Just how hateful a misinformed Christian do you need to be to equate Nazism to LGBTQ+ pride? One aggressively harmed others and ostracized entire groups from society, eventually imprisoning and killing them. LGBTQ+ pride flags, festables, and exisitance don’t harm anyone nor force anyone to live a LGBTQ+ lifestyle or be LGBTQ+. I cannot imagine the bigotry and being that unquestioningly misinformed. It stuns me how these bigots especally those claiming to be Christians following the Jesus Christ of the bible feel free to try to force everyone to live by their church doctrines and feel they have the right to tell others how they must live including who they can love and how they can pratice sex. HugsP
“The offensive aspect of her conduct was not her personal beliefs about homosexuality or what she calls ‘gender ideology,’ but rather her choice to use her social media platform to ostensibly equate support for gender and sexual diversity with Nazism.”
Red Deer Catholic school trustee Monique LaGrange at a meeting on Monday, September 25, 2023. Global News
Alberta’s highest court has struck the decision by a Catholic school division requiring a trustee to publicly apologize for a social media post that compared children waving Pride flags to Nazi Germany.
The social media post, which LaGrange later deleted, featured an image of children holding Pride flags in a classroom underneath an image of children waving swastikas, with the caption “brainwashing is brainwashing.”
The board ruled the post and media interviews LaGrange did in the weeks that followed violated division policies and the province’s education law. It sanctioned LaGrange by demanding an apology, censuring her from parts of her job and requiring she undergo sensitivity training.
LaGrange unsuccessfully challenged the board’s decisions multiple times in court.
A story shared online from the account of Monique LaGrange included an old black and white photo of smiling children leaning out a window waving Nazi flags with the swastikas on them.A more modern photo directly beneath it shows young children in a classroom holding up homemade Pride rainbow flags.The caption reads: “Brainwashing is brainwashing.”. Supplied to Global News
On Wednesday, a panel of three Court of Appeal judges ruled partly in her favour, striking the ruling that she issue an apology.
The court, in a written decision, says the board mandating LaGrange be “deeply sorry” amounts to compelled speech and imposes an impossible disciplinary standard, since she doesn’t believe she was in the wrong.
LaGrange had told the board that the “Holy Spirit” told her to make the social media post. She also told court she would do it again if she had the opportunity, says Wednesday’s court decision.
It notes that another court previously ruled the board couldn’t require an apology from LaGrange be “sincere,” since it amounted to compelled speech. The Appeal Court says it struck the entire apology requirement for the same reason.
It cited a number of past rulings about forced apologies, including one that determined they’re “likely to be regarded primarily as a form of unjust humiliation and not necessarily as a vindication of what is right.”
The court dismissed other aspects of LaGrange’s appeal, including her attempts to have the board’s decisions quashed for being unfair or unreasonable.
It also dismissed an argument by LaGrange’s lawyer that the board didn’t properly take Roman Catholic values into consideration.
The court says whether LaGrange’s post represented those values is irrelevant and subject to “considerable disagreement,” because her actions violated board rules.
“Ms. LaGrange was not sanctioned for her religious beliefs – she was sanctioned for engaging in conduct contrary to the behavioural standards set out in the (board’s) code of conduct,” says the decision.
“The offensive aspect of her conduct was not her personal beliefs about homosexuality or what she calls ‘gender ideology,’ but rather her choice to use her social media platform to ostensibly equate support for gender and sexual diversity with Nazism.”
James Kitchen, LaGrange’s lawyer, said in an email that they’re pleased with the decision striking the apology sanction. ”Especially since this has practical utility for other trustees and councillors encountering compelled apologies from their respective boards and councils,” he said. ”It is good to see that the Court of Appeal at least got that right.”
The school division didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
LaGrange ran for municipal council in Red Deer County last year but was defeated.
The parents of a transgender teen who died by suicide earlier this year are speaking out about the toll Idaho’s anti-trans laws and the Trump administration’s anti-trans crusade took on their daughter.
“You worry about that hatred being internalized, and that’s what happened to my kid,” Elyse Thorpe told NBC News in a recent profile. “It got inside.”
Thorpe and ex-husband Joseph Pollard describe their late daughter, May Pollard, as an energetic and curious child who loved sloths, video games, and writing poetry. She just wanted to live her life and experience the same things any teen does. But she was also keenly aware of the wave of anti-trans laws and sentiment that have swept Idaho and much of the U.S. in recent years.
According to NBC News, May, who had also been diagnosed with autism, came out as trans when she was in eighth grade. She began receiving gender-affirming medical care in ninth grade. But due to Idaho’s ban on such care for minors, passed in 2022 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2024, her parents were forced to travel to Portland, Oregon, every six months to get May the care she needed. Following President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, Thorpe began making the 13-hour round trip by car to avoid creating a flight record amid the administration’s relentless crackdown on gender-affirming care for young people.
While the treatment improved things for May, the obstacles placed between her and the care she needed by anti-trans legislators continued to weigh on her.
Then, in July 2023, Idaho’s law banning trans students from accessing single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity took effect. Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of Boise High School’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance, and in July 2025, May joined the lawsuit under the pseudonym Jane Doe. In court filings, May described feeling stigmatized by being forced to use her campus’s two single-occupancy restrooms, which came to be referred to as the “trans bathrooms.”
“It is scary having to look around before to see if anyone will see me going into the single-user restroom, as I worry about people gossiping and speculating about me being transgender,” she said. “I don’t want people to know I am transgender without my consent — even students who might be friendly. For me, it is not a part of myself I talk about or that I feel is the most important part of my identity.”
Her parents told NBC News that May would avoid eating and drinking during the school day, hoping to not have to use the school’s bathrooms. “I just want to fit in,” she wrote in her affidavit in the Lambda Legal case. “It is upsetting to think that I may have to go through the rest of high school without access to something as basic as the ability to use the same restroom as everyone else.”
May’s parents say she became more troubled last fall and winter, according to NBC News. She attempted to run away to Oregon, and at least one of her poems seemed to reference self-harm. Then on the morning of January 27, Thorpe woke to find May missing from her bedroom. She later found her daughter’s body in a downstairs bedroom. May was just 16 years old.
When a detective asked her parents whether anyone might have wanted to harm May, Thorpe responded that “A lot of America” did.
“There is a huge amount of animosity, every single day, thrown at trans kids,” an angry and grieving Pollard told the detective. “The whole f**king country. The whole f**king administration, every single f**king day.”
As NBC News notes, over the last few years, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) has signed 15 anti-LGBTQ+ laws. In April, Little signed a pair of bills, one of which made it a criminal offense for trans people to use the bathroom associated with their gender, while the other banned Pride flags on government buildings.
As for Lambda Legal’s challenge to the state’s school bathroom ban, at the time of May’s death, she was one of just two plaintiffs left in the case, as all the others had graduated high school and no longer held standing. Earlier this spring, Lambda Legal moved to dismiss the case after the final plaintiff graduated.
But Thorpe has continued to protest Idaho’s anti-trans laws. According to NBC News, she stood outside Gov. Little’s office during a March 31 protest holding a photo of her daughter.
“I wanted to support the protesters and remind everyone, including the governor,” Thorpe told the outlet, “that the stakes are real.”
“The parents go and testify, and we say, ‘Children are going to die,’” she said. “We tell the legislators that, and they dismiss it. I guess they think it’s hyperbole, or they think it’s hysteria, or they think it’s an acceptable outcome, probably some mix of those things. So I don’t understand why there is an unwillingness to connect these laws to these outcomes. It was right there from the start.”
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The game plan is clear and was used to accomplish the genocide of the LGBTQ+ from society in Russia. Attack the most vulnerable and smallest members of the LGBTQ+ trans people in the name of saving the most vulnerable, who are the little children espcailly little girls / daughters. Every study proves that the ones in real danger or under threat are not the kids but the trans people. Then use the momentum and rising bigotry to remove all rights and equality from the rest of the LGBQ+ based on the same lies. End goal is to create a straight cis country where the Christian white male is making the country safe / regressive enough for their bigoted view of Jesus to feel comfortable enough to return and pat them on their heads. Hugs
The Idaho Senate has widely passed a bill that would fine local and state governments for flying flags that aren’t on the Legislature’s pre-approved list.
The bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Ted Hill, an Eagle Republican, has said House Bill 561 is meant to target the city of Boise for flying an LGBTQ+ pride flag. Boise’s City Council voted to declare the pride flag and the organ donor flag as official flags, in an apparent move to work around the Legislature’s flag ban law passed last year.
The bill would add a $2,000 daily fine, per offending flag, to the flag ban law from last year, which lacked an enforcement process. The bill widely passed the House earlier this month. But since the Senate amended the bill, it must return to the House before it would go to Gov. Brad Little for final consideration.
Rep. Ted Hill [photo] appeared here yesterday for his successful bill that criminalizes using the “wrong” bathroom. Violating that law would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years would be a felony, carrying up to a five-year prison sentence.
Hill appeared here in 2024 for his successful bill banning teachers from referring to students with their preferred pronouns.
Earlier this month, the Idaho House passed a resolution to petition the US Supreme Court on overturning Obergefell.
In February, the Idaho House advanced a bill to overturn all local LGBTQ rights ordinances statewide. Thirteen Idaho cities and counties, including Boise and its home county, have such laws on the books.
The transgender flags that usually adorn the Stonewall National Monument in New York City during Pride Month were missing this year, so some New Yorkers are taking matters into their own hands.
During June, Pride flags are placed around the park’s fence. They usually include a mixture of rainbow LGBTQ+ flags, transgender flags and progress flags, which have stripes to include communities of color.
Photographer and advocate Steven Love Menendez said he created and won federal approval for the installation nine years ago. Within a few years, the National Park Service was picking up the tab, buying and installing flags, including trans ones.
Pride flags fly in the wind at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan’s West Village on June 19, 2023 in New York City.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
This year, however, Menendez said the National Park Service told him to change the protocol.
“I was told … only the traditional rainbow flag would be displayed this year,” he said.
Now, no transgender or progress flags are among the 250 rainbow flags installed around the park.
“It’s a terrible action for them to take,” Menendez said.
“I used to be listed as an LGBTQ activist, and now it says ‘Steven Menendez, LGB activist,'” Menendez said. “They took out the Q and the T.”
“I’m not going to stand by and watch us be erased from our own history”
Many visiting the monument said they are opposed to the change.
“I think it’s absurd. I think it’s petty,” said Willa Kingsford, a tourist from Portland.
“It’s horrible. They’re changing all of our history,” Los Angeles resident Patty Carter said.
Jay Edinin, of Queens, brought his own transgender flag to the monument.
“I’m not going to stand by and watch us be erased from our own history, from our own communities, and from the visibility that we desperately need right now,” he said.
The transgender flags that usually adorn the Stonewall National Monument in New York City during Pride Month were missing this year, so some New Yorkers are taking matters into their own hands.CBS News New York
He is not the only one bringing unauthorized flags to the park. A number of trans flags were seen planted in the soil.
National Park Service workers at the park told CBS News New York they are not authorized to speak on this subject. CBS News New York reached out by phone and email to the National Park Service and has not yet heard back.
Dave Carlin has covered major national news stories and events in the past four decades including Superstorm Sandy and its tri-state impacts, Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina and Iniki on Kauai, Hawaii. He also covered the Space Shuttle Program, 1989 San Francisco Earthquake, numerous Southern California wildfires, the trial and execution of serial killer Ted Bundy in Florida, the 1994 police shooting death of Tyke the eacaped Cirus Elephant on the streets of Honolulu, 2009’s Miracle on the Hudson, the NYC Mayoral administrations of Bloomberg through Adams and more.
The entire article is saying that the public schools should be for everyone … except LGBTQ+ kids and parents of those kids. Yes gay and trans children exist and need / deserve to see themselves represented in the community just as much as straight cis kids do. This is a hate bill, banning a group because the majority in charge doesn’t like them. The flags they say are ok to fly like the Gladstone flag or the thin blue line flag are not neutral and they most definitely represent a political ideology. Again this is about erasing the LGBTQ+ kids / people from society to make the Christian fundamentalist and insecure parents who know they can’t have produced a gay / trans kid feel better about themselves. It is a desire to force the fundamentalist view point on every one regardless if they believe it. It is a desperate attempt to return to the 1950s. Hugs
The law effectively bans Pride flags and other LGBTQ flags from being flown at schools or government buildings. In 2019, Gov. Steve Bullock, D-Montana, flew a Pride flag over the state Capitol, which drew criticism from Republicans.
Language in the bill does allow flags like the Gadsden flag and other “official historical flags” to be flown. It also allows flags for law enforcement officers and fallen officers, like the “Thin Blue Line” flag, which Gov. Gianforte, R-Montana, flew above the Montana Capitol on Thursday, May 15, 2025.
When HB 819 was debated on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives, Mitchell said the bill was intended to ensure government entities remain a place of neutrality and was not to impact an individual’s free speech.
“Government buildings, schools and public facilities serve all citizens and should not be used to promote political, ideological or activist messaging,” said Mitchell during the March 6 floor debate.
Critics of HB 819 say the bill targets free speech by allowing provisions for specific flags like the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag to be flown, while others were prohibited. Rep. Pete Elverum, D-Helena, said under the language, a Confederate flag could be flown.
“What we’re doing here is we’re expressly prescribing what speech is allowed, ‘these flags’, and what speech is not allowed, ‘these other flags’,” said Rep. Pete Elverum, D-Helena, on March 6. “And as for the definition of ‘promoting a certain ideology,’ those [flags] are expressly prohibited, but at the exact same time we’re sitting here with a bill proclaiming to be about free speech, we’re expressly prohibiting some and promoting others.”
Flags of tribal nations, foreign countries, military service branches, the POW/MIA flag and official school or government entities’ flags are also permitted under the law.
HB 819 went into effect immediately after Governor Greg Gianforte signed it.
This year, both Utah and Idaho have passed similar laws restricting or banning Pride flags on government property or at schools.
New Montana law decides which flags fly in public schools.
#BREAKING: On the eve of the state's flag ban, @slcmayor is proposing the @slcCouncil adopt three new city flags – each in Pride, transgender, and Juneteenth colors with the city's Sego Lily. They're expected to be adopted at their meeting tonight. @abc4utahpic.twitter.com/zAWlJaOPm4
Mayor @slcmayor says this is the way the city can "abide" by the law, and that the flags are meant to include, not divide. She says retribution is always possible and she laughed when I asked whether this was the "ultimate troll" of the Utah legislature. pic.twitter.com/dKo6kkB4Mi
Yes the flag ban bill was performative culture war nonsense. Doesn’t mean Salt Lake City was going to take it lying down. Private buildings across downtown raised their own flags today – including mine. pic.twitter.com/rNNrGuIuYD
Our new official flags. These flags are allowed by the law, that our state leaders spent hours debating. Thank you for allowing us to make those official city flags that can be flown at anytime highlighting the contributions of many. These flags won’t be kept in any closet! pic.twitter.com/YhdiR4uGAF
FYI, Salt Lake City isn't alone in doing adopting special flags to circumvent the new state law. The Boise City Council did the same thing last night. From @fox13news.bsky.social's sister-station in Boise: http://www.kivitv.com/downtown-boi… #utpol #Utah
The issue erupted in the summer of 2023 and led Monique LaGrange to resign from the board of Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools after fellow board members voted to disqualify her.
