*** Personal note*** I ran out of steam early yesterday. I only went back to bed for an hour in the morning, but by 3:30 pm, between the pain and being so tired I went to bed before 4 pm. I got up about 5:30 am. Hugs
Russia began the campaign against LGBTQ+ people by first targeting trans people as a threat to children. Then once the people got used to that line they claimed that any mention of non-cis non-straight way of living was sexualizing kids and so a threat to them. Mentioning or showing a gay person was equated with showing a kid hardcore porn. Fully nude bodies. It worked in their society. That is the play book the right wing haters / Christian nationalists have used against trans people here. How soon until they try to go the entire way to force the entire country / society to be straight and cis and that Christianity be the national religion enforced by white men who force those around them to follow their personal church doctrines. But what these nut jobs really want and understand is removing all mention and signs of being not cis or straight won’t stop LGBTQ+ people from existing. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning / queer / nonbinary, and all others not straight or cis are born to straight cis parents. What these outstanding moral Christians like Congress person Randy Fine from Florida want is that non-straight and non-cis kids be harassed and assaulted like when he was in school making them afraid to come out or be themselves publicly. In other words these haters want the facade of a straight cis country such as when one of the presidents of Iran said they did not have any gay people in his country ignoring a well know community that was there. They want anyone not like them to be afraid to live their lives in case they are discovered. They think that will please their god. The god who they believe created all people also created the LGBTQ+ ones as well. They think that the all knowing god will not know people are faking it due to fear and that they will be rewarded for causing that fear in the LGBTQ+ community. Very Christian of them. Hugs
The designation could mean anybody associated with the group risks years behind bars for supporting an extremist organization — akin to terrorism charges under the nation’s criminal code.
A gay rights activist wearing a headpiece walks ahead of a squad of gay rights activists, during a traditional May Day rally in St.Petersburg, Russia, Thursday, May 1, 2014. The poster reads : ‘Love is stronger than war!’ (AP Photo, File)
A Russian court on Monday labelled the country’s top LGBTQ rights group as “extremist,” effectively outlawing the organization and paving the way to prosecute its supporters.
Russia has for years targeted LGBTQ organizations but has become even more hostile since launching its full-scale assault of Ukraine in 2022, massively accelerating the country’s hardline conservative turn.
On Monday, a court in St. Petersburg ruled in favor of a case brought by the Russian justice ministry to brand the Russian LGBT Network — a top LGBTQ rights nonprofit — “extremist.”
“The public movement has been designated as an extremist organization, and its activities are banned in Russia,” the court’s press service said on Telegram.
The hearing was held behind closed doors.
The designation could mean anybody associated with the group risks years behind bars for supporting an extremist organization — akin to terrorism charges under Russia’s criminal code.
Amnesty International in February slammed the justice ministry’s move to seek the label.
“This move reflects a deliberate strategy by the Kremlin to legitimize and weaponize homophobia in its assault on dissent and equality,” said Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia director.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has for years denounced anything that goes against what he calls “traditional family values” as un-Russian and influenced by the West.
In 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court banned what it called the “international social LGBT movement” as an “extremist organisation”.
As part of the crackdown, Russia has in recent years targeted LGBTQ clubs and bars, raiding them and arresting owners.
Courts have also issued fines and short-term jail sentences to people displaying LGBTQ “symbols,” such as clothes, jewelry or posters featuring the rainbow flag.
The idea behind these laws seems to be if they can hide that LGBTQ+ people / kids exist they can prevent the acceptance and tolerance of LGBTQ+ kids / people. In the minds of the haters who write these bills hopefully that will force people who are not straight or cis to stay hidden from society. They are desperate to return to the 1950s when LGBTQ+ people had to stay hidden or risk losing everything they had, their job, housing, and friends. They are pathetic in their need for everyone to be the same as they are, feel the same as they do, and to live as they do. Why I did not know or understand. The irrational hate for LGBTQ+ kids is really weird. That they would rather have kids hurt, harmed, assaulted, ostracized, and possibly driven to suicide rather than give them acceptance or simply tolerance. I don’t undestand what their gain is in this? Hugs
The appeals court vacated two separate injunctions against the law, but advocates promise to keep fighting.
John Russell (He/Him)April 7, 2026, 1:00 pm EDT· Updated on April 8, 2026
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has ruled that Iowa can enforce a 2023 law restricting classroom instruction on LGBTQ+ topics and access to certain books while legal challenges against the law proceed.
On Monday, the three-judge panel overturned injunctions previously issued by lower courts in two separate lawsuits challenging aspects of the Senate File 496, according to the Associated Press and The Des Moines Register.
Passed by the Iowa state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2023, the law prohibits “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion, or instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation” in kindergarten through sixth grade. It also bans materials featuring “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from school libraries and classrooms — a provision which critics say is intended to ban books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
The law went into effect on July 1, 2023. The following November, the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal sued the state on behalf of LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Iowa Safe Schools and seven students and their families, challenging SF 496’s classroom instruction ban.
Last May, a federal judge issued a split decision, upholding the law’s ban on discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in K–6 classrooms, but blocking its ban on school “promotions” and “programs” that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher also blocked a provision of the law banning schools from providing “accommodation that is intended to affirm the student’s gender identity” without notifying their parents, writing that S.F. 496 was impermissibly vague about what constitutes an “accommodation.”
Writing for the Eighth Circuit on Monday, Judge Ralph Erickson held that the state’s interpretation of the law as requiring school “programs” and “promotions” to only encompass curricular activities does not violate the U.S. Constitution. However, the court did not address whether it is constitutionally permissible for the state to ban specific groups and extracurricular programs, such as Gender & Sexuality Alliance groups, because the Iowa Safe Schools lawsuit did not challenge specific applications of the law, according to the Register.
The court also disagreed with Judge Locher’s ruling that the law’s language around “accommodations” was too vague, restoring S.F. 496’s ban on schools accommodating students’ gender identities without outing them to their parents.
In a separate November 2023 lawsuit, the Iowa State Education Association was joined by publisher Penguin Random House and several prominent authors of banned books in a challenge to S.F. 496’s book-banning provision. Last March, Judge Locher sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a preliminary injunction preventing schools from removing books it considers “obscene” from classrooms and libraries.
Again, writing for the Eighth Circuit in a separate decision Monday, Judge Erickson disagreed w ith Locher’s ruling that school library books are not part a school’s curriculum. Erickson wrote that a school’s library catalogue constitutes government speech and can be restricted by state law, according to the Register.
The decisions on both cases send them back to the district court. But as the Register notes, the Eighth Circuit indicated in both rulings that the plaintiffs could not show a “likelihood of success on the merits” in their challenges to S.F. 496.
At the same time, in a joint press release the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal noted that the rulings narrow “where and how the law may be applied.”
“The prohibition regarding sexual orientation and so-called gender theory applies only to specific, mandatory instruction on these topics during class time. The law, as currently interpreted, does not require schools to prohibit student expression of LGBTQ+ identity nor does it limit the sponsorship or promotion of GSAs,” ACLU of Iowa Senior Staff Attorney Thomas Story said.
“The court’s interpretation of the provision on banning books is that it applies only to those that specifically describe or depict one of those sex acts defined in Iowa’s criminal law. And with the forced outing provision, a report would be made to parents or guardians only if a student specifically requests a school accommodation for the stated purpose of affirming a gender identity different from their registration forms,” Story added.
In a statement responding to the court’s decision, Iowa State Education Association president Joshua Brown told the Register that the case was “about much more than legal technicalities.”
“It is about protecting the freedom of speech and the right to share ideas — values guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Brown said. “Our schools should be safe spaces where students are free to learn, teachers can use their professional expertise without fear, and families can trust that education is based on open inquiry rather than government censorship.”
A spokesperson for Penguin Random House indicated in a statement to the Register that the company intends to keep fighting against S.F. 496. Similarly, Lambda Legal Senior Attorney Nathan Maxwell called the ruling “a setback,” but noted that “it is not the end of this fight.”
“Iowa’s SF 496 is a cruel and unconstitutional law that silences LGBTQ+ children, erases their existence from classrooms, and forces educators to expose vulnerable students to potential harm at home,” Maxwell said in a statement. “We will continue to use every legal tool available to protect these young people. They deserve nothing less.”
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Texas A&M University, earlier this month, banned a philosophy professor from teaching about Plato’s Symposium because it’s too gay (well, in their words, for discussing “gender ideology”), and, while obviously philosophy classes should be allowed to teach about Plato and state lawmakers and administrators shouldn’t be interfering in curricula… they are right that the specific texts that they banned are pretty gay.
If the legislators’ and administrators’ goal is to make LGBTQ+ people feel more isolated and alone as a way of getting them to conform and pretend to be cisgender and heterosexual, this won’t be enough to accomplish that goal — however, it’s a necessary step towards that goal.
I grew up in the ’90s in a conservative part of central Indiana, and I went to college on the other side of the country, determined to get away from everyone I knew and to live my life as I wanted. One of the classes I had to take in my first semester at college as an 18-year-old freshman was a survey of Western civilization-type class that included Symposium as one of its readings.
I still remember the professor warning us in the class prior to reading Symposium that the text was about “love” and that, for Plato, that very much included love between two men. This was 2001, pre-September 11, just a couple of years after Ellen DeGeneres came out, and at a time when homosexuality was illegal in many states, so, yes, we got a “trigger warning,” and the potential trigger was a discussion of homosexuality.
It’s hard to say what impact that book had on me. Pretty much the only mentions of homosexuality in grade school that I remember from Indiana were the slurs kids would throw around every other sentence, the jokes and insults that were never any deeper than calling someone gay, the Christians randomly arguing (against no one!) that homosexuality was sinful, the casual discussions of violence against gay people (I grew up in the days when fantasizing putting all gay men on an island and dropping a bombshell on them was just a normal thing for people to talk about, like the weather)… and here I was — a freshly minted adult among other adults — talking about Plato, the famous philosopher who (pretty much every adult my whole life had said) was an important historical figure. And Plato was gay. Maybe not “gay” in the modern sense, but he was writing books about loving men, and that was close enough for me.
[This] is why MAGA wants to end liberalism itself. To them, people are workers, soldiers, baby-producing machines, not human…. It’s a cold and sad way of looking at the world.
One of the passages that Texas A&M University had an issue with was Aristophanes’ speech about the origin of love. The short version is that, in the distant past, humans rolled around like balls with four arms and four legs and two faces. Some people were all male, some all female, and some a mix. They were powerful and a threat to the gods, so Zeus cut them all in half. Now they (we) spend our lives looking for our other half and holding on when we find them.
While the point of the story isn’t an explanation of why some people are gay and others are straight, it’s baked in, and modern readers are going to notice that Aristophanes is saying that same-sex love has the same origin as opposite-sex love. They’re all just normal variants of human sexuality, and it’s not something that anyone else in the book even comments on. That is, same-sex love is just another legitimate expression of love that comes from the same place, at least for Aristophanes. Others in the book have different opinions about male same-sex love, but none are disapproving.
I wasn’t the only one to take that message from that story. I have heard it mentioned by other queer people throughout my adult life. It featured prominently in the late-90s musical (and later film) Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s a part of the queer lexicon.
“The ‘gender ideology’ of this tale comes to us from the fourth century BC,” writes Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu. “And philosophers in the many centuries since have examined it not only for what it tells us about the Greeks in Plato’s day but for what it might tell us, as far removed as we might be from ancient Athens, about sex, love, and longing. It is a tale about universal aspects of the human experience philosophers have examined in the service of understanding what it means to be a human being.”
Nwanevu’s larger point is that the underlying ideology of the presidential administration — as shown in Stephen Miller’s claim that the world is “governed by strength” and Vice President J.D. Vance’s statement that America is nothing more than a “homeland” for “people with a shared history and a common future” — is really selling people short. What it means to be human is much more than mere strength and domination, and America is supposed to be an idea and an ideal, not just a piece of land where we live.
LGBTQ+ rights flourished in the post-war world, as did other human rights protections; ending the constant spats over pieces of land inspired people to understand that there’s a lot more to being human…
That is, America is supposed to be about all people’s inherent value and right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” not Miller’s “iron laws of the world” — those of “might makes right” — that Nwanevu rightly calls “the laws of animals.”
This is fundamental to how the global neo-fascist movement sees the world: For them, everything is about domination and resource-hoarding. All other considerations are secondary.
It can be seen in the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights that are often justified by pointing to a decline in the birthrate, or in the attacks on humanities and social sciences at universities, degrees that many claim (often incorrectly) don’t pay well. This can be seen in the complaints that schools shouldn’t teach kids to be more tolerant of diverse people — a necessary skill in a multicultural world where we all get along — and should instead teach them the bare minimum of reading, writing, and arithmetic (and, since it’s the 21st century, how to code). It can be felt in the right-wing mockery of art and arts funding when they never have complaints about spending money on military equipment that will never (and should never) see combat.
And it’s in this horrifying Greenland business, which is what Miller was talking about when he was discussing “the iron laws of the world.”
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On the one hand, invading Greenland would end NATO, end all sorts of ties between the U.S. and Europe, and end the peaceful world created in the latter half of the 20th century that led to prosperity in the West and an end to the wars for territorial expansion that defined Europe for millennia.
On the other hand, Greenland looks kinda big on Mercator-projection maps, and adding a big splotch to the part of the world labeled “United States” would make the president feel like he actually accomplished something of value in his life.
It shouldn’t be surprising that LGBTQ+ rights flourished in the post-war world, as did other human rights protections; ending the constant spats over pieces of land inspired people to understand that there’s a lot more to being human, to be concerned with their own and other people’s happiness, and to try to live up to the ideals laid out in previous centuries.
Which is why MAGA wants to end liberalism itself. To them, people are workers, soldiers, baby-producing machines, not human. Our worth is measured in terms of how much stuff we can produce, how much we can contribute to our nation’s domination over other nations. Individuals’ fulfillment and happiness are secondary. It’s a cold and sad way of looking at the world.
So Plato, of all people, is taking a beating in Texas. Learning about philosophy opened my mind when I was young and taught me to ask questions about what life could offer. (The part of Symposium about how homosexuality results in intellectual reproduction instead of biological reproduction like heterosexuality wasn’t even on the syllabus at Texas A&M, but I still haven’t forgotten about it.)
In the war on human-ness itself, LGBTQ+ identities will always be one of the first victims. That’s why they don’t want us learning about ourselves.
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Scottie's Playtime 