#ban guns not drag queens

[hungergames2023]

TW: Mass Shooting, Again

Another mass shooting.

Allen, Texas. Mall. Not a lot of details out yet but there’s deaths, including children.

Thoughts and prayers are useless.

THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE USELESS.

[aunti-christ-ine]

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is one of Alexandra Petri’s best columns. It is satire in its most heartbreaking form. The column is so good, I am using a gift link, so anyone can read the entire column, even if they don’t subscribe to The Washington Post. Below are some excerpts from this column:

I can think of nothing worse than children — in school, sitting at their desks, reading banned books. A horrible thought, all those children solemnly holding books in their hands and reading them and putting the thoughts in those books into their minds. Learning the wrong lessons and growing up — the wrong way. Growing all the way up. Getting to grow up and think thoughts about those improper things they read in unsanctioned books, their whole lives, maybe. Horrible. I can think of nothing worse. Children who get to be 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and beyond — children who get to grow and have children of their own, and call their mothers or forget to call them, children who get to see the places they always wanted to see and children who get to be the best aunts in the world, but one afternoon in 2023 they read a book I didn’t approve of. I can’t imagine anything more horrible. Something must be done. To protect the children, we must stop at nothing. [...] I can’t think of anything worse than children reading history and feeling bad. Imagine, children, going home alive to their parents and complaining that they were made to feel bad by reading about the horrible events of the past. Can you think of a worse thing? Imagine that happening to a child. Imagine being a parent, and seeing the door open, and your child come through it, unharmed, with a complaint about a textbook. Unthinkable. Awful. Frightening. We must pass legislation.

I can’t think of anything worse than children going to a library to hear a drag queen read a story. Children sitting there alive in a library, hearing a story, surrounded by books and glitter, laughing. Children having a pleasant time, feeling as though there was nothing to be afraid of and going home happy. Can you think of anything worse? No, no. We must stop this at once. There must be laws. We must take action. We must protect the children from this awful fate.

Can you think of something worse? Are you thinking of something worse? Don’t worry: I will not think of it. I will not legislate about it. I will not give it a moment’s concern. To protect the children, I will stop at nothing. At absolutely nothing.

[tomorrowusa]

Tennessee’s descent into far right extremism probably began gradually a while ago but didn’t get much notice until the late 2010s.

And it wasn’t until 2023 that things became so hideous that the state began to attract worldwide attention.

Any sane person or business thinking of relocating there is probably having second thoughts.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

BY AMANDA MARCOTTE

Republicans know exactly what they believe is the greatest threat to American students: books.

In Florida, the possibility of a student choosing a book to read was deemed so threatening that teachers were ordered to lock up all the books until they could be — slowly, painfully — combed over by censors. Now, as the censors make their way through the books at a snail's pace, word of what has been officially banned from shelves thus far is starting to trickle out. Unsurprisingly, in a state controlled by a retentive fascist like Gov. Ron DeSantis, the books deemed too dangerous to read mostly involve ideas like "gay couples exist" and "there was once a civil rights movement." As Tom Fontaine of Trib Live reports:

"PEN America, a New York-based nonprofit that works to defend free expression, reported the district had removed at least 176 titles from classrooms. They include works such as ‘My Two Dads and Me,’ ‘My Two Moms and Me,’ ‘Celebrating Different Beliefs,’ ‘The Gift of Ramadan,’ ‘The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question’ and books about Rosa Parks, the Underground Railroad and Japanese internment camps during World War II.

Also removed was ‘Roberto Clemente: The Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates,’ a 2005 book by Dormont's Jonah Winter.

The 32-page book references racism Clemente sometimes endured."

Republicans are also deeply worried that a child might enjoy a drag queen story hour, in which drag performers use their skills at entertaining a crowd to get kids excited about reading. The threat that a funny person in a flashy costume might make a child happy is such that Republicans in state legislatures are considering bans so draconian that they could criminalize merely being a trans person in public or wearing makeup on a stage.

Of course, considering the Republican hostility to children reading, the "story hour" may be as offensive to them as the "drag" part.

The nation woke on Tuesday to familiar news that doesn't get any less disturbing, despite being painfully common. There was another mass shooting, this time at Michigan State. A gunman left three dead and five more critically injured. This is in a year where there has been an average of more than one mass shooting a day. At least one of the survivors of this latest shooting also survived a mass shooting 14 months ago at Oxford High School.

At this point, the Republican callousness to the carnage is so baked in that it barely feels worth remarking upon. Nor is this just a matter, as so many claim, of Republicans being too "afraid" of the NRA to stand up for meaningful gun safety laws. As I've written about before, there's plenty of reason to believe that the reason Republicans block most efforts to prevent mass shootings is that they benefit politically from both the feelings of helplessness and social decay that such shootings sow in the public.

"Please don't tell me you care about the safety of children if you are not willing to have a conversaion about keeping them safe in a place that should be a sanctuary," Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, who represents the Michigan district the shooting happened in, said during an emotionally raw press conference Tuesday morning. She didn't need to elaborate on who claims to "care" about children but certainly does not.

We've been subject to a yearslong effort to ban books and gut the rights of LGBTQ people, all justified by GOP claims to be "protecting" children. The College Board, under pressure from DeSantis and the larger Republican establishment, has even gone so far as to remove books by renowned writers and poets like bell hooks, June Jordan, and Ta-Nehisi Coates from an African-American studies course. The excuse is that the fragile self-esteem of white students cannot withstand learning about the realities of racism.

But while Republicans fret and moan over the supposed damage done to students' minds by learning that racism happens or LGBTQ people exist, the much more real danger that comes from a bullet tearing through a body is not considered a priority. In the Republican imagination, a high school or college student is too delicate to read about the Holocaust or slavery, but should also be tough enough to stand up to an armed madman mowing down kids with a semiautomatic weapon. And if such kids do survive the kind of graphic violence that Republicans believe they're too sensitive to read about, then such kids are also expected to be tough enough to endure members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., denying the violence ever happened and harassing those who survived it.

After last year's shooting in Uvalde, Texas — which left 19 kids and two teachers dead — a handful of Republicans decided it was becoming politically untenable to maintain the "thoughts and prayers, but nothing can be done" position that has characterized the party for so long. So 15 Republican Senators crossed the aisle to vote for a gun safety bill last June. The Beltway media, longing for a narrative of bipartisan comity, swooned rapturously over this supposed evolution away from sociopathic disregard towards gun violence towards something more humane.

But, at the cost of sounding overly cynical, the whole thing was probably more of a ploy to get people off their backs than anything else.

For one thing, for every Senate Republican who did vote for the bill, there were more than two who refused. Second, while there were some good items in the law that President Joe Biden signed last summer — especially closing the "boyfriend" loophole that let domestic abusers buy guns — the legislation stops well short of what's needed to keep guns out of the hands of unhinged people who want to shoot up nightclubs, schools, and shopping malls.

To make it worse, what little Republicans are willing to do in Congress is in real danger of being dismantled by Republicans in the federal courts.

The same week Congress passed their watered-down gun safety bill, the six Republican Supreme Court justices overturned a New York state law that is over 100 years old, which restricted who can carry guns in public. As Slate's legal expert Mark Joseph Stern wrote at the time, the decision rests on "a maximalist opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that renders most of the nation's gun control laws presumptively unconstitutional."

Sure enough, other Republican-controlled federal courts took note. Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit used Thomas's decision as a pretext to rule against a law barring domestic abusers from owning guns. This law not only protects the lives of women who are being stalked by former partners, but it's useful in preventing mass shootings. Over half of mass shooters had a known history of domestic violence. Sadly, many of them were able to commit their crimes by taking advantage of the pro-gun, anti-woman views of local Republican politicians, who won't enforce existing gun laws. That appears, for instance, to be the case in the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in December. The suspect had been previously arrested after a reported domestic violence incident involving his mother, but the right-wing sheriff who had bragged about being a gun rights absolutist did not enforce a law allowing the government to take the shooter's guns from him.

When faced with the carnage that their gun fanaticism inflicts on our nation, Republicans will often pretend that their hands are tied by the constitution. The GOP cowards who rule against the ban on wife beaters owning guns used this excuse. The court claimed there is no "historical tradition of firearm regulation" regarding domestic violence and that therefore they are forced — forced I tell you! — to believe the Second Amendment's language about a "well-regulated militia" somehow covers unregulated, non-militia wife beaters.

This feigned constitutional absolutism is ridiculous on its face. It's even more obviously a lie in the context of GOP enthusiasm for book banning. Unlike the Second Amendment, which puts strong limits ("well-regulated militia") on the right to bear arms, the First Amendment grants Americans expansive rights to free speech. It very clearly states that there should be "no law...abridging the freedom of speech." That's without caveat, unlike the Second Amendment. And there are certainly no exceptions for "unless it offends the bigoted sentiments of Ron DeSantis."

Most of all, of course, this exposes how Republicans are only interested in controlling students, not protecting them. The threat of the targeted books is not to students, who will only benefit from learning more about the world around them. The threat is to the fragile egos of the right-wing bigots who make up the Republican base. This focus on control also explains the GOP's disinterest in doing anything to save students from mad gunmen. They may be saddened by a dead child, but they aren't threatened by them. A murdered child, after all, is unlikely to think for themselves, much less grow up to vote against Republicans. And ultimately, that's all the GOP is really worried about when they talk about "the children."

[jaybirdbluelily]

MY AUNT BETTER STAY AWAY FROM POLITICS THIS SUNDAY, OR IM COMING FOR HER HEAD

[nerdykeith]

Matt Ford is correct, the reckless support for guns is indeed the cause of children getting hurt & killed. Conservatives need to stop blaming Drag Queens and trans people, it's only a distraction from the real issues. Gun violence and mass shootings in the US is off the charts. 

I'm not saying ban all guns, but some sort of ristrictions need to be put in place. As Ford says “When did it become OK to love our guns more than our children?” 

#GunControl #SchoolShootings 

[wilwheaton]

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS' legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks��An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

[casbeeminestiel]

my school just banned the clock app (the one I don’t actually use frequently) on university wifi so the first thing I did was switch to cellular and scroll through it for hours

[sophieinwonderland]

That moment a TERF shows up in the Syscourse tag...

I think I need ayahuasca to recover from seeing their blog.

First, just A+ response there from @rainnthefrog!

Just love how they completely shut that down!

When the people banning drag queens (who have never harmed in children in these schools) from performing at schools are encouraging guns to be brought in, you should heavily question how committed people are to the safety of children.

As for @femaledracula, there is so much wrong with this. First, again, zero incidents of drag queens preying on children. It's not a thing. You're talking about a problem that doesn't exist. Second, how do drag queens performing in schools have power over students?

Teachers are in a position of authority. Religious leaders are in a position of authority. Drag queens in schools just... are there. They're just an adult who happens to be present. And if this hypothetical problem were so important, why not take issue with every instance of guest performers and speakers? A police officer or fireman speaking at a school will be seen as more of an authority figure over students than dancers.

Wait... it's the transphobia and homophobia, isn't it? That makes sense.

Oh, and did I mention the sheer audacity of comparing LGBT people to the Catholic Church?

The next post wasn't on femaledracula's blog, but was another reblog of the OP from @aftonfamilyvalues. And I just absolutely love @benkybot's take on the whole dumpsterfire of a post.

🏆

Thank you!

And finally, as a tulpa, this especially caught my eye.

No. We're not our bodies. We're our consciousness. Our bodies are vessels our emergent consciousnesses ride around in. An amputee doesn't cease to be themselves because they lost their leg. A blind person doesn't cease being themselves because they lost their eyes.

Seeing your body as your whole self can be an extremely unhealthy outlook, especially when it comes to beauty standards and their affect on people's self-esteem.

I realize this is primarily about transness, but the mentality @talktomydoctorate is pushing is something that is also incredibly dangerous to the plural community where multiple people share a single body.

With that in mind, I'd like to take a moment to spout off a bunch of stuff to scare some TERFs! 😁

Let me start with an introduction! Hi, I'm Sophie, a cis girl tulpa riding around in an AMAB body!

Our tulpamancy practices can reliably make people of the opposite gender inside people's brains!

Tulpamancy, over time, is generally regarded as functionally irreversible, with one psychiatry professor likening getting rid of a well-developed tulpa to trying to will yourself to forget how to read.

Every new tulpamancer who creates an opposite-gendered headmate will be a brand new non-binary/genderfluid system in the world.

And tulpamancers tend to be creative people. I know many who are interested in animation and writing, where we can influence pop culture for future generations. Others are studying to be psychologists and psychiatrists where they can be influential in other ways.

And the best part is that there's really nothing you can do to stop it. 🤷‍♀️

Please, chew on that for a while.

And stay out of system tags. You and your kind aren't welcome here.

[queerism1969]

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), firearms are a leading cause of death among children in the United States. In 2019, there were 3,537 firearm-related deaths among children and adolescents aged 0-19 years old.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cancer was the fourth leading cause of death among children aged 1-14 years old in the United States in 2019.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were a total of 1,042 deaths due to motor vehicle accidents among children aged 1-14 years old.

Right-wing nuts banning drag queens to ''save'' the children, but they won't ban guns to truly save the children. This is hypocrisy at its highest order.

[merverb]

What are your thoughts on the attempts to ban drag in some states?

“Well, I mean, come on, America is a hot fucking mess, a real hot mess. I recently saw Wanda Sykes’ stand up special, which was genius. First of all, Wanda is one of the funniest people I’ve ever witnessed perform and she’s also a very nice lady. I’ve met her many times in New York and Fire Island. We’ve hung out a lot and she’s wonderful. In that latest comedy special, she summed it up best when she was like, “until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird, I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit.” That makes total sense to me. We’re in this country with gun control issues and all of the madness going on, the number one killer is guns, and they’re worried about a drag brunch for fuck’s sake?! You know, if you don’t like it, don’t go.”

“To be fair, I don’t know any drag queen that likes children! I am not that person. I am not interested in performing to children. I’m not interested in that side of it at all. It’s pretty insane that this is where we are in this world, that this is the top topic of discussion because none of it is true. Every day on Twitter, I’m seeing news about some youth pastor who has been molesting children. That’s the problem. Organized religion is a problem. Guns are a problem. No one’s educated, that’s a fucking problem. So it blows my mind that this is a hot topic. The fact that everything is run state by state, is so insane too, so just when you think you’re in the clear, you take 10 steps back with another state. I’m amazed and yet appalled by it, but this is where we are in the world. This is what’s dominating the news right now, which is completely insane to me.”

-- Exclusive Interview: Bianca Del Rio dishes on Hulu’s Drag Me To Dinner for The Queer Review

[mychal-is-fed-up]

RULES FOR THIS BLOG

If you think:

🍉that not all cops are bastards

🍉trans women should use the male restroom

🍉there should be a straight Pride

🍉that abortion should be banned

🍉Israel is doing the right thing

🍉drag queens are groomers

🍉that guns aren't a problem

🍉that homeless people deserve to be homeless

🍉that anyone should allowed to use the n-word

🍉and anything along those lines

Congratulations! This isn't a safe space for you! Feel free to unfollow and block me, because this is all I'm going to talk about 🍉

[eaudrey35]

I don't want to see another conservative anything say crap Abt ban books drag queens trans bathrooms CRT the fake boggy man if u r not going to put that same energy into protecting our children against gun violence the real boggy man.

[massharp1971]

The right want free speech, but only for themselves

When I was a in my teens, they brought in a law in my country (UK) that prevented any local government worker "promoting" homosexuality. It was called Clause 28, and the legacy of it was horrendous. It meant particularly that schools couldn't challenge queerphobia, teach kids about LGBT+ people, and LGBT+ teachers couldn't be out.

At the very same time, the very same arseholes brought two phrases into popular use "it's political correctness gone mad" and "you can't say anything nowadays".

The thing is, from a sane point of view, these views are contradictory. One is authoritarian, the other libertarian. But they came out of the same mouths and were working together.

Because the people who won't ban guns will ban drag queens. The people who see talking about systemic, structural racism as dangerous refuse to consider dehumanising language about marginalised folks as dangerous. There is no coherence to their ideology. Which means that, and I cannot stress this enough:

When you talk in generalities, you will almost always support their arguments

When you say a generalised "words can't ever harm people" you're taking away marginalised people's rights to talk about the known harm of microaggressions, incitement, dehumanisation and scapegoating.

Support LGBT+ people and kinky people not because "anything goes" but because there is nothing wrong with us.

Support people talking about racism and transphobia and expressing feelings/setting boundaries about the harm it does not because of "the importance of free speech" but because racism and transphobia are objectively and provably bad and harmful and we should care about that.

Support anti-censorship not because all text is innocent but because when censorship happens, it's never the actually harmful stuff that gets censored. Carceral solutions always fall unevenly onto marginalised shoulders.

Let POC speak up on racism, let them be angry, let them negotiate for safer spaces, let them expect care and acknowledgement of the harm of structural racism.

We can do better than this and fandom will be a better place for everyone if we do.

[tealoverdrawssomething]

If TERFs say that: "A woman is not a costume", when they try to insult trans women, crossdressers and drag queens, then by their logic, cosplay, theatre and even child celebrations should be banned into shadow realm, cause there entertainers very often put on "a woman costume". Ah, and so because women are as humans as men, men are also "not a costume". So, women should not be allowed to wear trousers and jeans, cut hair short and use anything "masculine", cause it means a woman mocks a man and puts on "a man costume". Drag kings and female cosplayers using male characters looks should also be punished for "wearing a male costume". Do you know how ridiculously stupid it sounds? Everyone should have freedom to dress how they want and it should not be your fucking business to police someone's looks. I don't see any person attractive, but I don't try to shove my personal views of life into everyone's throats. If you see a drag queen and you instantly think they "mock" a female appearance, then just move on. Anyway, nobody forces you to go to drag shows with a gun on your head.