#Tennessee Secretary of State

[svalleynow]

Tennesseans Warned About Donation Scams Claiming to Support Hurricane Victims

Secretary of State Tre Hargett As northeast Tennessee continues to recover from Hurricane Helene’s devastating impacts, Secretary of State Tre Hargett wants to remind citizens to remain vigilant about potential scams claiming to support victims. “National data shows Tennesseans are among the most generous givers to charitable causes. However, too often, we see bad actors targeting the good faith…

[dadsinsuits]

Cordell Hull

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #36

September 27-October 4 2024

President Biden and Vice-President Harris have lead the federal response to Hurricane Helene. President Biden's leadership earned praise from the Republican Governors of South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, as well as the Democratic Governor of North Carolina and local leaders. Thousands of federal workers are on the ground in effected communities having given out to date over 8 million meals, over 7 million letters of water. Both President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been on the ground in resent days meeting with effected families. During her trip to Georgia Vice-President Harris announced that the federal government will reimburse state and local government 100% of the costs from Hurricane Helene.

A strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association that briefly shut down ports on the East Cost and Gulf ended in a tentative deal. Both sides thanked Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for helping push the deal through. President Biden and Vice-President Harris had expressed solidarity with the works when the strike was announced and President Biden directed Secretary Buttigieg to take the lead in pressuring management to make a deal with the Longshoremen. The ILA got a 62% raise as part of the agreement.

Vice President Harris announced new actions to help those struggling with medical debt. This actions include new standards from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on debt collection. the CFPB plans on requiring debt collectors to confirm debts are valid and accurate before engaging in collection actions. As well as cracking down on debt collectors that collect on debt that is not owed by patients. Other actions included an announcement by the DoD that it was reducing pricing for civilians who get medical treatment at DoD hospitals and a track down on tax-exempt hospitals who are required by law to offer financial assistance but often do not. These steps come after Vice President Harris in June announced plans to remove medical debt from credit scores. Following the Vice President's call to action North Carolina moved forward a plan to eliminate medical debt for 2 million people in the state. President Biden's American Rescue Plan funds have been used by state and local Democrats to eliminate $7 billion dollars in medical debt.

The Department of Transportation announced $62 Billion in infrastructure funding for 2025. Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by President Biden this will be $18 billion dollars more than was spent in 2021. The Biden-Harris Admin has helped support over 60,000 infrastructure projects across all 50 states, rebuilding roads and bridges, breaking ground on America's first high speed rail, updating ports and airports, and breaking high speed internet to rural communities.

The Department of Transportation announced $1 Billion dollars of investment in America's passenger rail future. This comes on top of $8.2 billion in investments announced in December 2023. The funds will help expand and modernize intercity passenger rail nationwide.

The Departments of Energy and Agriculture announced a $2.8 billion joint project to bring 100% carbon pollution-free energy to the rural midwest. The DoE is investing $1.5 billion into helping bring the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan back on-line. Shut down in 2022 plans to refit and reopen it to allow the plant to keep generating clean energy till 2051. Once back online the Palisades Nuclear Plant will help stop an anticipated 4.47 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, or 111 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime. The USDA is investing $1.3 billion in two rural electric cooperatives, Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy, which cover rural communities in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. This investment will help Wolverine and Hoosier connect to the Palisades Plant, reduce prices for customers, and reduce climate pollution, putting Wolverine Power on the path to be 100 percent carbon-free energy before 2030.

The Treasury and the IRS announced that 30 million Americans, across 24 states will qualify for free direct filing of their taxes in 2025. The IRS says that the average American spends $270 dollars and 13 hours filing their taxes. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by President Biden with Vice President Harris' tie breaking vote, Americans will be able to file their taxes quickly and for free directly with the IRS. Tax payers in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming will in 2025 be able to use direct file.

The USDA announced $7.7 billion in funding for Climate-Smart Practices on Agricultural Lands. This represents the single biggest investment in these programs in USDA history. Since implementation began in 2023 this conservation assistance has helped over 28,500 farmers and ranchers apply conservation to 361 million acres of land.

The Department of Energy announced $1.5 billion in investments in transmission infrastructure to help ensure our grid is reliable and resilient. This will help support nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission lines across Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. These lines will bring 7,100 MW of new capacity and create 9,000 good paying union jobs. Studies find to keep up with growth and meet our climate goals of carbon free energy the US will need to triple the 2020 transmission capacity by 2050. This is an important step to meeting that goal.

[brostateexam]

Can you provide a definition for the word woman?”

Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn lobbed this query at Ketanji Brown Jackson during her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Blackburn was doing her bit for her party’s effort to enforce transphobic gender conformity, positioning herself as a defender of womanhood as something fixed and narrow. When Jackson declined to provide Blackburn with a definition, noting that she was not a biologist, the senator took the opportunity to dial it up a notch. “The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” Blackburn said with lip-smacking satisfaction.

Two years later, Republicans remain cruelly closed to the realities of gender fluidity and trans existence. But how the party understands — and represents — womanhood more broadly? Well … that’s getting weird. As we cruise toward November with two ancient white men on the presidential ticket and the rights of millions of people who are not white men in the balance, the public performance of Republican womanhood has become fractured, frenzied, and far less coherent than ever.

“A true conservative woman,” Valentina Gomez, one of several Republican candidates vying to be Missouri’s next secretary of state, told me in an email this spring, “speaks the truth, works hard, loves and knows how to use guns of multiple calibers, cares for the wellbeing of children and her family, doesn’t sleep with multiple men and most important, does not murder babies.”

(x)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

Yesterday, nearly 200 Democrats and Republicans wrote amicus briefs asking the Supreme Court to rule in favor of transgender rights in the upcoming L.W. v. Skrmetti case, which challenges Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. It is the first such case that the Supreme Court is hearing. “While the government has a role in keeping kids safe, that role is limited, and it does not justify the State second-guessing the judgments of parents acting in good faith who are best positioned to know what their children need,” the Republican signatories wrote in their brief. “States have no business overruling the decisions of fit parents who make an informed medical choice for their children that is supported by their doctors, by the medical profession more generally, by the children themselves, and by their conscience.”

The Republican brief was signed by numerous former and current Republican politicians and notable officials like Kentucky state Rep. Kim Banta; former U.S. Reps. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), Denver Riggleman (R-VA), and Deborah Price (R-OH); former Republican National Committee National Press Secretary Kirsten Kukowski; Republican campaign manager Colin Reed; and the late Sen. John McCain’s chief of staff and advisor Mark Salter. It was also notably signed by former Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the mother of Advocates for Trans Equality executive director Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen.

[...] 164 Democratic legislators signed their brief. The group was made up of 11 U.S. senators and 153 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and their brief stressed the discriminatory nature of Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban. “The current rash of bills targeting transgender people is merely the latest round of discrimination faced by transgender individuals. Lower courts have cataloged the “widespread private opprobrium and governmental discrimination” faced by transgender individuals,” they wrote in their brief. “But amici believe enough is enough. Tennessee has no ‘proper legislative end but to make [transgender adolescents] unequal to everyone else. This [Tennessee] cannot do.’—so the Court should reverse.” The politicians seen in this brief include Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), among others. They also argue that animosity towards trans people played a large role in passing Tennessee’s bill. They note that Tennessee is a “hotbed” for such animosity, having nearly twice as many anti-LGBTQ+ laws as any other state. They refer to hateful rhetoric from Tennessee politicians. The core argument in this brief is that there is a medical consensus that gender-affirming care is safe, medically necessary, and backed by numerous reputable organizations across the United States and the world. They argue Tennessee is discriminating against transgender individuals by blocking them from accessing safe and effective health care. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign both supported the brief.

Nearly 200 Democrats and Republicans filed amicus briefs in support of gender-affirming care in the United States v. Skrmetti (L.W. v. Skrmetti) case, with 164 of those being Democrats.

These are just two of the pro-trans amicus briefs filed in Skrmetti.

See Also:

Erin In The Morning: Families Split Apart: Families Fleeing Anti-Trans Laws File Amicus In Supreme Court Case

[minilev]

☢ Miss Patsy is the way Codsworth calls Patricia

☢ came from Tennessee few days before the bombs fell to visit her brother Nate (didn't even know about the newborn nephew)

☢ moved from state to state a lot, changed many jobs - worked as seamstress (to make a bra is not a problem!), secretary with terminals, nurse, etc because... she's a ✨serial killer✨! The family always disapproved her lifestyle (what a light-headed girl! no husband and no career!), but Patsy became quite handy and resourceful.

☢ her and Nate's father was in military - war deforms people, all the violence and screaming behind the closed doors of their seemed perfect family did something to both of them. Their mother never daring to even look up or speak without permission, forced army drillings and shooting trainings while they were kids, hazing and abuse... Patsy ran away when she was 19, her Greaser boyfrend started abusing her and so he became her first victim<3

☢ while Patsy found her own fun way to give in to their family violence tendencies, Nate became a soldier. Oh well, seems like it didn't help - there was a hole punched in a wall when she arrived.

☢ avoids Valentine - what if he remembers something from her time? Patsy has very standart features which are hard to describe the moment she hides her bright auburn hair. Who knows what leads did police have after her eighth victim...

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

DNC convention

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 18, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 19, 2024

On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by a vote of 50 to 49. The deciding vote came from Harry T. Burn, who supported suffrage but was under pressure to vote no. His mother had urged him to vote yes despite the pressure. “I believe in full suffrage as a right,” he said. “I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify. I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”

Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and the last one necessary to make the amendment the law of the land once the secretary of state certified it.

The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected the right of Black men to vote, and it read: 

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.

But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “male” citizens, inserting the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.

Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was outraged. The laws of the era gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.

“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.

The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a general reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.

That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” It listed the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisted that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.

The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.

Suffragists had hoped that women would be included in the Fifteenth Amendment and, when they were not, decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.

In Missouri a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision in 1875, the justices decided that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.

For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.

Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.

Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”

Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on August 18, 1920, made it the law of the land as soon as the official notice was in the hands of the secretary of state. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years. And yet they never stopped fighting for that right. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton, Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Constance Baker Motley were key organizers of voting rights initiatives, spreading information, arranging marches, sparking key protests, and preparing legal cases.

In 1980, women began to shift their votes to the Democrats, and in 1984 the Democrats nominated Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York to run for vice president alongside presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Republicans followed suit in 2008 when they nominated Alaska governor Sarah Palin to run with Arizona senator John McCain. Still, it was not until 2016 that a major political party nominated a woman, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, for president. In 2020 the Democrats nominated California senator Kamala Harris for vice president, and when voters elected her and President Joe Biden, they made her the first female vice president of the United States.

Tonight, on the 104th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, delegates are gathered in Chicago, Illinois, for the Democratic National Convention, where they will celebrate Harris’s nomination for the presidency.

It’s been a long time coming.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[stupittmoran]

Top 10 headlines the media didn't tell you this week, Repost & FoIIow for more.

Governor Greg Abbott signs a bill making it a state crime to enter Texas illegally.

Fulton County counted 20,713 votes that did not exist in the 2020 election; Trump "lost" by 11,779 votes.

Senate staffer fired after filming gay sex tape in Senate hearing room; apparently, we're not the only ones getting f*cked by the government.

Dismantling of a Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery was halted by Trump appointed Federal judge.

Vivek Ramaswamy to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary until Trump is allowed to be on the ballot.

The State of Tennessee is suing BlackRock, the world's largest financial asset manager, for misleading investors about their money being used to fund ESG policies.

California Lieutenant Governor demands Secretary of State remove former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot, the last US president to be removed from ballots was Abraham Lincoln.

A second Democratic candidate joins Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., claiming the left is rigging the primaries for Biden.

New Supreme Court filing claims Jack Smith was never properly appointed as Special Counsel, declaring all of his legal acts null and void.

A Federal judge ordered more than 150 names linked to Jeffrey Epstein to be unsealed, 3 of the names will remain sealed, who do you think they are?

If you appreciate this Top 10 recap, remember to Repost and FoIIow me for another week in a clown world 🤡🌎

From

TaraBull𝕏

@TaraBull808 on Twitter/X

[mariacallous]

This spring, Tennessee passed a first-of-its-kind law that protects the rights of adults who object to LGBTQ+ identity on moral or religious grounds to foster and adopt LGBTQ-identifying kids. Tennessee’s move came partly in response to a considered Department of Health and Human Services rule designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids. The federal change, passed shortly after the Tennessee bill, was a reversal of a Trump administration decision to remove nondiscrimination protections.

It’s a chilling law, one that echoes the most virulent anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes pushed across a number of Western democracies. The policy sets up the family as an instrument for disciplining unwanted elements in society, following the model established by Hungary, Russia, and others.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary amended the constitution in 2020 for the purpose of redefining family and stripping same-sex couples of their parental rights. The change defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Non-married people require special permission to adopt children. As a government official put it, “The main rule is that only married couples can adopt a child, that is, a man and a woman who are married.” The constitution now defines family as “based on marriage and the parent-child relation. The mother is a woman, the father a man.” It goes on to declare, “Hungary defends the right of children to identify with their birth gender and ensures their upbringing based on our nation’s constitutional identity and values based on our Christian culture.”

In a country where pro-natalist subsidies bolster family planning through grants for families to purchase homes to the abolition of income tax for mothers who give birth to or raise at least four children, circumscribing same-sex couples as ineligible to foster or adopt is more than an act of cultural and economic discrimination. It’s an attempt at annihilation.

Tunde Furesz is the president of the Hungarian Maria Kopp Institute for Demography and Families and previously worked in the government as deputy secretary of state responsible for family policy and demography. In an interview with the Hungarian Conservative, she addressed criticism of Hungary’s family policies by saying, “Attacks on family policy, on the Fundamental Law and now on the child protection act are always ideological attacks. Right now, Hungary is against LGBTQ propaganda.” As to the appropriateness of Hungary’s discriminatory policies, she asserted that “every state has the sovereign right to prioritize which groups of society are to be focused on.”

This is a crucial point, because Furesz is drawing out exactly what’s at stake in the Tennessee law and so many other instances of anti-LGBTQ+ and discriminatory family policy. It is a question of what kind of country is being built, beginning with one of the smallest and most rudimentary units within society. How the family is defined and how the contours of parental rights and the nascent individualism of the child are traced posit fundamental ideas about who we are, how we relate to one another, and the boundaries between our freedom and society’s demands.

Of course, perhaps no other European state has been as pioneering in its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda as President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Gay adoptions were banned in 2013, around the same time a ban on gay “propaganda” was implemented. A ban on adoptions by international same-sex couples came in 2014. Putin has repeatedly portrayed LGBTQ+ rights and other liberal ideals as a form of Western cultural aggression. He reiterated this in his speech announcing the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.”

More recently, the Russian Supreme Court banned the “international LGBT social movement” as an extremist organization in November. In early 2024, the first convictions were handed out: a man in Volgograd for posting a picture of a pride flag and a woman in Nizhny Novgorod for wearing LGBTQ+ earrings. The man paid a 1,000-ruble fine, and the woman spent five days in detention.

But it’s Orban’s regime that has become a particularly popular rhetorical and policy touchstone for right-wingers in the United States. Americans who want to learn from Hungary’s illiberal cultural crusade in order to reshape this country see much to import. This spring, Gladden Pappin, the American academic and Catholic integralist who now works as the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, told an interviewer from the National Catholic Register that “American conservative politicians need to ask: What positively can I do to make the traditional family more likely to survive? Sometimes it’s implementing the anti-woke policies in education. … But with changing mindsets, we need to think ahead about how to increase the likelihood that people will choose the family life they really want.”

Rod Dreher, another right-wing American expat in Orban’s orbit, has characterized Hungary as standing athwart the gates of European history, defending values against a woke horde: “For example, even as European Union inquisitors are trying to punish Hungary for protecting its children from LGBT propaganda, Disney—Disney!—in Germany has greenlighted a new series for youth about a teenager who has sex with Satan and falls pregnant with the devil’s baby. Not a peep from the bespoke Huns of Brussels about that. The real threat, you see, is from retrograde Christians like Viktor Orban, who believe things about family that most Europeans did seemingly the day before yesterday.”

On this side of the Atlantic, right-wingers are fond of parental rights arguments, but this commitment falters when the parents in question are LGBTQ+ or when they affirm such identities in their children.

Policies like Tennessee’s and the wider environment of hostility toward LGBTQ+ people also decrease the likelihood that potential LGBTQ+ parents will seek to foster or adopt. Polling from Gallup shows that LGBTQ+ adults are more likely to consider fostering or adopting, but they also report high levels of concern about possible discrimination in the process. The deterrent effects of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination are visible, with nearly half of LGBTQ+ men reporting that fear of discrimination poses a “major barrier to fostering and adopting.”

These measures are not limited to Tennessee. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, this February, right-wing commentator Michael Knowles declared that “true freedom is a national policy based on what we know in our hearts as morally right” and went on to attack same-sex couples and the practice of surrogacy, insisting that “children are people and no one has a right to another person.” Last week, Gabriella Gambino, the Vatican’s undersecretary for the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life moderated a panel at the U.N.’s Geneva headquarters on the need to abolish interns surrogacy. Gambino referred to international surrogacy as “procreative tourism.” Italy’s Minister for Family, Natality, and Equal Opportunities, Eugenia Roccella, also participated.

Last year, during a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene attacked American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who is gay, as “not a biological mother.” Parents’ rights tend, however, to mainly run in one direction: exerting control over trans youth. Tennessee passed a law in May that criminalizes adults who assist minors in receiving out-of-state gender-affirming care without parental or guardian consent and another that would require schools to out trans students to their parents.

I am adopted myself, and I’ve written before about some of the thorny challenges around adoption and its ethics. But in places like Nashville and Budapest, what we find are not moral gray areas or troubling dilemmas. There is only the use of state power to impose a rigid concept of family and to further marginalize a minority under the guise of defending values and honoring would-be parents.

The hard-line approach to cultural issues in Republican-dominated states threatens to turn parts of America into places that more closely resemble the illiberal regimes of Europe’s backsliding democracies rather than the fully free society the United States is at the national level. In places like Tennessee, just as in Orban’s Hungary, the sort of society being molded and the kind of family being promoted are exclusionary, regressive, and profoundly illiberal.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

"In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed cutting the state’s public health funding by $300 million. And the Department of Health in Washington state slashed more than 350 positions at the end of last year and more than 200 this year." Tell me again that the Democrats are damage control: They can't even do the right thing in the states where they have absolute majorities. You should be livid, not complacent or complicit.

Analysis by Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez and McKenzie Beard

Good morning. I’m Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez, a KFF Health News correspondent based in Elko, Nev., which is about as high in elevation as Denver, the Mile-High City. Email me about your experiences with health care in rural America at jorozco@kff.org.

Today’s edition: The Harris-Walz campaign rolled out a plan to improve rural health care. Nebraska voters are set to weigh in on two conflicting abortion-related ballot initiatives. But first …

The boom-and-bust funding cycle for public health hits states

During the coronavirus pandemic, states received a rush of funding from the federal government to bolster their fight against the disease. In many cases, that cash flowed into state and local health departments, fueling a staffing surge to handle, among other things, contact tracing and vaccination efforts.

But public health leaders quickly identified a familiar boom-and-bust funding cycle as they warned about an incoming fiscal cliff once the federal grants sunset. Now, more than a year since the federal Department of Health and Human Services declared the end of the coronavirus emergency, states — such as Montana, California and Washington — face tough decisions about laying off workers and limiting public health services.

In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed cutting the state’s public health funding by $300 million. And the Department of Health in Washington state slashed more than 350 positions at the end of last year and more than 200 this year.

Public health experts warn that losing staff who perform functions like disease investigation, immunization, family planning, restaurant inspection and more could send communities into crisis.

“You cannot hire the firefighters when the house is already burning,” said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, an organization that advocates for public health policy.

In late September, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra declared a public health emergency for states affected by Hurricane Helene, allowing state and local health authorities in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee to more easily access federal resources. Last week, ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall in Florida, Becerra declared another public health emergency to aid the state’s response.

If states don’t have robust public health resources ready when disasters like this hit their communities, it can have devastating effects.

Local health department staffing grew by about 19 percent from 2019 to 2022, according to a report from the National Association of County and City Health Officials that examined 2,512 of the nation’s roughly 3,300 local departments. The same report found that half of those departments’ revenue in 2022 came from federal sources.

But in some places, the pandemic cash did little more than keep small health departments afloat. The Central Montana Health District, a public health agency serving five rural counties, received enough money to retain a staff member to help handle testing, contact tracing and rolling out the coronavirus vaccines. It wasn’t enough to hire extra workers, but it allowed officials to fill a position left empty when a staffer left the department, said Susan Woods, the district’s public health director.

Now, five full-time employees work for the health district — enough to scrape by, Woods said.

“Any kind of crisis, any kind of, God forbid, another pandemic, would probably send us crashing,” she said.

Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the national health officials’ group, said she expects layoffs and health department budget cuts to intensify. Those cuts come as health officials work to address issues that took a back seat in the pandemic, such as increases in rates of sexually transmitted infections, suicide and substance misuse.

And rural health departments deserve more attention, Casalotti said, as they are likely to be the most vulnerable and face compounding factors such as hospital closures and the loss of services including maternity and other women’s care.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism.

[svalleynow]

Secretary Hargett encourages Tennesseans to register to vote as part of National Voter Registration Day

Secretary Hargett encourages Tennesseans to register to vote as part of National Voter Registration Day...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – As National Voter Registration Day approaches, Secretary of State Tre Hargett is encouraging all eligible Tennesseans to register to vote. “It has never been easier to register or cast a ballot in Tennessee,” said Secretary Hargett. “If you have not already registered, National Voter Registration Day is a great opportunity to do so.” National Voter Registration Day is Tuesday,…

[whencyclopedia]

Henry Knox

Henry Knox (1750-1806) was a Boston-born bookseller who became a general of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and served as the army's Chief Artillery Officer. After the conflict, he was appointed the first Secretary of War of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1794 in the Washington administration.

Knox first distinguished himself in January 1776, when he guided his 'Noble Artillery Train' of 58 artillery pieces on a harrowing 300-mile trek across the snowy and mountainous terrain of New York State and Massachusetts; this effort helped the Continental Army win one of its first major victories at the Siege of Boston. Henry Knox commanded the Continental artillery for most of the American Revolution and was one of George Washington's most trusted subordinates. When Washington became President of the United States in 1789, Henry Knox was put in charge of the War Department. In this capacity, he sought to strengthen the military and helped create the Legion of the United States, a standing army of professional soldiers, while simultaneously overseeing the Northwest Indian War. In 1795, he retired to his estate in Thomaston, Maine, where he died in October 1806, at the age of 56. Today, many American towns, cities, counties, and military bases are named in his honor, including Knoxville, Tennessee, and Fort Knox in Kentucky.

Early Life

Henry Knox was born on 25 July 1750 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the seventh of ten children born to William Knox and Mary Campbell, both of whom were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had emigrated to Boston in 1729. William Knox was a shipbuilder who, in 1759, was spurred on by financial troubles to abandon his family and move to Sint Eustatius in the West Indies to start a new life; his new life would not last long, however, as he died three years later of unknown causes. Henry, who was only nine years old when he was abandoned by his father, was now responsible for caring for his mother and younger siblings, and he eventually found a steady job as a clerk in a Boston bookstore.

The shopkeeper, Nicholas Bowes, became something of a father figure to Knox, encouraging the young clerk to take home books from the shop's extensive library to furnish his self-education. Knox soon became a voracious reader; with the help of the books in Bowes' shop, he educated himself in the topics of philosophy, mathematics, and even French, and spent his free time reading the works of classical literature. Yet Knox also took a special interest in military theory, reading everything he could get his hands on about tactics and military engineering. When he came of age in 1771, Knox opened a bookstore of his own called the London Book Store, which boasted a "large and very elegant assortment" of the newest books and magazines from London (McCullough, 58). Since Henry Knox's store offered a large selection of fashionable English products, it soon became a popular "morning lounge" for the Boston elite; the store, and Knox himself, soon became well-known throughout the city.

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[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Thomas Fountain Blue

Thomas Fountain Blue, the first African American to head a public library in the United States, was also a civic, educational, and religious leader. Blue was born in Farmville, Virginia, on March 6, 1866, to Noah Blue, a carpenter, and Henry Ann Crawley Blue. They were parents of two other children, Alice Blue and Charles Blue.

Blue enrolled in Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, in 1885 and graduated in 1888. In 1894, he enrolled in Richmond Theological Seminary (now Virginia Union University) in Richmond, Virginia, finishing in 1898 with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. One week later, when the United States declared war on Spain after the sinking of the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba, touching off the Spanish-American War, Blue joined the Sixth Virginia Volunteers battalion comprising African American soldiers and was stationed first in Camp Poland in Tennessee and later at Camp Haskell in Georgia.

In 1905, Blue was selected to lead the Western Branch Library of the Louisville Free Public Library on South 10th and Chestnut Street, the first Carnegie Library in the nation to serve African American patrons with an exclusively African American staff. The facility cost $31,024.31 to build and when completed had over 4,000 books and 53 periodicals.

In 1914, Blue opened Louisville’s second Carnegie Library for African Americans, the Eastern Branch Library. During World War I, Blue was drafted, left the branch, and was appointed the Education Secretary at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, one of sixteen national Army training camps created across the nation. Blue worked with Black troops who mostly had supporting and laboring roles in the United States.

After the war ended in 1918, Blue returned to Louisville, and a year later, in 1919, he was named head of the “Colored Department” for the city’s public library system and supervised eight African American assistants. The Colored Department was the first in the United States to have a staff which served multiple Black library branches.

In 1922, Blue was a presenter at the American Library Association Conference in Detroit, Michigan, where he gave a paper titled, “Training Class at the Western Colored Branch,” and led the subsequent discussion with the Negro Roundtable composed of other African American Library staffers from across the nation.

On June 18, 1925, Blue married Cornelia Phillips Johnson from Columbia, Tennessee, and they parented two children, Thomas Fountain Blue, Jr., and Charles Blue (named after his younger brother). Two years later, in 1927, Blue founded the Negro Library Conference and conducted its first meeting at Hampton Institute.

Later becoming a minister, Reverend Thomas Fountain Blue—who held membership in the American Library Association, the Special Committee of Colored Ministers of Louisville on Matters Interracial, and was a charter member of the Louisville Chapter of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History—died on November 10, 1935, in Louisville, Kentucky. He was 69.

At the 2003 joint conference of the American Library Association with the Canadian Library Association Annual Conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Blue was posthumously honored when the organization passed a resolution recognizing his leadership in promoting professionalism among the staff of African American libraries across the United States. In 2022, a headstone honoring Blue and his wife, Cornelia Phillips Johnson, was placed at Eastern Cemetery in Louisville by the Frazier History Museum.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/thomas-fountain-blue-1866-1935/

[alainamama17]

Steps to Establish Initiatives and Referendums If You Live In a State Without Them

If you live in any of these states, your state does not have the initiative and referendum process.

Alabama Connecticut Delaware Georgia Hawaii Indiana Iowa Kentucky Kansas Minnesota New Hampshire New Jersey New York North Carolina Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina Tennessee Texas Vermont Virginia West Virginia Wisconsin

If you don't know what initiative and referendums are, here's what they are.

Referendum: This is an electoral process where voters can express their opinion on government policy or proposed legislation. It can be obligatory, meaning certain actions, like constitutional amendments, must be put to a popular vote, or optional, where a vote on a law passed by the legislature is required only if petitioned by a specified number of voters.

Initiative: This process allows citizens to propose new laws or constitutional amendments. An initiative can be direct, where the proposal goes straight to a vote, or indirect, where it first goes to the legislature and, if rejected, then to a popular vote.

In the U.S., these are forms of direct democracy that give power to the people to shape legislation and policy directly, rather than through elected representatives. They are tools that can empower citizens to have a more active role in governance, especially at the state level, as there is no federal initiative and referendum process.

Steps to Establish Initiatives and Referendums If You Live In a State Without Them

Residents of states without an initiative and referendum process can push to establish these processes through several steps. Generally, the process includes:

Preliminary Filing: Submit a proposed petition to a designated state official, often the Secretary of State.

Review of Petition: Ensure the petition conforms with statutory requirements and, in some states, a review of the language of the proposal.

Ballot Title and Summary: Prepare a ballot title and summary for the proposed initiative or referendum.

Signature Collection: Gather the required number of signatures from registered voters within the state.

Submission and Verification: Submit the signatures for verification.

Ballot Placement: Once verified, the measure is placed on the ballot for a public vote.

It’s important for residents to organize and campaign effectively to gather support for their cause. They may also need to work with legal experts to ensure that their proposed measures are in line with state laws and regulations. Additionally, public awareness campaigns can help educate voters about the benefits of having an initiative and referendum process in their state.

[todaysdocument]

Letter from Gladys W. Center to Mrs. Mable Walker Willebrandt Asking Which Federal Department Is Best Suited to Enforce Prohibition

Record Group 60: General Records of the Department of JusticeSeries: Class 23 (Liquor Violations) Litigation Case Files and EnclosuresFile Unit: 23-0-15

in pencil] Crochett [blue stamp] "record" [red stamp] Dec 7, 1928 [blue stamp] 23-0- Department of Justice December 7, 1928 A.M Mail and files Division WILLEBRANDT [text of letter] Copperhill, Tennessee. November 21, 1928 Mrs. Mable Walker Willebrandt Washington, D.C My dear Mrs. Willebrandt: Do you think prohibition would be more efficiently enforced under the Department of Justice or under the Secretary of Treasury as it has been here to fore? I am a student in the high school in my home town. One of my teachers surprised the students and patrons a short time ago by saying prohibition had never been enforced and will never be enforced. He stated that is very unpopular. He made other remarks detrimental to the students. I favor prohibition and would value your opinion as to the best method of enforcement. Personally, I wish to say you are due much credit for loyal service during the recent presidential campaign. We are Hoover democrats. Very sincerely yours, (Miss) Gladys W. Center

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson Editorial Cartoons Page

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 31, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 01, 2024

Today felt as if there was a collective inward breath as people tried to figure out what yesterday’s jury verdict means for the upcoming 2024 election. The jury decided that former president Trump created fraudulent business records in order to illegally influence the 2016 election. As of yesterday, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States of America is a convicted felon. 

Since the verdict, Trump and his supporters have worked very hard to spin the conviction as a good thing for his campaign, but those arguments sound like a desperate attempt to shape a narrative that is spinning out of their control. Newspapers all over the country bore the word “GUILTY” in their headlines today.

At stake for Trump is the Republican presidential nomination. Getting it would pave his way to the presidency, which offers him financial gain and the ability to short-circuit the federal prosecutions that observers say are even tighter cases than the state case in which a jury quickly and unanimously found him guilty yesterday. Not getting it leaves Trump and the MAGA supporters who helped him try to steal the 2020 presidential election at the mercy of the American justice system.  

After last night’s verdict, Trump went to the cameras and tried to establish that the nomination remains his, asserting that voters would vindicate him on November 5. But this morning, as he followed up last night’s comments, he did himself no favors. He billed the event as a “press conference,” but delivered what Michael Grynbaum of the New York Times described as “a rambling and misleading speech,” so full of grievance and unhinged that the networks except the Fox News Channel cut away from it as he attacked trial witnesses, called Judge Merchan “the devil,” and falsely accused President Joe Biden of pushing his prosecution. He took no questions from the press.

Today the Trump campaign told reporters it raised $34.8 million from small-dollar donors in the hours after the guilty verdict, but observers pointed out there was no reason to believe those numbers based on statements from Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile, Trump advisor Stephen Miller shouted on the Fox News Channel that every Republican secretary of state, state attorney general, donor, member of Congress must use their power “RIGHT NOW” to “beat these Communists!” 

The attempt of MAGA lawmakers to shape events in their favor seemed just as panicked. Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) posted on social media that “New York is a liberal sh*t hole,” and Jim Jordan (R-OH) today asked Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case against Trump, to testify before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about “politically motivated prosecutions of…President Donald Trump.” Representative Dan Goldman (D-NY) noted that Trump is a private citizen and Congress has no jurisdiction over the case, but that Jordan is using his congressional authority illegally to defend Trump. 

MAGA senators were even more strident. Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah melted down on X last night over the verdict, and today he led nine other Republican senators in a revolt against the federal government. Lee, J. D. Vance of Ohio, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Rick Scott of Florida, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin issued a public letter saying they would no longer pass legislation, fund the government, or vote to confirm the administration’s appointees because, they said, “[t]he White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways. As a Senate Republican conference,” they said, although there were only 10 of them, “we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.” 

It was an odd statement seemingly designed to use disinformation to convince voters to stick with them. Ten senators said they would not do the federal jobs they were elected to do because private citizen Trump was convicted in a state court by a jury of 12 people in New York, a jury that Trump’s lawyers had agreed to. The senators attacked the rule of law and the operation of the federal government in a demonstration of support for Trump. A number of the senators involved were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

Awkwardly, considering the day’s news, a video from 2016 circulated today in which Trump insisted that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who he falsely insisted had committed crimes even as he was the one actually committing them, “shouldn’t be allowed to run.” If she were to win, Trump then said, “it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation, we could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and, ultimately, a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put it correctly: this is not an “outpouring of rage and anger,” so much as “an overwhelming effort to match and muffle the earthquake of what happened yesterday afternoon with enough noise and choreography to keep everyone in Trump’s campaign and on the margins of it in line and on side.”

Still, there is more behind the MAGA support for Trump than fearful political messaging. Trump has been hailed as a savior by his supporters because he promises to smash through the laws and norms of American democracy to put them into power. There, they can assert their will over the rest of us, achieving the social and religious control they cannot achieve through democratic means because they cannot win the popular vote in a free and fair election. With Trump’s conviction within the legal system, his supporters are more determined than ever to destroy the rules that block them from imposing their will on the rest of us. 

Today the Federalist Society, which is now aligned with Victor Orbán’s Hungary, flew an upside-down U.S. flag as a signal of national distress. Their actions were in keeping with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s statement that Trump is being persecuted “for political reasons” and that the cases show “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.”

Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported today on a spike in violent rhetoric on social media targeting New York judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s Manhattan election interference trial, and District Attorney Bragg. Users of a fringe internet message board also shared what they claimed were the addresses of jurors. “Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote. Another wrote, “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to [W]ashington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution.”

This attack on our democracy was the central message of a crucially important story from yesterday that got buried under the news of Trump’s conviction. In The New Republic, Ken Silverstein reported on a private WhatsApp group started last December by military contractor Erik Prince—founder of Blackwater and brother of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos—and including about 650 wealthy and well-connected “right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and journalists,” including Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT), who served as Trump’s secretary of the interior. 

Called “Off Leash,” the group discussed, as Silverstein wrote, “the shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists,” collapsing Gaza into a “fiery hell pit,” wiping out Iran, how Africa was a “sh*thole of a continent,” and ways to dominate the globe. Mostly, though, they discussed the danger of letting everyone vote. “There is only one path forward,” Zinke wrote. “Elect Trump.” Another member answered, “It’s Trump or Revolution” “You mean Trump AND Revolution,” wrote another. 

And yet the frantic MAGA spin on the verdict reveals that there is another way to interpret it. Americans who had lost faith that the justice system could ever hold a powerful man accountable as Trump’s lawyers managed to put off his many indictments see the verdict as a welcome sign that the system still works. 

“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” Biden said today. “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself. It was a state case, not a federal case. And it was heard by a jury of 12 citizens, 12 Americans, 12 people like you. Like millions of Americans who served on juries, this jury is chosen the same way every jury in America is chosen. It was a process that Donald Trump's attorney was part of. The jury heard five weeks of evidence…. After careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict. They found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts. Now he���ll be given the opportunity as he should to appeal that decision just like everyone else has that opportunity. That's how the American system of justice works. And it's reckless, it's dangerous, and it's irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don't like the verdict. Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years and it literally is the cornerstone of America…. The justice system should be respected, and we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It’s as simple as that. That's America. That's who we are. And that's who we will always be, God willing.”

Today the publisher of Dinesh D’Souza’s book and film 2000 Mules, which alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election, said it was pulling both the book and film from distribution and issued an apology to a Georgia man who sued for defamation after 2000 Mules accused him of voting illegally.  

MAGA Republicans confidently predicted yesterday that the stock market would crash if the jury found Trump guilty. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained almost 600 points.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON