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lilyrashkind

DeSantis courts further controversy by honoring swimmer who finished second to Lia Thom... - 0 views

  • The Republican governor, already embroiled in a fight with Disney over the state's so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill, claimed that the NCAA is "perpetuating a fraud" and declared University of Virginia freshman and Florida native Emma Weyant the "rightful winner" of the race.Weyant had finished about 1.75 seconds behind Thomas, who has come to personify the ongoing discourse on trans women's participation in sports and the balance between inclusion and fair play."The NCAA is basically taking efforts to destroy women's athletics," the Republican governor said in a news conference. "They're trying to undermine the integrity of the competition and crown someone else."
  • field.Read MoreTuesday's proclamation comes against the backdrop of DeSantis' showdown with Disney over the controversial Florida bill that would ban classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity before fourth grade. A day after Disney CEO Bob Chapek publicly condemned the legislation -- which DeSantis has said he will sign into law -- the Florida governor ripped Disney as a "woke corporation" to a room of supporters.
  • "In Florida, we reject these lies and recognize Sarasota's Emma Weyant as the best women's swimmer in the 500y freestyle," he said in a tweet.
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  • While sex is a category that refers broadly to physiology, a person's gender is an innate sense of identity. The factors that go into determining the sex listed on a birth certificate may include anatomy, genetics and hormones, and there is broad natural variation in each of these categories. For this reason, critics have said the language of "biological sex," as used in DeSantis' proclamation, is overly simplistic and misleading.A 2017 report in the journal Sports Medicine that reviewed several related studies found "no direct or consistent research" on trans people having an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers, at any state of their transition, and critics say postures like DeSantis' will only add to the discrimination that trans people face, particularly trans youth.
  • So far this year, Iowa and South Dakota have approved legislation banning transgender women and girls from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender at accredited schools and colleges. And last year, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia enacted similar sports bans, infuriating LGBTQ advocates, who argue conservatives are creating an issue where there isn't one.
lilyrashkind

The librarians uniting to battle school book ban laws - ABC News - 0 views

  • Last fall, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the state's school board association saying public schools shouldn't have "obscene" books and called on certain books about gender and sexual orientation, among others, to be removed.
  • Texas is the latest state to introduce legislation concerning how controversial subjects including race and even the Holocaust are taught in schools.There have been over 122 such bills introduced across the country since last year.Books focusing on LGBTQ and racial issues that critics say are inappropriate for students are being banned across the country. Now, some librarians are joining together to protest those bans.
  • who advocate for students' freedom to read books. They came together in November 2021 in response to Republican Texas Rep. Matt Krause's request that schools inform him if they carry books that focus on LGBTQ and racial issues.FReadom Fighters started as a social media movement with the hashtag "#FReadom" in protest of Krause's request, and then blossomed into activism.
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  • While Foote and some librarians are fighting for these books to stay on shelves, others disagree and are fighting to keep them off."I felt that I had a duty as a parent, because this type of material is so over the top in terms of inappropriateness … I felt I had a duty as a parent, to warn other parents and to bring it to the attention of the school board, because quite honestly, you know, I didn't know at that moment who's making these decisions as to what books are put into our school library," Stacy Langton, a Virginia mother and co-founder of Mama Grizzly, a conservative grassroots organization that she says aims to protect "our children's learning environments."
  • In other states, including North Carolina, Maine and Missouri, Republicans have begun campaigns targeting books that deal with segregation and racism.However, according to an American Library Association poll, 71% of Americans are opposed to banning books.
  • "It's just really important that we understand that just because we read something or watch a TV show or read a newspaper article, it doesn't mean we personally or our students are going to go out and enact anything they read about. Books just have ideas in them, and ideas cause us to think, and we can use our own minds to make critical decisions. And as educators ... we train students to ask critical questions like, 'Where did this data come from? And who wrote this? What is their point of view?'" Foote said."And I think that if parents considered that point of view, then they would understand that we're all in this together as partners," she added.
sgardner35

'I Have a Dream' should be required reading - CNN.com - 1 views

  • Looking for Martin Luther King's 'Dream'
  • Violence, hatred and the spiritual sickness he talked about in our country are alive and we
  • We do ourselves a great disservice if we do not challenge ourselves, and others, to actually spend time, throughout our lives, to read and listen to his words
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  • If we did, we would know that this speech so deeply connected to the notion of a dream of a different America begins with a history lesson, tying modern America to President Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.
  • But there is more in the "I Have a Dream" speech that is often ignored or forgotten. King used the term "police brutality" twice in this historic address, and here we are many seasons later wondering why police-community relations are so tainted.
  • "'When will you be satisfied?'
  • Yet they, too, will pause on the King national holiday and say they loved the man and his ideals, when we know that is not the truth.
  • But they heard about the March on Washington, they heard about these people, mostly black but also white sisters and brothers, too, who were making their way to America's capital to fight for freedom, equality and jobs for all people.
  • And as he instructed folks to go back to their home states to keep marching and fighting for what was righ
  • learn that King had been killed because he was fighting for the rights of black people, of all people. Doubly confused me that his words spoke of love and peace, yet he was gunned down in cold blood on the balcony of a motel.
  • To paraphrase the words Bobby Kennedy said to an Indianapolis crowd on the night King was assassinated, we've got to make an effort to be compassionate and show love, toward ourselves, toward each other, for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of America.
  • For it takes great courage to love any people who do not love you. It takes great courage to push for peace with every fiber of your being when violence is the language of those who believe in hate, division and fear.
  • And it takes great courage to see an America full of unity and togetherness even when fellow Americans cannot imagine it for themselves.
  • The killings of the prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, echoes the four little girls killed in a Birmingham church the same year King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. That kind of trauma and shock makes you question America, makes you question humanity, and makes you question King's dream itself.
  • I lost respect for King, when I was in college, because I did not think he was as fearless as other black leaders of his time, like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party.
  • If we did, we would know that King declared, matter-of-factly, that America had not made good on its promise of full citizenship rights to black people. We would acknowledge, 50 years later, how sad and unfortunate it is that we are still having the same conversations about equality for people of color, women, the LGBTQ community
  • a lesson some of us need to learn or relearn as we engage in civil disobedience in this new millennium. But those who say movements of today are disrupting their lives also fail to connect that the civil rights movement was completely about making the comfortable uncomfortable until real justice was served.
  • g's "I Have a Dream" speech. My mother and her family were so poor she interrupted her education for the first of many times when she was only 8 years old, to pick cotton on land owned by local whites that had been forcibly taken from her grandfather upon his death at their hands. The family was so poor there was no telephone, no television, no radio, and no indoor plumbing.
  • Nor do they love people like my mother, a woman born and bred in the backwoods of South Carolina, whose 20th birthday was the same day as Ki
  • "I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
  • I sensed his sorrow when he talked about the need for a relevant ministry among the faith community, and how so many have moved so far away from being relevant in these times. I think of how King asked us to practice a dangerous kind of selflessness, to not put ourselves, our lives, our material things, before people. The dream cannot be only about individual success, individual progress, while ignoring the plight of others. Even if we have some form of privilege, as King himself had, we must never forget that the basics of life must be for all people.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: The Vatican's Corruption Has Been Exposed - 0 views

  • the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind
  • It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”
  • The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do
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  • And if you want to understand the ferocity of the opposition to him on the Catholic right, this is the key. His most determined opponents are far-right closet cases, living in palaces, leading completely double lives, backed by the most vicious of reactionaries and bigots on the European and American far right
  • As a secular gay journalist, not hostile to the church, he walked into the Vatican and was simply staggered by its obvious gayness.
  • (Lepore hazards a guess that 80 percent of the Vatican’s population is gay.
  • as Martel probes deeper and deeper, one theme emerges very powerfully: “Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.”
  • it’s highly predictable that John Paul II’s pontificate, which launched a new war on homosexuals, turns out to be the gayest of them all — and the one most resistant to any inquiry into stories of sex abuse
  • Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI) personally received notification of every claim of sex abuse in the church under John Paul II, ignoring most, and made the stigmatization and persecution of sane, adjusted non-abusive gay people across the globe his mission instead. There wasn’t a theological dissident he didn’t notice and punish, but barely a single pedophile he found reason to expose
  • Martel explains how two of John Paul II’s favorite cardinals — whose nicknames within the Vatican are Platinette (after a drag queen) and La Mongolfiera — set up an elaborate and elite prostitution service that continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI, and was financed from the Vatican coffers.
  • He notices simple things that some might call innuendo, but any gay man will instantly recognize, like the fabulous interiors of the gay cardinals’ palaces, always with their “assistants” or young “relative” on hand
  • take Martel’s interaction with the Swiss Guards, one of whom vents: “The harassment is so insistent that I said to myself that I was going straight home. Many of us are exasperated by the usually rather indiscreet advances of the cardinals and bishops.”
  • Or the prostitutes who keep elaborate records of their clients, and have already caused huge scandals in Italy.
  • Or a confessor-priest in Saint Peter’s who guides Martel into the Vatican with the words: “Welcome to Sodoma.”
  • If you want to find a figure who crystallizes all this hypocrisy in the narrative, it would be the late Colombian cardinal, Alfonso López Trujillo, tasked by John Paul II in the 1970s to rid Latin America of liberation theology, and then to launch a global crusade against homosexuality and the use of condoms
  • Trujillo’s own master of ceremonies on these trips tells us: “López Trujillo travelled with members of the paramilitary groups … He pointed out the priests who were carrying out social actions in the barrios and the poorer districts. The paramilitaries identified them and sometimes went back to murder them. Often they had to leave the region or the country.”
  • “López Trujillo beat prostitutes; that was his relationship with sexuality. He paid them, but they had to accept his blows in return. It always happened at the end, not during the physical act. He finished his sexual relations by beating them, out of pure sadism.”
  • if the Catholic right wants to weaponize the book, they’ll have to take on their own icons, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a whole range of their closest allies in the church.
  • what was Trujillo’s task in Rome? You guessed it: president of the Pontifical Council for the Family! This was the figure who spearheaded the war on gays in the 1980s and 1990s, who forbade the use of condoms, who spread the lie that condoms don’t protect anyone from HIV. And yet when he died, Benedict XVI gave the homily at the funeral mass.
  • It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try:
  • And the core thesis of the book — which is that it is the hypocrisy of the closet that is the real problem — is not one the right will be able easily to absorb.
  • Critically, Martel reaches the same conclusion I did recently — the omertà of the closet was a core reason for sex abuse
  • Gay priests felt unable to report pedophiles or abusers or hypocrites because they too could be outed by the abusers and forced out
  • When Trujillo was promoted to Rome, the reckless excesses went into overdrive. A Curia source tells Martel: “Everyone knew that he was homosexual. He lived with us, here, on the fourth floor of the Palazzo di San Calisto, in a 900-square-metre apartment, and he had several cars! Ferraris! He led a highly unusual life.”
  • There can be no meaningful reform until this closet is ended, and the whole sick, twisted syndrome is unwound.
  • only a radical change will help. Ending mandatory celibacy is no longer an option
  • Women need to be brought in to the full sacramental life of the church. Gay men need to be embraced not as some manifestation of “intrinsic moral evil” but as human beings made in the image of God
  • Francis is nudging the church toward this more humane and Christian future, but the more he does so, the more fervently this nest of self-haters and bigots will try to destroy him.
  • Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters.
  • the last drops of moral authority the Vatican might hope to have evaporate with this book. It is difficult to express the heartbroken rage so many of us in the pews now feel.
  • It tells you a lot about the LGBTQIA++ movement that it’s now lost Martina Navratilova.
  • A pioneering open lesbian who had an openly transgender coach in her glory years, who did more for gay visibility than any gay group ever has, is now being disowned by Athlete Ally, a New York–based organization that supports LGBT athletes
  • She argued in an op-ed that a trans woman who started out in life as male has an unfair advantage in sports over women who have never biologically male. For this, her comments have been condemned as “transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.”
  • The truth, of course, is that the science is firmly behind Navratilova.
  • If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt
  • denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people
  • if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.
  • There is no “gay lobby.” There is a “honeycomb of closets,” often insulated from each other, built on deception and self-hatred, that amounts to a system where protecting the image of the church became far more important than saving children from rapists.
  • Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.
  • Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?
  • Smollett was dumb and incompetent in his elaborate hoax. But he was smart about one thing. The most noble thing in our current culture is victimhood
  • Smollett aimed for the jackpot — physically attacked for being gay and black by Trump supporters
  • so all good liberals instinctively and with good intentions believed him, embraced him
  • His identity as gay and black rendered him instantly innocent, just as the Covington boys’ whiteness rendered them instantly guilty.
  • Booker, Harris, Pelosi: They’ll never apologize for their rush to judgment. This may not have been “precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” you see, but it was morally true.
  • Believe Jussie. Just believe. He may have made up an entire story, but “he’s not lying.”
Javier E

That sophisticated, specific Russian 2016 voter targeting effort doesn't seem to exist ... - 0 views

  • Of course, no one knew with certainty that the states that ended up being close were going to be the ones that ended up being close. Part of political targeting is guesswork, estimates based on polling and prior elections. But that there were so few ads in, say, Nevada or Florida in the weeks before the election gives the lie to the idea that the Russian effort was focused on targeting specific voters.
  • These ads were not the only way that the Russians targeted American voters, of course. As mentioned above, there were hundreds of ads targeting broad interest groups like gun rights supporters or the LGBTQ community. But those efforts were obviously more focused on the stated intent of fostering political division than on ensuring a particular outcome in the 2016 election.
  • It has been argued that the focus on messages disparaging Hillary Clinton in the black community might have been effective at tamping down turnout in important ways. What that argument misses, though, is that the ads at the tail end of the campaign didn’t really focus on suppressing turnout that heavily, and that it was generally much broader outreach than targeting people in particular places.
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  • Could the Russians have deployed sophisticated social media tracking tools to follow users across sites and determine where they were based, then tailor political messages to the broad groups or Twitter accounts they created? In theory, sure — but it seems like an awfully indirect way of targeting specific geographies, especially when they were already buying ads with specific geographic targets without raising any eyebrows.
  • Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman remains the more obviously successful and effective influence effort of the 2016 campaign.
Javier E

Sohrab Ahmari and David French showed why conservatives feel threatened by the illibera... - 0 views

  • ven agenda-less Ahmari-ism galvanizes many social conservatives, especially younger ones. Ahmari highlights the thing they most fear: the relentless leftward shift of virtually every culturally powerful institution, increasingly including corporations. These social conservatives believe the left will use that cultural and economic power to proselytize their children for a sort of hypersexualized secular faith — and to cleanse the resisters from both the public square and the economic mainstream.
  • Those fears are often exaggerated, yet not utterly unfounded. If you’d told me 10 years ago that same-sex marriage meant evangelical Christian bakers might be legally required to cater gay weddings, I would have rolled my eyes at such hysterical conservative propaganda. Post-Obergefell v. Hodges, the default left-wing position seems to be that you cannot shun gay weddings and continue to own a bakery, or work as a tech CEO. 
  • Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union went after Catholic hospitals for refusing to provide abortions, and companies have threatened to boycott states that sided with conservatives in the conflict between LGBTQ rights and religious liberty.
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  • For the center-right to hammer out a peace the religious right can live with, it needs a counterpart on the left that can stand up to its illiberal flanks and deliver a deal. Today, that portion of the center-left is small and quiet. The large remainder too often goes along with the illiberals — either loudly out of conviction or quietly out of fear.
  • If we procedural liberals can’t bring our left-wing counterparts to the negotiating table, the future of the right probably belongs to a muscular populism that can hold out hope for social conservatives. Even if it’s a false one.
Javier E

Why Policing Pete Buttigieg's Gayness Is Essentialist - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • he latest way that Pete Buttigieg allegedly brought shame upon the queer community was by discussing shame itself.
  • The clip of that meant-to-be-humanizing moment quickly became the object of mockery in queer circles online. Some users LOLed at Chasten’s reaction, interpreting him as showing embarrassment rather than empathy. Others acted as though Buttigieg were articulating a self-hating desire to become straight now, at 38, rather than describing how he felt in his closeted earlier years. Twitter critics called his words “the most evil shit” and “vile,” and said his comments were “absolutely going to do damage” to thousands of “vulnerable LGBTQ youth.”
  • they shoved the pill-the-gay-away comment into a preexisting narrative: the one that says Buttigieg is basically straight.
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  • In a New Yorker piece titled “The Queer Backlash to Pete Buttigieg Explained,” Masha Gessen ends by calling Buttigieg “a straight politician in a gay man’s body.”
  • A queer reader of Buttigieg’s memoir and life story is left to project
  • Conflating gayness with any particular moral, political, or aesthetic value the observer has deemed good, though, is an act of hijacking—one weirdly similar to the rhetorical move homophobes use when they say gay people are immoral.
  • the chatter painting Buttigieg as virtually straight points to something that’s harder to talk about: the ways in which a Democratic front-runner is, in fact, unmissably gay, and how the backlash to him is itself tinged with its own strain of queer shame.
  • These arguments that present Buttigieg as not really gay so obviously flirt with the essentialism queer people fight against that it’s a bit shocking to see them get traction at all.
  • If he ever pithily sums up the psychological motive underlying all the hustle, I haven’t quite caught it. But I have thought a lot about the stereotypes of gay men as hyper-successful, image-conscious, and wounded. I have revisited Alan Downs’s widely read 2005 book, The Velvet Rage, which diagnosed gay men’s defining motive as shame.
  • the psychologist Downs describes queer children’s impulse toward parent-pleasing: What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in a church? Mother’s little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved.
  • “Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves,” Leon began. “We grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we’ve created to protect us.”
  • Buttigieg’s performances invite terms such as calculating, cold, and studied. These have a marked resemblance to the terminology often tagged to female politicians, whose affects have inevitably been shaped in response to sexism
  • The super-rehearsed presentational tics shared by Buttigieg and, say, Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris remind viewers of the outsize work that’s been required for these people to be taken seriously. They suggest that thriving as someone other than straight, white, and male in America can require making yourself into a politician—and not only in politics.
  • The way he’s presented his marriage and his life story underlines the ways in which a gay life can resemble a straight one. The routine has been so deft that, according to one viral video from the Iowa caucus, people might actually cast ballots for him without realizing he’s gay.
mimiterranova

Biden Expands Obamacare, Eliminates Trump-Era Abortion Policy : President Biden Takes O... - 0 views

  • President Biden signed two executive actions Thursday that are designed to expand access to reproductive health care and health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
  • "There's nothing new that we're doing here other than restoring the Affordable Care Act and restoring Medicaid to the way it was before [Donald] Trump became president. Because by fiat, he changed — made [it] more inaccessible, more expensive and more difficult for people to qualify for either of those two plans," Biden said in a brief Oval Office signing ceremony.
  • "This is going back to what the situation was prior to Trump's executive order."
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  • instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to open a special enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act through HealthCare.gov,
  • "As we continue to battle COVID-19, it is even more critical that Americans have meaningful access to affordable care," a White House fact sheet reads.
  • His second executive action aims "to protect and expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care" by rescinding the Mexico City policy, also known as the global gag rule. This policy, reinstated and expanded by the Trump administration, bars international nongovernmental organizations that provide abortion counseling or referrals from receiving U.S. funding. Biden on Thursday called the gag rule an "attack on women's health access."
  • Last November, the Trump administration and several Republican-led states argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the program should be voided, which would have eliminated popular elements of the law such as protections for those with preexisting conditions.
  • The Supreme Court will hear a case that could decide the legality of work requirements for Medicaid recipients.
  • Biden is reversing course and directing federal agencies to reconsider those work requirement rules. He is also asking agencies to review policies that undermined protections for people with preexisting conditions, including complications related to COVID-19.
  • The administration faced pressure to open HealthCare.gov for anyone to enroll in the Affordable Care Act in response to the pandemic, but it never did.
  • For decades, Democratic and Republican presidents have alternately rescinded or reinstated the global gag rule, with Democrats, such as Biden, opposing the policy. Republicans have argued that the rule would reduce the number of abortions.
  • However, a study released last year suggested the policy failed to reduce the rate of abortions and ultimately had the opposite effect. The study said the rate of abortions increased by about 40% in the countries studied — most likely because the funding ban caused a reduction in access to contraception and a consequent rise in unwanted pregnancies.
  • Under the actions announced on Thursday, the president is telling federal agencies to review a Trump-era rule that limited the use of Title X federal funds meant for family planning and reproductive health services for low-income patients. Under this program, organizations that provided abortions or abortion counseling could not have access to those federal funds. The White House said, "Across the country and around the world, people — particularly women, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low incomes — have been denied access to reproductive health care."
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    I did highlights but they didn't show up
yehbru

On International Women's Day, Biden Signs Gender Equity Measures : NPR - 0 views

  • President Biden marked International Women's Day on Monday by signing two executive orders geared toward promoting gender equity, both in the United States and around the world.
  • "In our nation, as in all nations, women have fought for justice, shattered barriers, built and sustained economies, carried communities through times of crisis, and served with dignity and resolve. Too often, they have done so while being denied the freedom, full participation, and equal opportunity all women are due."
  • "We intend to address all sorts of discrimination and fight for equal rights for people, whether that's LGBTQ+ people, women, girls, men."
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  • The Council's staff will include a special assistant to the president to focus specifically on "policies to advance equity for Black, indigenous and Latina women and girls of color," Klein said
  • Areas of long-term focus for the Council, Reynoso said, will include "increasing economic security and opportunity by addressing the structural barriers to women's participation in the labor force; decreasing wage and wealth gaps; and addressing the caregiving needs of American families and supporting care workers."
  • The second executive order the president signed Monday is directed at the Department of Education, and seems expressly aimed at reversing a controversial rule on campus sexual assault and harassment that was issued last year by then-President Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
  • "[guarantee] an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex, including discrimination in the form of sexual harassment, which encompasses sexual violence, and including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity."
carolinehayter

Gab: hack gives unprecedented look into platform used by far right | The far right | Th... - 0 views

  • 61A data breach at the fringe social media site Gab has for the first time offered a picture of the user base and inner workings of a platform that has been opaque about its operation.
  • The user lists appear to mark 500 accounts, including neo-Nazis, QAnon influencers, cryptocurrency advocates and conspiracy theorists, as investors. They also appear to give an overview of verified users of the platform, including prominent rightwing commentators and activists. And they mark hundreds of active users on the site as “automated”, appearing to indicate administrators knew the accounts were bots but let them continue on the platform regardless.
  • showing the entrepreneur seeking direct feedback on site design from a member of a group that promotes a “spiderweb of rightwing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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  • On Monday, the platform went dark after a hacker took over the accounts of 178 users, including Torba and the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
  • Gab, a Twitter-like website promoted by Torba as a bastion of free speech, has long been a forum of last resort for extremists and conspiracy theorists who have been banned on other online platforms. It attained worldwide notoriety in 2018 when a user, Robert Bowers, wrote on the site that he was “going in”, shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killing eleven people.
  • The leaked files contained what appears to be a database of over 4.1 million registered users on the site and tags identifying subscribers as “investors”, “verified” users and “pro” users.
  • The 2017 share offering, for example, required a minimum investment of $199.10, and rewarded investors who contributed a greater amount with “perks”. Users who invested $200 could display a “Gab investor badge” on the site. The badges corresponded with a tag in the database, which allowed investors to be looked at in detail.
  • Some of the people associated with investors’ accounts had high-profile jobs and public roles, while spewing hate and extremist beliefs online.
  • The data breach also appears to offer some insight into users tagged as “verified” by Gab, which according to the platform’s own explanation means that they have completed a verification process that includes matching their display name to a government ID.
  • And it appears to include a list of users registered as “pros”, which allows users to access additional features and a badge at a price starting at $99 year. The database indicates over 18,000 users had paid to be pro users at the time of the breach. Nearly 4,000 users were flagged as donors to Gab’s repeated attempts to attract voluntary gifts from users.
  • Direct messages included in the leak appear to show close communication between Torba and a major QAnon influencer who is labeled a Gab investor, seemingly reinforcing the CEO’s public efforts to make Gab a home for adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which helped fuel the 6 January attack on the nation’s Capitol.
  • According to Wired, the data exposed in the apparent hack was sourced by a hacker who had found a security vulnerability in the site.
  • “Gab was negligent at best and malicious at worst” in its approach to security, she added. “It is hard to envision a scenario where a company cared less about user data than this one.”
martinelligi

Republicans And Democrats Largely Oppose Transgender Sports Legislation, Poll Shows : NPR - 0 views

  • In at least 30 states nationwide, lawmakers have introduced bills aiming to keep transgender girls and women from participating on girls' and women's sports teams. These type of restrictions have become a major culture war battle, with Republican lawmakers being the loudest proponents of such bills, while Democrats often oppose them.
  • Republican voters aren't that enthusiastic about those proposed laws, even while they do have reservations about transgender sports participation.
  • Just 29% of Republicans said they "support a bill that prohibits transgender student athletes from joining sports teams that match their gender identity." Moreover, there was no significant party divide: Similar shares of Republicans, Democrats and independents also said they oppose the bills.
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  • While there is no apparent partisan divide on legislating the issue, there is a pronounced partisan divide on transgender sports participation itself
  • This suggests that while many Republicans and some independents may feel strongly about keeping transgender girls off girls' teams, they have a much smaller appetite for states being involved in that issue.
  • Political party isn't the only major dividing line when it comes to opinions on LGBTQ issues; age also seems to play a significant role. Fully 78% of millennials and people in Generation Z support the Equality Act; progressively smaller shares of Generation X (61%), baby boomers (54%) and people in the silent and greatest generations (46%) support it.
Javier E

How the Religious Right Made Same-Sex Marriage a Gay Rights Crusade - The New York Times - 0 views

  • he implies that the marriage issue would not have taken hold of L.G.B.T.Q. politics if it had not been for the vociferous opposition of the religious right. Because conservatives deemed marriage so crucial — and because they went to such lengths to keep queer Americans away from the institution — they successfully (and perhaps unwittingly) laid a trap, forcing activists to defend gay marriage and concede the importance of the institution.
  • Issenberg’s book, then, serves as a 900-page case study of what the sociologist Tina Fetner refers to as the “symbiotic” relationship between conservatives and queer activists. The religious right told us we couldn’t have marriage, so we decided we needed it.
  • If that’s the case, gay couples owe no organization more than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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  • Money itself, especially the importance of “gay economic might,” also takes center stage in Issenberg’s book. “A galaxy of covert donors orbiting around Denver software millionaire Tim Gill remade the gay-rights movement in their own image,” he writes, “ideologically conservative and strategically radical.”
  • In addition to broader racism and transphobia within the mainstream gay rights movement, marriage was always primarily a white, cisgender issue.
  • In his postscript, Issenberg recognizes that the fight for gay marriage left much of the L.G.B.T.Q. community behind. “Transgendered Americans were certainly no better off than they had been,” he writes
  • This admission raises the question: What was lost in spending untold millions of dollars on same-sex marriage instead of a more expansive form of queer liberation? Given that queer and trans people of color had been offering alternative visions of freedom since the beginning of L.G.B.T.Q. organizing, what if we had instead focused on the most marginalized members of our community, those who put their bodies on the line at the Stonewall riots of 1969?
yehbru

Supreme Court ruling in Arizona case will be another front in the voting rights wars - ... - 0 views

  • Now, within the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will enter the melee and weigh in on the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a way that could bolster efforts by Republicans in states like Georgia and Texas to limit access to the polls.
  • It's the first time the justices have considered the scope of the Voting Rights Act as it applies to the denial of the vote since Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a 5-4 opinion in 2013 effectively invalidating Section 5 of the law
  • Since the decision in Shelby County v. Holder, states have moved forward with new laws, an effort further fueled by former President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
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  • "The wave of restrictive laws being introduced and passed in state legislatures across the country highlights once again how important it is to have a strong Voting Rights Act to protect voters."
  • The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated both provisions, stressing the state's "long history of race-based discrimination against its American Indian, Hispanic, and African American citizens" and highlighting a "pattern of discrimination."
  • Unlike fights against voting restrictions in Georgia and Texas, however, Democrats are divided on whether the two Arizona laws should be allowed to stand. The Democratic National Committee argues the rules should fall, but the Biden administration told the court that the laws passed legal muster.
  • "If the Supreme Court weakens the Voting Rights Act as they are being asked to do, it will make it much harder to stop the kind of legislation we saw Texan lawmakers try to ram through over the weekend," Morales-Doyle said.
  • Ho and others are worried that the court could issue a ruling, for instance, that required evidence that there is a significant racially disparate impact on voter turnout. Such a standard would be hard for challengers to satisfy because it is difficult to always make a direct connection between fluctuations in voter turnout based on a single law.
aidenborst

Supreme Court spokeswoman to step down after more than 20 years - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Supreme Court public information officer Kathy Arberg will step down on July 3 after some 22 years at the high court, the court announced Wednesday.
  • The announcement -- and the word "retirement" -- came as a jolt to the Supreme Court press corps that is on high alert to see if Justice Stephen Breyer will retire at the end of the term, which is expected to go through June.
  • Arberg joined the court in 1982 and served as an assistant in the office for 17 years before becoming head of the office in 1999.
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  • She serves as the court's official spokesperson and manages a staff of six employees who assist in furthering the public's understanding of the history and function of the court.
  • For more than a year, due to Covid-19, the court building and the chamber itself have been closed to the public.
anonymous

Pentagon Maintains Ban On Pride Flag And Other Flags At Installations : NPR - 0 views

  • The Pentagon confirmed Friday it will not allow rainbow pride flags to fly at military facilities in celebration of Pride Month. The fell in line with the Pentagon's 2020 decision to permit only certain flags at Department of Defense installations.
  • Along with the American flag, the current policy implemented under the Trump administration authorizes flags representing states and U.S. territories, military services, prisoners of war and missing in action, national flags of U.S. allies and a handful of others.
  • The flag policy was put into place last July to bar the display of the Confederate flag without specifically referencing it,
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  • Kirby said making an exception for the rainbow pride flag could leave the Pentagon open for additional policy challenges down the road.
  • President Biden acknowledged Pride Month with an official proclamation earlier this week. Nearly 14% of his federal agency appointees identify as LGBTQ+, he announced.
anonymous

An Enormous Rainbow Mural Graces The National Building Museum Lawn During Pride Month :... - 0 views

  • The wide lawn of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., has taken on a riot of rainbow hues in a geometric mural designed by artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer.The installation, titled Equilateral Network, was designed to create spaces for social distancing with its triangular grid. Unpainted sections of lawn provide walking paths, and equilateral triangles lined in pink define spaces for people to sit, separated by six feet of distance.
  • Thalhammer designed the work in the fall of 2020, when social distancing was a pressing concern. Its opening now coincides with Pride month, creating a colorful new space for gatherings in the newly reopened city.
  • To create her design, Thalhammer took inspiration from Pierre L'Enfant, the French-American engineer and city planner who was tasked by George Washington with creating a plan for a new federal district along the Potomac. L'Enfant's design endures in modern D.C., where wide avenues cut angles across the city's grid.
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  • Thalhammer was fond of L'Enfant's use of stars and triangles in his plan for the city – and found herself particularly drawn to the equilateral triangles that took shape in his designs."I really love the equilateral triangle as a symbol of justice, as a symbol of balance as it relates to our three bodies of government and how they're equal," she says.
  • The pink triangles in her design have particular meaning, she explains. "Some of it goes back to the Holocaust, of gay people being identified with the pink triangle. And then it was also used in ACT UP in the '80s when people were protesting against AIDS and not having a vaccine for AIDS. So the use of the pink triangle in this piece, for me, it's a bit of a reference to that historic identity of justice."
  • Then there are the rainbows – a symbol of identity for LGBTQ people, as well as a symbol of diversity. Thalhammer's palette is a 12-color spectrum, which she says represents the intersection of people's lived identities."We're very rarely just one thing as people, as humans. We're normally a variety of different identities that all come together and I think they're all beautiful," says Thalhammer, who identifies as pansexual.
  • Thalhammer hopes that people will walk through the space, work out, do yoga and meditate there. And she wants it to be a place where people can gather, in a year when many of the typical Pride events are canceled.
anonymous

German Catholic clergy rebel against Vatican over same-sex unions - CNN - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • German Catholic theologians and clergy have mobilized against a recent ruling from the Vatican that said the Catholic Church would not bless same-sex unions.
  • "We decisively distance ourselves from this position," it said.The statement, signed by 266 theologians, said the ruling lacks "theological depth, hermeneutical understanding as well as argumentative stringency."
  • "A document that in its argumentation so blatantly excludes any progress in theological and human scientific knowledge will lead to pastoral practice ignoring it," Georg Bätzing, Bishop of Limburg, said in a statement published on Facebook on Wednesday.
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  • Bätzing's diocese also updated its Facebook profile photo to an image of Limburg Cathedral surrounded by a rainbow, a symbol of the LGBT community, and the phrase "#LoveIsNoSin."Bätzing is the head of the German Bishops' Conference, the Catholic church's ruling body in Germany.
  • "We are here to bless, no matter how and no matter whom," Lentz said in a statement. "We want to be an open church where everyone feels at home."Since Friday afternoon the community has flown a rainbow flag with a phrase from Genesis 12:2 that reads: "You shall be a blessing."
  • While Pope Francis has frequently been praised for his welcoming tone toward LGBTQ people both within and outside the church, he approved the March 15 statement."The blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit," wrote the Vatican's top doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
  • Blessing same-sex unions, the Vatican says, would send a sign that the Catholic Church approves and encourages "a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God."
  • Same-sex unions are the latest issue on which the German Catholic church has clashed with the Vatican in recent years.In 2019, it revealed plans for a two-year process of reckoning and reform, to rebuild public trust in the wake of a shocking report into child sexual abuse in the church.
remystewart

The politics of the 1930s are still playing out in Eastern Europe - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Soviet-imposed communism, I wrote that night in an article for The Post, had suppressed the politics that drove events in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other East Bloc states before World War II
    • remystewart
       
      The political impact on WWII still is making an impact now
  • Thirty years later, the politics of the 1930s are still playing out in the former Eastern Bloc. Poland is governed by an authoritarian-minded right-wing government closely aligned with a reactionary Catholic Church. An uneasy peace prevails in the splintered remains of Yugoslavia after a devastating ethnic war.
  • They are authoritarian and socially reactionary — anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is a favorite theme of Poland’s ruling party. Prewar evils such as irredentism and anti-Semitism are alive in mainstream politics to a degree they are not on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.
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  • Yet some legacies of communist rule have proved enduring, perhaps because they are all too compatible with the resurgent illiberal movements.
  • One is the use of state-run national television for political propaganda. After the establishment of democracy, Poland moved to make its government-owned network independent, similar to the BBC.
  • After the war, while West Germany de-Nazified, East Germans, Hungarians and Poles were told they bore no responsibility for fascism or the Holocaust, which were portrayed as capitalist crimes.
  • Eastern Europe is far better off than in 1989. Its people are vastly richer and, in spite of creeping authoritarianism, far freer. But the euphoria I saw and shared in that momentous weekend in Berlin seems a little naive 30 years later. We underestimated the tenacity of the culture created by Soviet communism — and the perils of a return to history
mattrenz16

Congress Swearing-In: A Look At The Incoming Freshman Class : NPR - 0 views

  • For many, the process will be familiar territory. But for most of the incoming lawmakers, it's the beginning of a brand new chapter.
  • After electing a speaker of the House, one of the first orders of business for the new Congress will be adopting a set of rules to govern the much-talked-about Jan. 6 joint session, when both chambers meet to formally count the votes of the Electoral College. Several House members and a group of senators have said they plan to object, which will cause a delay in the proceedings.
  • A record number of women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ community make the 117th Congress the most diverse in history.
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  • For the first time, women of color will completely comprise New Mexico's House delegation, including Democratic Rep.-elect Teresa Leger Fernandez, who becomes the first woman to represent the 3rd district since its creation in 1983.
  • Rep.-elect Yvette Herrell, R-N.M., becomes the first Republican Native American woman in Congress.
  • Rep.-elect Marilyn Strickland, D-Wash., will be the first Black woman to represent her state in Congress.
  • Incoming Republican North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, 25, has replaced Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as the youngest member of Congress.
  • As for the Senate, incoming Sens.-elect Roger Marshall (Kansas), Ben Ray Luján (New Mexico) and Lummis (Wyoming) all have served in the U.S. House. Lummis was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus.
  • Reps.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., made headlines earlier this year for their support of QAnon, a fringe movement that has launched baseless, far-right conspiracy theories about the U.S. government.
  • In October, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning QAnon.
  • Several younger, more diverse and progressive candidates ousted longstanding Democratic incumbents this year.
  • It's quite possible some of these progressives will quickly become household names in the way that Ocasio-Cortez and members of the so-called "squad" have (which includes Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass).
  • Rep.-elect Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., a formal school principal, won his general election after triumphing over Rep. Eliot Engel in the primary. Engel was a 16-term incumbent who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Bowman was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ocasio-Cortez.
  • Should both Democrats prevail, control of the Senate will be split 50-50 between the two parties and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris can cast tiebreaking votes.
katherineharron

2021 US Congress: Breaking down the historic numbers - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The 117th Congress, being sworn in Sunday, is historically diverse, with record-setting numbers of women, Black and Latino members and members who identify as LGBTQ.
  • There will be two vacancies in the House: New York's 22nd District will not have representation as legal challenges in the race continue, and Louisiana's 5th District will not have representation due to the death of Republican Rep.-elect Luke Letlow. I
  • Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler is also running in Georgia's dual runoff elections Tuesday. Perdue's term finished at the end of the 116th Congress, so he is not included in the new Congress' numbers. Loeffler's term will continue unless she is defeated Tuesday, so she is counted.
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  • three Democratic members are expected to leave office to take on roles in the new Biden administration: Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana (2nd Congressional District) to be White House senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement; Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico (1st Congressional District) to be Secretary of the Interior; and Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio (11th Congressional District) to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
  • Democrats: 222Republicans: 211
  • There will be 60 freshmen in the 117th Congress. Seventeen of those seats flipped during the 2020 general election, with Republicans picking up 14 seats and Democrats picking up 3.
  • Eleven of the Republicans who picked up seats defeated Democrats who flipped seats in the wave year of 2018, while one GOP pickup came from the defeat of long-time Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, one came in an open seat (Iowa's 2nd) and one was in a Libertarian-held seat (Michigan's 3rd District).
  • Total 2020 flipped House districts: 17
  • Total Women: 118
  • The 117th Congress will see a record number of women in the House, and a record number of Republican women.
  • Republican Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, born August 1, 1995, will be the youngest member of this Congress at age 25. He takes that title from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York who, at 31, is now the chamber's second youngest member.
  • Republicans: 51 (including Sen. Kelly Loeffler)Democrats: 48 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats)
  • There will be 7 new senators at the start of 117th Congress, including Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who was sworn in in December.
  • Total women: 26 (will decrease to 25 when Padilla replaces Harris)
  • Total states with two female senators: 5 (will decrease to 4 when Padilla replaces Harris)
  • Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, born on December 31, 1979, remains the Senate's youngest member at 41.
  • Total Black members in the House and Senate: 61
  • The 117th Congress will have the largest number of Black members in the history of the House and in the history of Congress. The 58 representatives are a new record for the House, while the record-high three in the Senate remains the same, at least until Harris resigns to become vice president.
  • Total Latino members in the House and Senate: 44
  • Fourteen newly elected veterans will be joining the House this year, according to the University of San Francisco and the Veterans Campaign. That's down from the 18 veterans who were first elected in 2018, but up slightly from the three cycles before that.
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