Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

A double creature feature from Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis this week, first, DeSantis has no problem repeatedly using violent rhetoric against the hundreds of thousands of "deep state" federal government employees he wants to get rid of if elected president.

 

The two largest federal employee unions on Thursday denounced Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s recent vow that as president he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy — the latest escalation in intensifying Republican attacks on government operations they want to slash or eliminate.

DeSantis, whose campaign for the GOP nomination has included promises to downsize agencies and fire bureaucrats, made the comments this weekend in New Hampshire while criticizing the “deep state,” echoing a term regularly used by former president Donald Trump to deride Washington.

“On bureaucracy, you know, we’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on Day One and be ready to go,” DeSantis said at a barbecue in Rye, N.H., on Sunday hosted by former senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.). “You’re going to see a huge, huge outcry because Washington wants to protect its own.”

The governor also mused last week about the possible need for the Defense Secretary to “slit some throats” while discussing changes he’d make at the Pentagon as president.

On Thursday, as those comments drew more attention, two prominent unions representing tens of thousands of federal workers called on DeSantis to retract his words. Tony Reardon, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union — which represents about 150,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service and 30 other federal agencies — called the comments “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail” in a statement.

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement that “violent anti-government rhetoric from politicians has deadly consequences,” pointing to a pro-Trump’s mob’s storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Any candidate who positions themselves within that shameful tradition has no place in public office,” said Kelley, whose union represents 750,000 civil servants across the federal workforce of 2.1 million. Both labor organizations are closely allied with President Biden.

DeSantis’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday, but some of his allies embraced the rhetoric. “Hell yes,” tweeted Matt Wolking, an official with the super PAC supporting DeSantis’s presidential bid.

 

DeSantis has to out-Trump Trump when it comes to stochastic terrorist violence if he wants to get Trump voters to notice him. Violence against the voluminous GOP enemies list can never fail, it can only be failed.

 

It would make a fascinating psychological study if it wasn't for the fact that there are going to be a lot fewer psychologists coming out of Florida in the years ahead.

Florida "effectively banned" Advanced Placement Psychology classes in the state due to the course's content on sexual orientation and gender identity, the College Board said Thursday.

The state's Department of Education informed the College Board that its AP Psychology class is in violation of state law, the higher education nonprofit said in a statement. Florida's Parental Rights in Education Act, or what critics have dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law, restricts the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in the state's classrooms.

“The state’s ban of this content removes choice from parents and students,” the College Board said in a statement. “Coming just days from the start of school, it derails the college readiness and affordability plans of tens of thousands of Florida students currently registered for AP Psychology, one of the most popular AP classes in the state.“

The state's move to restrict the AP Psychology course comes several months after its decision to block AP African American Studies courses was widely condemned by academics and civil rights activists.

The College Board added that Florida will allow superintendents to offer the college-level psychology class for high schoolers if they exclude LGBTQ topics.

However, the College Board argued that excluding the lessons — which it describes as teachings on "how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development" — "would censor college-level standards."

It added that lessons regarding sexual orientation and gender identity have been included in AP Psychology since the course was created 30 years ago.

The group said that more than 28,000 Florida students took AP Psychology in the prior academic year.

 

Remember, admitting that LGBTQ+ folks exist is illegal in Florida. And when you criminalize a group, you can eliminate them, too. These are also the throats DeSantis wants to see slit by the thousands. 

Never forget that.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's hand-picked Disney control board has abolished diversity, equality, and inclusiveness (DEI) programs for the district and ordered the firing of all employees involved, calling the programs unconstitutional, illegal, and wasteful of taxpayer dollars.

In the ongoing battle between Walt Disney World and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Disney’s governing district – whose current board was hand-picked by DeSantis and took control of the district in February – abolished all of its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the district said in a Tuesday news release.

The statement from the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District cited an internal investigation into the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s policies, claiming the district “implemented hiring and contracting programs that discriminated against Americans based on gender and race, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”

“The so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were advanced during the tenure of the previous board and they were illegal and simply un-American,” district administrator Glenton Gilzean said. “Our district will no longer participate in any attempt to divide us by race or advance the notion that we are not created equal.”

CFTOD will dissolve the district’s DEI committee and eliminate any job duties relating to DEI. District employees will also be prohibited from using staff time to pursue DEI initiatives, the statement said. However, this change affects only the government and not the companies that operate inside the district (i.e. Disney) and would seem to eliminate contracting protocols that in the past gave special consideration of women and minority owned businesses during the procurement processes.

According to the new oversight district, Reedy Creek “wasted taxpayer dollars” by entering into contracts based on race- and gender-driven goals and “aggressively” monitoring contractors’ race and gender practices under its Minority/Women Business Enterprise and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise programs. CFTOD said it estimates the previous district spent millions of dollars finding businesses who helped meet these DEI quotas.

 

Once again the plan here is for Republicans to make diversity, equality, and inclusiveness illegal across the country for not just government, but private employers as well. Hiring anyone who isn't a buttery male will leave your company open to being sued for discrimination, so companies will basically stop hiring anyone other than white guys.

 

Anyone left who isn't will have to constantly defend their job when it comes to performance reviews, promotions, and new initiatives. Having to work twice as hard to get half the recognition will be codified into law. 

You didn't think ending affirmative action would stop with universities, did you?

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

Once again, if you legally define away your enemies as entities that have no existence and therefore no rights as human beings, it makes it far easier to destroy them with the power of the state. 

 

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday directed state agencies to use narrow definitions of “female” and “male,” in the latest attack on transgender rights in a state that already has laws targeting bathroom use, health care and sports teams for transgender people.

Stitt signed the executive order flanked by women from the anti-trans group Independent Women’s Voice, including Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer known for criticizing an NCAA decision allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete against her in a women’s championship race.

“Today we’re taking a stand against this out-of-control gender ideology that is eroding the very foundation of our society,” Stitt said. “We are going to be safeguarding the very essence of what it means to be a woman.

“Oklahomans are fed up with attempts to confuse the word ‘woman’ and turn it into some kind of ambiguous definition that harms real women.”

In addition to requiring state agencies and boards to define the words “female” and “male” to correspond with the person’s sex assigned at birth, the executive order also includes definitions for the words “man,” “boy,” “woman,” “girl,” “father” and “mother.” The order specifically defines a female as a “person whose biological reproductive system is designed to produce ova” and a male as a “person whose biological reproductive system is designed to fertilize the ova of a female.”

It also directs schools and other state agencies to use these definitions when collecting vital statistics.

Stitt’s order, dubbed “The Women’s Bill of Rights” by its supporters, is the latest Oklahoma policy to attack the rights of transgender people and is part of a growing trend in conservative states. Stitt signed a bill earlier this year that made it a crime for health care workers to provide gender-affirming medical care for minors, and has previously signed measures to prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams and prevent transgender children from using school bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

“This executive order is neither about rights, nor is it about protecting women,” said Nicole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, which supports the rights of trans people. She called it a “thinly veiled attack” that codifies discrimination against transgender women.

 

There are no trans or non-binary folks in Oklahoma, you see. They don't exist. Everyone is male or female as defined by the state and must be defined as such by all state agencies.

 

It's hogwash, but if you define them away, they'll cease to exist. It's illegal to be trans according to the state.

One way or another, Oklahoma will get rid of trans and non-binary folks. And it's being done to "protect women". Just like banning abortion.

 

That's been the plan now for some time.

Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

More performative nonsense here from Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as he's suggesting he wants the state to sue Anheuser-Busch parent company InBev over shareholder stock losses for the state's pension fund due to the stupid controversy over Dylan Mulvaney's TikTok ad for Bud Light, but it's also an open threat against Fortune 100 companies that's working.

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is hinting at legal action against Bud Light's parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, for the beer brand's promotion earlier this year with TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.

Bud Light's March Madness promotion with Mulvaney, a transgender actress and activist, sparked an uproar among some conservatives, including singers Kid Rock and Travis Tritt, who called for a boycott of the popular beer. An ongoing sales slump for Bud Light has been attributed to backlash from both conservatives and the LGBTPQ community over the marketing campaign.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News, DeSantis said that Florida's pension fund contained over $50 million worth of Anheuser-Busch shares. Bud Light's decision to team with Mulvaney was followed by a sales slump, and as a result the state's pension fund has suffered collateral damage, according to the 2024 presidential candidate.

"When you start pursuing a political agenda at the expense of your shareholders, that's not just impacting very wealthy people, it impacts hardworking people who were firefighters, police officers and teachers," DeSantis told Fox News.

"And it could be something that leads to a derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the shareholders of the Florida pension fund," he added. "Because, at the end of the day, there's got to be penalties for when you put business aside to focus on your social agenda at the expense of hardworking people."

In the letter, DeSantis said AB InBev has struggled recently because the company decided "to associate its Bud Light brand with radical social ideologies."

"It appears to me that AB InBev may have breached legal duties owed to its shareholders and that a shareholder action may be both appropriate and necessary," DeSantis wrote.

 

Steve M does the math on how much Florida taxpayers have been "harmed" by a trans woman drinking watery beer online:

Let's break that down.

The pension fund is $180 billion. Florida held $46 million in AB InBev stock, which means it constituted approximately .026% of the fund. The stock lost $8 a share; $8/share times 682,000 shares = a $5,456,000 loss. That's something like .0028% of the fund. You're going to sue over that? How much would it cost the state to try to recoup that tiny amount, which is a relatively normal stock loss?

Oh and let's look at that decline in context:

The company’s stock price has fallen since then from $66 a share to $58, though it’s still higher than its 52-week low of $44 from September 2022, which was well before the company’s recent controversies.

So the stock has gained 31% over the last eleven months.

This seems like an empty threat. But I think lawsuits of this kind are coming.

 

He's right. The real target isn't Mulvaney herself or even InBev, it's your employer's diversity, equality and inclusiveness initiatives.

Two years ago chief diversity officers were some of the hottest hires into executive ranks. Now, they increasingly feel left out in the cold.

Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments.

Diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—jobs were put in the crosshairs after many companies started re-examining their executive ranks during the tech sector’s shake out last fall. Some chief diversity officers say their work is facing additional scrutiny since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and companies brace for potential legal challenges. DEI work has also become a political target.

“There’s a combination of grief, being very tired, and being, in some cases, overwhelmed,” says Miriam Warren, chief diversity officer for Yelp, of the challenges facing executives in the field. Warren says the fear that company commitments are imperiled fuel her and others to feel “more committed to the work than ever.” Yelp’s DEI budget has grown for the past five years.

In interviews, current and former chief diversity officers said company executives at times didn’t want to change hiring or promotion processes, despite initially telling CDOs they were hired to improve the talent pipeline. The quick about-face shows company enthusiasm for diversity initiatives hasn’t always proved durable, leaving some diversity officers now questioning their career path.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody in May 2020, companies scrambled to hire chief diversity officers, changing the face of the C-suite. In 2018, less than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed someone in the role, and by 2022 three out four companies had created a position, according to a study from Russell Reynolds, an executive search firm.

Once mostly tasked with HR matters, today’s diversity leaders are expected to weigh in on new product development, marketing efforts and current events that have an impact on how workers and consumers are feeling. Warren and other CDOs said the expanded remit is playing out in a politically divided environment where corporate diversity efforts are the subject of frequent social-media firestorms.

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.

“I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work.

 

The goal here, as I have said on numerous occasions, is the roll the country back to before the civil rights era.  It's to make America's largest employers limit their hiring of non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-Christian employees, lest they be attacked for discrimination and right-wing boycotts, which affect the stock price, which allows red states to sue as pension shareholders. which leaves the company open to attacks that they discriminate against white, straight Christian males and lowers the stock price, and so on.

The goal is to make the act of hiring someone who isn't a white straight Christian male subject to penalties, so that companies just stop doing it.  It's performative now, but it's having its intended effect. The right is celebrating this, and have every reason to push harder on this, and imply to white voters that they will directly benefit from total Republican rule.

Believe me, multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar corporations will abandon every pretense of diversity, equality and inclusiveness if red states make it prohibitively unprofitable to do so in order to operate in their states. It's already happening.

It'll carry the penalty of law soon, and that's when the employment picture changes dramatically across the country, rolling back decades of improvements, out of fear of shareholder lawsuits and civil action.

More of this is absolutely coming.

Last Call For Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

House Republicans are doing everything they can to punish the LGBTQ+ community for existing, and that means millions of dollars in cuts to eliminate federal projects entirely.

 

House Republicans struck three Democratic projects that would provide services to the LGBTQ community during Tuesday’s fiscal 2024 Transportation-HUD Appropriations markup, enraging Democrats on the committee.

The three earmarks total $3.62 million, with two in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. The projects were eliminated as part of a Republican en bloc amendment that advanced a range of Republican cultural priorities, including a provision that would ban flying gay pride flags over government buildings. The vote was along party lines, 32-26.

Subcommittee ranking member Mike Quigley, D-Ill., then introduced an amendment to add the three projects back into the bill.

That amendment remained pending as the committee recessed around 3:45 p.m. as it awaited advice from the parliamentarian, after Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., asked that a statement Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis. made be struck from the record.

“There’s a saying, how do you show you’re a bigot without saying you’re a bigot," Pocan said during debate over the GOP amendment. "I’m just saying, there’s a saying."

Pocan also said Harris was too tired from reading the websites of the organizations he opposes to listen to what Pocan was saying, another comment Harris objected to.

Earlier in the meeting, Pocan said the committee’s move to strip the earmarks was “bigoted” and described his own experience getting attacked leaving a gay bar that left him unconscious.

“This is what you guys do, by introducing amendments like this,” Pocan said. “Taking away from people’s earmarks is absolutely below the dignity of Congress, and certainly the Appropriations Committee.”

The earmarks that are set to be stripped include two in Pennsylvania: $1.8 million that Rep. Brendan F. Boyle requested for an expansion project at the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia and $970,000 that Rep. Chrissy Houlahan requested for a transitional housing program at the LGBT Center of Greater Reading.

“This cruel and unjust decision is not rooted in any legitimacy, but instead in bigotry and hatred,” Houlahan said on Twitter.

The third project is $850,000 that Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, D-Mass., requested for LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc. to convert a former Boston Public School building into 74 units of affordable housing for seniors.

Harris criticized the Greater Reading center for offering services to children as young as 7, and argued the Philadelphia center promotes protests held by the Young Communist League of Philadelphia. And he said the Massachusetts project would discriminate against those who are not LGBTQ or allies.

Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont. said taxpayers should not be paying for the resources for transgender individuals that the LGBT Center of Greater Reading offers.

“The question is, should taxpayers pay for this?” he said. “The answer is no.”

 

And there you are. 

 

Republicans are now instituting a dollar cost for keeping the T in LGBTQ+ in an effort to punish and split the community. Pretty soon it's going to be a legal and criminal cost as well if Republicans have their way in states they control, but these cuts are specifically happening in blue states too.

And yes, this is all part of hundreds of billions in cuts that House Republicans want to defund from President Biden's infrastructure and green energy bills.

A series of GOP bills to finance the federal government in 2024 would wipe out billions of dollars meant to repair the nation’s aging infrastructure, potentially undercutting a 2021 law that was one of Washington’s rare recent bipartisan achievements. The proposed cuts could hamstring some of the most urgently needed public-works projects across the country, from improving rail safety to reducing lead contamination at schools.

Some of the cuts would be particularly steep: Amtrak, for example, could lose nearly two-thirds of its annual federal funding next fiscal year if House Republicans prevail. That includes more than $1 billion in cuts targeting the highly trafficked and rapidly aging Northeast Corridor, which runs between Boston and Washington, prompting Amtrak’s chief to sound early alarms about service disruptions.

In recent days, Republicans have defended their approach as a fiscally responsible way to reduce the burgeoning federal debt. They’ve largely tried to extract the savings by slimming down federal agencies’ operating budgets next year, technically leaving intact the extra funding that lawmakers adopted in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

But the effect would be the same: The GOP bills would reduce the federal money available for repairs. The cuts would come at a time when the country is grappling with the real-life consequences of its own infrastructure failures, from train derailments in Ohio and Pennsylvania to the collapse of a key portion of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia last month.

I guarantee you that these same House Republicans will blame Democrats when these cuts are forced into must-pass legislation later this year. 

The cruelty is the point.

Sunday Long Read: The Neighbors From Hell

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from the Washington Post's Tim Carman, detailing a small-town northern Virginia restaurant ran by a gay couple that was doing perfectly fine until their new neighbors moved in, and started a war against the idea that a restaurant ran by a gay couple in small-town anywhere should be allowed.

 

As soon as she spotted the lifeless vermin, Tiffany Foster had a hunch about how it appeared near the trash bins behind the Front Porch Market and Grill in The Plains, Va. The general manager went inside, pulled out her phone and reviewed security-camera footage. Her suspicion was confirmed: The dead rat had been tossed onto the property.

The suspect? Mike Washer. The businessman and his wife, Melissa, first complained to the Front Porch proprietors about pre-dawn vendor deliveries in 2019, not long after the conservative Christian couple moved their financial firm right next door to the restaurant, which flies a gay Pride flag. The renovated building doubles as the Washers’ residence, where they have a front-row view of the Front Porch’s operation.

By the time the rat appeared last summer, the relationship between the two businesses had devolved. A year earlier, the Washers had started filing complaints about their neighbor’s trash with the health department. Fed up with what they viewed as harassment, the Front Porch owners filed a no-trespassing order against their neighbors. The Washers responded by installing signs to prevent diners from parking in spaces the Washers own in the shared lot. They confronted or towed drivers who ignored the signs. Their attorney threatened legal action against the restaurant’s suppliers if their trucks continued to “trespass” in the lot. The same attorney wrote a town official, challenging the restaurant’s right to operate under its existing permit.


Still, when she spotted the rat last August, Foster was not prepared for what she saw on the video: Mike Washer flipping the rodent onto the Front Porch’s property and taking photos of it, in what she assumed was a staged effort to flag health officials about an infestation. Foster remembers thinking, “I cannot believe that someone would stoop so low to try to put someone out of business.”

The Washers don’t deny Mike’s actions but dispute the motivation: They say they have no interest in closing the Front Porch. They claim the rat was first dumped near their back door by restaurant employees, and Mike was returning the favor.

What’s more, the Washers say, the dead rat was just one more insult that the couple, who once planted an “all lives matter” sign in their front yard, have endured since moving next door to a restaurant owned by a gay couple. They are not the harassers, the Washers argue. They are the harassed. They say they are being treated unfairly because they are conservative. They say they have been insulted by staff, including Foster, have lived with a bright security light shining into their home, and have found used chewing tobacco next to their car doors.

“We still feel like somebody put it there to, excuse me, eff with us,” Melissa Washer said about the rat. “Because they had done so many other little s---ty things to us.”

This conflict has dragged on for years, creating friction where friendships used to be and often forcing residents to pick sides. The conflict has dragged on so long that some people in The Plains, population 250 or so, have been left to develop theories about what’s driving it, some perhaps more rooted in reality than others: Some fear the Washers’ actions could break the town financially with hearings, lawsuits and paperwork. They even fear the couple’s legal challenge could end up compromising The Plains’ ability to maintain its old-world charm.

“Part of what makes our community special are long-standing social networks and special traditions built on trust,” the Rev. E. Weston Mathews, rector of Grace Episcopal Church in The Plains, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

“But like so many places in our country, our community is not immune to dangerous conspiracy theories, extremism and tribalism,” Mathews continued. “In my view, what began as a difficult dispute between two neighboring businesses has become something much greater, is accelerating through social media and is damaging our sense of trust in each other as neighbors in a close-knit village.”

The Washers — the newcomers in a village where families that have lived there 20 years still feel like outsiders — say they’re misunderstood. They love this tiny town. They’re not out to destroy it, or remake it.

 

This is a story of the classic conservative "I'm the real victim here having to put up with those people!" fight that consumed an entire village. One side of the fight is an older Gen X gay couple making pancakes and the other side is an older Gen X straight couple who went to DC on January 6th, 2021. Not even the WaPo's bothsiderism can hide the level of pure hate radiating from the right-wing assholes here. The rat was just one part of it.

As a bigger picture in America of the 2020's, this one is going to stick with you.

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

As widely expected, and widely demonstrated by Republican lawmakers in red states, anti-trans policies to "protect children" are now anti-trans policies directly targeting trans adults. 

 

A Kansas judge has ordered Gov. Laura Kelly's administration to stop changing gender markers on driver's licenses for transgender people.

Shawnee County District Court Judge Teresa Watson issued the temporary restraining order on Monday at the request of Attorney General Kris Kobach, who is suing two officials at the Kansas Department of Revenue over the practice.

The lawsuit is an attempt from Kobach, a Republican, to force the agency under Kelly, a Democrat, to follow new state law from Senate Bill 180.

The law went into effect July 1 with a strict biological definition of sex. The attorney general and governor have disputed whether or not the law bans the current practice of changing gender markers on both driver's licenses and birth certificates.

"The Attorney General points out that driver's licenses are issued for a period of six years and are difficult to take back or out of circulation once issued," Watson wrote. "Licenses are used by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, crime victims, wanted persons, missing persons, and others. Compliance with stated legal requirements for identifying license holders is a public safety concern.

Taryn Jones, vice chair and lobbyist for the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Kansas, acknowledged the concern that allowing the state to keep making changes would make it more difficult for law enforcement, but asked, “How many criminals are you having that are trans?” She said trans people will still be able to change their names to align with their gender identities.

Jones also said potential problems for law enforcement should be weighed against the harm to the mental health and safety of transgender people who don’t have licenses that match their gender identities.

“You know, it’s hard enough being trans right now in America, especially in a conservative place like Kansas,” she said.

"Allowing Respondents to issue non-compliant driver's licenses pending a court hearing is an immediate and irreparable injury that supports the grant of a temporary restraining order on the terms requested by the Attorney General."

The order is in effect for 14 days, but may be modified, vacated or extended by the court.

Under Kansas law, a court is allowed to issue a temporary restraining order without providing prior notice to the other party if the facts "clearly show that immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damage will result to the movant before the adverse party can be heard in opposition."

 

First of all, it's our old fascist friend Kris Kobach, who I have covered extensively on ZVTS over the last decade plus years, so you know this is some fascist bullshit of the nth degree.

 

But second, did you catch that? The legal argument is that the state acknowledging trans people existing in official identification is a public safety concern preventing law enforcement from doing their jobs.

The state recognizing trans folks existing is a public safety concern that has to be stopped. That's where we are, and if you define a group out of existence, the state can simply eliminate members of that group.

Do you see where the GOP is going on this? Germans did this 90 years ago, folks.

It will end badly.

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

We're back on a regular schedule today, and I wish I had better news to do that with. But late last night the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals here in Cincinnati issued a 2-1 ruling overturning the injunction against Tennessee's anti-trans law taking effect, and as Law Dork's Chris Geidner looks at this garbage fire of a ruling, the ban on Kentucky's anti-trans law will be overturned in short order.

 

The Saturday ruling itself alters the legal landscape for these bans, at least temporarily.

First, and most immediately, Tennessee is free to enforce its ban, pending any further court orders.

While calling the ruling “wrong on the facts and on the law,” Chase Strangio, who is one of the key ACLU lawyers on this and several other challenges to anti-transgender laws, added, “We also know that things are moving quickly and for many families, waiting for legal relief is not an option. The untenable position that adolescents, their caregivers and their doctors have been put in is not only illegal, but also deeply unethical and dangerous.”

One of the most prominent trans legal advocates in the country over recent years, Strangio added a personal note to those affected by Sutton’s ruling, telling Law Dork: “From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry. I know it feels bleak now and I am also confident that in time, working together, we will prevail.”

Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice within the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, added that the ACLU “will continue to aggressively litigate these cases in Tennessee and across the country.”

It was not immediately clear, however, whether the challengers would seek to get the stay lifted, either by the full Sixth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court. “We are still evaluating all our options with our primary concern of course being how can we help ensure that people in Tennessee are not cut off from the care they need,” Strangio stated.

Second, the Sixth Circuit set a very quick schedule for the merits appeal of the preliminary injunction — with the “goal” of reaching a resolution by Sept. 30.

Third, Kentucky is within the Sixth Circuit and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron has already cited the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in a filing at the district court in the case challenging Kentucky’s ban as a reason why the court should “immediately” issue a stay of its June 28 ruling granting a preliminary injunction.

Fourth, the Sixth Circuit also consolidated Cameron’s appeal of the Kentucky injunction in a separate order Saturday, which not only brings that case on the same schedule as the Tennessee appeal but also essentially confirms that Sixth Circuit would almost certainly issue a stay of the Kentucky injunction if the district court does not do so.

Finally, the new, if tentative, lack of unanimity itself matters for two reasons — one rhetorical and one practical. Obviously, having unanimity is its own argument against the constitutionality of these bans. Additionally, although only at the stay request posture, the ruling increases the likelihood that a “circuit split” on these bans will develop — a factor that greatly increases the chances of the U.S. Supreme Court taking up one of these cases.

Few people know that better than Sutton.

It was, after all, Sutton’s 2014 decision in the marriage cases out of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee that prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue of same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marriage equality. Less than two months before Sutton’s decision in those cases, the Supreme Court denied other states’ requests to hear similar appeals when the federal appeals courts were in unanimity on the issue. After Sutton’s decision created a circuit split, however, the Supreme Court took up the issue.

 

The most ominous part of the decision is that two Republican judges decided that the Dobbs ruling can be applied to other medical care issues.  Even if a doctor agrees that gender-affirming care is the correct issue, the state can still ban it.

 

Of course, it gets worse. 

Republican attorneys general from seven states signed a letter Wednesday to Target (TGT), warning clothes and merchandise sold as part of the retail giant’s Pride month campaigns could violate their state’s child protection laws.

GOP attorneys general from Indiana, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and South Carolina signed the letter, writing they were “concerned by recent events involving the company’s ‘Pride’ campaign.” The letter asserts the states are obliged to “enforce state laws protecting children” from “content that sexualizes them,” including obscenity laws. The letter also suggests Target may be breaching the law by making decisions that are allegedly “unprofitable” and not in the best interests of its shareholders, citing it as a violation of the company’s fiduciary duty.

The AGs said they believed the campaign was a “comprehensive effort to promote gender and sexual identity among children,” criticizing items such as “LGBT-themed onesies, bibs, and overalls, T-shirts labeled ‘Girls Gays Theys’; ‘Pride Adult Drag Queen Katya’ (which depicts a male dressed in female drag’); and girls’ swimsuits with ‘tuck-friendly construction.’”


The letter does not provide specific details regarding potential legal consequences if Target continues to sell the merchandise in question. It follows a wave of bills introduced in various states aiming to ban LGBTQ+ content under obscenity laws, as well as a record-shattering year for anti-LGBTQ legislation, with particular scrutiny on gender-affirming health care access for transgender children and teenagers. Nineteen states have passed laws restricting it.

The Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the US, slammed the letter as “another attempt from the extreme right to bully anyone who stands by values of inclusion and diversity.”

“These attorneys general are trying to rile up their far-right base and force us back into the closet. It’s not going to work,” Jay Brown, HRC’s Sr Vice President of Programs, Training and Research said in a statement provided to CNN.

 

Steve M. is correct in his assessment. 

If you're saying that it's a potential violation of the law to sell children's products proclaiming that LGBTQ people exist, are equal citizens, and should be celebrated, you're a very short step from declaring that it's illegal to be a gay parent. If the presence of pro-LGBTQ clothing results in unlawful sexualization of children, so does the ongoing presence of an LGBTQ parent -- right?

"Because we have to do whatever is necessary to protect the children" mean Republicans can criminalize, harass, and imprison whomever they deem to be "bad." Steve continues:

These AGs are implying that legal action might be appropriate because Target made a business decision they don't like. That's a heavy-handed use of the power of government to try to enforce ideological conformity. And, of course, this was a questionable business decision only because the AGs' ideological allies in the right-wing rage community were encouraged to vent their wrath at Target. So first these folks boycott your company, then they threaten legal action because you as a corporation should have known they were going to do that.

 

And then these Republicans will pass laws giving legal power of the state behind these threats, because they are "necessary to save kids". It's bullshit, of course. But that's where we're headed, a toxic, corrosive mix of Hobby Lobby and Dobbs where the existence of trans folks, and eventually all LGBTQ+ folks, will be banned because people existing violates the "closely held religious beliefs" of asshole bigots and "we have to protect the children from teh gayz".

 

By the way, I expect that the next step in this battle will be contraception, eventually SCOTUS will decide that Griswold v Connecticut is void too and that women will soon have to get permission from their husbands to use birth control in a state like Missouri or Texas, and that the state has a "vested interest" in banning birth control altogether. We've been through this fight before, decades before I was even born. We're going to have it again.

The path of the falling dominoes is easy to predict, and it leads to a significant percentage of women of child-bearing age in prison for failing to give birth. And this too will be done to "protect the children".

 

When you remember the goal is to overturn the entire civil rights era and put us back into Jim Crow, where everyone who isn't a married, straight white male has second-class citizenship and fungible rights, all of this makes sense.

Sunday Long Read: Red Meat For Red States

This week's Sunday Long Read explores the questions involving where the hatred on the MAGA side keeps coming from, in states like Missouri where Republicans are banning everything from abortion to gender-affirming care with seemingly no care about the people being destroyed by these laws. Rene Pfister from Der Spiegel meets one such family under siege.

"That was her in tears," says Daniel Bogard as he sets down his mobile phone, after receiving a call from her. He, too, needs a brief moment to collect himself. "We'll figure it out," he had just told his wife. But the truth is that he has no idea what to do either.

Bogard had long been hoping that things wouldn’t ultimately get this bad. That the Republicans only wrote the law to produce a few eye-catching headlines. That they spewed all the invective ("pedophile," "child abuser," "groomer") just to shore up their support from conservative voters.

But now, on this sunny Wednesday morning in May, they’ve really gone through with it. They actually passed the Missouri Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act, a law that doesn’t just ban all medical care for those under the age of 18 who do not identify with their biological gender. It also threatens doctors with the withdrawal of their licenses should they defy the ban. The law, signed by Missouri Governor Mike Parson, goes by the acronym SAFE – a cruel joke to Bogard’s ears.

For the first time, he says, he can understand how Jews in Germany must have felt in the 1930s. He says he sometimes finds himself thinking about where he could escape to with his family. Perhaps Illinois, where a Democratic governor is in power? Or to Canada? A few months ago, that may have sounded a bit overwrought. But now? In the current situation? "The political power of that hate is so enormous," says Bogard.

He is sitting barefoot, kippa on his head, on the veranda of his home in Creve Coeur, an idyllic suburb of St. Louis with verdant green grass, gently rolling hills and old trees with squirrels scampering among the branches. A guitar is leaning against the wall of the house.

Bogard is the rabbi of a liberal Jewish synagogue in St. Louis, a city that has always been a left-leaning enclave in an extremely conservative state. Around 70 percent of Missouri residents are deeply devout Christians, and many of them voted for Donald Trump. In the 2020 presidential election, he received 56.8 percent of the vote in Missouri.

Highway 70 leading west from St. Louis toward the state capital of Jefferson City is lined by a seemingly endless string of churches: Faith Christian Family Church, New Life Church, Independence Baptist Church.

Faith in the Almighty in Missouri is only exceeded by faith in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the right to bear arms. The state capitol, an attractive neo-classical structure on a bluff over the Missouri River, is open to any citizen who would like to enter, including those who are carrying a firearm with a permit.

Bogard is heavily involved in politics, and isn’t particularly thin-skinned, a necessary quality for someone who leans to the left in a state like Missouri. There have always been stories from the capitol that conservative lawmakers drink their coffee from cups reading "Liberal Tears." But something has changed in recent years – something that Bogard can’t really explain.

Was it Trump? Twitter? The pandemic? Or a mixture of all three?

There have always been freaks in Missouri politics, Bogard says. Men like Mike Moon, for example, a Senator from the rural, south-western part of the state, who made headlines for saying during a floor debate that he knows of girls who got married at the age of 12, and that they are still married. It sounded a lot like Moon thought it was perfectly sound policy to allow underage marriage – which he would later deny.

Among Republicans in Missouri, says Bogard, there have always been people like Moon. Now, though, he says, extremists have taken over – and they need a constant stream of new issues to keep the base happy. Bogard refers to it as "red meat."

The right to abortion long served as the largest slice of "red meat" in Missouri, a perfect windmill for Republicans to tilt at, particularly because there were no consequences for doing so. The right to abortion, after all, was protected by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, which was applicable to the entire country. That changed in June 2022, when the court’s new, conservative majority overthrew the ruling almost 50 years after it was originally passed. Today, Missouri has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the entire country, not even allowing for exceptions in cases of rape or incest. Republicans celebrated passage of the law like it was an epochal victory, but it proved to be a double-edged sword: Where was the red meat to come from now?

Their gaze fell on families like Daniel Bogard’s. He and his wife have twins, and Bogard realized early on that one of them wasn’t entirely comfortable with their biological gender. Ever since his child was able to choose what clothing to wear, they would always go into their older brother's room to borrow his clothes, Bogard says. When he was taking his child to bed one evening, they asked: "Can God make me over again as a boy?" – at age four, maybe five Bogard recalls.

Bogard is rather progressive, but it took quite some time before he could accept his child’s new identity. He loved the long hair, but his child kept asking to have it cut shorter and shorter, first to the shoulders, then to the chin and then over the ears. At some point came the request for a new name, a boy’s name. It was a huge step, but Bogard was relieved. "It shook me when he said it because it was so much better."

Bogard’s son is receiving medical care from doctors in Missouri, but the father says he doesn’t know what will happen now. The next step would likely be the prescription of puberty blockers to prevent female gender attributes from developing. But the therapy will be banned once the new law goes into effect in late August.

An intense debate is raging in the U.S. over whether and how early trans children may be prescribed puberty blockers and hormone therapy. There is even debate among experts, in part because of the relative paucity of studies. Studies, though, are of no interest to the Republicans. Nor are they particularly committed to a sensible solution. The fight against "trans ideology" is the newest front in the culture war, and it can only be effectively fought if there is a clear right and a clear wrong. Worried parents and "child abusers" in lab coats.

In a video released in late January, Donald Trump pledged that he would stop the "chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth." Should he be re-elected, he would pass a law that would ban teachers from even talking with children about the possibility that they may have been born in the wrong body.

According to a survey performed by the New York Times, 13 Republican-led states have passed laws completely proscribing gender-affirming medical care, including Missouri, Texas, Florida and Idaho.

"Republicans have declared war on democracy and have chosen trans kids as cannon fodder in this war," Bogard says on his veranda. He says that two families from his circle of friends have already left Missouri. But Bogard doesn’t want to be driven out so easily. Missouri is his home, and the house where he lives was designed and built by his father. Plus, he says, he doesn’t want to give up his work as a rabbi. It means a huge amount to him, Bogard says. "All we're asking is that the government leave us alone."

 

But MAGA state governments will not do that. The entire point is to drive a wedge between Bogard and his neighbors Majorities of Americans want to see gender-affirming care denied to kids, poll after poll shows that even Democrats want laws like this on the books.

 

And then Republican lawmakers will come for the next group. And the next. And the next...

A Supreme Week From Hell, Con't

And the Roberts Court saved the worst for last, obliterating Colorado's law protecting same-sex couples from discrimination by ruling that a Christian web site designer cannot be forced to do work for the same-sex couple she believes are second-class citizens.

In a defeat for gay rights, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled on Friday that a Christian graphic artist who wants to design wedding websites can refuse to work with same-sex couples. One of the court’s liberal justices wrote in a dissent that the decision’s effect is to “mark gays and lesbians for second-class status” and that it opens the door to other discrimination.

The court ruled 6-3 for designer Lorie Smith despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation, race, gender and other characteristics. Smith had argued that the law violates her free speech rights.

Smith’s opponents warned that a win for her would allow a range of businesses to discriminate, refusing to serve Black, Jewish or Muslim customers, interracial or interfaith couples or immigrants. But Smith and her supporters had said that a ruling against her would force artists — from painters and photographers to writers and musicians — to do work that is against their beliefs.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s six conservative justices that the First Amendment “envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.” Gorsuch said that the court has long held that “the opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong.”

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.” She was joined by the court’s two other liberals, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Sotomayor said that the decision’s logic “cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.” A website designer could refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, a stationer could refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple, and a large retail store could limit its portrait services to “traditional” families, she wrote.

The decision is a win for religious rights and one in a series of cases in recent years in which the justices have sided with religious plaintiffs. Last year, for example, the court ruled along ideological lines for a football coach who prayed on the field at his public high school after games.

The decision is also a retreat on gay rights for the court. For nearly three decades, the court has expanded the rights of LGBTQ people, most notably giving same-sex couples the right to marry in 2015 and announcing five years later in a decision written by Gorsuch that a landmark civil rights law also protects gay, lesbian and transgender people from employment discrimination.

Even as it has expanded gay rights, however, the court has been careful to say those with differing religious views needed to be respected. The belief that marriage can only be between one man and one woman is an idea that “long has been held — and continues to be held — in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court’s gay marriage decision.

 

Gorsuch, pulling a Full Alito, practically begs for those with "closely held religious beliefs" to sue over state and federal civil rights protection laws in order to create battleship-sized holes to allow discrimination. We're not quite there yet, but very soon it will be legal to discriminate against whoever you hate most as a religious belief and to refuse to offer them goods and services. The bright line from the Hobby Lobby decision by Scalia to this ruling by Gorsuch is visible from two or three galaxies over.

 

We're basically at that point now with LGBTQ+ folks.  We can now clearly see the end of the civil rights era, with it being replaced by a "Christian" theocratic dictatorship.

America is going to be a terrible place for everyone who isn't a white straight "Christian" male very soon, and your rights as a US citizen or even as a human being are now optional.

Oh, and the Roberts Court threw out President Biden's student debt relief program entirely.

In a stinging defeat for President Joe Biden, the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s student loan forgiveness plan Friday, rejecting a program aimed at delivering up to $20,000 of relief to millions of borrowers struggling with outstanding debt.

The decision was 6-3 with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative supermajority.

It will immediately become a potent issue in the 2024 presidential race, as Biden can try to galvanize liberals by claiming the conservative court prevented him from delivering debt relief to voters. Republicans, meanwhile, are celebrating the ruling as a defeat for a “bailout” plan.

Republican-led states and conservatives challenging the program say it amounts to an unlawful attempt to erase an estimated $430 billion of federal student loan debt under the guise of the pandemic.

Roberts said the Biden administration and Secretary of Education rewrote the law.

“The Secretary’s comprehensive debt cancellation plan cannot fairly be called a waiver – it not only nullifies existing provisions, but augments and expands them dramatically,” Roberts wrote. “However broad the meaning of ‘waive or modify,’ that language cannot authorize the kind of exhaustive rewriting of the statute that has taken place here.”

The White House sought to use the HEROES Act authority to waive the debt.

Roberts said the government needed direct authorization from Congress.

 

And Republicans will never allow that.

 

But you'll vote for them anyway because it's Biden's faaaaaaaaaaaaaault.

Last Call For Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Local Edition

A federal judge has blocked Kentucky's vile anti-trans law from taking effect today, saying that the law violates the Constitution and finding that gender-affirming care is medically necessary.

Seven transgender youth and their families sued the state in May, challenging the medical portion of Senate Bill 150 and asking for temporary injunctive relief. The families, who use pseudonyms in the lawsuit, argued the new law violates both plaintiffs’ and their parents’ individual protected rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.

On Wednesday, hours before the full law was slated to take effect Thursday, U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Kentucky David Hale found merit in that claim and temporarily blocked that portion of the law from being enforced.

“Based on the evidence submitted, the court finds that the treatments barred by SB 150 are medically appropriate and necessary for some transgender children under the evidence-based standard of care accepted by all major medical organizations in the United States,” Hale wrote in his order. The families who’ve sued have “shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits of their constitutional challenges to SB 150.”

The bill, passed this session, was the subject of massive protests in Frankfort this year, with many in the LGBTQ community saying that the omnibus bill unfairly targeted them and that it was “anti-trans.”

Senate Bill 150 passed with the support of the vast majority of GOP legislators, who have supermajorities in both chambers of the Kentucky General Assembly. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode his veto. Numerous major medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Medical Association, have filed amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs who assert the law is unconstitutional.

In addition to banning banning puberty-blockers, hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for kids under 18, Senate Bill 150 also bans discussion and lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation, prevents trans students from using the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, and stops school districts from requiring teachers use a student’s preferred pronouns. Those portions of the law remain intact.

In his Wednesday order, Hale debunked many of the assertions Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron cited in his defense of the law, and chided him for relying on “unnecessarily inflammatory language.”

“The Commonwealth offers no evidence that Kentucky healthcare providers prescribe puberty-blockers or hormones primarily for financial gain as opposed to patients’ well-being,” Hale said, referencing a claim made by Cameron. “Nor do the quoted studies from ‘some European countries’ questioning the efficacy of the drugs, or anecdotes from a handful of ‘detransitioners’ banning the treatments entirely, as SB 150 would do.”

Hale continued, “doctors currently decide, based on the widely accepted standard of care, whether puberty blockers or hormones are appropriate for a particular patient. Far from ‘protecting the integrity and ethics of the medical profession.’” Rather, “SB 150 would prevent doctors from acting in accordance with the applicable standard of care,” the judge wrote.

Cameron claimed in a filing that the law doesn’t violate parents’ due process to seek medical care for their children, because they do not have “fundamental right to obtain whatever drugs they want for their children, without restriction.”

But plaintiffs’ parents don’t allege this in their lawsuit, Hale said. Rather, they insist on “the right to obtain established medical treatments to protect their children’s health and well-being,” he wrote.

If the law were to take full effect, it would “eliminate treatments that have already significantly benefited six of the seven minor plaintiffs and prevent other transgender children from accessing these beneficial treatments in the future,” Hale wrote.

Blocking the law from taking effect “will not result in any child being forced to take puberty blockers or hormones,” he continued. “Rather, the treatments will continue to be limited to those patients whose parents and health care providers decide, in accordance with the applicable standard of care, that such treatment is appropriate.”

AG Daniel Cameron is appealing the injunction based on the grounds that trans kids need to be made to suffer or some shit to keep the normies happy, but frankly, fuck him.

The bigger issue is every time that anti-trans bills like this have been challenged in federal court as the KY ACLU did here, the feds have enjoined and blocked the laws from taking effect because they are patently unconstitutional.

This was always headed for SCOTUS.

Equal Justice, Under The Law, Con't

The Club Q shooter who massacred five and injured 19 others in Colorado Springs last year is getting five consecutive life sentences with no parole, as Colorado abolished the death penalty in 2020.

The suspect accused of fatally shooting five people and injuring 19 others last year at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado has pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder and agreed to serve five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole as part of a deal with prosecutors, the defendant told a judge.

Anderson Lee Aldrich, 23, also pleaded guilty Monday morning to 46 counts of attempted murder in the first degree – with 48-year consecutive sentences each – and no-contest to bias-motivated crimes in the November 19 massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs.

Shortly after Aldrich confirmed the plea deal, survivors began to give victim impact statements as the court moved directly to the sentencing phase.

“Why isn’t the punishment for this much harsher?” Ashley Paugh’s husband, Kurt Paugh, said in court. Her sister described the state of mind of the slain woman’s child – prompting tears in the courtroom.

“My 11-year-old niece wants to forgive you because that’s what she says her mom would want her to do,” Stephanie Clark said to Aldrich.

Aldrich, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, was charged with more than 300 state counts, including murder, assault, attempted murder and hate crimes. Prosecutors could not seek the death penalty in the case because Colorado in 2020 abolished the death penalty – becoming the 22nd state to do so.

The massacre at Club Q – long considered a safe haven for the LGBTQ community in a city with a history of being anti-gay – evoked memories of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, which left 49 people dead.

The Club Q victims – Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump and Paugh – were among at least 642 people killed in 2022 in mass shootings with four or more wounded, excluding shooters, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

This year’s pace of slayings is on track to exceed that, with 385 people killed in mass shootings in the first 177 days of this year, the Gun Violence Archive reports.

 

I've got to say good riddance to a monster. I don't believe in capital punishment, but five consecutive life sentences without parole, one for each murder, is exactly what they deserve. 

I hope this stops the next LGBTQ club shooting, but we all know more violence is coming here in Gunmerica.

A Supreme Week From Hell

With the last week of June upon us, several critical Supreme Court decisions are still awaiting, and these rulings could affect the rights and lives of tens of millions of Americans in the days ahead.

The Supreme Court is set to hand down key decisions this week on student debt relief, affirmative action and federal election laws as it enters the last week of its summer session with 10 cases pending.

The court has given no indication it will break its norm of finishing decisions by the end of June, and the next batch is slated to be released Tuesday morning.

Beyond the decisions, the court is also forming its docket for the next term. The justices on Monday could announce whether they will take up several high-profile cases, including on guns, racial discrimination and qualified immunity.

Here are the remaining cases as the Supreme Court wraps up its annual term:

President Biden’s plan to forgive student debt for more than 40 million borrowers will soon be greenlighted or blocked, depending on how the justices rule.

Biden’s plan would forgive up to $10,000 for borrowers who meet income requirements and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

But the debt relief remains on hold until the Supreme Court resolves two lawsuits challenging the plan.

If either succeeds, the debt relief will be blocked.

During oral arguments, the conservative majority cast doubt that the administration had the authority to cancel the debts, expected to amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.

But before they can strike down the plan as unlawful, the justices must first decide whether any of the challengers have legal standing.

The six GOP-led states and two individual borrowers challenging the plan have promoted various arguments.

Missouri’s argument received the most attention, and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in questioning the state’s theory during oral argument.

The cases are Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown.

When the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action in college admissions in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her majority opinion made a temporal prediction:

“The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” she wrote.

That landmark decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, marked its 20th anniversary Friday.

It might not reach its 21st.

The justices have been weighing whether to overturn Grutter — and decades of affirmative action programs in higher education along with it — in challenges to admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

During oral argument, the majority appeared skeptical of upholding race-conscious college admissions.

The justices tend to write no more than one majority opinion for each monthly argument session.

Chief Justice John Roberts and conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh have not yet issued majority opinions for any cases argued in November, when the affirmative action challenges were heard, meaning one of them is the likely author.

The cases are Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.

Web designer Lorie Smith, an evangelical Christian, is challenging Colorado’s public accommodation law on free speech grounds.

Like many other states, Colorado’s law prohibits businesses that serve the public from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

Smith wants to expand her business to create wedding websites. But Colorado’s law would demand she create same-sex wedding websites if she wants to do so for opposite-sex unions, and Smith is vehemently opposed to gay marriage.

The justices are now set to decide whether public accommodation laws, as applied to Smith and other artists, violate the First Amendment by compelling their speech.

The conservative majority signaled support for Smith during oral argument.

Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch appear to be the likely pool of authors because they are the two remaining justices who have not issued majority opinions from a case argued in December.

The case is 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.

The court is weighing a major election clash that will decide who has the final word on setting federal election rules.

North Carolina Republican lawmakers appealed a state court ruling that struck down their congressional map, promoting to the justices a sweeping argument known as the “independent state legislature” theory.

That theory asserts that state legislatures have exclusive authority to set federal election rules under the Constitution.

Adopting it would claw back the ability of state courts and state constitutions to block legislatures’ congressional map designs and other regulations surrounding federal elections.

It’s possible, however, that the court tosses the case without reaching the theory’s merits.

As the justices considered the case, Republicans regained control of North Carolina’s top court and overturned the underlying decision that struck down the state’s congressional map.

The Supreme Court has been paying close attention to whether they still have jurisdiction in the case, a potential offramp from the high-stakes dispute.

Based on the decisions released so far, Roberts or Gorsuch appears to be the likely author of the majority opinion.

The case is Moore v. Harper.

Again, predicting SCOTUS decisions is something even the experts get wrong, and I'm just a guy with a blog who probably should have walked away a decade ago. But as I'm here and you're reading this, I expect three really awful conservative decisions and a punt on the independent state legislature nonsense, with the court all but begging for cases where they can greatly expand on the precedents set in all four cases.

But if the worst comes to pass, and the Roberts Court sides with NC in the final case there, our democracy is all but finished. The notion that state legislatures can simply determine the electoral college outcome of each state regardless of the vote for president is heartstopping lunacy, and you'd better believe that Republican state legislatures will anoint Republican winners for everything across the board, no matter what the voters actually say or do.

Granted that would mean Democratic state legislatures could simply appoint democrats across the board too, but who knows how far that could go? We don't need to find out.

The point is, this is most likely going to be a dismal week, starting Tuesday.  

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Local Edition

A Pride Month rally near Lexington last weekend nearly turned deadly as armed bigots showed up and broke up the proceedings.

On June 3, Hensley and Osborne say they and about six other people set up in downtown Corbin with signs and chairs to support Pride and the LGBTQ community.

“It was just to inspire change and help people be confident,” Hensley said.

Things turned more aggressive that afternoon when Osborne said two men approached, one on a motorcycle and the other in a car. He said the men flipped the group off and proceeded to pull over and approach them.

“They began spouting slurs and hateful slander. The F-slur was said on multiple occasions, when the two men approached they each had their hands on their guns which were hidden in their pockets,” Osborne recalled.

Osborne said he confronted them about the weapons. One of the men pulled a card from his pocket, which Osborne said he recognized as a “KKK card.”

“They even proudly proclaimed to be homophobic, and racist,” Osborne said. “At one point the man who pulled his weapon later in the altercation looked at me and said ‘I’ll burn you and that sign.’”

The situation escalated further when the man allegedly put his card in Hensley’s face, and they began to slap each other’s arms until the man unholstered his weapon and put it down by his side. Both Hensley and Osborne said they began to yell out for help, and police arrived shortly thereafter.

In video footage of the incident, Hensley appears to shout expletives at the men and flip them off.

According to Osborne, the police demanded the man drop his weapon and confiscated both men’s firearms, one of which was not in a holster and was hidden in his shorts pocket. Police allegedly took the guns apart and removed the bullets that “were in the chamber and ready,” Osborne said.

“The police then do an investigation to find out what is happening, then ask us to leave as we have no permit, and they escort the men to their vehicles, giving their weapons back and sending them off,” he recalled.

The men in the video have not been publicly identified. Corbin police did not return phone calls Thursday afternoon to address the incident or whether anyone had been charged. The Corbin mayor was not immediately available for comment either.

 

The cops told the rally-goers to leave. It wasn't an issue of course until the two openly armed bigots showed up with loaded guns and the intent to harm people.

Oh, and cops gave the terrorists -- because that what this was, terrorism -- their firearms back.

Nobody was hurt this time. Next time it may be another mass shooting.

Tales of the Shattered Rainbow, Con't

As Pride Month in 2023 continues, the relentless radicalization of men 18-40 by the right has significantly shifted the opinions of America on trans and non-binary folks, with more acceptance of the LBG but definitely not the QT+ from even two years ago.

 

In the past several years, views have shifted on gender identities. In 2021, nearly six in ten Americans (59%) said there are only two gender identities, man and woman, and 40% of Americans believed there are many gender identities. The following year, in 2022, 62% of Americans believed that there are only two gender identities, and more than one-third (35%) said there are many gender identities. This divide slightly increased again in 2023, with 65% saying there are two gender identities and 34% saying there are many.

The discourse on the gender binary is highly polarized along partisan lines. Around nine in ten Republicans believe there are only two genders (87% in 2021, 90% in 2023). Democrats, by contrast, are less likely to believe that there are only two genders (38% in 2021, 44% in 2023). Independents have become more likely in the past few years to say that there are only two genders (60% in 2021, 66% in 2023).

Beliefs in a gender binary increased or remained steady from 2021 to 2023 among all religious groups. In 2021, 86% of white evangelical Protestants said there are only two genders, compared with 92% in 2023. In both years, around eight in ten Hispanic Protestants and Latter-day Saints said there are only two genders (79% and 81%, respectively, in 2021, and 82% and 81% in 2023). More than seven in ten Black Protestants (73% in 2021 and 71% in 2023) and around two-thirds of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (65% in 2021 and 67% in 2023) say there are only two genders. White Catholics have gone from more than six in ten in 2021 (62%) to nearly seven in ten in 2023 (69%) believing there are only two genders. Other Protestants of color and Hispanic Catholics have had the most drastic changes on this question among the religious groups. In 2021, 52% of other Protestants of color believed there are only two genders, compared with 73% in 2023. Hispanic Catholics went from 48% to 66%.

Like Hispanic Catholics, followers of other non-christian religions went from a minority saying there are only two genders in 2021 (42%) to the majority having that belief in 2023 (55%). Jewish Americans have remained consistent, at 44%, on this question. Religiously unaffiliated Americans who believe in only two genders have increased but remain in the minority, going from 38% in 2021 to 46% in 2023.

Younger generations are significantly less likely to believe that there are only two genders, but belief in a gender binary has increased among both Generation Z and millennials over the past several years. In 2021, Generation Z (43%) and millennials (51%) were more closely aligned with each other on this question than they were with Generation X (65%), baby boomers (62%), and the Silent Generation (68%).

In 2023, Generation Z saw a jump in the belief that there are only two genders (rising to 57%, from 43% in 2021). In 2023, members of Generation Z (57%) and millennials (60%) still hold closer beliefs to each other on this question than they do to Generation X (71%), baby boomers (68%), and the Silent Generation (69%).

There is a significant gender difference in views on the gender binary in every generation except for millennials, with men being more likely than women to believe there is a gender binary (64% of men vs. 50% of women in Generation Z, 61% vs. 59% among millennials, 75% vs. 67% among Generation X, 73% vs. 65% among baby boomers, and 76% vs. 62% among the Silent Generation).

 

In other words, using trans and non-binary folk as demonic enemies to be destroyed in order to "protect" women and children has worked astonishingly well. In more than a dozen states, in particular Florida and Texas, trans folk are being deliberately targeted for violence, but it's happening across the country.

A brawl broke out Tuesday as hundreds of protesters supporting and opposing LGBTQ rights gathered outside a Southern California school district headquarters where board members were deciding whether to recognize June as Pride Month.

At least three people were arrested outside the Glendale Unified School District’s headquarters as school board administrators discussed whether the district should declare support for Pride Month, the Glendale, Calif., Police Department said in a news release. The school board unanimously voted to recognize Pride Month as it has for the past five years.

Hundreds of demonstrators turned up, many waving rainbow and American flags, and clashed outside of the headquarters. Police said that both sides rallied their supporters on social media to gather at the headquarters before the board meeting. Around 500 people showed up on Tuesday evening, reported KABC in Los Angeles.

Video posted to social media shows people throwing punches, jumping on each other and pulling one another by their hoodies as officers tried to intervene.

“While most of the protest was peaceful, a small group of individuals engaged in behavior deemed unsafe and a risk to public safety,” police said in a statement.

 

More of this is coming, and people will be hurt or killed. The trans folks you know are being targeted and they need our help. Reach out to them and let them know you are there.

 

And rein in your friends and family when they start talking about how "Pride month is anti-straight". Your sons, nephews, cousins and grandsons are being taught some heinously violent stuff. Disabuse them of it. 

 

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

As critics made it painfully clear, Florida's law banning gender-affirming care for minors signed into law last month by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, also makes it effectively impossible to get for adults, and the state's trans community is finding out the hard way that this was the intent all along.

 

Eli and Lucas, trans men who are a couple, followed the discussions in the Legislature, where Democrats warned that trans children would be more prone to suicide under a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and Republicans responded with misplaced tales of mutilated kids. Eli said he and his partner felt “blindsided” when they discovered the bill contained language that would also disrupt their lives.

“There was no communication. … Nobody was really talking about it in our circles,” said Eli, 29.

Like many transgender adults in Florida, he and Lucas are now facing tough choices, including whether to uproot their lives so that they can continue to access gender-confirming care. Clinics are also trying to figure out how to operate under regulations that have made Florida a test case for restrictions on adults.

Lucas, 26, lost his access to treatment when the Orlando clinic that prescribed him hormone replacement therapy stopped providing gender-affirming care altogether. The couple also worries about staying in a state that this year enacted several other bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community.

“My entire life is here. All my friends, my family. I just got a promotion at my job, which I’m probably not to be able to keep,” Lucas, who works in a financial aid office at a college, said. “I’m losing everything except Eli and my pets moving out of here. So this was not a decision that I took lightly at all.”

The Associated Press is not using Eli’s and Lucas’ last names because they fear reprisal. While their friends and families know they are trans, most people who meet them do not.

The new law that bans gender-affirming care for minors also mandates that adult patients seeking trans health care sign an informed consent form. It also requires a physician to oversee any health care related to transitioning, and for people to see that doctor in person. Those rules have proven particularly onerous because many people received care from nurse practitioners and used telehealth. The law also made it a crime to violate the new requirements.

Another new law that allows doctors and pharmacists to refuse to treat transgender people further limits their options.

“For trans adults, it’s devastating,” said Kate Steinle, chief clinical officer at FOLX Health, which provides gender-affirming care to trans adults through telemedicine. Her company decided to open in-person clinics and hire more physicians licensed in Florida in order to continue to provide care to patients who have already enrolled, even though that represents a major change to the company’s business model.

Eli has been seeing a physician for years and therefore still has access to care. But SPEKTRUM Health Inc., the Orlando clinic that prescribed Lucas hormone replacement therapy, has stopped providing gender-affirming care.

“There are a lot of people looking for care that we’re no longer legally able to provide,” said Lana Dunn, SPEKTRUM Health’s chief operating officer.

Florida has the second-largest population of transgender adults in the U.S., at an estimated 94,900 people, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. It used state-level, population-based surveys to determine its estimates. Not all transgender people seek medical interventions.

At least 19 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. But restrictions on adults haven’t been part of the conversation in most places. Missouri’s attorney general tried to impose a rule in that state, but it was pulled back.

Florida is “the proving ground of what they can get away with,” Dunn said.

 

That last sentence there, marking trans folks for increasingly brutal and endless state-sponsored cruelty, is, as they say, the point. More is coming. Republicans will block any federal attempt to stop red states from eliminating trans folks, but the government-sponsored destruction of an entire class of people is the key to a fascist state. Once you can take the rights of a group, then everyone else's rights become secondary to the whims of state decreeing the next group slated for demolition, until nobody is left.

Regardless of DeSantis's ongoing failure as a GOP presidential primary candidate, his policies are going national across dozens of states, hurting hundreds of thousands of Americans.