Charter schools have long been a scam, a way to get either Christian theocracy into the classroom or for right wing profiteers to get tax dollars. Remember these schools take dollars from public schools while being exempt from all the same rules. Including test score rules. Like church schools, they get to pick and choice which students they take, leaving the most difficult and disadvantaged to the public schools that lost money to the choosy charter schools. Now it is coming out that most charter schools have horrible results. In fact, one I read about was a tennis charter school that just had the students play tennis and never did school work. Yup, those students will get into advanced education easily. Hugs. Scottie
Thank you Tengrain for another wonderful post that puts the cards on the table and shows who holds the chips. But this one paragraph is to me everything the republican maga fundamentalist Christian right wants to do. Hugs. Scottie
If you happen to be a kid in Floriduh, there’s so many ways this jamoke is taking away your ability to learn about the world around you, from banning books, to expressly banning LGBTQ information, to now banning social media. It’s almost like Bootsie is afraid of what you might learn on your own.
This is government by gang thuggery, or to call it what it is, terrorism. And driven by religion. This was again pushed as evil and child abuse by Libs of TikTok who as I recently have posted she is very proud of the violence she promotes. She also is a rather stupid person who is overjoyed at the all the notoriety and attention she receives for stirring up hate and fear. This is the attempt by the religious minority to take over the country, force the majority to live by their biblical doctrines / views, and rolling back all the civil rights gained by women, black people, and the LGBTQ+. The US has never been and shouldn’t ever be a theocracy. This country must not let bigotry and hate causing fear and targeting people for harm become a legitimate way to govern. But again the haters win because the show was canceled denying the kids and parents who wanted it to lose out. The haters are denying the freedom of others to enjoy themselves freely to enforce a religious view of morality on everyone. We have to stop letting these events be canceled and the haters win. If there was a bomb let the haters get blamed then found, charged, go to court, and … Hugs. Scottie
A scheduled “Drag Queen Story Hour” at a Pennsylvania library that had drawn opposition was canceled Saturday after a suspicious package was found in the building and two blocks were evacuated after threats were reported, authorities said.
Police evacuated the Lancaster Public Library after the package was found. A state police bomb squad later cleared the library, but police said “additional reported threats” were still being investigated. Residents of the block and another block nearby were told to evacuate, an order lifted several hours later.
A city spokesperson later said that a dog had alerted on the package and that the contents were later found to be “benign” but “subsequently, we received additional written threats via email.”
Lissa Holland, the library’s executive director, said she felt “really sad, very disappointed and angry, that leaders of this county turned this into saving the children from the library and we are having to cancel this event because of safety threats.”
Though the library did not make the decision to cancel Saturday’s event, Holland said it was the right call during a brief interview under the overhang outside the Starbucks at 101 N. Queen St..
“Absolutely. It’s safety first, for everybody involved, For our storyteller, for the staff — and most important for the children that were going to be here and the families. I am saddened to the core” that the event had to be canceled, Holland said.
Police just pushed media an additional block pack after clearing the apparent suspicious package at the library. They say there are “additional reported threats” to the already cancelled drag story event. https://t.co/SNeLejHKdPpic.twitter.com/wKJJbwF323
In addition to the protests that received permits locally, this particular drag queen story event received considerable attention on Twitter in the leadup to today’s incidents. https://t.co/enBb9S10Fl
Right now: Protesters opposed to the drag event cancelled over an apparent series of incidents including a “suspicious package” and multiple “threats” according to Lancaster Police continue to demonstrate outside the police perimeter. pic.twitter.com/owRnPUbvtT
Earlier: A street preacher calling the drag story hour reader a "drag whore" was confronted.
"You are hateful," an individual said after tossing their mango dragonfruit lemonade on him. "This is not a Christian nation!" pic.twitter.com/lqdSEdP9mP
"I'm not saying anything about the bombs, but I'm saying praise God it was cancelled," the street preacher remarked when asked about the event being cancelled.
"I didn't even know it was cancelled, so hallelujah, it was canceled!"
This is what those terrorists are demonizing. I don’t why we didn’t start protesting at churches every time a pedo was found, lost opportunity to show where the real threat to children was coming from.
I figure it’s a play on “People of Walmart” and other similar things – the pictures and profiles being posted are of the people the profile is against, not something they identify with.
Makato is right. Her account started as something else and her career basically shifted because of the attention that was focused on her. There are several of these accounts on Twitter and what they do is collect other peoples posts from any social media–Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, et cetera–and post it in their timeline. They have names like Whatever Posting Ls or something similar. LisbonTikTok (I like that typo and I’m keeping it) started posting stuff from TikTok.
Do you hate some group but don’t want to be bothered searching the Internet for things to hate and laugh at? Do you want reinforcement of your own biases? They’ve got you covered.
That, then. How is this not a domestic terror threat? She got our leading childrens’ hospital shut down with her terrorism. Kids missed pedi chemo treatments.
She would claim this is a free speech thing and point out that she never actually tells people to do the terrible things they do. It’s a cop out of course because she gets her viewers enraged over BS. It would be like me saying, “Mr X is a terrible danger to society and someone should do something about him” and then when said person gets attacked and blames me I can say “I didn’t tell anyone to attack you!”
Enough, enough, enough! This is no way to maintain a society, permitting the sickest among us to call the shots by threats of violence. There must be stronger penalties for those bullies, those who terrify others with their threats, those who shut down the normal activities of society, those who cost thousands-to-millions of dollars for law enforcement and lost business. We must not allow them to make us all live in fear.
It is what the laws were meant to do, stop the teaching of tolerance and acceptance and vilify LGBTQ+ kids with the goal of trying to return to when LGBTQ+ kids were scared to be found out so were invisible. These laws have to go, it is a horrible attempt to install a fundamentalist religious view on everyone else and their children. Hugs. Scottie
The data comes amid an ongoing explosion in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.
According to a new report, anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in K-12 schools have quadrupled in U.S. states that have laws restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ students.
A Washington Post analysis of FBI data on anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes taking place in K-12 schools and on college campuses, published on March 12 found that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes “serious enough to be reported to local police” more than doubled across the country in recent years. The Post found that while an average of 108 anti-LGBTQ+ school hate crimes were reported between 2015 and 2019, that average rose to 232 between 2021 and 2022. According to FBI data, the most common hate crimes reported at schools were intimidation, simple assault (assault where no weapon was used), and vandalism.
However, this rise in school hate crimes was more pronounced in the 28 states that have enacted policies restricting LGBTQ+ students’ self-expression and/or limiting how teachers can talk about gender and sexuality in school. In these states, reported anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes on K-12 and college campuses more than tripled from an average of 28 per year between 2015 and 2019 to an average of 90 between 2021 and 2022.
As the Post points out, this increase is even more staggering when you remove college campuses and look at the anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in K-12 schools only. In states that have enacted restrictive laws, there were more than four times the number of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes across elementary, middle, and high schools, per year, from 2021 to 2022, compared with the years 2015 to 2019.
Although it’s only March, the American Civil Liberties Union is currently tracking a whopping 478 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across the U.S. this year, with 190 of those bills targeting student and educator rights.
Gerald Declan Radford, 65, initially claimed he shot Lay in self-defense. Prosecutors believe that Declan was the aggressor and was motivated by Lay’s sexual orientation.
Meanwhile, nonprofits that work with LGBTQ+ youth have reported an increase in crisis calls. According to the Post, The Trevor Project received over 500,000 crisis contacts during the fiscal year ending in July 2023 compared to the 230,000 the group received the previous year, while the Rainbow Youth Project received over 1,400 calls to its mental health crisis hotline per month in 2023 compared to 1,000 per month in 2022. According to the Rainbow Youth Project, calls from Oklahoma to the group’s hotline more than tripled after details about Nex Benedict, the trans Oklahoma teen of Choctaw ancestry who died the day after three older girls reportedly beat them in a school bathroom, became national news.
“Young people will say, ‘My government hates me,’ ‘My school hates me,’ ‘They don’t want me to exist,’” the Rainbow Youth Project’s founder and executive director, Lance Preston, told the Post. “That … is absolutely unacceptable. That is shocking.”
This very quickly went to being a right vs left talk about abortion and even teaching girls on how not to become pregnant. Again I ask why it is so vitally important for the fundamentalist Christian maga right to prevent young girls learning how to keep from getting pregnant or learning sexual educations about their bodies !!!! Hugs. Scottie
So everything is basically reset back to where it was before this law. The only difference is teachers and schools will have to deal with fundamentalist Christian maga parents and wing nuts who don’t even live in those schools claiming that teachers are teaching gender or sexual orientation for allowing a rainbow sticker, that the schools are violating the law because the library returned the books with and about LGBTQIA characters / plots in them, and it will tie all schools up in lawsuits the state won’t help them with. DeathSantis is really just admitting he was wrong without saying it. Kaplan said that she was sure that the law would be ruled unconstitutional if they continue with the appeal, but that it would take at least two years of kids being bullied and the books out of the library. Of course DeathSantis is claiming a total win when it completely rolls back his law. Gay teachers can let the kids know they are gay, those married can talk about their spouses and post pictures. Anti-gay bullying programs are allowed again. Plus maybe the best thing, the gay straight alliance clubs are allowed again. The real thing you see is DeathSantis only pushed this as long as he was running for office, and once he was no longer needing to suck up to the fundamentalist Christians he backed down, and did not fight for it. I think he knew all along it was an illegal bill. Hugs. Scottie
*** Personal note. Was not feeling well all weekend and this morning I woke up at 4 am needing to throw up. But all I could bring up was air. Then after half a cup of coffee, I started to throw up last night’s meal. All morning I keep feeling dizzy and nauseous every 20 minutes or so. I have spent a lot of yesterday and so far today, in bed. Hugs. Scottie1`
Opponents said the law had created confusion about whether teachers could identity themselves as LGBTQ or if they even could have rainbow stickers in classrooms.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Students and teachers will be able to speak freely about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms, provided it’s not part of instruction, under a settlement reached Monday between Florida education officials and civil rights attorneys who had challenged a state law which critics dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.”
The settlement clarifies what is allowed in Florida classrooms following passage two years ago of the law prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. Opponents said the law had created confusion about whether teachers could identity themselves as LGBTQ or if they even could have rainbow stickers in classrooms.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attends the drivers meeting prior to the NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway, in Daytona Beach, Fla., on Feb. 19, 2024.Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images file
Other statesused the Florida law as a template to pass prohibitions on classroom instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and North Carolina are among the states with versions of the law.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Florida Board of Education will send instructions to every school district saying the Florida law doesn’t prohibit discussing LGBTQ people, nor prevent anti-bullying rules on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or disallow Gay-Straight Alliance groups. The settlement also spells out that the law is neutral — meaning what applies to LGBTQ people also applies to heterosexual people — and that it doesn’t apply to library books not being used in the classroom.
“What this settlement does, is, it re-establishes the fundamental principal, that I hope all Americans agree with, which is every kid in this country is entitled to an education at a public school where they feel safe, their dignity is respected and where their families and parents are welcomed,” Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview. “This shouldn’t be a controversial thing.”
In a statement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office described the deal as a “major win” with the law remaining intact.
“Today’s mutually agreed settlement ensures that the law will remain in effect and it is expected that the case will be dismissed by the Court imminently,” the statement said.
The law, formally known as the Parental Rights in Education Act, has been championed by the Republican governor since before its passage in 2022 by the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature. It barred instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, and it was expanded to all grades last year.
Republican lawmakers had argued that parents should broach these subjects with children and that the law protected children from being taught about inappropriate material.
But opponents of the law said it created a chilling effect in classrooms. Some teachers said they were unsure if they could mention or display a photo of their same-sex partner in the classroom. In some cases, books dealing with LGBTQ topics were removed from classrooms and lines mentioning sexual orientation were excised from school musicals. The Miami-Dade County School Board in 2022 decided not to adopt a resolution recognizing LGBTQ History Month, even though it had done so a year earlier.
The law also triggered the ongoing legal battles between DeSantis and Disney over control of the governing district for Walt Disney World in central Florida after DeSantis took control of the government in what the company described as retaliation for its opposition to the legislation. DeSantis touted the fight with Disney during his run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, which he ended earlier this year.
The civil rights attorneys sued Florida education officials on behalf of teachers, students and parents, claiming the law was unconstitutional, but the case was dismissed last year by a federal judge in Tallahassee who said they lacked standing to sue. The case was appealed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Kaplan said they believed the appellate court would have reversed the lower court’s decision, but continuing the lawsuit would have delayed any resolution for several more years.
“The last thing we wanted for the kids in Florida was more delay,” Kaplan said.
Of note, the lead attorney in the lawsuit is Roberta Kaplan, who is best known to most as E. Jean Carroll’s attorney. Kaplan was also Edith Windsor’s attorney in the landmark Supreme Court ruling on DOMA.
A settlement over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law will allow students and teachers to speak about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom, if it's not part of a lesson. https://t.co/FTg3TWJCyo
#Florida settles lawsuit over @GovRonDeSantis' controversial parental rights law & will clarify vague wording. Plaintiffs calling it the Don’t Say Gay law say the deal will stop school districts from “overreacting.” https://t.co/E4SQGjlUYQ via @JeffSolochek
The short clip is very important for all to hear. Thank you TG for posting it. I know many here also follow Mock Paper Scissors, but for those that do not or missed the post, this is great. It is about mistreating children, it is about Nex Benedict. Hugs. Scottie
Scottie's Playtime 