If you read the law it lets anyone claim to be offended by any media and that it doesn’t need to be declared obscene to be labeled obscene. Why is that? Because to a small group of very vocal haters just the existence of LGBTQ+ people is obscene. It offends their god so it offends them. But don’t try to claim the Bible is obscene or pushes offensive stuff it has special carve outs that make all the icky bad parts OK. I hope this will be appealed to the full appeals court as this attempt to errase an entire population of people based on bigotry must not be allowed to stand. I also just read where the education department under the hypermaga education secretary will not be enforcing or even recording the bullying and abuse of the LGBTQ+ kids at school. Her view is let the little fagots fend for themselves it seems. Remember she and her husband turned a blind eye to the many young boys being sexually assaulted by the wrestlers in their group.
Also the majority of the three judges panel said that the three patrons did not have standing to object because no books had been banned yet. They seem to have a wait and see if the victim is stabbed before taking the knife from the threatening person. That is stupid. Everyone knows what the law is intended to do and the writers of the law admit that openly. It seems the tRump appointed judges want to let attacks on the librarians and on the books that mention gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, and questioning kids / people be removed as soon as possible knowing it is harder to put them back than to ban them in the first place. Hugs.
The “social section” in Crawford County Library’s Van Buren branch (Screenshot from court documents)
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Arkansas’ 2023 law restricting access to library materials can go into effect, three years after a judge blocked two sections of the law on First Amendment grounds.
The three-judge panel from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled that the 18 plaintiffs had no standing to challenge one section of Act 372 and failed to prove that the other section was unconstitutionally vague.
The two sections create criminal liability for librarians who distribute content that some consider “obscene” or “harmful to minors,” and give city and county governing bodies the final say over library content.
Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin praised the ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.”
The plaintiffs challenging the law include libraries, bookstores, advocacy groups and individual library patrons. Their lead attorney, John Adams, said in a statement that the legal team is “evaluating all available legal options, including further review by the courts,” after Thursday’s ruling.
“Libraries and bookstores should be places where people can freely explore ideas — not where booksellers and librarians face criminal liability for selling, checking out, or even just shelving constitutionally protected books,” Adams said. “The freedom to read is fundamental to a free society and has always been protected by the First Amendment.”
Griffin said Act 372 was meant to “to address legitimate concerns about minors’ access to obscene materials and to establish a process for reviewing challenged content.”
School and public libraries already had content challenge policies before Act 372. The law stalled in the Legislature in 2023 before it was amended to say library materials would be relocated to an area inaccessible to minors, not removed from the premises, if elected officials find them to be “obscene.”
Section 5 of Act 372 allows city and county governing bodies to relocate challenged material if a challenger disagrees with a library panel’s decision to keep it in its original section.
Another section of the law that gave school boards the same authority over school library materials had not been challenged.
Adams told the appeals court in June that Crawford County, a defendant in the case, showed what the law’s restrictions would look like in practice. The county’s five library branches separated LGBTQ+ children’s books from the rest of the collection after public outcry, and county officials cited Act 372 as a reason to maintain these “social sections,” even before the legislation became law.
Crawford County lost a separate federal lawsuit in 2024 after three parents alleged that the “social sections” violated the First Amendment.
The three library patrons who sued over the state law do not have standing because Section 5’s book challenge and relocation policies do not harm the plaintiffs, the appeals court panel said Thursday.
“Plaintiffs are speculating libraries might decide to segregate certain books as part of their curation policies, which they have not yet adopted, or in response to challenges, which have not yet been filed,” the panel wrote.
The librarian and bookstore plaintiffs have standing to challenge the other section of the law because they would be at risk of prosecution for noncompliance, according to the ruling, but the three judges disagreed with Adams’ claim that Section 1 of Act 372 was too vague.
This section makes “furnishing a harmful item to a minor” a Class A misdemeanor. Conviction would lead to a maximum prison sentence of one year.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that the law’s lack of a definition for terms like “furnishing” and “harmful” could lead to violations of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
An unchallenged provision of Act 372 removes schools and public libraries from the part of Arkansas state code that previously exempted them from prosecution for disseminating obscene content. Another unchallenged provision made school and public library employees liable for a Class D felony if they “knowingly” distribute obscene material or inform others of how to obtain it. A Class D felony conviction carries a maximum prison sentence of six years.
However, the language of Section 1 “limit[s] its application to situations when a person knowingly furnishes an item to a minor knowing of the item’s harmful character” and therefore is not too vague, the appeals court ruled.
Chief Judge Steven Colloton wrote in a concurring opinion Thursday that he understood the plaintiffs’ vagueness claim but disagreed with it “because third-party library patrons have no constitutional right to receive unfettered access to books of their choice at taxpayer expense.”
Colloton was appointed to the court in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush and has been chief judge since 2024. President Donald Trump appointed the panel’s other two judges, Ralph Erickson and L. Steven Grasz, in 2017.
Erickson was on the three-judge panel in April that allowed a 2023 Iowa law to go into effect, requiring the removal of books containing “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from Iowa public school libraries.
The removal of the injunction on Act 372 comes as the Arkansas Department of Education has been considering requiring public libraries to restrict children’s access to “sexually explicit materials” in order to receive state funding.
Dozens of Arkansans told the education department in June that they oppose requiring libraries to ensure patrons age 16 or younger cannot check out materials that depict or describe sexual contact and behavior.
The Arkansas State Library Board will meet Aug. 14 to consider sending the rules to a legislative panel for further approval. Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed all six board members.
Author Info
Tess Vrbin
Tess Vrbin came to the Advocate from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, where she reported on low-income housing and tenants’ rights, and won awards for her coverage of 2021 flooding and tornado damage in rural Arkansas. She previously covered local government for The Commercial Dispatch in Mississippi and state government for the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri.
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
I do not think the punishment fits the crime here. These people tried to stop other people from exercising their civil rights simply due to the bigotry and hate of the oppressors. Hate doesn’t give people the right to stop people from gathering or enjoying legal activities. These haters got away with it. That will simply encurage others to do the same thing over and over until they drive those they hate underground and out of the public view. Which is what these haters want to accomplish: remove those they hate from society. Hugs
The group behind the incident, NSC-131, will be permanently barred from ‘unlawful discriminatory practices’ in the state, if a judge approves
By Steven Porter Globe Staff,Updated July 31, 2026, 25 minutes ago
In this file photo, Christopher R. Hood Jr. appears at West Roxbury Municipal Court on July 25, 2022, when he was 23 years old. Hood founded the Nationalist Social Club 131 in 2019.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
The founder of a neo-Nazi group that sent masked men to protest outside a 2023 drag queen story hour event in Concord, N.H., has admitted their anti-LGBTQ intimidation tactics amounted to a civil rights violation, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office announced Thursday.
Christopher R. Hood Jr. of Newburyport, Mass., and his group, the Nationalist Social Club-131, or NSC-131, will be permanently barred by court order from engaging in any further unlawful discriminatory practices, if a judge accepts the deal. Anyone who violates those terms could face further sanctions.
Hood, 27, will be required to complete 250 hours of community service and pay $2,500 in civil penalties, plus another $7,500 if he violates the terms of the court’s order, according to a motion filed by prosecutors. He’ll also be barred from coming within 250 feet of the eatery where this occurred or any other Teatotaller Café location.
The core allegation in this case was that Hood, his organization, and 19 unnamed co-defendants — who directed intimidating chants and homophobic slurs at those inside the establishment, performed Nazi salutes, and banged on the cafe’s glass windows — had sought to compel a place of public accommodation to engage in unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
“No individual or organization has the right to threaten, intimidate, or coerce a New Hampshire business into violating the law or denying lawful access based on protected characteristics,” Attorney General John M. Formella said in a statement.
“This resolution delivers accountability and sends the message that organized hate group activity that violates the law will not be tolerated,” he added.
The attorneys who represented the defendants in this case, Bradford Ryan Stanton and William E. Gens, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Formella said certain terms under the agreement apply to NSC-131 as an unincorporated association. For example, the group will be permanently barred from all unlawful discriminatory practices and will be prohibited from coming within 250 feet of any location that’s part of the Teatotaller Café business, which has since rebranded as Totally Tea and Coffee.
That means an individual who didn’t participate in the 2023 incident could theoretically be subjected to the terms of this agreement in the future, if there is evidence of their affiliation with NSC-131, he said.
The motion Formella’s office filed with the court indicates NSC-131 has disbanded and Hood has stated he intends to discontinue his involvement with that group and other organized hate activity.
Formella told the Globe that securing a victory in which the defendant admitted wrongdoing represents a significant achievement.
“It was worth it, I think, in the greater context of our civil rights efforts to get that admission,” he said.
This wasn’t Formella’s first attempt to clamp down on NSC-131’s activity. His office filed a complaint in early 2023 alleging the group had committed civil rights violations by hanging a “Keep New England White” banner from a Portsmouth overpass in 2022. But the New Hampshire Supreme Court ultimately ruled in early 2025 that the prosecution was unconstitutional on free-speech grounds.
Formella’s office filed the second case against Hood and NSC-131, regarding the Teatotaller incident, in late 2023.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell also filed a complaintin late 2023 against Hood, NSC-131, and a group leader named Liam McNeil of Waltham, Mass., over incidents involving LGBTQ events and immigrants in emergency shelters. That case is still pending, according to court records.
Hood was formerly part of Patriot Front and the Proud Boys before he founded NSC-131 in late 2019. The members of his group disrupted or shut down several drag queen story events in Massachusetts in 2022, according to the lawsuit. Members of the group regularly wore khaki pants, black shirts or jackets, and ski masks, balaclavas, and neck gaiters to hide their identities.
The parents of a transgender teen who died by suicide earlier this year are speaking out about the toll Idaho’s anti-trans laws and the Trump administration’s anti-trans crusade took on their daughter.
“You worry about that hatred being internalized, and that’s what happened to my kid,” Elyse Thorpe told NBC News in a recent profile. “It got inside.”
Thorpe and ex-husband Joseph Pollard describe their late daughter, May Pollard, as an energetic and curious child who loved sloths, video games, and writing poetry. She just wanted to live her life and experience the same things any teen does. But she was also keenly aware of the wave of anti-trans laws and sentiment that have swept Idaho and much of the U.S. in recent years.
According to NBC News, May, who had also been diagnosed with autism, came out as trans when she was in eighth grade. She began receiving gender-affirming medical care in ninth grade. But due to Idaho’s ban on such care for minors, passed in 2022 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2024, her parents were forced to travel to Portland, Oregon, every six months to get May the care she needed. Following President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, Thorpe began making the 13-hour round trip by car to avoid creating a flight record amid the administration’s relentless crackdown on gender-affirming care for young people.
While the treatment improved things for May, the obstacles placed between her and the care she needed by anti-trans legislators continued to weigh on her.
Then, in July 2023, Idaho’s law banning trans students from accessing single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity took effect. Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of Boise High School’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance, and in July 2025, May joined the lawsuit under the pseudonym Jane Doe. In court filings, May described feeling stigmatized by being forced to use her campus’s two single-occupancy restrooms, which came to be referred to as the “trans bathrooms.”
“It is scary having to look around before to see if anyone will see me going into the single-user restroom, as I worry about people gossiping and speculating about me being transgender,” she said. “I don’t want people to know I am transgender without my consent — even students who might be friendly. For me, it is not a part of myself I talk about or that I feel is the most important part of my identity.”
Her parents told NBC News that May would avoid eating and drinking during the school day, hoping to not have to use the school’s bathrooms. “I just want to fit in,” she wrote in her affidavit in the Lambda Legal case. “It is upsetting to think that I may have to go through the rest of high school without access to something as basic as the ability to use the same restroom as everyone else.”
May’s parents say she became more troubled last fall and winter, according to NBC News. She attempted to run away to Oregon, and at least one of her poems seemed to reference self-harm. Then on the morning of January 27, Thorpe woke to find May missing from her bedroom. She later found her daughter’s body in a downstairs bedroom. May was just 16 years old.
When a detective asked her parents whether anyone might have wanted to harm May, Thorpe responded that “A lot of America” did.
“There is a huge amount of animosity, every single day, thrown at trans kids,” an angry and grieving Pollard told the detective. “The whole f**king country. The whole f**king administration, every single f**king day.”
As NBC News notes, over the last few years, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) has signed 15 anti-LGBTQ+ laws. In April, Little signed a pair of bills, one of which made it a criminal offense for trans people to use the bathroom associated with their gender, while the other banned Pride flags on government buildings.
As for Lambda Legal’s challenge to the state’s school bathroom ban, at the time of May’s death, she was one of just two plaintiffs left in the case, as all the others had graduated high school and no longer held standing. Earlier this spring, Lambda Legal moved to dismiss the case after the final plaintiff graduated.
But Thorpe has continued to protest Idaho’s anti-trans laws. According to NBC News, she stood outside Gov. Little’s office during a March 31 protest holding a photo of her daughter.
“I wanted to support the protesters and remind everyone, including the governor,” Thorpe told the outlet, “that the stakes are real.”
“The parents go and testify, and we say, ‘Children are going to die,’” she said. “We tell the legislators that, and they dismiss it. I guess they think it’s hyperbole, or they think it’s hysteria, or they think it’s an acceptable outcome, probably some mix of those things. So I don’t understand why there is an unwillingness to connect these laws to these outcomes. It was right there from the start.”
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For those who think it is just the government of Israel that is pro-genocide of the Palestinians. In fact due to media and training in jewish schools the drum has long been pushing that Palestinians are evil sub humans. Sound familiar? It is what happened to the very people now doing it to others. Seems they learned the wrong lessons from Germany in the 1930s to 1945. The public is mostly fully OK with what the government is doing and the media has pushed it hard like our own billionaire bought media is trying to do. The media is hiding the truth and wants to push a narrative that supports / makes Israel the poor agreevied party when they are in fact the ones pushing the hostility and threats onto others. Israel retuniely killed journalists and banned all others from entering Gaza and the West Bank trying to keep video of the crimes being committed by the Jewish public and Israeli government from being seen by the world. They know what they are doing is wrong and if people knew the truth they would force their government to stop Israel.
Israel doesn’t want coexistence with others; it wants to rule over them. They want to take land they claim a 2,500 year old document gives to them that the rest of the world doesn’t recognize as the borderlines. Here is the public supported by the majority of the government, saying no Arabs in Gaza anymore. While the IDF destroyed water for the Gazans, they passed it out to the illegal settlers. If Palitisinans were doing this on their side of the fence the IDF would shoot them no questions asked. The MR crew is doing an impressive job laying out the difference in rules and privileges for the Palestinians and the settlers. As Matt says, Israel is now South Africa apartheid on steroids. Hugs
An update on my procedure to shave the spinal cord in my lower spine. The people at the surgical center were grand. I can’t describe them any other way. One nurse even joked with Ron and me that she would love to spend time with us off work hours because she loved our sexual innuendo banter with each other, stuff like we can’t even think straight after 36 years together and that we don’t say move straight forward we say move gayly forward. But work required her to only join us around the fringes but we had her laughing so hard. All of the staff were wornder and one even walked me to the bathroom when I felt I needed to pee. It was relatively embarrassing, but as I had worked in ICUs before I realized it was totally every day normal for the nurses to see my butt. She did hang the IVs and give me privacy which was more than we were able to do for the ICU patients.
When they took me into the procedure room, I was worried that I might not be out enough and would feel pain. The anesthesiologist asked me if I had ever had a colonoscopy. I repiled yes. He said do you remember it? No I replied. Same here he said, once we get you positioned, you won’t remember anything. They got me positioned, and then he told me that once they got me an arm rest for my right hand he would administer the aniestha. I was gone even before the arm rest was set up. Totally out. Woke up in the recovery room, and once I was awake they went and got Ron.
I have a list of do and don’ts. But on the way home we stopped to eat, I had a large breakfast for me. Then we got home, and I went to bed until 12:30. Got up, ate again, and locked the Majority Report into the fun half so I can watch it free, and went back to bed. Then I slept until nearly 5 PM. Got up and started working on the cartoon / meme / news post that was to go out today. I will go out tomorrow. Sorry about that, the spirit is willing, but the body is very weak right now. On the plus side the pain in my right leg I have been living with seems to have diminished greatly and in some cases gone away.
The video below is very funny and points out how tRump is now just a befuddled grandpa who thinks everything must be about him and how he is the greatest even when he is clueless about what he is talking about. The host points out the mistakes and money interests of the entire cabinet. Hope you enjoy. Hugs
I watched this the day it aired on the show. My gods how horrific and horrifying. The out of control settlers try to kill these people because they are recording the stealing of Palestinian lands and murdering Palestinians. If the driver had been any slower these people in the cars would have been killed. And the IDF supported the attacks on helpless people. US citizens. The Israeli government takes our taxpayer money and supports the killing of US citizens and reporters. If there is anything that says the Israelis know they are committing war crimes it is the killing of the reporters for showing their crimes. The place these attacks took place is in a zone that no Israeli is supposed to be even allowed in. Israeli is out of control and they use our taxpayer money to do it. The reason the reporter wanted to go to that spot was because a palestinian man’s son was killed and those with him hunted for 2 hours by settlers. The settlers live in the homes that the Palestinians built for themselves. Israeli settlers are nothing more than thieving thugs, and the population of Israel supports them which makes all those in Israel supporting this nothing more than thieving thugs. The people in these cars were terrified. You can hear it in the cries of the people in the car. The US ambassador supports Israel in this killing of US people. Please watch and do what you can to stop these lawless attacks against innocent people by Israeli settlers. Hugs
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Billionaire TERF influencer J.K. Rowling has announced that she will cover the legal costs of anti-trans groups named in a report by Amnesty International (UK), which called them “anti-rights.”
The report was retracted shortly after publication and replaced with a statement from the organization saying the report was uploaded “without going through the established internal review processes” and that its “language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK, which is why it was promptly removed.”
But the withdrawal and public acknowledgement was not enough to sate the organizations that have fought tooth and nail to exclude and/or antagonize the transgender community in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is notoriously more perilous for free speech than the United States. For our neighbors across the pond, the burden of proof lies with the defendant to prove the statement is true; here in the United States, the burden of proof lies with the aggrieved to prove that a statement is categorically false, and published knowingly or at least recklessly regardless. The US also benefits from “anti-SLAPP” laws to prevent such frivolous lawsuits waged by wealthy individuals or powerful corporations against those who criticize them.
So Rowling capitalized on the spectacle to, in essence, help dozens of groups in what appears to be an attempt to sue Amnesty into oblivion.
CAPTION: Screenshot from Rowling’s Twitter, where she offers “women’s organizations” backing to sue Amnesty International (UK) through her own charitable fund. She quote tweets a group of people who self-identify as “trans widows”—referring to cisgender people whose spouses or ex-spouses came out as transgender.
The saga began earlier this month, when Amnesty International (UK) released a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It released a similar report last year, but this year, it added a new category for what appears to be the anti-rights movement’s most rapidly growing sector: “Gender critical” groups, or groups that are antithetical to transgender rights and inclusion.
Rowling rushed to tweet about the situation.
CAPTION: Rowling tweets a group’s response to Amnesty International (UK)’s report on “anti-rights” groups.
She lauded “LGB” groups—another anti-trans buzzword, which, as the name suggests, describes groups that wish to erase transgender people from the queer liberation movement—like the Gay Men’s Network, an organization that has pushed for anti-trans policies. That group posted a public letter indicating it might sue Amnesty International for defamation. The Network demanded a retraction of the report and then claimed that Amnesty is guilty of “trying to control gay and lesbian free speech.”
In the day or so that followed, Rowling retweeted around a dozen similar letters. The posted letters include groups like Genspect, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that threatened Amnesty International with legal action, as well as groups like LGB Alliance and Sex Matters.
Amnesty International (UK) did not formally reply to a request for comment for this piece.
Gender critical activists, often financed by Rowling, rely on legal “guerilla warfare” said one U.K.-based trans rights organizer, who could only speak to Erin in the Morning if granted anonymity. The tactic is familiar: Wear down non-profits and individuals who dare speak out against anti-trans and anti-rights groups. They don’t have to win a lawsuit; they can just file again, and again, and again, draining valuable time and resources.
“They have sued organizations into the ground,” the advocate said.
Some context for just a handful of these groups so up in arms about being labeled as hateful: Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy for Sex Matters, gave a speech at a Genspect conference (both are groups on the anti-rights list) about how “beauty” is “inimical to trans bullshit.
She also boasted about manufacturing a moral and medical panic about how, although only a “small” segment of trans kids are prescribed puberty blockers, it has been a strategic “rhetorical device” to erode the rights of transgender people more broadly.
Depending on who you ask, TERFs are considered either a self-branded liberal faction of gender critical ideology, or a different term for what is essentially the same movement. TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” a term to describe self-proclaimed “feminists” who oppose giving transgender women and cisgender women equal rights.
Many of these TERF or “gender critical” groups have close ties to far-right Christian groups. DonorsTrust, the conservative donor behemoth and primary financier of initiatives like Project 2025, also forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and Thoughtful Therapists, both of whom made the “anti-rights” list because, as Amnesty International (UK) among many others have put it, they promote “conversion practices.”
One major point of contention was the inclusion of Rowling’s own organization, Beira’s Place. It does not primarily seem to function as any sort of advocacy organization. Rather, it’s a women’s shelter for those fleeing domestic violence, but it also has an explicit anti-trans policy, banning transgender women from accessing its services.
However, as the report explained, none of these groups exist in a vacuum. “These entities must be understood as an ecosystem sharing values, goals, strategy and tactics and, for some of them, formal collaboration,” it reads.
Amnesty isn’t the first or last institution or expert to call out gender critical ideology for being anti-rights. UN Women has published materials saying as much.
Meanwhile, University of Sheffield sociologist Dr. Sally Hines has called this framework “deeply conservative.” In the Journal for Gender Studies, she writes that “despite its origins within a branch of radical feminism, [gender-critical ideology] has a profoundly misogynist agenda that stands opposed to the rights of women.” It is a “key force within a current conservative pushback against the rights of women and minoritized sexual groups.”
Gender critical activists continue to use the language of oppression to characterize their plight. Many say “TERF” is a slur. Others believe criticizing a group because of its arguably regressive politics is grounds for a lawsuit.
Despite the fact that the report was pulled down, Erin in the Morning was able to retrieve a copy reposted by an anti-trans news outlet. You can read a full version of that archived version below.
Report A Growing Threat The Anti Rights Movement In The Uk July 2026
Ro Khanna details the abuses the Israelis commit against the palestinians and how the authorities do nothing to stop these abuses. Khanna gives numerous details and says that the israeli governments want to make it clear that no one should go to see the attractions and abuse done to the Palestinians but should only visit the Jewish parts of Israel. This is the best reporting of what happened to the congressman and the other US citizens. Hugs
In this file photo, Christopher R. Hood Jr. appears at West Roxbury Municipal Court on July 25, 2022, when he was 23 years old. Hood founded the Nationalist Social Club 131 in 2019.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Scottie's Playtime 
