to FOX 35 that they have plans to issue similar memos.
For example, if your child’s name is Robert but likes to be called “Rob,” the form will need to be filled out to make that happen.
This form also applies to transgender students who wish to be called something other than their legal name, according to the school district. This, however, does not allow teachers and staff to use a student’s preferred pronouns, and does not allow a teacher or staff member to ask a student’s preferred pronoun, which was barred under House Bill 1069.
For example, if your child's name is Robert but likes to be called Rob, the form will need to be filled out so teachers and staff can call your child Rob. https://t.co/fwwxtt0287
some people are shocked when I tell them the unabridged complete works of Shakespeare was in the bookcase of the bedroom I shared with my brother when I was 8 years old and he was 4. The set was given to this pastor’s family by another pastor.
What the fuck. I’ve gone by my middle name — without needing anyone’s permission — for decades. The only people who call me by my first name are 1) my mom, and 2) telemarketers.
Just finished reading for the second time “Downfall” byTraudl Junge Hitlers personal secretary. For Florida aand indeed America in many many ways an exacting template If we do NOT learn from history we are destined to repeat in It.’s been not quite 100 years
I had one high school teacher, Sister Mary Robertine, who insisted on calling all students by their “real” name. Classmate Frank gave it to her when she called him “Francis” (Frank was his legal name).
By my dogs that love gravy this is so asinine I really doubted it could be true. First the trend by religious people to think they have the right to push their god and religious driven opinions on everyone else is increasing to a level that is stunning. That a judge thought it was OK for a religious Christian woman to spam and harass her co-workers with her church views and offensive pictures is also something I don’t understand. The judge was appointed by trump if that helps to understand she is a fundamentalist Christian nationalist. But what really scares me is the actions of the judge who went full fundamentalist Christian on the defendants to the point of forcing a religious indoctrination on them. HOW IS THAT LEGAL? Forcing a nonbeliever on threat of the court to not only attend forced religious indoctrination, but to also pay for it. Plus it seems a large part of the woman’s story was made up as it is becoming increasingly a tactic by religious fanatics to get their cases in court. Plus the religious hate group was no way involved with the case but the judge forced his fundamentalist views and support of the religious hate group to force them into the case. What has Texas and this country become? Hugs
The lawyers must take religious freedom classes from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the right-wing Christian group that has systematically rolled back civil liberties.
KENT NISHIMURA/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES
Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, speaks to members of the press outside the Supreme Court on December 5, 2022.
A Trump-appointed Texas judge has ordered three senior Southwest Airlines lawyers to take eight hours of “religious-liberty training” from the far-right Christian hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.
In his late Monday ruling, U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr specifically mandated the lawyers take the training as part of court-ordered sanctions for religious discrimination. He described ADF as one of several “esteemed non-profit organizations that are dedicated to preserving free speech and religious freedom.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated ADF as an extremist hate group.
The mandated hate-group training is the latest phase of a lawsuit brought by flight attendant Charlene Carter, who sued Southwest for firing her in 2017 after she sent confrontational anti-abortion messages to her union’s former president. Carter argued she had been discriminated against based on her religious beliefs, and U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr sided with her in December, ordering she be reinstated.
Starr, who was appointed by Donald Trump in 2019, also ordered Southwest to issue a statement telling its employees that the airline “may not” engage in religious discrimination against them. Instead, Southwest said that it “does not” do so, prompting Carter to demand additional sanctions against the company.
Carter had made no request for Southwest to undergo religious liberty training. ADF is not representing Carter, nor is it otherwise related to the case at all, so it’s unclear why Starr felt the need to involve the group.
It’s hard to overstate ADF’s role in rolling back civil liberties. One of its lead lawyers is Erin Hawley, who is married to far-right Senator Josh Hawley. ADF helped overturn Roe v. Wade and then sued to remove mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medication abortions, from the national market. That case is still in limbo, as the Fifth Circuit Court has yet to issue a ruling.
ADF also represented the plaintiff in the recent Supreme Court case 303 Creative v. Elenis. Web designer Lorie Smith was suing to have the right to refuse services to LGBTQ people. The design request she claims she received that prompted her suit appears to have been entirely fabricated.
The judge, a Federalist Society member, worked for Texas AG Ken Paxton before being appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2019.
NEWS: Federal judge in Texas orders airline lawyers to take "religious-liberty training" from the extremist advocacy organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, in issuing sanctions in an employment case on Monday. https://t.co/onHycu5zmfpic.twitter.com/WE6cuJDr5d
If upheld, Trump Judge Brantley Starr's order would let courts force lawyers to undergo religious indoctrination sessions from an extremist group that may well contradict their own deeply held spiritual beliefs and freedom of speech. This cannot possibly be legal.
Yes, this is even worse than the state requiring attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous, which many courts have held violates the Establishment Clause:
A number of state Supreme Court and federal circuit court cases–including Arnold v. Tennessee Board of Paroles (1997), Griffin v. Coughlin (New York, 1996), Warner v. Orange County Dep’t. of Probation (2nd Cir. 1997), Rauser v. Horn (3rd Cir. 2001), and Kerr v. Farrey (7th Cir. 1996)– have defined Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and other treatment programs based on AA’s 12 steps as religious in nature.
Yeah, and I also wondered how it was legal for the State of Florida to contract out supervision of those on probation to a group like The Salvation Army, but it has been that way in several FL counties for a very long time.
While the rest of the country wasn’t paying attention, evangelical Christianity became the de facto national religion. Expect the US Supreme Court to make it official any day.
1. Wear rainbow shirts, pro-choice shirts, etc. 2. Put on headphones the entire time, browse phone. 3. See how long you can hold up a middle finger during the lecture.
KENT NISHIMURA/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGESKristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, speaks to members of the press outside the Supreme Court on December 5, 2022.
Scottie's Playtime 