Because the SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Jackson Brown’s hearing was public, we got to see the strength with which members of the GOP attempted to justify past bigotry and promote its continuance. You basically had a group White, conservative Southern men explaining racism and segregation and their effects on people to a Black Woman.
It was a terrible display and should be noted by the public, especially those who reject the ideology and politics that was so open.
In a less nationally televised campaign, it is obvious that racism is not the only thing these men want to bring back.
Close to 200 hundred state bills have been filed this year seeking to erode and/or remove protections for Gay kids in schools with a emphasis on the Transgender ones.
While attempting to appear Pro-family and Pro-child, by their very words they clearly show that they have not taken the time to do even the minimum amount 0f research to have even a rudimentary idea of what Transgender actually is, the science behind it ,and its relation to children.
To them it is boys playing on a girls’ team because that is scarier and easier than grasping and then explaining the realities of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.
In some states Gay children are actively and tacitly reduced as people as are their families. In these states their laws against discussing or mentioning anything Gay is so broad and open ended, hot only must a Gay child keep quiet, but that child’s family must go unrecognized or spoken of if a child has two mommies or two daddies.
The number of proposed anti-GLBT laws is quadruple the number of similar bills introduced just three years ago.
While Christianity runs rampant in our schools and its adherents demand it be the predominant consideration when it comes to curriculum and school activities and who can participate in them, and while Christian symbolism in the form of golden crosses worn by faculty and students, posters about church activities and Christian holidays and holy days, and demands from the Christian community that school policies and curriculum be based on the Bible a which is not consistent even among Christians (Book of Sirach anyone?), they claim that acknowledging a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, their same sex parents or Transgender parents, the family they have created, or that some of the people who made our society and created Western Civilization were gay, is a form of recruitment unlike all the religious things and the question actually asked in school and sometimes by faculty and staff, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior”, usually followed by the reasons why you should, somehow, is not.
Now they are attempting to proselytize on school campus during school hours by both 0vert and covert means.
It is obvious that the unprecedented legislative efforts are aimed at dismantling the hard-won civil rights of a group the religious right needs to have as a bogey, As all bullies, they need the vulnerable victim to feel good about themselves
These proposed and passed bills are based on the false claim thatparental authority is being undermined and that things mentioned in schools are sometimes in conflict with religious tenets taught at home.
As State Senator Rob Standridge of Oklahoma explained concerning his motivation for proposing his Anti-Gay bill and that of others proposing theirs,
“Christian parents don’t think the schools should be evangelizing children into sexual ideologies they don’t agree with. So that’s what the bill is about, to try to get schools to stop doing that … I’m empowering the parent that is directly affected by what they see as overriding their beliefs.”
Notice that only the religious beliefs of Christians are mentioned and he compares teaching facts to evangelizing.
What bills is this Oklahoma state senator speaking of”?
In his state alone, One such bill, for instance, “would require school districts to submit to the State Department of Education detailed expenditure reports on diversity, inclusion and social justice training for teachers and administrators,”
while another “would outlaw teaching of social-emotional learning in schools”
Another “require higher education institutions to post their budget for student and teacher diversity curriculum online,”
And one that would, “ban voluntary surveys in schools from asking questions about sexuality or gender and would ban school libraries and curriculum from including books that deal with sexuality or gender.”
At the same time that these bills are being considered the state senator also filed one that
“would require teaching ‘patriotic education” or be subject “impose civil penalties of at least $10,000 on school personnel who teach lessons related to critical race theory [and] require the employee to be fired and blacklisted from educational employment for at least five years.”
Oh, and another bill would “require social studies classes to teach at least 45 minutes every Nov. 7 on “Victims of Communism Day”, take that Native Americans, make it mandatory for
“schools to distribute historical Thanksgiving day proclamations, all of which list the importance and role of Christian faith,” “add reading requirements for high schoolers that contain some theological themes,” and “require the Oklahoma State Department of Education to contract for curriculum for a four-year pilot project for 11th graders on U.S. history that “narrowly tailors the subject areas to align with free high school curriculum courses from Hillsdale College”, which, for those who are not familiar with it, is a private, conservative liberal arts college with a curriculum based on Western heritage, as per Greece and Rome, and Judeo-Christian traditions that opted out of the federal affirmative action policies choosing to replace federal funds with private donations rather than comply. It has connections with both the Heritage Foundation and, recently, the Trump administration.
Clearly in the attempt to honor and empower parents, there would seem to be a limit on which parents they accept, the conservative, white, Christian ones.
Rather than educate themselves and the public, politicians in Oklahoma and the other states that are proposing, discussing, and passing the anti-Gay bills, play into fears that true Americans are being replaced by immigrants, people of color, and younger more progressive people.
And that their religious beliefs are not accepted by everyone and given precedent in all civil decisions and that s more people’s rights are recognized, theirs are somehow decreased.
Parents always had a say in their child’s education. There are parent conferences, Parent/Teacher Nights, email, and the phone along with going to the school and talking to the relevant staff member, and when there has been questions or conflict meetings usually resolved situations.
To be clear, by “Parental Rights” they claim the right and demand that a limited group of parents, in the majority white, Christian, conservative ones, should be given the power to control the education of all other parents’ kids who, if they are not white, Christian, conservatives, have no say, and that screaming at and threatening school personnel on campus or at school board meetings is an exercise of that right..
Nationally, approximately about 75 of the new bills call for bans or severe restrictions on classroom discussions, curriculum, and library books that mention Gay issues, and are so vague it is unclear whether educators or students could even mention their own sexual or gender identity or even that of their parents.
50 bills seek to ban Transgender youth from playing competitive school sports on school teams.
29 seek to ban gender-affirming medical care for Transgender youth, which primarily involves hormone therapy to delay the onset of puberty, so that if it comes to that, there is no going back to undo what was done by puberty or is part of the transitioning process.
While supposedly dealing with schools, legislators want to make it a crime to provide such care to children and young teens, and, in contradiction to the claim the laws are to protect Parental rights in the education and health of their child, many of these laws, passed, proposed, and being discussed, would also make it a crime for parents to sign off on such care, thus removing parental rights and putting this decision in the hands of politicians and the government.
The bills do not just exercise the parental rights tactic, but at least a dozen states are sticking with toilets as there are also about 15 or so Anti-Trans “bathroom bills” out there and they apply to Transgender students and Faculty.
In 2019 there were 18 anti-Gay bills with a heavy concentration on Transgender people of all ages. In 2020, a big election year, that number rose to over 100.
The whole Judeo-Christian tradition begins with a story of a flawed product incredibly produced by an all-powerful, omni-present, and omniscient Being that failed its first major test about obedience being good and disobedience bad, by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which at the time the rule was issued meant that neither Adam nor Eve had no idea that some things were good and somethings weren’t. Disobedience, like everything else was a neutral thing, a Schrodinger’s cat. God gave the Test without covering the topic in class.
Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the snake, and that set the Judeo-Christian tradition of blaming everyone and everything else, real or imagined for their own failings. There has to be someone to blame for their own shortcomings so that their failures are not their own but that of someone else.
“The devil made me do it” excuses the Christian of fault, and the devil who forced them to sin can conveniently be whoever it is that they do not like. They did come up with incubi and sucubi to dodge responsibility for sexual activity between consenting, yet unwed, adults.
Throughout the bible there are countless retellings of the need to protect oneself from the evil of others and assigning the role of the evil-doer to anyone not from the tribe.
We cheer that the Israelites took over the promised land by killing off the Canaanites because those people were somehow, in their difference, evil and their mass killing justified because, well, the Israelites wanted their stuff and took it because, they claim, it was what God wanted.
The conservative, white, Christian approach is to label people as the “enemy of God”, and with God offering no clarifications, treating them in very unchristian ways, and with all his omnipotence could just snuff them out, allows young people to kill them off in ever undulating waves over the centuries and letting certain people. godly or not, tto benefit from that.
The overwhelming sentiment of the public when it comes to GLBT things is to just let it be and stop the obsessing in the name of religion.
8 in 10 Americans support laws to protect GLBT people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations.
68 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, a rise from 54 percent in 2014.
This means all this ant-Gay legislation is not what the American people want but is what will please partisan interests and voters in the upcoming election.
How to best help GLBT children is sacrificed to getting votes by promoting bigotry.
States are requiring school librarians to go through shelves and remove certain books that Christians might find uncomfortable, books dealing with gender and sexuality, unless, of course, they are about heterosexuality.
The ban on trans athletes competing on public school sports teams that passed the Idaho legislature was influenced by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal organization founded in 1993 and employs a national network of Christian lawyers to fight for its Conservative Christian beliefs encoding them in laws that apply to all of us and helps lawmakers craft legislation and provides legal support.
Joining in with ADF in promoting Christian anti-Gay laws are the Heritage Foundation and the Family Policy Alliance, each of whom published a list of positions on Transgender and Gay rights that are included in these restrictive new state bills.
Together they are the Promise to America’s Children coalition, and it supplies legislators with boiler plate anti-gay legislation that state legislators can pass off as their own.
To fill in background,
The Alliance Defending Freedom filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas case, argued in favor of Arizona’s right to maintain sodomy laws, has defended parents’ right to have their LGBTQ children undergo conversion therapy, which uses unproven and often dangerous, but Christian, psychological, physical, or spiritual interventions in an effort to make a Gay person Straight, and, spreading the Christian message as Jesus told them to, has worked to get other countries to criminalize same-sex sexual acts.
Because its members and supporters believe that marriage between on man and one woman is the best institution for humans to flourish, they want the exercise of that belief to trump any beliefs of other religions or those not affiliated with an organized 0ne.
The coalition has stated,
“In the wake of COVID, with children engaged in remote learning, parents gained a new window into what their children were learning in the classroom. For some parents, this revealed curriculum which not only taught viewpoints about sex and gender with which they disagreed but taught them as fact to young children.”
And the operant words “Some parents’ assume they speak for all.
Because no one ever taught kids in school anywhere that creation in Genesis and Noah’s flood are facts that must simply be accepted when presented as such.
The American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, raised $750,000 to get Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to order the state to investigate parents of trans children who have received gender-affirming medical care.
South Dakota state Representative Fred Deutsch introduced in 2020a bill to ban gender-affirming medical procedures for transgender youth. It resulted from his attendance at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation and is a good bill because the original bill he came up with
“was developed organically in the living room of my country home in South Dakota, surrounded by miles of corn fields.”
Apparently, this bucolic scene of law inspiring Americana , however, was before he got input from the Alliance Defending Freedom and asked the Heritage Foundation if he could share the bill draft.
Arkansas and Tennessee have already passed this bill not crafted by the needs of any state’s citizens, but as part of the agenda of national conservative groups.
Such laws put doctors in the untenable position of having to decide between legitimately helping a child or avoiding the penalty for breaking a law either by refusing to begin or stopping a successful course of treatment no matter where along it the person is.
This is legislated medical abandonment.
It is a choice between violating a major ethical tenet of health care delivery or risking a felony conviction. It is a choice forced on the doctors who may have their own children to help as their patient’s parents have allowed and with the parents face a felony conviction that will have a deleterious effect on their own children or deny the proper medical and Psychological care.
The vaunted “Parental Rights” in this case could result in prosecution.
Watching the SCOTUS nominee hearings, it was more than obvious that many questions were based on getting even. Throughout the hearings GOP senator after GOP senator mentioned the Bret Kavanaugh and Amy Barret hearings , while, of course, ignoring the full picture that included why they were even having a hearing, saying in so many words what Lindsey Graham at one point articulated, that any hardball questions were because of how Kavanaugh and Barret were treated, and this after Mitch McConnell had previously said this treatment of Democratically nominated justices for the bench would be treated just like Robert Bork was.
Like the hearing was Festivus, we were treated to the Airing of Grievances.
Over the years, GLBT people have been getting their constitutional and Creator endowed rights recognized and all these bills could be the poor sport backlash.
Treat people of color right, there goes the White race.
Recognize the civil rights of Gay people and Straight people’s rights go away.
What people like to claim are traditional values, traditional family values, basic Biblically allowed values, are being shown to be in support of human constructs not humanity. As more knowledge comes out and people’s understanding of the world and their place in it, some of the old ideas are showing their age, and some people cannot abide that.
They set up a chair on the Titanic’s deck as people were boarding lifeboats because they were told the boat could not sink, and, by god, they would not accept it might in spite of the evidence. They were surprised when they found the ship was gone.
The Alabama Senate passed a bill in February that calls for penalties of up to 10 years in prison and a $15,000 fine for anyone who provides gender-affirming care to a child or teenager.
The Idaho House passed this month that would allow librarians to be jailed for up to a year and fined $1,000 each time they are found guilty of disseminating material that is “harmful to minors,” harmful left vague.
But it is clear, when these library censorship bills come up, that as the sponsors only specifically bring up books that have GLBT themes or characters.
Florida, without looking up the meanings of the words, is dealing with a bill that would ban public schools from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, and that any such instruction must be “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students,” neither of which, like “harm”, are not defined, and Parents who believe an educator has violated the law may sue.
When Texas lawmakers did not pass a transgender medical care ban, its governor requested the public turn in parents to the state if they have or are providing gender-affirming medical care to their trans children which could result in a criminal investigation and potential charges. Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton consider this parental choice to be “child abuse.”
The Texas AG has officially opined that parents and guardians should be blocked from signing off on all transgender procedures “because children are legally incompetent to consent,” and they “infringe on the child’s fundamental right to procreate.”
Yet, parental control is what he wants when it comes to education and books, but not when it comes to a child’s health and wellbeing.
These laws attack GLBT people in ways beyond just the students.
They attempt to take away doctors’ ability to treat a patient by putting them between the rock and the hard place, legally pursue supportive parents who have arrived at their decision after much careful thought and uneasy discussion, ban teachers’ support, eliminate certain students from having a safe and welcoming school and forcing them to be someone they are jot, and, really bad for kids, separate them from their teams and coaches.
Five bills have been passed by states which contain actions that curtail the rights of trans children and their families, and a dozen bills would require medical care providers and educators who learn of a child’s sexual orientation and gender identity to notify parents in spite of the consequences, and teachers could be charged with violating the law if they did not reveal what they knew for the sake of the child’s safety.
Regardless that more than 170 major U.S. corporations have signed a statement condemning the bills, and Disney CEO Bob Chapek formally apologized to employees this month for the company’s silence on the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” bill announcing Disney would pause all political donations in the state after the financial contributions statement showed it gave to lawmakers who championed that bill.
But pass or fail, the GOP is using these bills and the fictitious reasons they are needed for political gain while destroying the lives of children, their heterosexual and Homosexual parents, and their friends, and, most sadly, the lives of their own sons and daughters who, seeing the anti-Gay vehemence, would, obviously, keep their truth silent.
Also, in their haste to pass these bills as if there is a deadline to get it done (election day, perhaps), the sponsors of the bills did not look up the word to find that every person has a sexual orientation and that heterosexuality is just one of them.
If there can be no discussion or acknowledgement of things related to sexual orientation, no straight kid could talk about families or dating, and all school activities that are modeled after the heterosexual model, like Prom Royalty and school dances must be expunged.
These bills are like Edward Gorey’s Cashlycrumb Tinies. Each one from Amy to Zillah rushed into an environment too hastily to assess if it was a good thing or a bad one to their peril.
What was seen at the Ketanji Jackson Brown hearing is just the tip of the racist iceberg. There is more behind the senators’ spoken words.
These anti-Gay bills are the tip of another iceberg.
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