Please notice the legislators use their religious beliefs to force their religion on all people in the state. My god doesn’t make mistakes so you have to put your body at risk having your rapists baby even if you are a little child yourself, and you have a different faith than mine. My god, my god, my god, they scream as they stamp their feet. Worship my god the way I do they yell at people.Women are nothing but vessels for a man’s use, pleasure, and birthing his off spring. She should be happy to be property. I know it is so because I believe it is what a mythical being told me that I follow. They don’t get that not everyone goes to their church and wants to live by their idea of god’s laws / church doctrine. I can not decide if it is pure ego that thinks they have a right to force their religious views on everyone, if it is ego that makes them ignore all science in favor of belief, or if it is a desperate need to please their god and show it that they are worthy of him. Like a child desperate to please an abusive parent. Hugs. Scottie
Missouri was the first state in the nation to ban abortion and seemingly remains determined to be as cruel as possible.
Missouri state Sen. Rick Brattin said forced pregnancy and birth could be “the greatest healing agent” for rape victims in his arguments against adding a rape exception to the state’s abortion ban.
Photo: Rick Brattin/Facebook
In 2022, Missouri was the first state to ban abortion when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and anti-abortion lawmakers in the state are continuing their streak of cruelty. On Wednesday, across party lines, Republicans rejected an amendment that would have added rape and incest exceptions to the state’s total ban. Democratic state Sen. Tracy McCreery proposed the amendment by pleading with her colleagues to “show an ounce of compassion” for victims. As it currently exists, McCreery said the ban tells victims, “We’re going to force you to give birth, even if that pregnancy resulted from forcible rape by a family member, a date, an ex-husband or a stranger.”
As if voting to reject McCreery’s amendment weren’t insulting enough to victims, state Sen. Rick Brattin (R) explained his vote by arguing that being forced to carry their rapist’s baby could be “healing” for victims. “If you want to go after the rapist, let’s give him the death penalty. Absolutely, let’s do it,” Brattin said. “But not the innocent person caught in-between that, by God’s grace, may even be the greatest healing agent you need in which to recover from such an atrocity.” Seemingly trying to make his comments as horrific as possible, Brattin also managed to compare abortion to slavery.
Another Republican, state Sen. Sandy Crawford, argued against rape exceptions because “God doesn’t make mistakes”: “Even in some of these very horrific cases, there was a reason that God allowed there to be a child out of this situation,” Crawford elaborated. Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Bill Eigel—who’s running for governor—inexplicably claimed McCreery’s proposed amendment would “bring back the institution of abortion so that kids can get abortions in the state of Missouri,” stating, “A one-year-old could get an abortion under this.” To this, a Democratic senator returned, “I don’t know that a one-year-old could get pregnant, Senator.” I really don’t know what to say to any of this, except that Republican lawmakers clearly have no good arguments in support of their heinous laws and the violence they’re inflicting on survivors and pregnant people—and that becomes clearer every day when they start inexplicably invoking pregnant one-year-olds.
Missouri legislators’ rejection of a rape exception comes after, last month, new research estimates that in states that have banned abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022, there have been an estimated 64,565 rape-induced pregnancies. Of these 64,565 pregnancies, 91% were in states with bans that lacked rape exceptions.
Missouri Republicans’ arguments against a rape exception are the latest contribution to anti-abortion politicians’ hall-of-shame hits on the topic of rape and abortion. Over a decade ago, failed Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin gave us “legitimate rape” (his claim that there’s no need for rape exceptions because “legitimate rape” won’t result in pregnancy). And ever since—certainly, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe—it feels like every other month there’s a new outlandish, wildly offensive comment from anti-abortion officials about abortion and rape. Shortly after Roe fell, a Utah Republican said she “[trusts] women enough to control when they allow a man to ejaculate inside of them and to control that intake of semen,” therefore negating the need for abortion for rape victims.
Also in 2022, a Michigan Republican candidate said he told his daughters “If rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.” A Republican state lawmaker in Ohio called pregnancy from rape “an opportunity.” Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) acknowledged the abortion ban in his state could force child rape survivors to carry their rapist’s babies, but shrugged off the idea of personally doing anything about it: “I would prefer a different outcome than that, but that’s not the debate today in Arkansas. It might be in the future, but for now, the law triggered with only one exception … in the case of the life of the mother,” he said in June 2022. In other cases, Republican lawmakers have refused to even address rape victims speaking out against their laws altogether.
McCreery introduced the proposed rape exception as an amendment to a Republican-sponsored bill that would continue Missouri’s ban on taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Democratic lawmakers in other states have also run into problems trying to add exceptions—including rape exceptions—to their state abortion bans, and rape victims and advocates have argued that the processes to access rape exceptions are too cumbersome for victims. “It may not be today or tomorrow, but down the line, this could happen to someone you love,” Hadley Duvall, a rape survivor who’s helping to lead an effort to add a rape exception to Kentucky’s ban, told Jezebel in January about the prevalence of sexual violence. “And if you can look them in the eye and tell them ‘You don’t deserve this medical procedure, even though your innocence was taken from you, your health is in danger’—I don’t know how they live with themselves.”
Per Jezebel, Brattin went on to compare abortion to slavery. Brattin first appeared here in 2017 when he declared that there’s a “distinction” between human beings and LGBTQ people. That earned him a scathing rebuke from the editorial board of the Kansas City Star. In December 2023, Brattin appeared here when he authored or co-sponsored nearly two dozen anti-LGBTQ bills. One of his bills would make it a felony to perform drag in the view of children, another would institute a K-6 “Don’t Say Gay” law.
In 2014, Brattin introduced a bill that would require women seeking abortion to get written permission from the father of the fetus. In 2022, Brattin ran for the US House, finishing second in the GOP primary.
My aunt had a former student who was a result of a rape. He is now in prison as a result of several acts of violence against different people due to anger issues. Anger issues brought on in large part by his mother who made no secret of the fact he wasn’t wanted and how much she resented him. This fucker has no clue what he is talking about. P.S. Even in ones with “happy endings” the woman in each story made clear it was HER choice and no one else should get to make that for them.
State-level legislation and executive orders this year shifted from censoring racial issues in classrooms and instead focused on censoring LGBTQ+ issues, according to a new report from PEN America. At the same time, this significant shift also created an increased resistance to these unpopular laws and policies.
The free-expression nonprofit PEN America has been tracking what it describes as “educational gag orders” since 2021. While such bills introduced in 2021 and 2022 focused on limiting how issues of race and racism could be taught in classrooms, in 2023, conservative lawmakers and advocates turned their attention to banning discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in K–12 classrooms.
The anti-LGBTQ+ group’s candidates lost big in at least four states.
“It appears that America’s would-be censors now see proposals to restrict conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity as more of a winning political issue than efforts to restrict discussions of race and racism,” the report stated. “Leveraging that presumed support, [conservatives] have attempted to enact sweeping restrictions on what school-age children can read and learn.”
PEN America documented 110 state-level bills introduced during the 2023 legislative sessions that it defined as educational gag orders. Only 10 became law, while four other restrictions on education were imposed via executive orders or state or system regulations. Of those 110 bills, 39 specifically targeted how public school teachers could discuss LGBTQ+ issues (five of those also applied to private schools).
According to the report, about three-quarters of those anti-LGBTQ+ bills were modeled on Florida’s infamous “Parental Rights in Education Act,” commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
These restrictions resulted not only in the marginalization of LGBTQ+ students and students with LGBTQ+ family members, they have also had a devastating impact on public education more broadly, forcing teachers to self-censor and contributing to teacher shortages across the country, the report added.
“If teachers are afraid to make any mention of race or LGBTQ+ identities in the classroom, if they are afraid to answer student questions, if quality educators are leaving and cannot be replaced, students are the ones who suffer most,” PEN America’s report stated.
While efforts to impose educational censorship are expected to continue into 2024, the report also offers reason for hope in the form of increased resistance to such legislation. According to PEN America, at least 13 different lawsuits challenging educational gag orders are currently pending, and political resistance has also grown.
“Over the last three years — and especially in the past twelve months — an increasing number of national groups have begun dedicating significant resources to combat educational censorship,” according to the report. “Simultaneously, a network of state-centric groups — many of them founded by parents, community members, and educators themselves — has emerged to take the fight directly to the local school board or state legislature.”
As PEN America notes, growing public opposition to educational censorship targeting issues of race and LGBTQ+ identity could ultimately make such legislation less attractive to conservative lawmakers.
This is the result and fear of the minority when they try to rule over the majority. Think of it. The majority of the voting public, the people, want this right. So republicans being a minority based on misogynistic religious ideals want to deny the majority the right to have a say. That is the republican right wing maga in its entirety. That is the mom’s of liberty, the mom’s of TikTok, it is the idea that a racist bigoted repressive regressive oppressive religious minority trying desperately to force their ideas on the rest of society. I am so sick of these anti-democracy theocratic republican minority trying to force the rest of the country to live by what their preacher says. Hugs. Scottie
Again this is about making sure only their god is seen, celebrated, and worshiped. It must be only their god in schools, seen in public, and running the government. It must be prevented that this fundamentalist minority in their own religion must be prevented from taking over the country. Hugs. Scottie
The GOP-backed bill selectively prevents one group from accessing public spaces
FEB 5, 2024
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Republicans in Arizona have introduced a bill that would ban Satanic displays in public spaces. It comes months after a Satanic display in the Iowa Capitol sent conservatives reeling, leading one man to vandalize it. (Just last week, he was charged with a hate crime.)
Titled the “Reject Escalating Satanism by Preserving Essential Core Traditions (RESPECT) Act,” SB 1279 would alter the law by adding the following line to three different parts of the state statute:
SATANIC MEMORIALS, STATUES, ALTARS OR DISPLAYS OR ANY OTHER METHOD OF REPRESENTING OR HONORING SATAN MAY NOT BE DISPLAYED ON PUBLIC PROPERTY IN THIS STATE.
The bill was introduced by Sen. Jake Hoffman, a first-term senator and former member of the State House most (in)famous for being one of Arizona’s fake electors back in 2020.
He’s joined by a dozen fellow Republican co-sponsors who don’t understand that the Establishment Clause doesn’t allow them to exclude one particular religious icon just because they disagree with whatever they think it represents.
Because if there’s one thing we know about Satanic monuments, it’s that groups like The Satanic Temple only request that they go up when there’s a Christian monument already in place. In Arkansas, for example, there’s an ongoing lawsuit involving Satanists who sued after state officials rejected their statue of Baphomet despite allowing a Ten Commandments on Capitol grounds.
By singling out one religious group’s monuments for exclusion—presumably when displays from other faiths would be allowed—this bill would almost certainly trigger a lawsuit if passed.
Even the title is a farce. What’s the danger of “escalating Satanism”? Too much compassion and empathy? What “essential core traditions” are Arizona Republicans trying to preserve? Apparently they involve religious supremacy.
Bills like this, though, aren’t introduced because there’s any chance of them passing. They’re introduced to placate conservative Christians who fantasize about living in a theocracy. They’re a reminder that Christians like Hoffman believe they’re superior to people who don’t share their faith, and they intend to use the government to codify that belief into law—or at least send that message.
The Satanic Temple’s co-founder Lucien Greaves shared a similar view in an email. saying he found the bill “frightening” for what it symbolized more than what it would actually do:
The bill is frightening. Not because I worry that it will pass and will reduce us to a lower tier of citizenship, but because it has no hope of passing, and is so flagrantly unconstitutional that it demonstrates the most horrific incompetence of its every signatory from the Arizona senate.
These are public representatives who not only disrespect the oath of office they swore to uphold, but apparently have no clear understanding of what the purpose of their office is, or what legal principles underpin their authority to begin with.
For an actual senator to write and/or sign such a hopelessly illegal, petty and futile bill is to announce utter and complete ignorance as to the function of their office, and total disregard for the services they are expected to perform as public representatives.
Presenting such a bill, as a Senator, should be a sanctionable offense, as it impossible to imagine that any signatory to a document so embarrassingly juvenile and counter-Constitutional could ever truly be effective at anything.
SB 1279 will be formally discussed during a hearing of the Committee on Government on Wednesday morning. That committee happens to include Sen. Juan Mendez, a Democrat who’s openly atheist. So there will be at least one voice of reason in the mix.
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A robocall that used an AI voice resembling President Joe Biden’s to advise New Hampshire voters against voting in the state’s presidential primary has been linked to a pair of Texas-based telecommunications companies, the state’s attorney general announced on Tuesday.
New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, in a news conference on Tuesday, said the source of the calls were linked to two businesses: Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. Formella identified Walter Monk as the owner of Life Corporation.
Formella said the investigation is ongoing and suggested it involves additional entities other than Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. He did not say who, or what entity, was ultimately behind the disinformation campaign and the creation of the AI audio. No charges have been filed, Formella said.
“We have issued a cease-and-desist letter to Life Corporation that orders the company to immediately desist violating New Hampshire election laws. We have also opened a criminal investigation, and we are taking next steps in that investigation, sending document preservation notices and subpoenas to Life Corporation, Lingo Telecom, and any other individual or entity,” Formella said.
Formella said that the robocalls numbered in the “thousands,” though he offered a wide range of 5,000 to 25,000.
The calls were made ahead of New Hampshire’s presidential primary in January, urging New Hampshire voters not to vote in the contest and instead “save” their vote for the November election.
“Republicans have been trying to push nonpartisan and Democratic voters to participate in their primary. What a bunch of malarkey,” says the digitally altered Biden voice in the call. “We know the value of voting Democratic when our votes count. It’s important that you save your vote for the November election. We’ll need your help in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.”
Biden’s campaign at the time said it had been referred to the attorney general, and slammed the call as disinformation.
“I think this case is unique in that it is providing us a real-life example of an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election,” Formella said on Tuesday. “That’s been something that we’ve been concerned about in the law enforcement for a while, and it’s certainly something that state attorneys general have talked about. But we had not seen as concrete of an example as this, days before a primary, an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election or to mislead voters.”
Formella also said that other unnamed entities potentially had relevant information about the robocalls, though he declined to share specifics.
“I’m not going to give you an exact number but I can say it’s beyond the two – it’s beyond Texas Life Corporation, Walter Monk, and Lingo Telecom. There are other entities that we think have relevant information, and I would not be surprised if we discover additional entities or individuals beyond those that we have discovered up to this point,” he said.
Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez commended Formella in a statement on Tuesday.
“Disinformation aimed at suppressing voting and deliberately undermining free and fair elections is an unacceptable threat, and we commend the New Hampshire Attorney General for taking the matter seriously and moving swiftly as a powerful example against further efforts to disrupt democratic elections,” she said.
An AI voice creation tool
The fake audio was created using an AI voice creation tool named ElevenLabs, according to two separate analyses by the security company Pindrop and by digital forensic experts at University of California, Berkeley.
ElevenLabs told CNN in a statement that it is “dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools” and that it takes appropriate action in response to reports by authorities, but declined to comment on the specific Biden deepfake call.
Monk has had run-ins with US robocall regulations before, said Formella and the Federal Communications Commission. On Monday, the FCC issued a cease-and-desist letter to Lingo Telecom and said both Lingo and Monk’s company, Life Corporation, have previously been warned about apparent illegal robocall violations.
In July of 2003, the FCC issued a citation to Life Corporation for delivering “one or more prerecorded unsolicited advertisements to residential telephone lines.”
In the citation, the FCC said Monk’s company delivered the prerecorded advertisement calls to telephone subscribers who did not have a business relationship with the company and did not authorize the calls.
The FCC’s citation found that Life Corporation did not disclose required information in the prerecorded calls – including the name of the caller, who the call is made on behalf of, and an address or telephone number.
The citation — which is addressed to Life Corporation along with 16 other business aliases for the company — notes that the unsolicited advertisement calls were in violation of the Communications Act of 1934, as well as the FCC’s rules regarding telephone solicitation.
Included in the citation is a warning that subsequent violations would result in financial penalties of up $11,000 for each such violation or each day of a continuing violation.
Telecom companies that persistently facilitate illegal robocalls can and have been forcibly disconnected from the US telephone network by FCC order, as part of a wider crackdown on illegal robocalls by state and federal officials.
More than 50 attorneys general from both political parties wrote to Life Corporation on Tuesday about the AI-generated robocall, as part of a task force focused on anti-robocall litigation.
The attorneys general expressed concerns that Life Corporation or others “may seek to replicate in each of our respective states” the type of deepfake calls that hit New Hampshire. The letter told Life Corporation “that it should cease originating any illegal call traffic immediately,” adding that the calls risked violating numerous laws.
In social media profiles reviewed by CNN, Monk describes himself as a serial entrepreneur and, in an interview with Dallas Magazine in 2016, discussed many of his business ventures that failed. The list included a company marketing “upscale survival gear” to women, which Monk reportedly spent more than $1 million of his own money on but that Dallas Magazine wrote was a “failure of epic proportions.”
One of Monk’s ventures, a company known as Voice Broadcasting, has been paid to send political robocalls and advertises the ability to send 8 million calls per day on behalf of clients. When CNN attempted to contact Voice Broadcasting, a person who answered the phone said Monk was “very busy” and that the company is “undecided” on whether to issue a statement.
Little is known about Monk’s own political history. According to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by CNN, Monk and his ex-wife each donated $5,000 in 2008 to PLR PAC, a Kansas-based political action committee that has spent most of its receipts on advertisements airing on Spanish-language broadcast channels.
Senior US law enforcement officials have been closely monitoring the New Hampshire robocall incident to determine if a federal crime was committed, a senior US official familiar with the matter told CNN.
The official declined to discuss the status of any investigation into the robocalls, but said that the Justice Department has brought at least one recent case against a defendant accused of suppressing votes by spreading false information. That case was against Douglass Mackey, a social media influencer accused of targeting Black voters on Twitter with false messages claiming they could vote for Hillary Clinton via text message in the 2016 election. Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison in October.
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Allison Gordon, Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez and Andrew Kaczynski contributed to this report.
Photo: Shutterstock
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