The two quotes from the article I added just below what I am writing give away the Fundamentalist Christian republican’s goal, which is to make those people they disagree with, that they hate, disappear from society. Their goal by taking LGBTQ+ media out of schools is to make it appear that all kids are straight and cis. No one can be different from them or their beliefs. Everyone must walk lockstep with them, their way is the only way people can live. Holy dictators. Their goal is to erase anyone different from them from the public view, from society. We must not let them do that. Hugs
A controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”-Adrienne Rich
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could possibly perpetuate the “psychic disequilibrium” that Adrienne Rich laments.
Trump’s Department of Education called the suggestion that rightwingers are trying to ban book a “hoax.”
The case arose from conflicts between those in favor of teaching LGBTQ+ topics in schools and those who believe in so-called parents’ rights on religious grounds when it comes to the education of their children. The case stems from some parents’ concerns about a policy sanctioned by the Montgomery County Board of Education requiring new elementary school storybooks covering LGBTQ+ topics that could be read in class.
One of the contested books is titled “Pride Puppy!” and is about a puppy who gets lost in the crowd during an LGBTQ+ Pride parade.
When the policy first passed, parents could opt their children out of the curriculum, but later, the board reversed that part. In this demographically diverse school district, some Christian and Muslim parents, in particular, objected. I wonder, though, whether they think parents should be allowed to opt their children out of reading age-appropriate stories about Jewish or Asian people, for example.
This case harkens back to one of the earlier curricular programs created in 1991 by the New York City Board of Education. The Children of the Rainbow Curriculum was introduced to first-grade teachers to “assist with teaching about multicultural social issues.” The board developed the program to counter the increase in hate crimes directed against members of marginalized communities.
The curriculum contained 443 pages of suggested readings, activities, and other lectures, all designed to help teachers promote academic and social skills while teaching about diversity.
Unfortunately, the section on families that covered LGBTQ+ people incited enormous criticism. Some opponents argued that it promoted sex and sodomy to kids.
The battle gained significant publicity, and the New York City Department of Education ultimately voted against accepting the entire Children of the Rainbow Curriculum.
And the moments of psychic disequilibrium continued.
Surplus Repression & Anti-Knowing
Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.
In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and that person’s restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization) and sustaining the life of the individual.
Nonetheless, we must establish a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from oppression, and minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society and enters into the realm of domination, control, and oppression).
Authorizing the “truth”
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.
Paul Simon laments in his song “Kodachrome” that his education consisted of neutralizing, meaningless content. “Everything looks worse in black and white,” he sang of the whitewashing of his lessons.
Metaphorically, most schools teach only in black and white, whereas most students want the array of colors Paul Simon wished for: “Those nice bright colors: the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”
Unfortunately, Simon’s educational system took his Kodachrome away: the camera film that captured the full spectrum of the rainbow from the brightest reds, oranges, and yellows, to the darkest blues and browns and deepest purples.
Schools across the nation are attempting to function amidst increased book banning and control of course content by state legislatures under the false flag of “parental rights.” It’s all part of the current tide of right-wing takeovers of educational systems.
People on the political right transform terms like “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into hate-filled and frightening epithets. In the process, they have driven us away from the underlying purpose of education.
The term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
In its original translation and intent, education includes the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge. This is in contrast to the placing or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the students’ waiting and docile minds, or what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
Surrounding forces – religion, parenting, schooling, and other types of socialization – often inhibit the maintenance of critical thinking facilities in young and old alike.
Let us take, for example, the Biblical warning in Genesis 2: 16-17, related to the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’”
The apples on that tree represent knowledge. When eaten, this “forbidden fruit” unlocks levels of knowing that can more than overturn the apple cart. But more importantly, it can give the knower a full-color spectrum of the workings of the world. We are encouraged, nonetheless, to think only in the black and white determined by those in power.
Figures like the biblical Eve and Greek Pandora, women, are blamed for the downfall of “man.” In fact, they were strong women who refused to be trapped under the thumbs of the patriarchy.
Additionally, the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus casts a cautionary tale on the gifting of knowledge. The chief of the gods, Zeus, punished him for offering mortals the best of the sections from a slaughtered cow while giving the gods the remaining fat and bones.
After an infuriated Zeus took back fire from humanity, Prometheus stole and returned it to mortals, thus turning the darkness from the spectrum of black and white to technicolor once again.
For Prometheus’ crime of returning light and knowledge to humankind, Zeus had Prometheus chained to the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver every day, which grew back every night.
Literature and cinema likewise warn of the horrific and often fatal risks of challenging the limitations placed by the powerful on the accumulation of knowledge.
The first film in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, released in 1968, can be understood as a recreation of the legend of Prometheus. A U.S.-based crew crash land their space vehicle on a strange planet in the distant future amounting to nearly 2000 years advancement on Earth, as they traveled at the speed of light.
The crew, led by Taylor – the Prometheus character – discover that the planet is ruled by a species of apes who possess what to the Earthlings appear as human-like qualities, including speech, high reasoning, and cultural artifacts such as museums, medicine, constructed homes, a judicial system, and written religious and governing scrolls.
A community of humans on this planet, on the other hand, lacks the facility of speech and operates on an animal-like intellectual level. The apes hunt, enslave, and murder humans to keep them from invading their gardens and stealing food and to use them in medical and psychological experiments.
Taylor rebels and protests his treatment by challenging the hierarchical ranking of apes over humans. Two apes listen to Taylor and befriend him, Zira and Cornelius, and they eventually come to believe that what they have been socialized to accept as factual was somehow manipulated and falsified.
Blond-furred Dr. Zaius (Zeus), Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, knows the truth regarding the origins of his species and the rise and fall of humans through industrialization and the power of the atom, which terminated life as it had been once known. His primary objective has been to keep the fire of “knowledge” away from his ape community and humans.
He attempts to destroy any artifacts and other remnants of pre-nuclear holocaust human society to keep alive the myth of perennial simian superiority. Knowledge, therefore, represents overturning the proverbial apple cart, undermining origin myths, and challenging hierarchal positionings.
These genesis/origin stories are examples of the concept of “hegemony,” a term coined by social theorist Antonio Gramsci to describe the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates dominant social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as common sense and part of the natural order.
This controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and closed The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and homosexual sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research and was a precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
Storm troopers carried away and torched over 10,000 volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and libraries, confiscating books they deemed “un-German.”
The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” On May 10, 1933, students and Nazi leaders across Germany set ablaze over 25,000 volumes. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, fired up the Berlin crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
In 2018, we witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ Christian crusader Paul Dorr check out four LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books from the Orange City, Iowa Public Library and burn them in a 27-minute October 2018 video diatribe on Facebook. – Dorr is the founder of Rescue the Perishing, a group “contending against moral evil to advance the Kingdom of Christ.”
The books in question were Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan; Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, by Christine Baldacchino; This Day In June, by Gayle E. Pitman; and Families, Families, Families!, by Suzanne and Max Lang.
In his video rant, Dorr argued that Two Boys Kissing was “designed to get 12-to-13-year-old boys to start having homosexual sex together.”
The fight for all the colors
To build off of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famed poem:
First they came for Leaves of Grass, and I did not speak out — Because I was not gay.
Then they came for Stone Butch Blues, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a transgender person.
Then they came for Critical Race Theory and Beloved, and I did not speak out — Because I was not Black.
Then they came for Maus, and I did not speak out — Because I am a Christian and not a Jew.
Then they came for books representing my experiences and identities — and there was no one left to speak out for me.
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Has Oklahoma already become a theocracy? Is the will of the people not important, or only the doctrines of the fundamentalist Christ the majority of these people belong to so their god will be happy is important. The voters don’t matter, the wants and needs of those who elect the lawmakers don’t matter, only pleasing their one version of a god out of 1100 other versions of god. To hell with the rights of the people, to hell with the instruction of the woke hippy Jesus, just push the hates and desires of white males cis straight males to dominate and run everything. As Roger says if they win how long will they start warring with each other for the top positions of speaking for their god? Hugs
Sen. Dusty Deevers, R-Elgin, announced on Tuesday a bold slate of eight legislative measures aimed at restoring moral sanity in Oklahoma. Together, these bills set a course for pushing back against the moral decay foisted upon Oklahoma by the far-left’s march through our institutions to destroy the moral foundations upon which the United States and Christian Civilization had long rested.
“Sadly, the left’s century-long assault on morality and decency has been so successful that some have come to accept as normal a society that is drowning in hardcore pornography, prenatal homicide, and sexual performances for children. None of this is normal. Each one of these evils is a result of a policy choice to not stand for what we know is right. Opposing these evils does not mean we are extremists. It means we are sane,” Deevers said.
“Contrary to what the left would have us believe, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can and should imagine and move toward a society that celebrates virtue in the public square rather than vice. We can restore normalcy, decency, and morality; we can protect the most vulnerable, restore a high view of marriage, and shield children from explicit material that can warp their innocent minds. We simply must have the courage to stand against the most radical and degenerate elements of the far-left.”
SB456 seeks to protect the lives of all preborn children in Oklahoma by closing the self-managed abortion loophole. While clinics may be prohibited from performing abortions, pro-life laws currently being enforced allow mothers to order abortion pills online and administer them herself. Recent research from the Foundation to Abolish Abortion shows that an estimated 3,274 self-managed abortions are taking place annually in Oklahoma.
SB593 – Prohibiting Pornography in Oklahoma
The bill prohibits pornography in general, providing for criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for production, distribution, or possession. It also provides heightened 10-to-30-year criminal penalties for organized pornography trafficking. “Pornography is both degenerate material and a highly addictive drug,” Deevers said. “It ruins marriages, ruins lives, destroys innocence, warps young people’s perception of the opposite sex, turns women into objects, turns men into objects, degrades human dignity, and corrodes the moral fabric of society. Any decent society will stand against this plague with the full weight of the law.”
SB550 – Prohibiting Drag Performances for Children
SB550 would ensure that Oklahoma kids are not subjected to adult cabaret performances including Drag Queen Story Hour. Under the provisions of the bill, the performer would be subject to a prison sentence of one-to-five years, while the organizer of the event would face up to one year behind bars.
SB228 – The Covenant Marriage Act
The Covenant Marriage Act would allow for couples in Oklahoma to opt into a covenant marriage, based on the traditional understanding of marriage as a binding legal contract with meaningful vows to one another. Covenant marriages would only be able to be dissolved in cases of abuse, adultery, or abandonment. Couples who opt into a covenant marriage would be eligible for a $2,500 tax credit.
SB829 – Prohibiting No-Fault Divorce
This bill would end no-fault divorce in Oklahoma by removing “incompatibility” as a justification for divorce, leaving abandonment, gross neglect, extreme cruelty, habitual drunkenness, insanity for a period of five years, adultery, unknown pregnancy, and fraudulent contract as the available justifications. It also establishes that the at-fault parent must pay restitution to the victims of divorce–that is, the children–in the form of a trust fund that they get access to when they turn 18.
Deever’s appeared here in January 2024 when he first tried to make viewing porn and sexting a consenting person a felony.
In March 2024, he declared during a Oklahoma House floor speech that all federal regulations are “against God’s law.”
In September 2024, he declared that people who vote for Kamala Harris are “possessed by demons.”
As you’ve probably already guessed, Deever’s is a pastor.
Logan Casey, left, of the Movement Advancement Project, and Steven Hobaica, Ph.D., with The Trevor Project, worked on a report looking at LGBTQ+ youth who leave a state because of anti-LGBTQ laws. Photos: Courtesy MAP, Trevor Project
A new report estimates that roughly 266,000 LGBTQ+ young people and their families have uprooted their lives and left a state because of anti-LGBTQ politics or laws. It is also detailing in stark relief the positive outcomes on the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ youth that state lawmakers can have when enacting policy.
The eight-page research brief being released Wednesday by LGBTQ youth advocacy nonprofit The Trevor Project and the Movement Advancement Project used data sets from both organizations to draw its conclusions. It is the first time the two groups have utilized their data in such a way.
The report drew on the findings of Trevor’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, which was based on the responses of 18,663 LGBTQ+ young people between the ages of 13 to 24 from across the country. And it incorporated MAP’s policy tally scores for all 50 states that it compiles based on what laws individual states have passed benefitting or targeting the LGBTQ community.
“Year over year has been a record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ bills. And the attacks continue to escalate,” said Logan Casey, a queer and transgender man who is MAP’s director of policy research. “The more we can do to illustrate the harm of those attacks, and on the flip side the positive impacts of good policy, I think the better it will be to help us communicate to the public, policymakers and beyond that policies matter in shaping everyone’s individual lives, and that is true for LGBTQ people as well.”
One of the key findings in the brief is that an overwhelming 90% of LGBTQ+ young people cited “recent politics” as having impacted their well-being. Among transgender and nonbinary youth, the percentage was 94%.
Nearly half (45%) of the transgender and nonbinary young people reported considering moving to a different state because of their home state’s LGBTQ+ politics or laws. Among all LGBTQ+ youth, just 39% had done so.
“When we incorporated the MAP data, I was not surprised, but it was striking. It was very clear to me the data had a very clear relationship to how LGBTQ-related policy is related to relocation,” said Steven Hobaica, Ph.D., a Honolulu-based licensed clinical psychologist who is a research scientist at The Trevor Project.
According to the research brief, titled “How State Policy Affects the Well-Being and Relocation of LGBTQ+ Young People,” 12% of transgender and nonbinary youth said they had traveled to another state to receive medical care due to their own states’ policies. Among all LGBTQ+ young people, 9% reported doing so.
Twenty-seven percent of LGBTQ+ young people reported living in a state with a negative policy index, or within a particularly harmful policy environment, according to the brief. Unsurprisingly, LGBTQ+ young people in states that received a lower LGBTQ+ policy index from MAP, meaning their states have less LGBTQ+-affirming policy, were more likely to consider moving and to travel to another state to access health care, compared to those residing in states that have adopted more LGBTQ+-affirming policy.
“For me, I think sometimes when individuals approach policy surrounding a community they are not a part of, they often don’t understand the impacts it can directly have on that community. I hope it points to that,” Hobaica, who identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, said of the research brief.
The Trevor project did not ask the youth what states they had moved to in order to find a more LGBTQ-welcoming legislative environment. It remains unclear how many LGBTQ youth and their families have relocated to California, one of a handful of states to declare itself a transgender sanctuary, to escape the anti-LGBTQ laws adopted in their former states.
Kathie Moehlig, executive director of Trans Family Support Services, told the Bay Area Reporter that her San Diego-based organization two years ago routinely had fielded calls from LGBTQ families wanting to move out of their states due to anti-LGBTQ laws, especially when it came to health care for their trans children. More recently, they have handled far fewer requests for such assistance.
“Most people who sat in a privileged position and could move out of state for care have done that,” said Moehlig, whose 24-year-old son is trans.
A graph shows the number of LGBTQ+ youth considering leaving a state because of its anti-LGBTQ laws. Image: Courtesy The Trevor Project
Trump impact uncertain She has not seen any numbers on how many such families have moved to California, but surmised relatively few have due to the high cost of housing in the state and other factors. What impact the Trump administration and its attacks on trans rights will have on such relocations remains to be seen, she added.
“With Trump, maybe more families will move. More likely families will be hunkering down, finding resources, staying connected to community, and staying engaged in what may be coming our way,” said Moehlig. “We really don’t know. We just have to wait and see.”
The researchers noted that only 4% of LGBTQ+ young people in the sample they used had reported leaving a state because of LGBTQ+-related policies. Using estimations that 9.5% of youth age 13 to 17 and 15.2% of young people age 18 to 24 in the U.S. are LGBT, they then deduced the 266,000 number for how many have relocated to a new state.
“Unsurprisingly, these issues are even more pronounced for trans and nonbinary youth,” said Hobaica. “It impacts the whole LGBTQ community, but especially trans and nonbinary youth are going to be the youth who feel the most impact and typically are attacked the most by policymakers.”
In Missouri, where Casey lives, LGBTQ rights have been under assault. It has a negative rating on MAP’s policy tally, with an over score of -1.5/49.
“Politicians here are playing games with LGBTQ people’s lives, in particular LGBTQ young people’s lives,” said Casey.
He has had friends leave the state for Minnesota, California, and Pennsylvania. Casey told the B.A.R. he had contemplated doing so himself but hasn’t yet because Missouri is his home, he grew up in Ferguson, outside St. Louis, and he can still access the health care he needs.
“What me and other trans people are watching is whether the state or the new Trump admin will cut off medical care. That is the line in the sand for many people who either choose to move or have to move,” said Casey.
Positive benefits While the media’s and public’s attention are usually focused on the negative LGBTQ policies being adopted, and the impacts they have, what often goes missing from the discourse is how LGBTQ people, particularly young people, positively benefit when policymakers adopt affirming legislation, noted Casey. The research brief intentionally highlights those outcomes, noting LGBTQ+ young people are more likely to report being positively impacted by recent politics if they live in a state assigned a higher LGBTQ+ policy index by MAP.
“LGBTQ+ young people living in states with a higher LGBTQ+ policy index reported that recent politics were less likely to negatively impact their well-being. They were also less likely to report crossing state lines for health care or consider moving to another state,” noted the research brief.
Casey told the B.A.R., “It is not just bad policies lead to bad outcomes, it is the reverse is also true. Good policies lead to improved outcomes for mental health and all other kinds of outcomes.”
Shira Berkowitz, senior director of public policy and advocacy at PROMO, Missouri’s statewide LGBTQ advocacy group, believes the research brief will be beneficial to the lobbying efforts it and similar groups in other states undertake this year.
“We do significant policy work to change the landscape in this area so people feel Missouri is a state they can live and thrive in,” said Berkowitz, noting that “the most important thing to most lawmakers is the condition or ability for their state to thrive, or it should be.”
Hopefully the research brief will embolden lawmakers who want to help protect the LGBTQ community, said Casey.
“I hope it adds to the growing body of evidence that harmful policies have real costs on LGBTQ young people and their families across the country, but also that it will encourage legislators in states who want to do something proactive that they should,” said Casey.
For Moehlig, she would like to see pro-LGBTQ lawmakers make an effort to reach LGBTQ young people where they are at. It is not enough to just pass laws and talk about doing so at events, in media outlets, or on social media platforms that may not be reaching LGBTQ youth, contended Moehlig.
“I don’t think it is spoken enough in spaces where kids are going to hear that,” she said. “They need to be reaching in to where they are, whether on social media or whether communicating through their schools. They need to be finding those spaces so kids are hearing directly from the people who hold the power to say, ‘We’ve got you here.'”
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Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
Scottie's Playtime 