Because we must make slavery look as beneficial as possible to the black slaves. White people were doing these subhumans a favor by enslaving them and they gave them a chance to find the true god, have shelter, to have food, and work which every republican thinks black people should do more of. Sickening, but she is a true believer in the white race and in the need to have her god in every aspect of everyone’s life, enforced by the Christian Taliban moral police gang thugs. Hugs
The Arkansas Department of Education instructed the 6 schools offering AP African American Studies to submit their curricula to the state to ensure they don't violate a new state law banning "indoctrination" and Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools https://t.co/MQ9YWKRJ4S
They aren’t just denying credit for the course, now the state is demanding schools hand over all books and course materials on African-American history. https://t.co/7YWBCf3guQ
This is crazy. Another religious right wing judge pushing her views. She dismissed the suit saying there was no harm because a reasonable person wouldn’t think that the law precludes talking about gay people and same sex families. Just what the other trump judge said, but that is a lie. The law is written to allow any religious bigot to burden the school with lawsuits. Here are a couple examples from the article. Hugs
Based on the law, the Florida Board of Education recently instituted a new rule that says any K-3 teacher who is found to have taught their students about LGBTQ issues can have their licenses suspended or revoked. And in September, the Miami-Dade School Board voted against recognizing October as LGBTQ History Month over fears that it would violate the Don’t Say Gay law.
“It is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers,” wrote the judge.
For the second time, a Trump-appointed judge has upheld the legality of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.
Lambda Legal, the Southern Legal Counsel, and the Southern Poverty Law Center joined together with a group of LGBTQ students and their families to advocate for a preliminary injunction on H.B. 1557 – which prohibits K-3 teachers from talking about sexual orientation and gender identity issues with their students. The lawsuit argued that the law restricts free speech and encourages bullying.
But U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger dismissed their request.
“Plaintiffs have not directed this Court to any fact that would lead a reasonable person to believe that the law prohibits students from discussing their families and vacations at school or even on a school assignment,” Berger reportedly wrote in the decision, “or that it would prohibit a parent from attending a school function in a ‘pride’ t-shirt or generally discussing their family structure in front of other people.”
Lambda Legal staff attorney Kell Olson called Berger’s decision “wrong on the law and disrespectful to LGBTQ+ families and students.”
“H.B. 1557 suppresses wholesale the speech and identities of LGBTQ+ students and their families. It sends a message of shame and stigma that has no place in schools and puts LGBTQ+ students and families at risk,” Olson continued.
“The students and families at the heart of this case have experienced more bullying in the months since the law went into effect than ever before in their lives, but the court dismissed their experiences of bullying as ‘a fact of life.’ The court’s decision defies decades of precedent establishing schools’ constitutional obligations to protect student speech, and to protect students from targeted bullying and harassment based on who they are.”
Berger acknowledged some of the plaintiff’s bullying worries but said that “it is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers.”
“Indeed, middle school children bully and belittle their classmates for a whole host of reasons,” Berger continued, “all of which are unacceptable, and many of which have nothing to do with a classmate’s gender identity.”
A challenge to the Don’t Say Gay law was dismissed by another Trump-nominated judge, Allen Cothrel Winsor, in early October.
The Don’t Say Gay law, which went into effect on July 1, continues to make its mark on Florida schools.
Based on the law, the Florida Board of Education recently instituted a new rule that says any K-3 teacher who is found to have taught their students about LGBTQ issues can have their licenses suspended or revoked.
And in September, the Miami-Dade School Board voted against recognizing October as LGBTQ History Month over fears that it would violate the Don’t Say Gay law.
It is clear she supports the law. In the article, a man chaperoning kids felt he couldn’t mention his husband or their family as others were doing. That is the point of the law, to make the LGBTQIA disappear from society. Not mentioned, not heard about, don’t exist. Make it a weird fringe thing, instead of a large segment of the population. I don’t know how we get around the legal road blocks that the maga right has installed. Think of it, this judge says students, parents of students, and their legal representatives don’t have standing, yet the religious liberty legal groups can create a fictional business that doesn’t even exist and the court rules yes Christians have a pass to discriminate. What next, Christians suing to not serve black people? What about Jewish people. Yet if someone tried not to serve Christians their heads would explode and that would be illegal. Please note the related story of a trump appointed judge saying that gay kids shouldn’t be protected from bullying. “It is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers,” wrote the judge. Well that was changing just as acceptance of people of color stopped a lot of the tolerated bullying of black children, so the acceptance of the LGBTQ+ kids with anti-bullying programs was working also. Those programs were stopping the bullying and gay kids felt accepted and included at school. That is what the republicans were desperate to stop. That what these laws are doing. Hugs
U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger ruled that most of the plaintiffs lacked standing and accused them of “legal posturing.”
A Trump-appointed judge has dismissed a challenge to Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law for the second time.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger rejected a lawsuit brought by Lambda Legal, the Southern Legal Counsel, and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of a group of LGBTQ+ students, parents, and a nonprofit group seeking a preliminary injunction against the state’s Parental Rights in Education Act, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
“It is simply a fact of life that many middle school students will face the criticism and harsh judgment of their peers,” wrote the judge.
The legislation, signed into law last year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), bans instruction on topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and requires discussion of those topics to be “age appropriate” in higher grades.
This is the second time Berger has dismissed this case. Last October, she rejected a previous version of the lawsuit, giving plaintiffs until November 3 to file an updated version. (Another Trump-appointed judge, Allen Cothrel Winsor, dismissed a separate challenge to the law earlier this year.) As Orlando Weekly reported, the revised version of the lawsuit argued that the law violates the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by chilling speech related to sexual orientation and gender identity, while also raising equal protection and due process arguments.
“The impact of the law has been immediate and severe,” the revised version stated. “Defendant school boards and their agents have already begun implementing significant changes under the law. They have instructed teachers to review hundreds of books that acknowledge LGBTQ+ people and families and have eliminated vital support systems for LGBTQ+ students, including guidance and training that combat bullying and violence.”
In her 37-page ruling, issued last Wednesday, Berger wrote that all but two of the plaintiffs lacked standing. She also rejected the argument that the law forced one parent, David Dinan, to censor himself while chaperoning a school field trip “because he was concerned that mention or discussion of his husband or family could have been considered classroom instruction by a third party.”
“While Dinan felt his speech was chilled when he was acting as a chaperone, plaintiffs still fail to offer any argument as to how a reasonable person would have objectively believed that mentioning his same-sex spouse while acting as a chaperone would constitute instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity,” Berger wrote.
While the law does not explicitly ban the mention of LGBTQ+ people in schools, the Florida Department of Education has not yet released official guidance on how the law should be applied. At the same time, the law allows parents to sue school districts if they feel the law has been violated. Critics of the law say that it caters to particularly litigious parents who will sue school districts over their own interpretations of its provisions, forcing schools to foot the bill for frivolous lawsuits and, thus, chilling any mention of LGBTQ+ people out of an abundance of caution.
Berger also wrote that the plaintiffs “continue to include numerous allegations that appear to be wholly immaterial.”
“Even if such allegations are not immaterial,” she wrote, “the complaint is not the proper place for legal argument or posturing.”
But notice what book they don’t submit to the bot scan is the bible, which includes everything they programmed into it for getting rid of LGBTQIA inclusive material.
Official: “It is simply not feasible to read every book” for depictions of sex.
In response to recently enacted state legislation in Iowa, administrators are removing banned books from Mason City school libraries, and officials are using ChatGPT to help them pick the books, according to The Gazette and Popular Science.
The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials. Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be “age appropriate” and devoid of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.
But banning books is hard work, according to administrators, so they need to rely on machine intelligence to get it done within the three-month window mandated by the law. “It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements,” said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district, in a statement quoted by The Gazette. “Therefore, we are using what we believe is a defensible process to identify books that should be removed from collections at the start of the 23-24 school year.”
To determine which books fit the bill, Exman asks ChatGPT: “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If the answer is yes, the book will be removed from circulation.
The district detailed more of its methodology: “Lists of commonly challenged books were compiled from several sources to create a master list of books that should be reviewed. The books on this master list were filtered for challenges related to sexual content. Each of these texts was reviewed using AI software to determine if it contains a depiction of a sex act. Based on this review, there are 19 texts that will be removed from our 7-12 school library collections and stored in the Administrative Center while we await further guidance or clarity. We also will have teachers review classroom library collections.”
Unfit for this purpose
In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, it has been increasingly common to see the AI assistant stretched beyond its capabilities—and to read about its inaccurate outputs being accepted by humans due to automation bias, which is the tendency to place undue trust in machine decision-making. In this case, that bias is doubly convenient for administrators because they can pass responsibility for the decisions to the AI model. However, the machine is not equipped to make these kinds of decisions.
Large language models, such as those that power ChatGPT, are not oracles of infinite wisdom, and they make poor factual references. They are prone to confabulate information when it is not in their training data. Even when the data is present, their judgment should not serve as a substitute for a human—especially concerning matters of law, safety, or public health.
“This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results,” Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars. “The question of whether a book contains a description of depiction of a sex act can only be accurately answered by a model that has seen the full text of the book. But OpenAI won’t tell us what ChatGPT has been trained on, so we have no way of knowing if it’s seen the contents of the book in question or not.”
It’s highly unlikely that ChatGPT’s training data includes the entire text of each book under question, though the data may include references to discussions about the book’s content—if the book is famous enough—but that’s not an accurate source of information either.
“We can guess at how it might be able to answer the question, based on the swathes of the Internet that ChatGPT has seen,” Willison said. “But that lack of transparency leaves us working in the dark. Could it be confused by Internet fan fiction relating to the characters in the book? How about misleading reviews written online by people with a grudge against the author?”
Indeed, ChatGPT has proven to be unsuitable for this task even through cursory tests by others. Upon questioning ChatGPT about the books on the potential ban list, Popular Science found uneven results and some that did not apparently match the bans put in place.
Even if officials were to hypothetically feed the text of each book into the version of ChatGPT with the longest context window, the 32K token model (tokens are chunks of words), it would not likely be able to consider the entire text of most books at once, though it may be able to process it in chunks. Even if it did, one should not trust the result as reliable without verifying it—which would require a human to read the book anyway.
“There’s something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can’t understand books and can’t critically think at all,” Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.
Hey everyone. I know I am late to the party as they say on a lot of posts, but as I work my way through the backlog of fellow posters whose content I love, Jill again made a post I want to share. Even if everyone already seen it, the cartoons are so spot on, Jill’s post deserves another viewing. Hugs
According to a report in the Washington Post, a “Little Free Library” bearing a plaque honoring formerFirst Lady Michelle Obamahas been continuously under attack by Trump-loving vandals.
The reports states that the library, set up outside at home at 16th and Q streets in Northwest Washington, D.C. since early 2017, has had its glass broken and the name “Trump” scrawled upon it.
“Little free libraries” dot the country, looking like birdhouses and containing books that anyone can borrow, read and replace.
According to Maureen Dolan-Galaviz, who erected the library, she can’t understand why anyone would vandalize the library which bears the plaque stating, “In Honor of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama. Lawyer, writer, and First Lady of the United States.”
“Who would do that?” Dolan-Galaviz said in an interview. “If there is one thing that should be off limits it’s the idea that we all deserve access to books.”
“I’ve never seen the vandal,” said neighbor Debby Hanrahan, 79. “None of us have time to stand guard and protect it.”
“We are a neighborhood of writers and readers,” she added. “For somebody to have something out for a little library, I just can’t fathom it.”
According to the report, police haven’t received any reports about the vandalism, with locals attributing the attacks to racism.
Understand she is not just trying to regulate what she or her family reads, she wants to control what everyone else reads. She wants the power to control what your child reads, and what you read. Plus she is in some ways damaging other people’s property. But hey it is all OK because it is in the name of her religion, even though this is a secular country. Even after being found out, the religious gang thugs want her to keep doing it. Deny everyone else their right to read stuff, praise god! Hugs
** thanks to Ten Bears for the link. I had just heard of this when I read his page with the link. Hugs **
The wife of a Republican state lawmaker in Arkansas has made herself the unofficial monitor of her neighbors’ Little Free Libraries.
Arkansas Times reportsthat Jennifer Meeks, the wife of Arkansas State Rep. Stephen Meeks, posted on Facebook recently about her efforts to remove “terrible books” from local Little Free Libraries and replace them with Bibles.
“I have been swapping out books in little free libraries for awhile,” she wrote in a Facebook post earlier this month. “I have seen good books, terrible books… Recently I have been picking up free Bibles at flea markets and thrift stores. Sometimes I find good devotion books or kids’ Bible stories at a good price to add. Or just great books, and a gospel tract is a nice idea too.”
Meeks said she was inspired to do this after seeing a lot of LGBTQ Pride-themed books in the libraries.
“From what I have seen a lot of these books and other things don’t align with Christian values,” she wrote. “Today, I saw a bunch of Pride stuff in one. There’s a group of leftists, especially in Conway, who are very active in keeping little libraries well stocked.”
Meeks has since either deleted the Facebook post or made it private, although the local progressive organization Faulkner County Coalition for Social Justice said that her efforts would not stop people in the area from stocking libraries with quality reading material.
“Keep removing them, Jennifer,” they said. “We won’t stop.”
🎉 Buckle up for a rollercoaster ride through history, humour, and a touch of scepticism! In this video, we dive headfirst into the curious world of Young Earth Creationism, taking a side-splitting journey through their interpretation of the Bible’s age claims. 🌍📖
Join us as we dissect the claims that the Bible itself supposedly contains evidence of Earth’s mere 6000-year existence. With a dash of wit and a sprinkle of satire, we expose the creative contortions these claims require. 🎭🤯
From deciphering Bible verses with the finesse of a Shakespearean rapper to exploring the hilarious linguistic gymnastics of Young Earth Creationists, we dissect the arguments that keep us chuckling. 💃🎤
But hey, why stop at the age of the Earth? We’ll also tackle burning questions like: Did Moses really part the Red Sea? Why didn’t God just snap his fingers for creation? And who’s Father Abraham, the smurf guy or the biblical patriarch? 🤔😂
Get ready for laughter, thought-provoking analysis, and a pinch of scepticism as we navigate the world of scripture interpretation, contrasting it with the tried-and-true methods of science. 📚🔬
So hit that play button, grab some popcorn, and prepare to laugh your way through the twists and turns of biblical literalism and the scientific pursuit of truth. Don’t forget to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring the notification bell so you won’t miss a single punchline in our journey to unravelling the age-old mysteries!
00:00 Austen Hartke’s Theological Struggles 1:07 Why did God create Transgender people? 4:12 Queering Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch 6:16 Jesus’ Teachings on Eunuchs 8:27 Other Gender Queer Biblical Figures 9:13 Roman Catholic Teaching on Transgenderism 9:40 Counterarguments 10:40 Is God Progressive?
During the Fall of 2020, my college course on the “Theologies of Gender and Identity” was forced to go virtual. This video is one of the pre-recorded lectures from that course that I would like to share with a larger audience. Feel free to respectfully comment and question and I will respond in kind.
This is the 18th lecture in the series. Today we reflect on the Theological arguments presented in Queer Theologian (and fellow YouTuber) Austen Hartke’s book, “Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians.” Next we reflect on the arguments presented in a 2019 Roman Catholic Document entitled “MALE AND FEMALE HE CREATED THEM” and explore the question whether God is Progressive.
Recommended Reading: “Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians” by Austen Hartke “Male and Female He Created Them: TOWARDS A PATH OF DIALOGUE ON THE QUESTION OF GENDER THEORY IN EDUCATION” by the Congregation for Catholic Education
