At the Texas Tribune event in Austin, Texas on Saturday afternoon, California Governor Gavin Newsom took aim at far-right Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his anti-freedom stances, which span from his treatment of asylum seekers, the banning of books, the rollback of reproductive rights and beyond. Francis Maxwell reports.
Pen America says Central York school district banned the books but officials strongly deny it in statement
Demonstrators gather to protest against banning books in Dearborn, Michigan; Pen America reports that school districts across 32 states have banned books. Photograph: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images
A school district in Pennsylvania has banned the Girls Who Code book series for young readers, according to an index of banned books compiled by the free expression non-profit Pen America.
The books are four of more than 1,500 unique book titles that have been banned by schools across the country after conservative pushes to censor books. According to a report released by Pen America in April, 138 school districts across 32 states have banned books from their classrooms and school libraries.
A recent update to Pen America’s banned book index said the Central York school district last year banned the books The Friendship Code, Team BFF: Race to the Finish!, Lights, Music, Code! and Spotlight on Coding Club!. The school district has over 400 banned titles on the index.
A statement from officials in that district on Monday strongly denied that they had banned the book series.
“The information published in this article is categorically false,” the district’s statement said while linking to a Business Insider interview with the founder of Girls Who Code which reported the ban. “This book series not been banned, and they remain available in our libraries.”
Pen America couldn’t immediately be reached for comment about the Central York school district’s statement.
The district last year received national attention after it banned resource materials listed in 2020 by its diversity committee, including children’s books and documentaries. A coalition of students and parents successfully pushed the district to rescind its ban after public pressure.
In a statement explaining the ban of the diverse resources, the school district’s board president at the time, Jane Johnson, said: “What we are attempting to do is balance legitimate academic freedom with what could be literature/materials that are too activist in nature, and may lean more toward indoctrination rather than age-appropriate academic content.”
The Central York school district did not immediately respond to request for comment on its ban of the Girls Who Code series.
The series features a group of girls who become friends in their school’s coding club. The series is in partnership with Girls Who Code, a non-profit that runs computer coding clubs and programming in schools for girls.
How to beat a book ban: students, parents and librarians fight back
Read more
The CEO and founder of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, expressed her anger over the series being banned.
“We use these stories to teach kids to code,” Saujani told Business Insider. “It felt very much like a direct attack on the movement we’ve been building to get girls coding.
“This is an opportunity to realize how big this movement is against our kids and how much we need to fight.”
Saujani said that the group Moms for Liberty, a conservative non-profit formed in 2021 that has been pushing book bans through local chapters across the country, was responsible for the Central York district’s ban on the series. The organization has advocated for banning books on race – including ones on the civil rights movement – and on LGBTQ+ themes, saying the volumes are “sexually explicit”, according to media watchdog Media Matters.
Aggressive campaigns to ban books in schools and libraries across the country have flared up over the culture wars of the last two years. While campaigns to ban books have always existed in the US, the movement gained momentum in 2021 when conservatives took aim at the academic “critical race” theory and turned it into a buzzword to stoke fears of liberal ideals being taught in classrooms.
According to Pen America’s banned books report, many of the titles being banned deal with LGBTQ+ themes or have non-white characters. The organization estimates that more than 300 groups, including local chapters of national organizations like Moms for Liberty, have been pushing for book bans. The groups have gained large traction through social media, where lists of titles have circulated.
The campaigns try to deflect accusations of racism and bigotry by claiming they are targeting material that is offensive or inappropriate for children.
Pen America estimates that 41% of banned books deal with LGBTQ+ themes while 40% have protagonists or secondary characters who are people of color.
An author of one of the Girls Who Code books, Jo Whittemore, said on Twitter: “Some people choose not to focus on how awesome and empowering and inspiring these books are but instead choose fear.”
This series was our labor of love, our commitment to our community to make sure that girls — all girls — see themselves as coders. You cannot be what you cannot see, and this was our effort to get more girls, girls of color interested in coding.@jowhittemore@GirlsWhoCodepic.twitter.com/C23VTgKyxZ
Hey @GOP book-banning asshats: I get it that you ban Handmaids Tale as it *gives a roadmap to your strategy*, but banning Girls Who Code is just embarrassing for you.
The first programmer, and the person who coined the term Software Engineering were WOMEN, a fact you can’t ban. pic.twitter.com/qLrF8NjBpv
Several years ago religious bigots got into the highest levels of the school education system in the state of Texas. I remember posting of Aron Ra and others going to testify against the rewriting of the textbooks to bring history, biology, and other subjects in line with the bible as much as possible. Including the stressing that the US was established as a Christian nation under Christian policies and that the constitution was given to the founding fathers by Moses. Then recently it was to get rid of any negative connotations of slavery and the horrors of that institution to calling slaves unwilling immigrants and unpaid workers. The drive was fueled by that CRT which is a advanced degree course taught in law schools was being taught to little kids and that white kids were being made to feel bad about being white. Then it became the drive to remove anything LGBTQ+ from schools. Don’t say gay bills. And now we are up to a total rewrite of history to prove how great and exceptionally honorable Texas is, just as god intended it to be. Hugs
The Texas Tribune reviewed the 15-page document, which will be handed out to new drivers, and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly it chronicles the state’s history.
The 1836 Project, an advisory committee created by the Texas Legislature last year to promote “patriotic education” about the state’s history, approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will be shared with Texans when they get a new driver’s license. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
A committee charged with producing a “patriotic” telling of Texas history approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will now be distributed to new Texas drivers.
The advisory committee — named the 1836 Project after the year Texas gained its independence from Mexico — was created last year with the passing of House Bill 2497. The legislation required the committee to tell a story of “a legacy of economic prosperity” and the “abundant opportunities for businesses and families, among other requirements.”
“We must never forget why Texas became so exceptional in the first place,” Gov. Greg Abbott said when he signed the bill. Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, later selected a nine-member, largely conservative group to head the 1836 Project.
The creation of the committee was largely a conservative backlash to The New York Times’ publication of “The 1619 Project,” which was named after the year enslaved people first arrived on American soil and aimed to center slavery in conversations about U.S. history. The pamphlet, which will be distributed at driver’s license offices, comes at a time when the state is increasingly trying to regulate how race, sexuality and history are taught in public schools.
The Texas Tribune reviewed the 1836 Project committee’s final pamphlet and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly the document chronicles the state’s history.
The historians acknowledged that the committee had a difficult assignment; Donald Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, called squeezing the entirety of the state’s history into little more than a dozen pages a “herculean task.”
But the historians also noted that condensing the state’s history and painting it in a mostly celebratory light came at a cost. The pamphlet, they said, fails to fully hold institutions accountable for slavery and other forms of oppression and shortchanged Indigenous Texans, Tejanos, Black Texans and women.
The pamphlet engages with contemporary research — like literature about the lasting impact of the Confederacy — but also tries to fulfill state lawmakers’ wish to promote “patriotic education” and avoid disturbing Texas’ myths, said Raúl A. Ramos, a history professor at the University of Houston.
“The traditional mythic version of Texas history, it’s about the heroes of the Alamo having pure intentions of liberty and freedom in the abstract rather than the liberty to conquer Indigenous and Mexican lands and freedom to own enslaved people,” Ramos said. “It’s that abstract idea that is attractive and powerful and [that’s what] people gravitate towards, and I think that’s what people associate with patriotism.”
Below is a look at how the Project 1836 advisory committee’s pamphlet discusses four areas of Texas’ history — early settlements, the oil and cotton industries, the Alamo and slavery — and the historians’ notes on what the document’s authors chose to play up, play down or omit.
Early settlements
Trinidad Gonzalez, a history professor at South Texas College, said the pamphlet aggrandizes Manifest Destiny, the belief that American settlers had the God-given right to expand across North America. It’s an idea about early settlements that was driven by 19th century nationalism and exceptionalism.
In the opening paragraph, the pamphlet says the land of Texas seemed like “an inhospitable zone to many,” but Americans “with fortitude and nerve” saw the opportunities and made the region productive.
“It wasn’t just the Americans who thought it was boundless opportunities. [The pamphlet’s authors] are trying to create the simplified Manifest Destiny story that fits this older myth of white Americans coming in and basically building Texas,” Gonzalez said. “And when you do that, then you silence everybody else that participated in the history of Texas.”
Historians told the Tribune that the pamphlet glosses over the Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican populations that resided before, saying Texas was “nearly depopulated” before American settlers migrated to the land.
However, the Indigenous population significantly outnumbered American settlers in 1836, Gonzalez said. The stretch of land from the Rio Grande Valley to Laredo was also once one of the most economically successful Spanish settlements, he added.
Emilio Zamora, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, called the pamphlet’s interpretation of early settlements in Texas “very unsettling.”
The document “speaks very negatively about the Mexicans and the colonial settlers that preceded them,” Zamora said.
Oil, not cotton
When it comes to the state’s economy, the pamphlet zeros in on the oil industry. The discovery of oil “ushered in a period of remarkable transformation,” the pamphlet says. It characterizes the wildcatter and oil derrick as “Texas icons.”
Nowadays, West Texas’ Permian Basin is the nation’s most productive oil region. The Permian produces more than 5 million barrels of the nation’s daily output of 11.6 million barrels of oil per day.
But before oil, there was cotton. Texas still leads the nation in cotton production. Cotton continues to be the state’s largest agricultural export and is responsible for thousands of jobs across sectors, such as ginning companies, warehouses and oil mill processing plants.
The 1836 Project pamphlet mentions oil five times. It never mentions cotton.
The pamphlet highlights Houston’s title as “energy capital of the world,” but cotton used to be so essential to the city that it would celebrate the crop with festivals, naming a symbolic leader for the carnival King Nottoc (“cotton” spelled backwards).
The pamphlet “ignores the reality that cotton production and poverty long characterized much of the Texas economy after the Civil War and through 1940. Instead it glamorizes the oil industry,” said Walter Buenger, a history professor at UT-Austin.
Buenger said that the state’s dependence on cotton made Texas one of the poorest states in the country.
The cotton market had globalized and become increasingly competitive, but the state delayed mechanizing cotton production to continue offering low-skilled jobs that had low returns. It resulted in an unequal distribution of income: While a handful of cotton traders got “fabulously wealthy,” most Texans struggled to survive, Buenger said.
“Through 1940, Texas was, for the most part, very poor. And they were poor because they were wrapped up in this cotton production business,” Buenger explained.
The Alamo
The Alamo, the Spanish mission founded in the 18th century in what is now San Antonio, has long been enshrined as “the cradle of Texas liberty.” The men who died as Mexican troops laid siege on the Alamo are often remembered as heroic martyrs who valued liberty over their lives.
“Only Texas could turn defeat into a legend — and a song, and a tourist attraction, and a major motion picture,” author Rosemary Kent famously said of the Alamo.
But the 1836 Project pamphlet does not dwell on the Alamo. Of the document’s 4,517 words, just 87 are spent on the siege.
Gene Preuss, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown, called that a notable move away from traditionalist history in a state where the Alamo has often been at the center of Texas politics and history.
“There really isn’t much discussion of the Alamo in the pamphlet,” he said. “And I find that interesting because a lot of traditional histories would focus on the Alamo.”
In fitting the Battle of the Alamo into one abridged paragraph, the pamphlet’s authors appear to acknowledge the recent efforts to reexamine the historic event.
“For a long time, Texas history has been taught from one perspective,” Preuss said. “I think [the pamphlet] does enough to open some cracks, which I as a professor can open further for my students so that when they come into class, they don’t say things like ‘I didn’t know [Black Texans] participated in the Texas revolution’ [or] ‘I didn’t know Tejanos were on the side of Texians and died at the Alamo.’”
But the pamphlet also avoids going into that reexamination. It doesn’t mention, for instance, the issues brought up in the book “Forget the Alamo,” which was published last year and prompted the lieutenant governor to push for the cancellation of an event featuring the title at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. The book highlights how the defense of slavery played a key role in the conflict with Mexico and questions the garrison defenders’ military strategy.
Slavery
When the 1836 Project committee was established, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project,” feared that the 1836 Project was another attempt to veil the nation’s history of slavery.
“When it comes to slavery, some people have never wanted open debate and honesty. They seek to bury and prohibit instead,” Hannah-Jones said on Twitter.
The pamphlet does mention slavery, acknowledging that it became an economic engine for the state. Republican lawmakers also required that the document mention how on June 19, 1865, the date that became the basis for Juneteenth, Union soldiers in Galveston announced the liberation of all enslaved people.
“We wanted to reemphasize and make dang true that everybody understands that slavery was a bad thing and Texas participated,” Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, said at the August committee meeting.
But many of the historians the Tribune spoke with said the pamphlet doesn’t go far enough, noting that it omits how central defending slavery was in the Texas war of secession from Mexico and the Civil War. They say it airbrushes gruesome accounts of how enslaved people were treated.
“Slavery is mentioned only as a complication that delayed annexation by the United States. The pamphlet never names any enslaved individuals, nor does it describe their fight for freedom,” historians Leah LaGrone and Michael Phillips wrote in a Texas Monthly column.
Ramos, the history professor at the University of Houston, said the pamphlet’s treatment of slavery is an example of how the document takes a passive, ambiguous approach to inequity and oppression that doesn’t hold Americans who participated in institutions accountable.
The pamphlet, he said, is a document birthed out of a political process and should be read as such.
“Sometimes people interpret history as being political, as being a way people might signal their politics,” Ramos said. “But it’s also political in that way that is part of how we view ourselves as people, as a community, and how we continue to either build community or divide community.”
Disclosure: Bullock Texas State History Museum, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston and the University of Houston-Downtown have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This is what happens when red state republican governors, right wing media hosts, and religious hate preachers make wild untrue accusations and targe the LGBTQ+. They put targets on the LGBTQ+ people and their organizations. While the police have not released the full context of the notes, one phone shows a note blaming the LBTQ+ for ” … holding get homosexual togethers for middle schoolers”. You know where that rhetoric comes from. It energizes the maga thug base to commit act of violence against those the republican governors like DeathSantis claim harm kids. About that harming kids, DeathSantis used taxpayer funds of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship Venezuelan legal asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard and one of those was a month old baby. DeathSantis rants about saving kids by the don’t say gay bills and tough abortion bills, but he did not care he was sending a one month old baby all across the country with no warning to those where they landed and no way the mother could get help. Lucky the community there rallied to do they could for the asylum seekers that were being used as pawns and it really pissed the right wing off that the left was not assholes like the right is. Hugs
On Saturday morning, members of the Pride Community Center in Gainesville received a call from a real estate office in the same complex about their building being vandalized.
“She told me that she was just informed by somebody that came to her office that the pride center had been vandalized and that the windows were all smashed,” said board member Debbie Lewis. “The reason it’s being investigated as a hate crime is because of the notes that were left.”
Members didn’t want to share the messages due to the ongoing investigation and the community joined in helping board up the windows.
The attack came just weeks before the highly anticipated return of the Gainesville Pride Festival on Oct. 22, which was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. Those who showed up at the center helped clean the mess left behind, sweeping up glass and rocks.
“Later I will be angry about this vicious hate crime but right now I’m incredibly sad for every vulnerable person in my community,” County Commission candidate Mary Alford said, adding that she faults some elected Republicans who have shared anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
The attack came just weeks before the highly anticipated return of the Gainesville Pride Festival on Oct. 22. https://t.co/hWDKiOlDRh
For me, the hate that has been generated by the likes of DeSantis, Trump, Abbott, Youngkin, Green and their likes has turned into sadness for our country and her citizens. I cannot understand what is going on anymore and why citizens cannot have some peace and reprieve from Republicans.
A teacher in Texas reported one of her own students' families to child welfare services after stalking their Instagram page and identifying them as transgender. Luckily the family had already left Texas for Colorado after Governor Abbott ordered the state to persecute them. pic.twitter.com/rO5mAZ82lB
Beginning to understand how the Nazis did it now. Just ordinary people, thinking it’s their civic duty to do what the government tells them, and if it aligns with their own prejudices even better.
My Lyft driver on Friday that took me home from the airport was brand new here in Palm Springs, just arrived from Fort Lauderdale 2 months ago, with the cutest little dog who slept in the front seat. I welcomed him to California and gave him a big tip.
God I wish I could afford to get out. if i had the money I would be gone. The place is a human cess pool and getting worse by the minute. But alas Im poor, all my friends live here, have dogs and cats so its hard to leave right now.
In just a few short years in politics, Evelyn Rios Stafford has managed to make an impression at the highest levels of government, and at the most local, too.
The first transgender person to hold elected office in Arkansas, Rios Stafford serves as Justice of the Peace for her small district in Fayetteville. In her role, she’s officiated dozens of weddings for constituents. “That’s one of the highlights of this gig as Justice of the Peace. It always gives me such a warm fuzzy feeling to do that for people,” she told LGBTQ Nation.
Now, Rios Stafford is running for reelection to the post without serious opposition, a vote of confidence even before the election that constituents view her time in office as effective.
Rios Stafford’s first political involvement was getting a local civil rights ordinance passed in the late 2010’s. In 2020, she ran for an open seat on the local Quorum Court, the equivalent of a board of supervisors, and won. She represents about 16,000 people in her district.
At 49, with a broad smile and the easy, thoughtful cadence of a Texas native, Rios Stafford says being trans wasn’t a focus of her first campaign. “You know, I made one post…about it on National Coming Out Day during the campaign. But that was about it.” It wasn’t until after she was elected that “some folks got wind of the fact that I was a first of something.”
But her victory would become pivotal in the fight over trans rights in the state.
In 2021, the Arkansas legislature passed HB1570, also known as the Save Adolescents from Experimentation or SAFE Act. Like similar legislation introduced in other red states, the bill would ban all gender-affirming care for minors, prohibit insurance from covering gender transition procedures, and criminalize those assisting minors in the process.
The bill was awaiting Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson’s signature when Rios Stafford was enlisted by an Arkansas legislator to help halt the bill’s march into law. From the “phone call to me to meeting the governor was probably, I’d say 24 hours.”
While Rios Stafford was trans, she hadn’t transitioned as a youth. “I knew that I needed to also make space for folks who had this experience and were directly impacted, because their voices are really the ones that have been left out of this whole thing,” she said. Rios Stafford brought 18 year-old Willow Breshears, who began transitioning at 16 with her family’s active support, to the ornate conference room table for her meeting with the governor.
“This was probably the first time that he had ever had a sit down, face-to-face discussion with a trans person before, or in this case two trans people. And, you know, he was kind of starting at zero in terms of knowledge.” A 15-minute appointment turned into half an hour and then 45 minutes. “He was just wanting to know more, basically.”
“I was on pins and needles walking out of that room, like, you know, almost on the verge of having a panic attack. I was replaying all of my answers in my head, like, did I say the right thing, did I screw this up completely?”
Not only did Hutchinson veto the bill, he wrote a Washington Post op-ed explaining why and also went on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend his decision. No matter, the Arkansas legislature overrode his veto, though the law remains tied up in court challenges.
Still, Rios Stafford was satisfied to hear “echoes of some of the things we talked about” in Hutchinson’s defense of the veto.
“‘Traditionally, Republicans have held themselves up as champions of limited government,’” Rios Stafford told the governor. “‘In what way, shape or form is this limited government? Because this is big government. This is government getting in between the families and their doctors.’”
Rios Stafford’s own gender awakening was pivotal to her work in her adopted home state. She majored in English at Rice University in Houston and was pursuing a career in journalism when she got a call from the ABC-TV affiliate in San Francisco asking her to come in for an interview. She got the job. She was young and bright and on the loose in Baghdad by the Bay.
“It was a great time to come there,” she recalled. “During the dot-com boom, the city was kind of going crazy, and it was a really fun time to be there in my 20s. And obviously San Francisco is a place where you can really explore your identity, as well.”
Born and raised in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, she grew up attending Catholic school, where she encountered the first signs of her conflicted gender identity.
“In Catholic school, I had a boyfriend when I was 15. A couple of our friends knew about it, but it definitely wasn’t something that we were out about. I knew that I wasn’t straight, exactly,” she remembers thinking, “but I didn’t really have the language or knowledge to have an understanding of exactly in what way.”
In college, she figured it out. It was “literally, when I was, like, doing research in the college library, that I came across the idea of transgender. And it was this lightbulb moment of like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s what’s been going on with me.’”
In San Francisco, she embraced her new reality. “Gradually, I became more and more out,” Rios Stafford recalled. “It was not a surprise for some people. It was a surprise for others.” While she was “bracing for the worst,” she was “really pleasantly surprised and so grateful for having such a positive experience.”
Evelyn Rios Stafford on her wedding day Provided
“Back then, this was sort of like, this was new territory,” she said. “I think I was the first employee at an ABC owned-and-operated station to transition on the job.” The following year, Rios Stafford picked up two Emmys for her producing. “I feel like it was all tied together.”
The total package arrived shortly after she transitioned, when Rios Stafford met her future husband, Bob Stafford, an artist and graphic designer, online. She was “smitten from the beginning.” The two shared mutual friends in the arts scene South of Market in San Francisco, and Southern roots, as well. Soon after, the couple moved east to Stafford’s hometown of Fayetteville. They were married in 2016.
According to Rios Stafford, performing weddings in her job as Justice of the Peace is optional. “Not all the JPs do it. I have a feeling that one or two of them might not be on there because if they were on the list, they might have to do a same-sex wedding, and it’s against their personal beliefs or something? But I was like, ‘Sign me up! I’ll do anybody.’”
In a test of the maturity of anyone who happens across this story, Rockman School Board candidate Craig Ladyman has been exposed for posting violently queerphobic and antisemitic imagery online.
Ladyman posted an image of four pride flags arranged to form a swastika pattern on Trump social media network Truth Social under the incredible username “@LadymanForLiberty”. The candidate writes, “Like my new Pride flag?” (very respectfully capitalizing the “P” in “Pride”, of course).
Appalled parents and voters sent the post along to Superintendent Steven Matthews, who says he shares in their outrage.
“It makes me feel angry,” he tells Fox WXMI. “Certainly, a symbol like that represents the and represents divisiveness. It’s a symbol that I don’t think represents who we are as a community, and anybody who would use it I don’t think represent who we are as a community.”
In addition to the bastardization of the Pride flag, the invoking of nazi imagery is deeply unsettling to community members.
Rabbi David Krishef, a leader at the Ahavas Israel congregation in neighboring Grand Rapids, explains to WXMI the harm that sentiments like Ladyman’s pose.
“It cheapens the Holocaust, it cheapens the suffering,” he says. “It’s a misuse of the imagery, it’s a misuse of the language.
“No matter what’s going on in this country, whether you’re coming from the right wing being afraid of what the left wing are doing or vice versa, we are not rounding people up wholesale and consigning them to concentration camps and death camps. But that’s what the Nazi imagery evokes.”
Not to psychoanalyze transphobes on main, but this candidate’s anti-trans rhetoric is particularly vehement and loud. His official school board candidacy poster reads, “Vote Craig Ladyman/Rockford School Board/He knows what a woman is!”
It’s giving “graphic design is my passion”:
His campaign website boasts, “I promise to fight for parental rights and children’s rights in school. I will never go along with unconstitutional mandates, medical tyranny, or the woke agenda.”
We’re not saying that this man was so horribly bullied for his name growing up that gender stricture became deeply embedded in his psyche and is now his only personality trait. Not out loud, at least.
“So this is how it works. You’re injected with graphene oxide. Once injected with the so-called vaccine, you become connected to the internet of things and you can be mind-controlled by artificial intelligence.
“And maybe 5G. Why are they putting 5G everywhere? It’s like the Tower of Babel. And how did God deal with the Tower of Babel? How much longer do you think he’s going to tolerate this satanic plan?
“This is trans-humanism. The internet of things. How would you like to be connected so that your thinking would no longer be your thinking, but it would be non-biological?
“The real question is who will control the computer that give you the messages? It won’t be your pastor.” – Anti-LGBTQ activist and supplements peddler Steven Hotze, speaking to a group calling themselves “Liberty Pastors.”
Hotze last appeared on JMG in August 2022 when he won a Texas ruling that may imperil insurance coverage for PrEP medications nationwide.
In April 2022, Hotze was charged with two felonies related to a bizarre 2020 “voter fraud search” incident. That case remains pending.
Hotze also appeared on JMG in 2020 when he left a voice mail for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, telling him to “shoot to kill” Black Lives Matter activists.
You may recall that Steven Hotze has compared gays to “communist termites” eating away at America’s moral fabric. He is also fond of declaring that it’s now a hate crime to denounce homosexuality.
It was Hotze who bankrolled the successful campaign to repeal Houston’s “wicked, evil, Satanic” LGBT rights ordinance, during which he compared gays to rapists and murderers.
According to Hotze, same-sex marriage will result in children “practicing sodomy” in kindergarten.
In 2017, he appeared here when he “prophesied” that God will deliver “just retribution” to lawmakers who vote for LGBTQ rights.
When he’s not calling on God to kill politicians or for the governor to kill Black Lives Matter activists, Hotze sells “miracle” supplements because high cholesterol doesn’t really cause heart disease.
Hotze regularly quotes QAnon slogans.
Watch the clip. There are slides!
Steven Hotze, a Texas-based religious-right activist and doctor, says that those who have received COVID-19 vaccines "become connected to the internet of things and you can be mind-controlled by artificial intelligence through maybe 5G." pic.twitter.com/BjpBqbPqja
ANd here I thought my cell reception was better becasue AT&T built a new tower a few blocks away. Noow we know that it is all part of the plan to control people, and we’re [aying for it through our cell phone bills.
The easiest solution for conservatives would be to turn off their cell phones, and disconnect their home internet completely.
As a person who actually works on this stuff, he’s so appallingly stupid that it boggles the mind. 5G is a problem but 4G wasn’t? And you know what the “Internet of Things” is? Any device that connects to the Internet and sends or receives data over it. The reason why they call it that is because those things might not be what we typically think of as “computers”. Your oven could be an ioT device because you could start it preheating while you’re on the way home. Your clothes dryer might be able to send performance data over the net and notify you if it needs service.
Just wait until he discovers what a “personal cloud” is… and no, it’s not a fart or BO. It’s when the various IoT devices on your body work in conjunction with each other to assist you. Your phone working with your watch and wireless headphones is a personal cloud. And as we move forward, more things that are on or in you will become part of your personal cloud. Hearing aids, contact lenses, implants in your body that monitor blood chemistry, etc… You think they’ve lost their shit now, just wait til they decide this is the “mark of the beast” they ramble on about.
Well, let’s see, according to your laughably puerile book of fairy tales, god made everybody speak a different language so that they couldn’t talk to each other to build the tower to heaven.
Then, humans developed new universal languages called “mathematics” and “science,” which allowed them to build the tower, where we discovered there’s no such dumbass thing as heaven.
This country is not a theocracy yet! Why are these religious bigots crafting legislation to instill their religious beliefs into secular laws? I am tired of these people insisting I live according to the limits of the people who lived 2,500 years ago. Societies grow, they change, they improve, and the way we treat people shows that growth, unless you live by the regressive rules of a religion. Hugs
Pennsylvania GOP state lawmakers are pushing a bill to limit school instruction that is more expansive than the Florida legislation that has been described by its opponents as the “don’t say gay” law. During a rally at the Capitol, Republican lawmakers and supporters framed the legislation, House Bill 2813, as a way to guarantee parental oversight and control over the availability of school materials that they portrayed as increasingly obscene.
“It is patterned after the Florida bill, but mine goes further,” said Rep. Stephanie Borowicz, R-Clinton/Centre, the bill’s prime sponsor. “It really needs to be protected up through 12th grade, we need to go all the way,” she told reporters. The GOP gubernatorial candidate, Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Adams/Franklin, appeared briefly at the event to voice full-throated support for such measures.
Borowicz last appeared on JMG in March 2020 when she introduced a resolution calling for prayer because the COVID pandemic was God’s punishment for sin. Her first appearance here came in March 2019 when she held widely-criticized floor prayer for conversions to Christianity moments before the swearing-in of a Muslim rep.
This is so sad and hateful. In our great Commonwealth, we don't “other” people. That is literally antithetical to our history.https://t.co/bECHWH51VK
Pennsylvania state representatives have introduced a bill regulating classroom instruction that is more restrictive than Florida’s infamous “don’t say gay” law. https://t.co/LH04cow20U
The absence of talking about LGBTx people communicates a lot — it says we’re “controversial”, tainted in some way, not to be discussed in general public… it teaches shame. Which is 100% everything the Christian agenda wants to teach about us.
It’s funny you should mention 1976. I remember that year vividly. I was a junior in high school who had just come out to myself (albeit to no one else) and I can remember reading an article that year in Newsweek magazine about the happy homosexuals who were making a community for themselves in San Francisco. Back then, it seemed like the world was young and new and that all things were possible. Little did I know the fierce backlash that would result from those happy homosexuals who were just trying to live their lives with happiness and some degree of integrity. But I would soon find out. Anita Bryant appeared with her crusade the very next year and it wasn’t long afterwards that Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed appeared on the scene to turn the clock backwards.
“Borowicz’s bill also contains requirements for parents to be notified about health services provided through schools,” So if a school nurse found too many bruises on the kid, the school would have to give the abusive parents a heads-up? Yikes!
Yep, to these hateful higots children have no rights, they are just pieces of property so when property gets damaged the slave owner should be notified
Her district is smack-dab in the middle of the state, but avoiding Penn State University and its bedroom communities. She’s a stay at home mom and appears to believe that’s the only acceptable role for women– probably hates women who work for wages (including single parents . . . especially single parents).
Although the plain text of the Pennsylvania bill would include a ban on any instruction regarding sexual identity – even heterosexuality – the rhetoric around such laws has clearly targeted LGBTQ people, Pick said.
There should be lawsuits if any heterosexuality is mentioned in any way. Any relationships mentioned illustrating heterosexual relationships like James Madison and Dolly Madison.
Only when they say the schools are “grooming” you kids to be gay or trans.
They really want erasure of anything LGBT. Right now there is a big uproar in Sarasota FL because a teacher had to revise her teaching material so it didn’t mention Sally Ride was a lesbian or had a long term partner.
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Photo: Robert Stafford
Scottie's Playtime 