This is what the culture hate warriors want here in the US. They saw what Putin did in Russia and what Victor Orbán did in Hungary. They used the idea of protecting children to limit representation of LGBTQ+ people in society, then they moved it up the war against that community to erase it based on it was an attack on families. The question you need to ask why is family threatened by including same-sex couples as a family? What makes that family unit an attack on families? In their mind it is twofold, one in their mind it doesn’t produce its own offspring and also it offends tradition / religious tradition. We must never change what was done in the past forever in the minds of those who preach the way to live from a book written centuries ago as they read it on their new smartphone. We must find a way to stop this big money steam rolling over personal civil rights to install fundamental religious dictates on how everyone lives in the US. There are those who believe just admitting and allowing LGBTQ+ people to exist is promoting it. Is admitting and showing red hair people exist promoting red hair? Hugs
The council claimed the content “promotes homosexuality,” “disregards family values,” and “conflicts with the shared values of society.”
A scene from “Cobalt Blue”
Turkey’s media regulator has imposed fines on five international streaming platforms and ordered the removal of several films and series, citing violations of “national and moral values.”
The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) announced the penalties following inspections conducted under the government’s “Year of the Family” initiative. According to the regulator, the inspections aimed to “protect children from harmful content” and “combat productions that threaten the Turkish family structure and shared societal values.”
RTÜK fined the platforms the maximum penalty allowed, amounting to 3% of their annual revenues in Turkey. The decision affects Disney+, Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, and MUBI.
Among the targeted content are All of Us Strangers on Disney+, Those About To Die on Prime Video, Cobalt Blue on Netflix, Looking: The Movie on HBO Max, and Benedetta on MUBI.
The council claimed the content “promotes homosexuality,” “disregards family values,” and “conflicts with the shared values of society.” It did not elaborate on the specific scenes or themes that led to the sanctions.
Under Article 32 of Law No. 6112, RTÜK is authorized to impose several administrative measures on broadcasting entities. These include warnings, suspension of programming, and fines. The council can also enforce temporary broadcast bans and revoke broadcasting licenses. (HA/VK)
Increase in violence since 2019 is linked to online campaigns seeking to sow disinformation and fuel hatred
A Malta Pride participant carries a giant rainbow flag during the parade in Valletta. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters
Europeans who do not fit the typical definition of male or female are grappling with an “alarming” rise in violence, the EU’s leading rights agency has said, as concerted campaigns seek to sow disinformation and fuel hatred towards them.
The findings from the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, published on Tuesday, were based on responses from 1,920 people in 30 countries across Europe. All of them identified as intersex, an umbrella term referring to those with innate variations of sex characteristics and which can also include people who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse.
It found that since 2019, the rates of violence and harassment against intersex people have sharply increased – particularly among those who identify as trans, non-binary and gender diverse – far outpacing the increases reported by others in the LGBTQ+ community.
One in three surveyed, 34%, said they had been physically or sexually assaulted in the five years prior to the survey, up from 22% in 2019. Between 2019 and 2023, the rate of reported hate-motivated harassment had almost doubled, from 42% to 74%.
The survey also found that more than half, 57%, of respondents said they had been subjected “without their informed consent” to surgery or other medical treatment to modify their sex characteristics, while 39% said they were put through so-called conversion practices aimed at changing their sexual orientation or gender, compared with a rate of 25% among all LGBTQ+ groups.
The Vienna-based agency linked the rise to a wider climate of “increasing or persisting intolerance and bigotry, as well as intense online hatred campaigns” that had “instrumentalised” the LGBT+ community.
“Disinformation campaigns fomenting intolerance and prejudice are often waged by foreign and domestic actors acting to undermine European and western democracies and core values, such as dignity, equality and diversity,” the agency noted.
The result was a “weaponising” of the fact that many people know little about those who identify as intersex, trans, non-binary and gender diverse, allowing these campaigns to spread disinformation and “fuel hatred and violence against them”, it said.
The report echoes organisations across Europe, who have long warned of politicians using parliament, political rallies and media interviews to fuel anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and normalise discrimination across the continent.
In its findings this week, the EU agency warned that the impact of this discrimination was far-reaching for those who identify as intersex. “Their repeated victimisation and the multiple and compounded challenges they face can lead to severe exclusion and critical life situations such as homelessness, suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts.”
More than half of the intersex people surveyed, 53%, said they had contemplated suicide in the prior year. The figure was notably higher than the overall rate of 37% reported across all LGBTIQ groups.
The EU agency called on countries to add sex characteristics to the protected grounds in anti-discrimination legislation and do more to combat hate crimes and hate speech aimed at intersex people.
Their struggle requires an urgent response, said Sirpa Rautio, the director of the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights. “Intersex people in the EU experience alarming levels of exclusion, discrimination and violence,” she said in a statement. “They must be provided with targeted support that addresses their specific needs to ensure they can enjoy their fundamental rights and live in dignity.”
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Since June, Amtrak Police officers have arrested dozens of people for alleged “public lewdness” at New York City’s Penn Station, a sting operation that sent at least one person to an ICE detention facility — and which one university professor says was conducted, in part, through popular cruising apps like Sniffies.
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As reported by NYC news outlet The City on Wednesday, Amtrak Police arrested 23 people for public lewdness in June — LGBTQ+ Pride Month — after making only eight such arrests in the five months prior. “Lewdness” arrest numbers have remained high since then, according to the NYC-based Legal Aid Society, which told The City that 20 people were arrested for lewdness at Penn Station in a single day in September.
One of the people arrested in June was David, a 31-year-old gay man and healthcare worker who said he was arrested while trying to use a Penn Station urinal on his way home from visiting a friend. He was wearing a rainbow bracelet. David told The City that he was taken to a cell inside the station and handcuffed to a wall, at which point he heard one officer tell others “we got three more fag pervs.” The lewdness charge against him was eventually dropped, but David said he was “traumatized” by the experience.
Immigration attorney Danney Salvatierra also told The City that one of her clients, an asylum seeker from Mexico, was arrested by Amtrak Police while using the bathroom at Penn in July and immediately handed off to ICE agents. Salvatierra said the arrest documents did not contain a charge against her client, who spent over a month in a detention facility before being released by a judge.
Last week, City University of New York (CUNY) law professor Jared Trujillo posted a TikTok video warning others about sting operations in Penn Station bathrooms. Trujillo claims that police have been using Sniffies to lure potential cruisers to a bathroom near a police booth, then arrest them. The arrests come during a marked increase in visibility for Sniffies through print media like The New Yorker and New York Magazine, though Trujillo pointed out that the platform wasn’t the only way police have targeted travelers.
Be safe!! Amtrak officers are using Sniffies and otherwise approaching people in the men’s Amtrak bathroom at Penn Statuon and charging them with lewdness #sniffies#NYC#civilrightawyer#amtrak#pennstation
“There are other instances where officers will approach someone who’s at a urinal, the officer will touch himself or will just peer at the person, and if the person — who is there just trying to pee — responds in any way, that person is then arrested or at least charged with lewdness,” Trujillo said in his video. (In his comments to The City, David said he felt “watched” by a nearby man shortly before his arrest.) Trujillo further noted that such stings closely resemble tactics used in the past decade by Port Authority police, who settled a class action lawsuit over similar arrests in 2022, promising to end plainclothes bathroom patrols and step up sensitivity training.
“Police have long weaponized constitutionally dubious tactics to target men they perceive as gay. Officers sometimes expose or touch themselves, or leer at men, only to arrest the man — even when he has done nothing wrong,” Trujillo told Them in a statement Wednesday. “These arrests are about padding numbers, not public safety. They waste resources and inflict trauma, and the charges can carry devastating immigration and employment consequences. The Port Authority police engaged in the same conduct until Legal Aid sued and forced a settlement in 2022.”
Trujillo urged LGBTQ+ people to exercise caution when dealing with the police to reduce the chance of harm. “If you are arrested, invoke your right to remain silent and ask for an attorney,” he told Them. “Do not consent to police searching your phone.”
The arrests come during a marked increase in visibility for Sniffies through print media like The New Yorker and New York Magazine.
LGBTQ+ people were scapegoated in elections in 51 countries last year.
John Russell (He/Him)September 11, 2025, 2:00 pm EDT
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Politicians across the globe used anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in their campaigns last year, according to a new report from LGBTQ+ rights NGO Outright International.
The organization’s just-released report “Queering Democracy: The Global Elections in 2024 and How LGBTIQ People Fared” examines “how LGBTIQ people navigated, participated in, and shaped electoral processes” in 60 countries and the European Union last year. Among its key findings, the report says that anti-LGBTQ+ hate became a widespread campaign strategy around the world even as queer and trans people made gains in some of the same countries.
Outright International describes 2024 as a “super election year” in which more than 1.5 billion people in 73 countries voted. But, they say, “this historic moment also came at a time of democratic backsliding, when LGBTIQ communities and other marginalized groups were among the first to feel the impacts of shrinking freedoms.” The organization describes LGBTQ+ communities as “canaries in the coal mine — among the first targets when democratic norms erode.”
According to Outright International, “In at least 51 of the 61 jurisdictions studied, political candidates weaponized anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric for electoral gain.” Politicians, the organization found, “demonized ‘gender ideology,’ labeled LGBTIQ people as ‘foreign agents,’ and scapegoated sexual and gender minorities to deflect from policy failures. In some countries, elections devolved into what one observer called ‘a competition of who was the most homophobic.’”
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The report cites leaders in Jordan, Czechia, Portugal, and Namibia among those who scapegoated LGBTQ+ people in an attempt to distract voters from their own governance failures. Uruguay, Panama, Australia, Moldova, and the United Kingdom were among 27 countries in which politicians explicitly used the specter of so-called “gender ideology,” “gender madness,” and “indoctrination” to demonize LGBTQ+ people and particularly transgender people.
And leaders across Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East stoked both xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment by describing gender and sexual diversity as the result of malign foreign influence. According to the report, anti-LGBTQ+ political rhetoric led to social media harassment and calls for violence as well as real-world crackdowns on the LGBTQ+ communities in Tunisia and Romania.
“You talk with a politician from Peru… or Hungary or the UK, you start to see common trends and you realize that it’s a global, coordinated and increasingly well-funded effort to diminish LGBTIQ people,” Outright International’s Alberto de Belaúnde told The Guardian.
Even ostensibly pro-LGBTQ+ parties and politicians in some countries appeared to turn on the community. As the report notes, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis claimed his New Democracy party “certainly suffered political damage” for supporting marriage equality. And in the U.S., some Democrats “blamed the party’s crushing defeat on the party’s perceived support for trans people’s rights, despite surveys showing that these issues were not a primary concern for voters.”
The report also includes a four-page case study on Republicans’ anti-trans messaging and misinformation during the 2024 U.S. election cycle, including the GOP candidate’s campaign’s $17 million investment in anti-trans ads. It concludes that the 2024 election cycle “highlights the vulnerability of marginalized communities to targeted misinformation, underscoring an urgent need for ongoing vigilance and robust advocacy to protect human rights amid escalating political adversity.”
The report also found that, while there was no evidence of laws explicitly denying LGBTQ+ people the right to vote, the community nonetheless faces significant barriers to participating in the democratic process around the world — fear of violence, political disillusionment, and lack of legal gender recognition among them.
Despite those barriers, Outright International says that LGBTQ+ communities consistently came out to defend democracy in the face of authoritarian movements in their home countries, most notably in Bangladesh, Türkiye, and Georgia.
Alongside its dire warnings about what de Belaúnde called a “weaponization” of anti-LGBTQ+ hate, the Queering Democracy report also highlighted significant political gains for LGBTQ+ people around the world. LGBTQ+ candidates ran for office in 36 countries last year, including for the first time in Botswana, Namibia, and Romania. It also notes trailblazing transgender candidates in Venezuela, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the U.S., where Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) became the first openly trans member of Congress.
The report includes a long list of recommendations for electoral management bodies, election monitoring organizations, political leaders, and candidates on how to combat anti-LGBTQ+ tactics. These include holding political parties and candidates accountable for hate speech, engaging with LGBTQ+ communities in developing political platforms, and supporting queer candidates.
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An important report on how the tRump bigots and trans people haters are targeting trans people. It shows how clearly they are lying and spreading disinformation so they can erase trans people from society. They flood the media at the first sign of violence yet never correct the misinformation when they are found to be wrong. The goal is to make the US a straight cis only society. They will be coming for the rest of the LGBTQ+ community as soon as they feel they win erasing the trans people. Remember they have made the pride flag political and forbidden to be displayed but the southern confederate battle flag is still allowed. Hugs
Investigative journalist, Ken Klippenstein joins the show to discuss the Trump administration’s manipulation of recent shootings to bolster their war on trans people. Live-streamed on September 25, 2025
This is a doctor who served in Gaz and explains how horrible it is with Israeli soldiers shooting children as sport. He talks of dealing with children with their intestines hanging out and they have to operate with out pain killers. Please watch to see how horrific Israel is being at this point.
Sorry I have not been posting much. Really struggling right now. Hugs
Dr. Mohammed Mustafa joins us to discuss the horrors he has witnessed while volunteering at hospitals in Gaza. Here is a link to the fundraiser for a children’s hospital in Gaza. Live-streamed on September 23, 2025.
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