Woot! It’s Another Segment Of Cover Snark!

Cover Snark: Does Jane Austen Know About This?

by Amanda · Sep 8, 2025 at 3:00 am · View all 15 comments

Welcome back to Cover Snark!

Snippet:

Keeper by Hope Ford. A man in jeans is looking down at his crotch. He has a red zipper hoodie on that is zipped open. His chest has a set of wings by the sternum and pecs. His belly button has a biohazard symbol.

Carrie: He looks like he’s cold but can’t figure out how his zipper works

Sarah: Shirts! Shirts are a great choice!

Kiki: Wash your belly-button, bud.

That tattoo is reminding me of a radioactive symbol.

Sarah: I think it is?

No, it’s not I’m wrong.

Kiki: I thought it was too, so I have to assume his belly button has got some stuff going on.

Amanda: It’s a biohazard sign which I think might be worse.

Kiki: That’s it! Yeah, that’s absolutely worse.

Sarah: You don’t want your belly button to be a biohazard.

I remember when mine nearly turned inside out while I was pregnant. I looked like a torpedo, all out in front. But I wasn’t a biohazard. I was cute.

(MORE-it’s as hilarious as usual)

https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2025/09/cover-snark-does-jane-austen-know-about-this/

A Moms for Liberty Leader Claims To Be a Nurse. Is She?

Hey if these people can outright lie about the LGBTQ+ community, willing to let LGBTQ+ kids die or be pushed via violence into the closet hiding who they really were, what is faking your expertise.  I already posted about a sexologist who had no experience with trans kids testifying to red state legislatures enabling his bigotry to further the harm to trans kids by giving an excuse for theirs.   These people are on a mission that is far from pure but one driven by hate and bigotry to make all kids pretend to be straight and cis in the hope that they can force all adults to pretend to be straight and cis also.  If they can’t force the adults to pretend to be straight or cis at least they can stop the trans adults from looking like the gender they identify with in hopes of stopping those that are passing as the gender they identify as.   This they hope will mark those people in ways that make their life harder.   Again their lies are OK for them because either they think their god approves or their hate is that great so nothing but the mission matters.   Hugs


https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/a-moms-for-liberty-leader-claims

Uncloseted Media has obtained documents that suggest a prominent member of Moms for Liberty may be falsely presenting as a nurse.

What do you think about Christian Nationalists banning mosques and temples?

This Blogger’s Work Is Fascinating

What do you think about Texas GOP candidate burning the Quran?

Google Sends Parents of LGBTQ Kids to Conversion Therapy Websites. Why?

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/google-sends-parents-of-lgbtq-kids

We asked Americans to Google five queries looking for resources for LGBTQ people who are struggling. Far-right religious groups dominated the results.

What are you willing to sacrifice to protect kids?

A Letter To An Editor In Regard To Ottawa PRIDE

(If you click through, you can read Dr. Hogans own story on his page.)

When the Parade Stops, the Silence Speaks Louder by Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA

null Read on Substack

Narrative Word Count: 289

Bio: Richard Francis Hogan is a Canadian writer, Poet and advocate on several levels based in Ottawa. His work explores hope, resilience, identity, faith, and the quiet power of public spaces.

(snip-personal contact info)

https://richardhogan1.substack.com

Cover Letter for Submission

Subject: Op-Ed Submission: When the Parade Stops, the Silence Speaks Louder

Dear  Editor,

I am submitting the attached op-ed for consideration in the Ottawa Citizen. It reflects on the recent cancellation of the Ottawa Gay Pride Parade and the deeper cultural and spiritual implications of that absence. As a longtime resident and advocate for inclusive public spaces, I believe this piece speaks to a moment of reflection for our city and its commitment to visibility, dignity, and belonging. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Richard Hogan

(snip-personal contact info)

Full Narrative

When the Parade Stops, the Silence Speaks Louder

By Richard Francis Hogan

The cancellation of the Ottawa Gay Pride Parade due to protests is more than a logistical decision. It is a cultural silence, a civic absence, a spiritual pause that demands reflection.

For decades, Pride has been more than a celebration. It has been a procession of courage, a public hymn of identity, a communal act of love. It has been where the marginalized found visibility, where joy became resistance, and where the city itself remembered its promise to all its people.

To cancel such a gathering is not merely to postpone an event. It is to interrupt a ritual of belonging.

As a Christian, I believe in the sacredness of every human soul. As a Buddhist, I recognize the impermanence of all things—but also the importance of showing up, again and again, with compassion. And as someone with Irish blood, I know that humor and heartache often walk hand in hand. We laugh because we’ve cried. We march because we’ve been still for too long.

This year, there will be no rainbow flags waving down Bank Street. No music echoing through Centretown. No cheers from sidewalks lined with families, allies, and elders who remember when Pride was a protest, not a party.

But let us not confuse absence with apathy.

Let us write, speak, gather, and remember. Let us honor those who came before, and those who still wait to be seen. Let us make sure that when the parade returns, it does so not just with glitter—but with grit.

Because Pride is not a date on the calendar. It is a declaration of dignity.

And dignity, like love, does not disappear. It waits. It endures. It marches on.

This Is Nice!

Jessica, of Goals & Good Vibes, visits us often. She posted this yesterday. Enjoy!

Nat Turner, Prague Spring, Benigno Aquino, & More, In Peace & Justice History for 8/21

August 21, 1831

Nat Turner, a 30-year-old man legally owned by a child, and six other slaves began a violent insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia.They began by killing the child’s stepfather, Joseph Travis, and his family. Within the next 24 hours, Turner and, ultimately, about 40 followers killed the families who owned adjacent slaveholding properties, nearly 60 whites, while freeing and inciting other slaves to join them.Militia and federal troops were called out, and the uprising was suppressed with 55 African Americans including Turner executed by hanging in Jerusalem, Virginia, and hundreds more killed by white mobs and vigilantes in revenge.
More about Nat Turner
Nat Turner’s confession 
August 21, 1968
The Czechoslovakian people spontaneously and nonviolently resisted invasion of their country of 14 million by hundreds of thousands of troops and 5000+ tanks from the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries.The troops were enforcing the overthrow and arrest of Alexander Dubcek and his government. They had been implementing significant democratic reforms known collectively as “socialism with a human face,” or the Prague Spring.
 
Cover of the magazine Kvety, with a photograph of the statue of St. Wenceslas in Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague. Graffiti on the statue reads “Soldiers go home” in Russian and “Dubcek – Svoboda” in Czech.

Hundreds attempted to obstruct invading tanks.
Both Czechs and Slovaks argued with the soldiers and refused all cooperation with the occupying armies while showing broad support for the deposed government and its reform program. Moscow relented and returned Dubcek to office, at least temporarily.
Prague Spring in retrospect
Czech perspective 
August 21, 1971
Two grenades killed and wounded members of the leadership of the Philippines’ Liberal Party during a rally in Manila’s Plaza Miranda. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos accused a leader of the party, Benigno Aquino, of the bombing and arrested him, labeling him a communist. Liberal Party Secretary-General Aquino, an effective young leader and Marcos opponent, was imprisoned, mostly in solitary confinement, for seven years until allowed exile to the U.S., ostensibly for medical treatment.
August 21, 1976
Approximately 20,000 people, mainly women, from both Protestant and Catholic areas of Belfast, Northern Ireland, attended a Peace People’s rally at Ormeau Park.
August 21, 1983
Exiled popular Philippine political leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated by soldiers of the Aviation Security Command as he crossed the tarmac at Manila International Airport.

Benigno Aquino
He had spent three years of asylum in the U.S. Upon his return, he intended to lead the political opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos and the martial law he had imposed.
During the plane trip across the Pacific, he had commented to reporters, 
“I suppose there’s a physical danger because you know assassination’s part of public service . . . My feeling is we all have to die sometime and if it’s my fate to die by an assassin’s bullet, so be it.”

Hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Marcos.


Ferdinand Marcos
The Aquino funeral drew millions and gave impetus to the broad-based People’s Power movement which eventually forced Marcos from power.
Read more about Aquino 
August 21, 1991
A coup against Soviet Union President Mikhail S. Gorbachev by hard-line Communist Party members (State Emergency Committee), collapsed in the face of popular opposition. Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, having quit the Party the previous year, had called for a general strike.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev | Boris N.Yelsin
August 21, 1998
Samuel Bowers, the 73-year-old former Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, of ordering a firebombing that killed civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer 32 years before. Bowers had also been instrumental in the killing of three other civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi for which he was never charged.
On Vernon Dahmer’s tombstone are the words,
“If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”

Samuel Bowers
32 years to justice

Dahmer’s home after the bombing

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august21

And From Lit Hub, “This Week In Literary History”

(It’s a newsletter I receive, and I don’t have a link for what I’ve copied and am pasting, but there are links within the piece. Enjoy.)

AUGUST 17 — AUGUST 23
Angela Davis debuts on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
In 1969, the legendary author and activist Angela Davis was a newly minted assistant philosophy processor at UCLA. But she was also an avowed Communist, and as a result, then-Governor Ronald Regan tried to have her fired before she’d begun any actual teaching. No luck: Davis’s dismissal didn’t hold up in court, and her first class had to be moved to a bigger classroom to accommodate the 2,000 students who had signed up for it—but she would finally be fired again nine months later, for “inflammatory rhetoric” in public speeches.  Davis was an outspoken supporter of the Black Panthers and was fervently against the Vietnam War, but arguably her most scandalous activist activities at the time were in defense of the Soledad Brothers, three Black inmates imprisoned in Soledad, CA, who were accused of killing a white guard. In 1970, guns registered to Davis were used in an attack on the nearby Marin County Civic Center; the perpetrators hoped to take hostages to bargain for the inmates’ release, but instead left four casualties. Davis, despite not being at the scene, was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges. She couldn’t be found, and so on August 18, 1970, by order of J. Edgar Hoover, Davis became the third woman ever to be included on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Eight weeks later, Davis was finally arrested in a New York motel; the trial that followed catapulted her to international fame—and turned her into a revolutionary icon—as her supporters, who viewed her as a political prisoner, chanted “Free Angela!” across the globe.In 1972, after 16 months in prison, she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. “It took a worldwide movement of people to acquit Miss Davis,” noted one of her attorneys, Howard Moore Jr., but it shouldn’t have. “Justice should be the routine of the system,” he added.
MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM
Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the Future of Radicalism

Angela Davis on International Solidarity and the Impacts of Black Radicalism

Angela Davis on Protest, 1968, andHer Old Teacher, Herbert Marcuse
THIS IS WHY THEY BAN IT:
“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. ”
–Angela Davis