Sunday Facepalm

On a recent episode of his “Pray In Jesus Name” program, Gordon Klingenschmitt declared that gays are driven by a demonic “spirit of persecution” that makes them attack Christians and “demand to have sex in your guest bedroom.”

“There is a spirit of persecution that is coming out of this homosexual movement,” Klingenschmitt said, “and it’s not enough that they get weddings in their own private churches, they want to come to your church, they want to come to your business, they might even come to your home — if you are a bed and breakfast owner, they’ll come right into your home and demand to have sex in your guest bedroom and there’s nothing you can do, they say, to deny them service because they have a right to violate your freedom.”

“That is an evil spirit of persecution,” he stated. “There are also evil spirits influencing them to come after the church and we’ve got to stand up, not necessarily against the humans, we’ve got to stand up against Satan, who is inside of them.”

From Right Wing Watch.

Cisgender Kids Bullied by Inclusivity.

The families, represented by right-wing attorneys, claim the federal government’s policies on trans students amount to “discrimination” against cisgender students.

One transgender student. A whole lot of cisgender students. Result: lawsuit against trans*persons inclusivity, non-discrimination and protection policies.

The Obama administration is bullying Illinois families by requiring cisgender (nontrans) students to share a locker room with a transgender classmate, according to a federal lawsuit filed by 51 families in Palatine, Ill.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Chicago, claims the federal government is discriminating against students by allowing a transgender girl at William Fremd High School to use the locker room that corresponds with her gender identity.

The families are being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom and Thomas More Society, both notorious right-wing, anti-LGBT legal nonprofits, which claim that the U.S. Department of Education’s inclusive stance on trans bathroom access is a “blatant violation of student privacy.”

[…]

Wilson represents the 73 parents and 63 students who are named plaintiffs in recent lawsuit. The court filing alleges that since that ruling was handed down, using the locker room with a trans student has made life difficult for the plaintiffs’ families. “Every day these girls go to school, they experience embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, fear, apprehension, stress, degradation and loss of dignity because they will have to use the locker room and restroom with a biological male,” the complaint reads.

The suit further claims that female students who weren’t comfortable undressing in the presence of a trans person were “ridiculed and harassed by other students to such an extent that the stalls are not a practical option.” The students filing the claim further stated that their peers labeled them “transphobic” and “homophobic” due to their discomfort.

ThinkProgress‘s Zack Ford notes the irony that the aggrieved families refuse to accept the same accommodation the school initially offered the trans student — that she use a private restroom and changing facility, away from all other students.

Zack Ford has an in-depth story at Think Progress. The Advocate also has this story.

Obliterating male and female distinctives.

House Speaker Tim Moore (The News & Observer)

North Carolina Republican lawmakers vowed to defy a federal order to repeal or stop enforcing a controversial anti-LGBT law.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday found the law violated the federal Civil Rights Act and Title IX, and officials ordered lawmakers to comply with those laws by next week or risk billions of dollars in federal education funding.

But House Speaker Tim Moore indicated Thursday that he and his fellow Republicans had no intention of meeting the federally mandated deadline, reported The News & Observer.

“We will take no action by Monday,” Moore said. “That deadline will come and go. We don’t ever want to lose any money, but we’re not going to get bullied by the Obama administration to take action prior to Monday’s date. That’s not how this works.”

[…]

One of their fellow Republicans, state Rep. Mark Walker, sniffed that Bruce Springsteen was a “bully” after the rock legend canceled a concert appearance over HB2.

“Bruce is known to be on the radical left,” Walker said. “He’s got every right to be so, but I consider this a bully tactic. It’s like when a kid gets upset and says he’s going to take his ball and go home.”

Aaaaand just what it is you all are doing? Mandating bigotry into law certainly seems like serious bullying to me.

The Christian Action League of North Carolina — one of the primary backers of the controversial law — offered a scenery-chewing statement urging GOP lawmakers to disobey the Obama administration:

“At the hands of his henchmen in the U.S. Department of Justice, King Obama, has delivered his message of intimidation to the state of North Carolina.

“The Administration has taken it upon itself to declare “sex” in Title VII and Title IX includes “sexual orientation” and “gender Identity.” This interpretation goes far beyond the language adopted and intended by Congress. Nevertheless, the Great Pontiff of Political Correctness holds the educational futures of our state’s children hostage, while dangling the money bags of federal funds over their heads, demanding in exchange North Carolina bow to the madness of obliterating male and female distinctives – something foundational to every society in human history.

“The battle over North Carolina’s common sense law, HB 2, has national significance. Must every state, more specifically, 28 other states, with laws similar to our own be forced to sacrifice their fundamental right to privacy and safety when using a restroom, locker room, or shower? That is the question of the hour.

“If this doesn’t make people righteously indignant, then our culture has lost any capacity for real moral outrage. We deserve exactly what we’ll get – confusion and chaos. Either truth is something evidential and verifiable or it’s purely subjective and determined wholly in the eye of the beholder.

“It is imperative the Governor and state lawmakers remain strong and fight the advancement of this misguided agenda. No federal law, approved by the people’s Representatives in Congress requires North Carolina comply with the Obama Administration’s demands.”

-Dr. Mark Creech

Well, male and female ‘distinctives’ are certainly foundational when it comes to misogyny, patriarchy, and every day sexism. They certainly do provide a framework for intolerance and remaining close-minded. All of which are great reasons to obliterate them. (As if it were possible to obliterate them. Christians do love being melodramatic.)

Full Story Here.

UPDATE:

(CNN)- North Carolina will meet a Monday deadline to respond to the U.S. Justice Department about the state’s transgender bathroom law, Gov. Pat McCrory said Thursday.

“We’re reviewing (the Justice Department letter) and we hope to have a response in the very near future.” he said, according to CNN affiliate WNCN.

When asked if the state will respond before Monday’s deadline set by the Justice Department, McCrory answered in the affirmative.

“Definitely,” he said. “We’ll have a response by Monday.”

CNN Story.

Transgender News Roundup

Oxford City Council President Steven Waits

Alabama City May Repeal Harsh Anti-Trans Ordinance.

The Oxford, Ala., City Council is considering repealing a controversial ordinance it approved last week, imposing fines and jail terms on transgender people for using public restrooms that match their gender identity.

The council will hold a special meeting at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday “to discuss potentially recalling” the ordinance, reports AL.com, a website for several Alabama newspapers. […] The American Civil Liberties Union’s Alabama affiliate is considering a legal challenge to the Oxford ordinance, and a rally to protest the law is scheduled for Saturday, AL.com reports.

Full Story Here.

Texas City Council Wholly Rejects Mayor’s ‘Bathroom Bill’

Mayor Jim Pruitt

Supporters and opponents showed up to watch the Texas city council deliberate on an ordinance proposed by Mayor Jim Pruitt, one that would force trans people to use the bathroom that matches with the sex they were assigned at birth, not their gender identity. “I just think that it’s insanity not to have those protections in place,” Pruitt told Dallas TV station WFAA last week.

Unfortunately for the mayor, he couldn’t find anyone on the town’s city council who agreed with him. The ordinance died in debate, after not a single one of the five council members stood up to support it. […]

But Mayor Pro Tem Dennis Lewis argued that if Pruitt doesn’t agree with the company’s statement, the solution is simple: Don’t go there. Others have the exact same option, he said. “If Target wants to have this policy, I have the choice of not shopping at Target,” Lewis told the Morning News.

The bill was vocally opposed by the local Hilton Hotel, which warned that passing an ordinance targeting trans bathroom use would be bad for the town’s local economy. Rockwall — with a population of just over 37,000 — is located outside of Dallas. “Our business will suffer,” Hilton general manager James Montgomery told KHOU. “This will negatively affect travel and tourism to our area.”

[…]

Montgomery warned that if Rockwall were to pass its own anti-trans legislation, Hilton might be forced to follow suit and leave the town. As KHOU reported, “the hotel employs 175 workers and pays $750,000 in property taxes.”

Full Story Here.

Boston Raises Transgender Pride Flag.

Boston’s mayor raised the flag in a show of support for the trans community in Massachusetts.

Boston Monday became the first city in Massachusetts to fly the transgender pride flag.

Democratic Mayor Marty Walsh raised the flag along with activists and other elected officials. Lawmakers are currently “pushing a bill aimed at creating anti-discrimination protections for transgender people, allowing them to enter a bathroom based on their gender identity,”in the state, reports MassLive, a website for several Massachusetts newspapers.

“We’ve proven there’s nothing to fear from being inclusive,” Walsh told MassLive. “Quite the opposite. We are safer, we are stronger when everyone enjoys the same protections.”

Both the House and Senate versions of the measure — House Bill 1577 and Senate Bill 735 — have been advanced by the state legislature’s Judiciary Committee. The Senate version of the bill is up for debate May 12, reports MassLive. Massachusetts currently has antidiscrimination protections for trans people in employment, housing, and other areas, but not in public accomodations. Boston has had a trans-inclusive public accommodations law since 2002.

Full Story Here.

The Supreme Court Decided Against N.C.’s Law 20 Years Ago.

John Miller

A federal lawsuit aimed at dismantling North Carolina’s sweeping anti-LGBT law is just getting under way, but the nation’s high court already struck down an eerily similar law. That ruling celebrates two decades of precedent this month.

Imagine, for a moment, that a proactive city council votes to extend nondiscrimination protections to LGBT people. The ordinance guarantees equal access to public accommodations and freedom from discrimination in housing, employment, and health and welfare services. You know, the basics.

Then, a fervent backlash arises — led by religious and political conservatives — and all LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances in the state are struck down in the heat of partisan overreaction. Further, local and state governments are prohibited from enacting these particular protections in any capacity. The American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal file a federal lawsuit to stop the anti-LGBT law from taking effect.

This sounds a lot like North Carolina, where the state’s Republican leaders are intensely defendingHouse Bill 2, the draconian anti-LGBT law passed in a single day-long special session March 23.

But in reality, it’s the background of a landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court 20 years ago.

Full Story Here.

Jesus Loves Me and Jesus Hates You!

A South Carolina School Board Meeting Erupts Into “Jesus Loves Me” After an Attendee Speaks Up for Transgender Rights.

“Jesus loves me…” and evidently spends a lot of time thinking about bathrooms. ChiccoDodiFC/Thinkstock

Some very strange shots were fired on Monday in a brewing transgender-bathroom war in Horry County, South Carolina, when a woman defending transgender rights at a school-board meeting was interrupted by a roughly 500-person chorus of “Jesus Loves Me.”

In January, a high-school senior who has used the boys’ restrooms since seventh grade was suspended for a day for refusing to switch to the girls’ (or the nurse’s) restroom in his last semester of high school. Until last fall, when a teacher discovered that he was born female and complained, the school had never taken issue with his use of the boys’ bathroom; according to CNN, his family had “reached a decision with school administrators to use the boys’ room to make everyone more comfortable” five years ago.

[…]

Which brings us to last night’s epic school-board meeting.

In the video, which is worth watching in its entirety, a lone woman tries to defend the rights of transgender students amid a sea of angry citizens (many of whom look far too old to have school-age students, incidentally).

[…]

Even before the thundering “Jesus Loves Me” coda (which gets underway at 6:19 in the 7-minute video), this chaotic school-board meeting offers an amazing inside look at the circular, nonsensical reasoning that the anti-trans contingent deploys to defend “the word of God” and the “order of Nature” against the rights of kids. Because, as Mark Joseph Stern wrote on Tuesday, anti-trans Americans are losing the moral and legal argument, big time, they’ve got nothing but cockeyed gender-binary absolutism to keep them afloat. As one audience member puts it, “A male dog has a male body part. If we see a dog with two body parts, we all know that there is something wrong with the order of nature and the order of God when it comes to that dog.” Uh… amen???

Slate has the full story.

White power meets business casual

Photo: Andrew Mears/ AFP

Thank God for Donald J. Trump,” cried National Policy Institute director Richard Spencer into the microphone.

Spencer, 37, has a boyish, straitlaced look about him. With his well-tailored suit and a nicely kempt undercut, he’d meld perfectly into the swarms of youthful think tank employees trotting down Massachusetts Avenue. But NPI is no ordinary Washington think tank. Founded by an heir to a conservative publishing fortune, it drew white nationalists and sympathizers from around the country—and at least one from Canada—to its innocuously named “Identity Politics” conference a couple of days after Donald Trump dominated the field on Super Tuesday. For $45, I snagged the last ticket designated for millennials.

It is the rise of the bombastic Republican frontrunner that brought this amalgam of aggrieved crusaders together for an evening of cocktails, appetizers, and songs of praise to the candidate who’s inspired them to dip a toe into the stream of establishment politics.

Full Story Here.

There’s another hate group tackling Target for daring to be inclusive, the AFA (American Family Association):

The American Family Association, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been sending cisgender men into women’s restrooms at the retail chain.

Previously, the AFA had organized a boycott of Target, which allows customers and employees to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity. The policy is a slap back at North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law prohibiting transgender people from using the appropriate facilities for their identity, although the law applies only to government buildings, not private-sector companies.

The group, which contends Target’s policy opens the bathroom floodgates to sexual predators, claims to have enlisted over 1 million people to join its boycott.

Sandy Rios, AFA’s director of governmental affairs, revealed its new anti-LGBT tactic in a Monday radio interview with Breitbart News.

“We’ve already had people testing this, going into Targets and men trying to go into bathrooms. There is absolutely no barrier,” she told host Stephen Bannon, who said “decent, hard-working people who don’t want their 4-year-old daughter to have to go into a bathroom with a guy with a beard in a dress.”

“Absolutely no barrier”. I think that one gets filed under “no shit, Sherlock.” There’s never been anything stopping anyone from going into any public lav. You don’t even need to play dress up, just walk right in. You’d think that might have occurred to the genius watchdogs of uStates morality, but apparently it just slid right by them.

Full Story Here.

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Sunday Facepalm

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Cisgender Kids Bullied by Inclusivity.

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Obliterating male and female distinctives.

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Transgender News Roundup

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Jesus Loves Me and Jesus Hates You!

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