Pastor Mark Burns, a loyal supporter of former President Donald Trump and a Republican congressional candidate, said earlier this week that parents and teachers who communicate with children about LGBTQ issues pose a “national security threat” to the United States and added that those found guilty of “treason” should be executed. Coach D reacts.
A toy yellow school bus is placed in front of a cross to honor Rojelio Torres, one of the children killed during the mass shooting in Robb Elementary School, while an American flag is seen in the foreground, Sunday, May 29, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Wong Maye-E/AP
Some 44% of Republicans say mass shootings are “something we have to accept as part of a free society,” a poll found.
The poll found that a majority of Democrats and Independents said shootings are preventable “if we really tried.”
The survey comes after a string of mass shootings have again prompted Congress to assess gun control.
More than 4 in 10 Republicans think mass shootings are inevitable in a “free society,” according to a new poll by CBS News and YouGov.
One of the questions in the poll asked respondents if they feel that mass shootings are “unfortunately something we have to accept as part of a free society” or “something we can prevent and stop if we really tried.”
In response, 44% of Republicans said mass shootings are inevitable “as part of a free society.” Meanwhile, 85% of Democrats and 73% of Independents said mass shootings are preventable “if we really tried.”
The survey had a sample size of 2,021 US adults that were interviewed between June 1 and June 3, per CBS News, which noted the margin of error is ±2.6 points.
Following the shooting in Uvalde, President Joe Biden insisted that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a “rational Republican” who could agree to gun control measures, despite the party’s longtime refusal to seriously entertain policy changes on firearms.
McConnell signaled his willingness for Republican senators to work with Democrats on a bipartisan push for gun safety legislation, but he did not endorse any specific proposals. The Minority Leader said he had “encouraged” Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, to talk to key Democrats “who are interested in trying to get an outcome that’s directly related to the problem.”
Days later, a conservative radio host tweeted that Cornyn was “open to making gun laws more restrictive.” Cornyn responded to the tweet, saying it was “not gonna happen.”
In the CBS/YouGov poll, respondents from political parties across the board seemed to agree that it is unlikely Congress will “pass any laws in the next few months that will make significant changes to gun policy.”
A total of 66% of Democrats, 72% of Independents, and 71% of Republicans indicated that they think it is “not very likely” or “not at all likely” that Congress passes significant, new gun policies in the coming months.
Deep beneath the waves there’s a source of power quite unlike any other. To tap into it, Japanese engineers have constructed a true leviathan, a beast capable of withstanding the strongest of ocean currents to transform its flow into a virtually limitless supply of electricity.
Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries – now known simply as IHI Corporation – has been tinkering with the technology for over a decade now, partnering with New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) in 2017 to put their designs to the test.
In February, the project passed a major milestone with the completion of a successful three-and-a-half year field test in the waters off Japan’s southwestern coast.
The 330-ton prototype is called Kairyu, a word that translates more or less into ‘ocean current’. Its structure consists of a 20 meter (66 foot) long fuselage flanked by a pair of similar-sized cylinders, each housing a power generation system attached to an 11 meter long turbine blade.
(IHI Corp./NEDO)
When tethered to the ocean floor by an anchor line and power cables, the device can orient itself to find the most efficient position to generate power from the push of a deep-water current, and channel it into a grid.
Japan is a country heavily reliant on importing fossil fuels to generate a significant amount of its power. With public sentiment towards nuclear power souring in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan is motivated to use its technological prowess to take advantage of renewable energy sources.
Unfortunately, the mountainous Japanese archipelago provides little scope for vast forests of wind turbines or fields of solar panels. With a location far from neighboring countries, there’s also less opportunity to balance the fluctuations in renewables through energy trade.
One thing the nation does have is vast stretches of coastal water. To the east, the ocean swirls under the might of the North Pacific gyre.
Where the gyre meets Japan, it’s channeled into a relatively strong flow called the Kuroshio current.
IHI estimates that if the energy present in the current could be harnessed, it could feasibly generate around 205 gigawatts of electricity, an amount it claims is in the same ballpark as the country’s current power generation.
That enormous amount of potential in the ocean’s tumultuous movements is also what makes it so hard to use as a power source. The fastest-flowing waters are near the surface, which also happens to be where typhoons can easily destroy power stations.
Kairyu was designed to hover roughly 50 meters below the waves – as it floats towards the surface, the drag created provides the necessary torque on the turbines. Each of the blades rotates in an opposing direction as well, keeping the device relatively stable.
In a flow of two to four knots (around one to two meters per second), Kairyu was found to be capable of churning out a total of 100 kilowatts of power.
Compared with an average offshore wind turbine’s 3.6 megawatts, it might seem like small sparks. But with demonstrated success at withstanding what nature can throw at it, Kairyu could soon have a monster sibling swinging 20-meter-long turbines to generate a more respectable 2 megawatts.
If all goes to plan, we might see a farm of power generators feeding electricity into the grid some time next decade. Whether Kairyu can indeed scale up is left to be seen.
In spite of huge interest in this relatively under-utilized reserve of renewable energy, attempts to wring watts out of the tides, waves, and currents of the open ocean typically end in failure. High engineering costs, environmental limitations, proximity of coastal areas to the grid … all manner of challenges need to be overcome to see projects like this through.
If IHI Corp. can overcome them, there are kaiju-sized benefits to reap, with ocean power potentially providing anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of Japan’s energy needs.
With advances in materials science and a better understanding of the marine environment, somebody is bound to overcome the litany of problems to harness the ocean’s vast supply of energy.
Please read this short article. It details how the drive to return the country to 1950s was driven mostly by one man who was disgusted by the 1960s and any changes to his white Christian male dominated society. He quickly spread his message of hate to the party to win elections. Now that segment of the party has shrunk to about 20% but are the driving force behind the entire culture wars the republicans are pushing. The goal is return to 1950 where they felt happy and in charge, sex was still icky, and done in only one way. That is the other thing, what do these people have against sex, it is really wonderful, they should try it. Also notice the way they attack trans people. No real mention of trans, they ignore trans boys / men, instead focus only on bodies of trans girls and fear. It is really interesting how the lives of the people do not to matter as long as these people get the political power and the religious power they want. Hugs
The recent blitz of anti-trans bills may not align with what many Republicans believe, but party lawmakers pursue them on behalf of their most important interest group.
When it came down to it, Rick Colby called on his spirituality in deciding how to support his transgender child, Ashton.
It wasn’t a guarantee. Colby had dedicated his life to Republican politics, starting in 1984 on the field campaign to reelect Ronald Reagan. Reagan and the Republican Party with him and in the decades following would push anti-LGBTQ+ policies. But Colby’s Methodist church by comparison preached inclusivity and empathy, a message that conflicted with what he was hearing from Republicans.
Colby went with Ashton to his first endocrinologist appointment. He held Ashton’s hand the following year as Ashton awoke from gender-affirming top surgery.
“You know, as a parent, you want to protect your child from the nastiness of the world,” Colby said. “I was so relieved as a parent that he was being accepted. And it was just wonderful.”
Survey after survey show that Americans support LGBTQ+ equality, and Republicans are no exception. Still, Republican-dominated states have seen a blitz of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation since 2020, particularly anti-transgender bills. That dissonance — between the reality of the electorate and the priorities of Republican lawmakers — may seem counterintuitive to many.
Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor who was raised evangelical, has spent much of his career researching those kinds of contradictions. His book, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of Religious Right traces the rise of the evangelical voting bloc from nonexistent in the 1960s to the single most important interest group for any Republican candidate in the 1980s. In a conversation with The 19th, Balmer said that rise was driving Republican support for anti-trans legislation now.
“They have an interest in keeping the base riled up about one thing or another, and when one issue fades, as with same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage, they’ve got to find something else,” Balmer said. “It’s almost frantic.”
Bob Jones University sign at entrance on Wade Hampton Boulevard, Greenville, South Carolina, United States. (John Foxe/Wikimedia) [CC BY-SA 3.0]
While many people believe that abortion was the issue that first galvanized evangelicals to the polls in the 1980s, Balmer points to a different issue. Paul Weyrich, an evangelical Christian who helped initially organize the “religious right,” had been testing out issues that would drive other evangelicals to the polls in the 1970s, Balmer says. Weyrich found it in Bob Jones University, a religious institution that was facing the loss of its tax-exempt status for refusing to racially integrate.
Weyrich’s strategy worked. In 1980, evangelicals – a group of denominations separate from mainline churches like Colby’s – flocked to the polls to back what had been billed as the freedom of a religious school to operate without government interference. Reagan backed Bob Jones University, with two-thirds of the evangelical vote, denied President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and an evangelical himself, a second term. It cemented White evangelicals as the key ingredient to Republican wins.
Any Republican who wanted to cross the finish line would have to kneel at the feet of the evangelical base, Balmer says. Decades later, Donald Trump would initially campaign on welcoming LGBTQ+ people into his Republican platform, only to later adopt the ideology of the far-right evangelical base he needed to win.
While Trump appeared to start out a social moderate, far-right evangelical policies increasingly dominated his agenda. On the campaign trail, Trump briefly vowed to be an ally to queer Americans. In office, his administration made so many policy moves against LGBTQ+ Americans that advocacy organizations branded his leadership “The Discrimination Administration.”
The religious right’s fixation on “social issues” — abortion, religious-based education, LGBTQ+ rights — served two purposes. In addition to keeping evangelicals a cohesive voting unit, they also formed an ideological bedrock for the religious right. Before Weyrich died, he argued that conservatives should be fighting to return to family structures of the 1950s, a goal that has been picked up by leaders after him.
In his book The Next Conservatism, Weyrich wrote that the goal was to weed out “cultural Marxism,” and “restore a non-ideological American republic, which is what we had up until the wretched 1960s,” when women and Black and LGBTQ+ Americans pushed for and won greater rights.
After Reagan’s 1980 victory, Weyrich would continue to test issue after issue to keep evangelicals voting, including abortion. This idealized rewind to 1950s America would systematically challenge the basic rights gained by Black Americans, LGBTQ+ people and those with disabilities.
“As they were searching for different issues, I think they understood that any issue that had some sort of connection to sexuality or sexual behavior was going to work for them,” Balmer told The 19th.
The first issue was “sodomy laws,” which aimed to make gay sex illegal. The Supreme Court overruled the last of them in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas. Next came marriage equality, which was granted nationwide by the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling in 2015. Still, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, evangelical Protestants were the only major religious group as of 2020 that opposed same-sex marriage: just 34 percent of those surveyed support marriage equality.
The country, however, moved on.
“It’s staggering how quickly [marriage] disappeared as an issue,” Balmer said “And so, they almost frantically began looking for something else. And of course, the trans thing was the next thing on the horizon.”
Today, nearly 8 in 10 Americans back nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, according to a poll from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. That includes 65 percent of Republicans. A 2021 poll by PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll found that two-thirds of Americans opposed bills limiting the rights of transgender people.
Maps of states that have passed laws that would ban abortion if the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade almost mirror those that have passed anti-trans bans. Eleven of the 15 states with a sports participation ban for trans youth have also moved to curtail abortion rights.
Zein Murib, assistant political professor at Fordham University, says that overlap is no mistake.
“They’re saying, ‘Forget about rights. This is about bodies,’” Murib said. “This is about these bodies being in places where they again presumably do not belong. … You see them deploying scare tactics like, ‘men disguised as women in girls’ restrooms’ or ‘boys in girls’ locker rooms.’”
As 19th News found in an investigation in 2021, the vast majority of anti-transgender bills never use the word “transgender” at all. Lawmakers instead pitch the bills as critical to securing rights for women in sports and larger society. Those arguments fail to acknowledge transgender women, and advocates say they are increasingly out of touch with the general electorate.
Chris Bull is the editorial director of queer media firm Q.Digital and the author of the 2001 book Perfect Enemies: The Battle Between the Religious Right and the Gay Movement. Bull argues that Republican lawmakers have abandoned 80 percent of their voters to cater to a sliver of their voters.
“I think that the cliche of American politics is not holding anymore,” he said. “They’re really running base campaigns, that 20 percent of the electorate.”
Still, political scientists warn that the strategy to attack trans rights could backfire and cost them support among an increasingly diverse electorate. More Americans, like Colby, know transgender people than ever before. More than that, evangelicals are statistically shrinking as a voting block, while the number who support LGBTQ+ people continues to rapidly grow.
In the 2018 midterms, the Human Rights Campaign, with polling firm Catalyst, found that people they dubbed “equality voters,” those whose support for LGBTQ+ rights strongly influenced their voting choices, made up 29 percent of the electorate. White evangelicals made up 26 percent of the vote.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wants his office to help defend Llano County officials being sued for restricting and banning books from their public library system. In a court filing, Paxton asked Austin-based federal district court Judge Robert Pitman to let the state intervene in the lawsuit, which was filed by seven Llano County residents.
If Pitman grants the motion, Paxton’s office could aid the county judge, county commissioners and library director in fighting the lawsuit. Books removed from the library include Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” and Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wants his office to help defend Llano County officials being sued for restricting and banning books from their public library system. #TXlegehttps://t.co/cNukzBOs92
When given a choice, Republicans show repeatedly, consistently they have no true principles. “Principles” are just a shield or a weapon to achieve the goal of power. They abandon those very same principles the very second it’s useful to do so. Do they care about the First Amendment now? No. Have they ever. Only when it’s ever been convenient to them.
But Republicans fight to the death over defending books that depict racist stereotypes and caricatures. They lost their collective little mind over Dr. Seuss books with clear racist overtones being taken off school shelves. Something anti-racist and educational, though? Suddenly banning books is fine. Patriotic, even.
Books removed from the library include Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” and Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group”
In a society run by Texan GQPers, all public libraries will have the identical offerings as your local Christian bookstore and church waiting room, as well as the same propaganda as Stormfront.
I’m so tired of the cranky contrarians in the center and left who only see “cancel culture” as happening on college campuses or in civil rights movements. Will they call this out, but will the likes of Bill Maher continue to obsessively condemn trans folks who speak out against Dave Chappelle?
(IHI Corp./NEDO)
Scottie's Playtime 