#or try to BAN ABORTION. AGAINST STATE LAW. AND THEN TRY TO ACT LIKE THE STATE IS ATTACKING YOU. FOR SAYING THEY WILL TAKE ACTION

[weirdbabs]

saw somebody say that bill clinton was “the most widely disliked president in recent american history”, at least until trump took office, and thats part of what made hillary so unlikeable and unelectable and like. granted. i wasnt really alive long enough to even be aware that there was a president when he was in office, let alone what his popularity was, but i DO know that in may of 2013 my ap us history teacher asked all his classes of 17 year olds who the best and worst president of the us was. my classes top 3 was washington, lincoln, and fdr and the worst president we unanimously agreed was bush. my teacher then revealed what the other classes had said and Every. Single. Class. said bush

personally i dont think clinton was the most widely disliked president in recent history in 2016. im pretty sure it was bush

[fullhalalalchemist]

URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator /��House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

ANNA BONESTEEL AND EVAN GREER at Them:

Pride Month is over. As the “LOVE IS LOVE” banners come down and companies lose the rainbow gradients from their logos, we’re faced with a painful truth: LGBTQ+ people, especially the most marginalized among us, are in the crosshairs of a queerphobic backlash that is targeting our health, our histories, and especially our youth. And things are getting worse, not better. According to NPR, half of all US states now ban gender-affirming care for people under 18. Eight states now censor LGBTQ+ issues from school curricula via “Don’t Say Gay” laws, and two more states are considering similar legislation this year. The number-one book targeted for censorship is a graphic novel memoir about gender identity.

This June, Democratic lawmakers marched in Pride parades and spoke on stages, vowing to protect our community and fight back against legislative attacks on queer youth. But some of these same lawmakers are actively pushing federal legislation that would cut LGBTQ+ youth off from resources, information, and communities that can save their lives. Currently, 38 Democratic senators support the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that is vocally opposed by many queer and trans youth, along with a coalition of human rights and LGBTQ+ groups. As a queer- and trans-led advocacy group focused on the ways technology impacts human rights, our organization, Fight for the Future, has seen bills like KOSA before: misguided internet bills that try to solve real problems, but ultimately throw marginalized people under the bus by expanding censorship and surveillance rather than addressing corporate abuses. KOSA’s most obvious predecessor is SESTA/FOSTA, a Trump-era bill that its supporters claimed would clamp down on online sex trafficking. Instead, the bill did almost nothing to accomplish its goal, and has actively harmed LGBTQ+ people and sex workers whose harm-reduction resources were decimated by the subsequent crackdown on online speech.

Like SESTA/FOSTA, some of KOSA’s supporters have positive intent. Many lawmakers and organizations support KOSA because they are concerned about real harms caused by Big Tech, like addictive design features and manipulative algorithms. But, also like SESTA/FOSTA, KOSA doesn’t touch the core issues with Big Tech’s extractive, exploitative business model. Instead, KOSA relies on a “duty of care” model that will pressure social platforms to suppress any speech the government is willing to argue makes kids “depressed” or “anxious.”

Under KOSA, platforms could be sued for recommending a potentially depression- or anxiety-inducing video to anyone under 18. We know from past experience that in order to protect their bottom line, social media companies will overcompensate and actively suppress posts and groups about gender identity, sexuality, abortion — anything they’re worried the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could be willing to argue “harms” kids. How do you think a potential Trump administration’s FTC would use that kind of authority?

Other features of the bill stretch its censorship potential further. Despite language claiming that the bill does not require platforms to conduct “age verification,” to meaningfully comply with the law, platforms will have to know who is under 18. This means they’ll institute invasive age verification systems or age-gating, which can completely cut off access for LGBTQ+ youth who have unsupportive parents, and/or make it unsafe for queer people to access online resources anonymously. KOSA creates powerful new ways for the government to interfere with online speech. For this reason, the bill is like catnip to extreme right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation, the coordinators of Project 2025, who have explicitly said they want to use it to target LGBTQ+ content. KOSA’s lead Republican sponsor, Marsha Blackburn, has also said in an interview she wants to use KOSA to protect minors “from the transgender.”

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) purports to protect children, but in reality, it’s a censorship bill that would impact LGBTQ+ youth. #StopKOSA #KOSA

[qqueenofhades]

I feel like, if Democrats want to win in places that AREN'T deep blue, if they want swing states and rural areas, they NEED to shut up about social issues. Don't talk about abortion or birth control or women's rights. Don't talk about police brutality and racism and immigration, legal or not. Don't talk about transphobia or homophobia. They should talk SOLELY about economic policy and solid legislation and sneak in protections for marginalized groups once elected.

Imma be real with you chief, since you came to my inbox and you presumably want my opinion: that is an absolutely terrible idea. Here's why:

First and most importantly, this is confusing "Democrats/progressives need to learn how to explain their policies in terms that are acceptable to the American mushy middle" with "they shouldn't talk about those policies at all." It's not that we can't pursue left-wing economic or social policies, it's that we should stop f'n calling them "socialist," which does nothing and causes a lot of harm among the people who instantly tune out or turn hostile the instant they hear that word and are unreachable afterward. If we CAN put them in terms that the American public likes, i.e. freedom, justice, opportunity, we should do that.

So... black people don't exist in America? LGBTQ people don't exist in America? Immigrants/racial minorities don't exist in America? Women (HALF THE ENTIRE POPULATION) don't exist in America? Especially when those are all core constituencies of the Democratic Party and vote for it precisely because it has openly expressed support for their issues and protection for their basic personal rights and civil liberties, especially as the right wing gets ever more reactionary, fascist, and crazy? You really think we should just throw up our hands and totally cede the public debate on these issues to the fascists, and act like any pushback or critique is the aberrant position??? Really???

Likewise, we're not gonna go for the "absolutely everyone in a red state/area is an unrepentant bigot who can only be mobilized if we discreetly tuck away our social liberalism." We're gonna talk about gerrymandering. We're going to talk about voter repression laws. We're gonna talk about how Ken Paxton, the Texas AG so wildly, insanely corrupt that he finally managed to get impeached by fellow Texas Republicans, boasted that if he didn't stop Texas counties from mailing out ballots to all registered voters, Biden would have won Texas. We're not going to act like there are Sensible Americans in Deep Blue Areas and everyone else is f'n David Duke of the KKK who needs to be appeased in hopes we can meekly trick them into supporting us. We're just not.

We're not gonna act like abortion or LGBTQ rights are shameful, unpopular, or minoritized views that have to be hidden or treated as secondary, especially when we're pummeling the Republicans, even and especially in deep red areas, precisely because of those things. Ordinary people in Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and all the other usual suspects are coming out to protest against drag bans and bathroom laws, not "superior" blue-area liberals. Republicans are backtracking on the abortion issue as fast as they can because it is so incredibly politically toxic and is costing them local/state/other competitive elections like crazy. 60% of the country supports abortion rights and 70%+ supports LGBTQ rights. The fascists are a minority and that is why they are so loud and so terrible: because they're shit-scared and they see the demographics coming to end them. We are not, again, acting like they're the majority or it's too shameful to speak about anything related to anything that's not the economy, especially since:

It won't work anyway! If people were actually, genuinely motivated by appeals to improved economic circumstances, they would already vote for Democrats! But they don't, because white supremacy and white grievance is too important for them! Even if the Democrats did try to rebrand themselves as solely focused on economic issues (which, for all the reasons stated above, would be insane), the people who don't vote for them now still wouldn't vote for them then! They will still vote for the Republicans, because a) they've been fed for decades on the myth of REPUBLICANS ARE BETTER FOR THE ECONOMY and b) they know that Republicans will punish non-white people, while Democrats won't. If they did try to "sneak in" protections for marginalized groups even once, and since that's, again, what they've built their entire party on, that would be it. It's the racism. It is always the racism.

Basically, this is the exact kind of mega-reductive "the only war is the class war"/"economic oppression is the only oppression" analysis that is so popular among Online Leftists and attempts to just erase racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and all the other complex reasons why people vote, experience oppression, want the government to represent their interests, affiliate with a political party, or prioritize their particular identity/civic participation, because it's inconvenient for something something the purity of their Marxist theory. Besides, this is not even to mention that the Democrats' existing supporters would abandon them in droves, which would gut any remote increase in the number of voters that they could even (wildly unrealistically) hope to gain for doing it. You might as well be the f'n No Labels party, which is trying this exact kind of BS in hopes of peeling off just enough of the ideologically wavering Biden voters to hand the election to Trump. So. Yeah. No.

[leohtttbriar]

Amarillo is the biggest Texas locality, so far, to consider the policy as a ballot measure—making this perhaps the most significant chance for ordinary Texas residents to vote on abortion rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. Statewide, voters may never get the chance to protect abortion rights as they have in Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio and might in at least 10 other states this November. This is because Texas is among the two dozen states that do not allow citizen-initiated statewide ballot measures, something only the GOP-controlled Legislature could change. 

[...]

“Generally, we don’t allow states to reach outside of their borders and regulate activity in another state,” said Liz Sepper, a University of Texas at Austin professor who specializes in healthcare law. “It’s even more suspect for a city to try and enforce its moral code outside its boundaries well beyond what the state has even done.” 

However, there is a “complex gray area” that could be open to a loophole, said Sepper. For instance, in his concurring opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that overturned Roe, Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that patients could not be prosecuted for out-of-state abortions under the constitutional right to interstate travel, yet he failed to address the civil enforcement strategy found in the travel bans. Additionally, that private enforcement framework helps shield the bans from federal lawsuits seeking to block them, as is also the case with SB 8. 

When confronted with the possible unconstitutionality of the ordinance, Dickson and his anti-abortion cohort often cite the federal Mann Act, a 1910 law—accused of being used as a tool of racially motivated persecution in the mid-20th century—that was originally intended to criminalize the transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

“These prohibitions on abortion trafficking no more infringe the constitutional right to travel than prohibitions on sex trafficking infringe the constitutional right to travel,” said Dickson. 

Regardless, the ordinance would likely create a chilling effect on those traveling out of state for care—and advocates say that’s by design. SB 8’s similar vigilante-style enforcement created the risk of potential litigation against anyone supporting care, which immediately halted abortion in Texas, causing damage even before legal pushback. “Like with SB 8, the point is to create fear,” said Sepper. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bill Bramhall

* * * *

Biden and Harris defend reproductive liberty

May 2, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

Republicans, the media, and the pollsters are underestimating the alarm and urgency that a strong majority of Americans feel about the GOP assault on reproductive liberty. When pundits are forced to explain why they were wrong in their predictions about the 2024 elections, they will claim they failed to appreciate the depth of anger and outrage felt by Americans who were denied basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

On a day when reproductive liberty was under active attack by MAGA extremists, President Biden and Vice President Harris were campaigning to protect and expand those rights. One day after Trump said he would support state laws to monitor women’s pregnancies to enforce abortion bans, the Biden-Harris campaign issued a joint statement that said, in part,

Donald Trump’s latest comments leave little doubt: if elected he’ll sign a national abortion ban, allow women who have an abortion to be prosecuted and punished, allow the government to invade women’s privacy to monitor their pregnancies, and put IVF and contraception in jeopardy nationwide. Simply put: November’s election will determine whether women in the United States have reproductive freedom, or whether Trump’s new government will continue its assault to control women’s health care decisions.

Vice President Harris was in Florida on the eve of that state’s six-week abortion ban. At a campaign stop, the Vice President attacked “Trump's abortion bans,” warning that “things will be even worse if Trump is reelected.” See ABC News, Harris hammers Trump for Florida's new abortion ban, warns it will be 'even worse' if he wins.

Vice President Harris said, in part,

Donald Trump's friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban and understand a national ban would outlaw abortion in every single state, even in states like New York and California.

Biden and Harris are not exaggerating the threat of a national abortion ban and pregnancy monitoring under the Trump administration. Trump's abortion policy is outlined in Project 2025, a detailed blueprint of the policy goals and actions planned by the Trump administration.

Project 2025 calls for a national abortion ban by simply appointing an Attorney General who will claim that the moribund Comstock Act effectively prohibits abortion healthcare. See The New Republic, Conservatives Plan to Ban Abortion and Cut LGBT Rights Starting Next January.

Per TNR, Trump's policy would be as follows:

Outlaw abortion. Until then, surveil abortion in the areas in which it remains legal in order to prioritize criminal cases against “chemical abortion” and “abortion tourism.” The playbook says the president should enforce a 150-year-old law, the Comstock Act, which right-wing groups see as a way to ban abortion nationally because it outlaws the use of the mail for the purposes of sending or receiving any object that could be used for an abortion.

As Project 2025 authors plot to further erode reproductive liberty, Republicans know that their extremist positions are losing propositions in the general election. On Wednesday, two Republicans in the Arizona Senate joined with fourteen Democrats to repeal Arizona’s 1864 analog to the Comstock Act. Arizona will thus revert to a 15-week abortion ban that was passed shortly before the Dobbs decision.  See NPR, Arizona lawmakers vote by a narrow margin to repeal Civil War-era abortion ban.

With only two Senate Republicans crossing over to repeal the 1864 law, the issue of reproductive liberty is still very much on the ballot in Arizona in November. Both chambers of the Arizona legislature have narrow Republican majorities and are flippable. Moreover, proponents of reproductive liberty successfully qualified a pro-choice ballot initiative to amend the Arizona constitution in November. See Ballotpedia, Arizona Right to Abortion Initiative (2024).

The issue of reproductive liberty drove voters to the polls in the 2022 midterms and special elections thereafter. But pundits and pollsters dismiss those actual results as unrepresentative because . . . why?? Because they don’t agree with their polls that overweight Republican respondents who still answer their landlines.

Actual results matter, and when women and men have had the opportunity to make their voices heard in elections, they have proven that Americans are highly motivated to vote for Democrats in 2024 in order to protect reproductive liberty.

It is essential that all Americans—but especially women and couples of childbearing age—understand that MAGA is trying to criminalize their family planning efforts.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[ejacutastic]

A Texas man, Marcus Silva, is suing three of his ex-wife’s friends for $1 million each, claiming that by helping her obtain an abortion medication, they engaged in a wrongful death conspiracy. Silva is being represented by Jonathan Mitchell, one of the architects of the SB 8 anti-abortion “bounty hunter” bill.

Text messages revealed from the lawsuit, showing that the woman was afraid Silva would use the pregnancy to force her back into a relationship, seem to confirm activists’ warnings that abortion bans will enable widespread domestic abuse.

The lawsuit describes a nightmare scenario faced by women across the country. The woman in question legally divorced Silva in February 2022. In July, she discovered she was pregnant with a child conceived with Silva. She reached out to friends via text for help.

Text messages from the lawsuit show that the woman was struggling with a crisis. If she kept the baby, her ex-husband would use it to force her back into the relationship she had just escaped. “I know either way he will use it against me,” she wrote.

“If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it [to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision. At that point, at least it won’t matter though.”

Her friends texted, “Mistakes happen … You can’t spiral. Hopefully this is the slap in the body that you need to remove yourself from him.”

Further texts seem to indicate that the friends helped her obtain an abortion medication, for which she expressed her gratitude: “[Y]our help means the world to me … I[‘]m so lucky to have y’all. Really … I was stupid to be doing it all. I didn’t think this would happen since it hasn’t in 7 f—— years either. But it’s still on me. I know I f—– up. Not letting that s— happen again.”

Silva and his lawyer, Mitchell, did in fact “use it against” his ex as she feared by suing the friends for obscene amounts of money and claiming that they committed murder.

Under Texas’ extreme and layered anti-abortion laws, domestic abusers, anti-abortion activists and even complete strangers have a full legal arsenal at their disposal to attack abortion rights. People who perform abortion face potential felony charges of up to life in prison and civil penalties of at least $100,000. In addition, SB 8, the “bounty hunter” bill, enables anyone to sue someone for a minimum of $10,000 for performing or facilitating an abortion.

In Silva’s case, he is pursuing a different legal attack, claiming that the abortion is a murder and pursuing wrongful death civil penalties. Silva also intends to add the manufacturer of the medication to the lawsuit, a similar strategy to the lawsuit that may lead to the banning of abortion pills nationwide.

The government of Texas and anti-abortion groups are throwing every possible legal challenge at abortion, hoping to use these cases as testing grounds to unroll new mechanisms for stopping abortion across the country. At the same time, they are exporting their successful anti-abortion strategies — such as “bounty bills” — to be used against drag shows and LGBTQ people.

But activists across the state are not allowing this to go unchallenged.

Dora Orjel, of the San Antonio-based Mujeres Marcharán Coalition, exposed the dangerous ramifications for domestic abuse: “I am trying to wrap my head around where he finds justice in suing those who assisted his wife in getting the means to self-abort. This just shows how much control he had and continues to have over her.”

Rachell Tucker, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, spoke out against the decades-long attack and the complacency of the Democrats, and named working-class self-organization as the way to fight back.

The rightwing has been launching an offensive on women for decades, but what’s worse is the Democrats have used our rights to abortion as a bargaining chip. They have refused to defend us. They have refused to codify and have continued to say they have our backs, but have abandoned us at the most crucial moment. They have left us to fend for ourselves. We must get organized, unify and fight — and that’s what we are doing.

For International Women’s Day on March 8, Mujeres Marcharán held a march that drew hundreds into the street to demand an expansion of abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, in addition to safe housing for all and public transportation, issues that affect all working women. In Houston, the PSL organized a women’s self-defense class; and in Dallas, PSL organizers held an event featuring poetry, speeches, live music, vendors and food. The event celebrated women and culture, but sharply connected the political struggles for women’s and LGBTQ liberation.

There is still a difficult struggle ahead, but the entire weight of Texas’ oppressive political and legal system has failed to stop the full range of rage, love, study and self-organization of grassroots, working-class feminists. All across Texas, la lucha sigue (the struggle continues)!

[isaacsapphire]

There are many behaviors that some people engage in, that other people would like to make them stop, because their ideologies say these behaviors are immoral.

The actors may be doing these things because the behaviors bring them joy, may be a cultural or family tradition, are in some way optimal solutions for their personal, local, and socioeconomic challenges, or because they hold a competing ideology that says the behavior is obligatory and so they are generally resistant to change.

Generally, if a behavior is sufficiently unacceptable to members of a community, they will have an explicit rule against it, with enforcement measures. In the case of nations, these rules are laws and enforced by the state using violence or intimidation via state power. (That is, if traffic tickets are not paid, eventually the state will revoke the offender’s driver’s license, at which point they are committing the more serious offense of driving with a suspended license, and so on until the offender is eventually taken into police custody and imprisoned for traffic crimes or shot trying to resist arrest. Property taxes are similar: ignore them long enough and eventually the arm of the state authorized to do violence will show up to force compliance and shoot you if you resist.)

It is perhaps human nature to want to forbid others from doing things you find morally offensive. The problem is that, in a multicultural society and global order, the range of things that someone finds offensive and someone else considers an essential part of their own culture in some way, where both groups are in sufficient proximity to be aware of each other’s existence and opinions is very large.

In addition to the legacy cultures and ideologies (eg. French culture, Islam, Hinduism, multiple branches of Christianity), recently developed ideologies and cultures are of course well-suited to modern conditions (eg. Feminism, The LGBTQ Community, environmentalism, animal rights). Each culture/ideology has behavioral precepts that they consider worthy of enforcement on nonbelievers.

As a result, there are many behaviors that many people wish to use any power they are capable of accessing to forbid or otherwise prevent.

Since achieving these goals frequently requires convincing some unbelievers that the despised behavior is in some way in their interest to not practice and to forbid, unfortunately, it is necessary to look with a measure of suspicion upon the motives of anyone who is trying to make entreaties to unbelievers about how the despised behavior ought to be banned for global reasons such as public health, climate change/sustainability, or using more specialized arguments such as disgust or cuteness, or using beliefs the speaker does not share to appeal to the holders of those beliefs to join them in coalition in seeking to force others to cease the behavior, especially known members of cultures/ideologies that despise the particular behavior for their own reasons.

That is, eg. an evangelical Christian who proclaims that abortion causes cancer and a Hindu or animal rights activist who proclaims that eating beef causes cancer should all be considered as acting in a somewhat disingenuous way and their evidence examined closely, as the deeper motives for making these claims is not primarily a desire to keep people from getting cancer, but to dissuade nonbelievers from behaving in a way they consider immoral.

Please do note that the “deeper motive” may be lodged in the source a not particularly intelligent rank and file adherent got this information about the despised behavior causing cancer rather than directly in the speaker, as a spear-carrier is neither interested nor capable of evaluating the tale of cancer, but most likely thoughtlessly accepted it via their own just world fallacy and is proclaiming this out of some genuine concern for the health of the nonbelievers, which is not a hostile or disingenuous intent.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

I think you may have answered this kind of question before but right now I do believe when they gut Lawrence v Texas they are going to charge everybody online who does art, fics and whatever gay with sodomy and be put on the sex offender registry unjustifiably and it's making me feel extremely worried that I have to distance myself. But I don't know.

That's why I really hope you respond with a longer response and explaining this and I'm prepared to hear that I am right or wrong or right but over exaggerating problem this is a seriously bothering me

I've literally heard nothing about this, so I did some searching and it seems like no one is advocating for overturning Lawrence v Texas, or even seriously considering that it might get overturned.

You can read a somewhat unbiased summary of the decision here, but basically the only reason anyone might be floating that it might get overturned is because the decision relies on the same "substantive due process" that the current court attacked when overturning Roe v Wade, and because Clarence Thomas was one of the dissenting justices in Lawrence. However, as the last two paragraphs of the linked article state:

Is Lawrence v. Texas In Danger of Being Overturned? After the court's decision in Dobbs and the end of the constitutionally-protected right to abortion, there has been speculation that Lawrence v. Texas may also soon be revisited. As noted above, substantive due process cases continue to be controversial, and many conservative legal advocates question whether the Supreme Court of the United States should have ever started down this path. At least one sitting justice, Clarence Thomas, has flat-out argued that the court should eliminate substantive due process, which would once again allow states to ban same-sex marriage, criminalize homosexual conduct, and outlaw birth control. However, others, such as Justice Samuel Alito, have attempted to distinguish abortion from other substantive due process rights such as intimate sexual acts and same-sex marriage. It's important to note, however, that Alito made the same legal arguments in ​Dobbs​ that Scalia did in his Lawrence dissent. Put plainly, the only certainty is that a lot of the legal grounds that Lawrence rested on have been shaken by the current court's revocation of a previously constitutionally protected right.

Note first the unsourced "speculation". Again, I could find nothing on Bing about Lawrence being overturned, or any current case that might overturn it, or any push to have it overturned. "Speculation" in this case seems to mean "some people online are acting like the sky is falling again".

Even if Lawrence did, somehow, get overturned again, all it would do is exactly what Dobbs, which overturned Roe, did, and send the issue back to the states. As far as I know, no state currently has any law against gay sex, or sodomy in general, and there are no "trigger laws" that will activate if Lawrence gets overturned like there were in several states with regards to abortion and Roe. There is no legal interest in anti-sodomy laws. Would some deep red states try to pass them if Lawrence got overturned? Maybe. But much like banning gay marriage, there is no real push to do so. There's no political will to do either of those things, not from politicians and certainly not from voters. You can never predict what a government will do with 100% certainty, but I think it's safe to say none of us are going to see sodomy made illegal in our lifetimes. What I might expect, maybe, is to see a bunch of anti-sodomy in public laws passed, since sexual activity in public is a hot issue right now. But that's already illegal, and would only be symbolic to show voters that the state legislatures are serious about cracking down on public indecency. But again, that's just speculation on my part.

As for fan art and fics, they would never be subject to prosecution if Lawrence gets overturned. Art and real life acts are not governed by the same laws. Just remember, murder is illegal, but you can't be arrested for drawing a picture of someone being killed. Rape is illegal, but you can't be arrested for writing a rapefic. The only legal murkiness when it comes to art vs real life is sexual art depicting underage fictional characters. And as far as I can remember from the last time I got into a discussion about that, the only law against fictional underage porn is that you can't import it into the country. And that law has only ever been enforced once or twice. Most notably, against some guy who imported hundreds of thousands of dollars in loli hentai from Japan, and I don't even think he went to jail. So fandom spaces are not going to come under legal attack even if, somehow, Lawrence gets overturned and congress passes a law that makes gay sex illegal across the country. I'd be more worried about the fan artists and fic writers selling their fanart or fanfic, tbh. That is dangerous legal territory, and more and more people seem to be diving into it headfirst.

[usedtobemygirl]

So what is your evidence that matty is not a bad person?

He’s offended so many marginalized groups and they’re allowed to be upset that a person that they look up to is associating herself with someone who has been so offensive.

He watches porn where the premise is beating black women. He has openly admitted to this. There’s a video of him doing a nazi salute (and even if he was making fun of nazis, he still did an action that’s literally illegal in Germany because of how offensive it is and he’s not Jewish, he doesn’t get to do that). He called ice spice chubby and then made fun of accents.

How do those things not rub you the wrong way? How do you not see that people of color and Jewish people are hurt by this

id say that if you’re upset about him doing a nazi salute during the line in the song that says ‘thank you kanye, very cool’ during the time when kanye west was being antisemetic and he was making a statement against it then you need to get a grip, and you obviously don’t understand the point he was making.

also when matty healy made that joke about porn, the ppl he was with said it wasn’t even real he was doing a bit. (X) obviously it’s a stupid fucking joke but like it’s not real

and yeah it was a shitty think to say to abt ice spice but I’m not sure she cares that much considering she’s collaborating w taylor lol.

it’s ok to be angry or not like him but to try and demand who she dates is weird as hell and it’s odd ? why do you think you can do that lol ?

he’s not a bad person because he’s a feminist (x) he spoke out against the abortion bill and was very vocal against it (x) my favourite quote being ‘you are not men of god, you are simply misogynistic wankers’. in 2019 his Brit awards acceptance speech criticised misogyny within the music industry and quoted the guardian feminist writer Laura Snapes in order to make his point that the music industry is misogynistic (x) in 2020 he stated he would not play another lineup at a festival unless there were as many women as men playing at the said festival (x)

he’s not a bad person because he’s a very vocal advocate for LGBT rights, he has raised thousands for lgbt+ projects (x), he was banned from Dubai from kissing a man on stage in order to protest the anti-lgbt laws they had put in place (x) this act was literally punishable by ten years in prison but he still did it in order to combat homophobia.

he is also very in support of people who strike and unions and has urged his fans to resist to demonise those who strike (x)

he’s also an environmentalist who is extremely in support of Greta thunburg despite the fact all British journalists hate her, yet he still sticks his neck out because he knows it’s important (x) the 1975 also have gigs where they use hybrid power generators in order to reduce their carbon footprint (x)

i just think there are many other things you need to be focusing on currently as the world is a shitshow ! and maybe not obsess who ur fav pop star is fucking right now but maybe that’s just me !

[steepedwonders]

^ What he did when he was in office. He also takes credit for Roe v. Wade being overturned, which has caused serious harm to women in states that have now enacted strict abortion bans.

Republican majority took over the Supreme Court in 2020, Biden took office in January 2021, roe was overturned in June 2022 returning the rights back to the states, he had over a year before it was even overturned to do something to protect that right and he did nothing. He has done nothing since to try and fix it so why would Kamala be any different? Roe being overturned was a collective effort between republicans and democrats. Why was Biden running on the “if you vote me in again I’ll codify roe into law” motherfucker you’ve been president for 4 years why not do it already? Oh right it bc neither republicans nor democrats give a shit about us like you think they do.

I take it you are unaware of this bill being introduced in 2021 that was rejected in Senate:

You can't codify Roe if the law protecting those rights doesn't even make it pass Congress.

And lets not forget that the Supreme Court is held by a conservative majority, so even if this was passed, do you honestly think it wouldn't be considered unconstitutional by SCOTUS when all the anti-abortion activists filed their suits against the law?

We needed more than a Democrat president and majority in the House to codify Roe.

[dankusner]

In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government

Last year, in Texas, a deteriorating marriage became the testing ground for a novel legal strategy favored by some of the country’s most prominent right-wing lawyers and politicians.

Marcus and Brittni Silva’s divorce had just been finalized when Marcus filed a lawsuit against two of Brittni’s friends.

According to his complaint, Brittni had discovered that she was pregnant with their baby in July 2022, and ended the pregnancy by taking abortion medication.

Marcus alleges that her friends Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter “assisted Brittni Silva in murdering Ms. Silva’s unborn child.”

He is suing for wrongful death and asking for at least $1 million in damages from each defendant.

Noyola and Carpenter tell their own version of what happened in a countersuit they filed.

Marcus drank often, they allege, and when he did, he was prone to verbally abusing Brittni.

He got so drunk at one of her work events that he had to be escorted off the premises—but not before he called her a “slut,” a “whore,” and an “unfit mother” in front of her co-workers.

Brittni had stayed in the marriage for the sake of their two daugh- ters, but Marcus’s outburst convinced her that there was no saving it.

In the spring of 2022, she filed for divorce.

That summer, soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned but before Texas’s abortion “trigger ban” went into effect, Brittni got a positive result on a pregnancy test.

Certain that she did not want to have another child with Marcus, Brittni texted Noyola and Carpenter to talk about her options.

Noyola and Carpenter allege that Marcus disapproved of the friendship; he would sometimes hide Brittni’s car keys to try to prevent her from seeing her friends.

Brittni kept her pregnancy test a secret from Marcus, but according to Noyola and Carpenter’s suit, he learned about it when he riffled through her purse and discovered a Post-it note with the number for an abortion hotline and, on her phone, her texts with her friends.

Marcus took photographs of the texts.

The next day, he looked through her purse again and found a pill that can be taken to induce abortion.

Later, Marcus confronted her, Brittni told her friends.

She wrote in a text message that he had demanded that she give him her “mind body and soul” and act “like his wife who loves him.”

If she didn’t agree to give him primary custody of their daughters, Brittni wrote, he would “make sure I go to jail.”

Brittni was surprised by Marcus’s reaction, her friends’ suit alleges; he’d never been opposed to abortion.

Now he was accusing her of killing a baby and threatening to go to the police.

(Noyola and Carpenter have denied all the claims in Marcus’s lawsuit, and he has denied all the claims in their countersuit.)

In fact, Marcus had already filed a police report.

Soon, he obtained legal representation.

Jonathan Mitchell, a conservative activist and attorney and the former solicitor general of Texas, became his lawyer in the case.

Mitchell is often cited as the brains behind Texas’s 2021 “bounty law,” which provides a reward of at least $10,000 to plaintiffs who successfully sue someone who “aids or abets” abortion.

The Silva case follows a similar logic:

Marcus is, in effect, seeking a reward for reporting his ex-wife’s friends to the state.

Mitchell declined to comment for this article.

But his work on the Silva case and the bounty law, among other matters, reflects a tactic that conservatives have recently embraced in a range of social battles, including those over abortion, LGBTQ issues, and school curricula.

Across the nation, Republican-controlled state legislatures and conservative activists have passed bills and embraced legal strategies that encourage Americans to monitor one another’s behavior and report their friends, family members, and neighbors to the authorities.

Call it the Snitch State.

Texas has been particularly hospitable to rules that promote such monitoring in service of advancing conservative ideological goals.

Perhaps it’s a matter of necessity:

Despite right-wing victories in court and at the ballot box in recent decades, public sentiment on a variety of cultural issues has drifted leftward.

And so, in an effort to impose their values, Republicans have turned to invasive forms of coercion.

M o s t A m e r i c a n s , including most Texas voters, believe that abortion should be legal in some form.

The architects of this new anti-privacy regime do not.

Republican legislators in Texas have proposed numerous additional restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned, including bills that would punish employers who help their workers get abortions, outlaw abortion funds that help women seek the procedure in another state, and circumvent local district attorneys who refuse to criminally prosecute abortion providers.

Some proposed measures would restrict access to contraception.

One would criminalize speech by making it illegal to provide “information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug” and forcing internet providers in Texas to censor such information.

It’s hard not to conclude that the people pushing for bills like these want women to be scared to even contemplate having an abortion, let alone seek one out.

They have said so themselves; in 2021, for example, the anti-abortion organization Texas Right to Life said it was “optimistic that,” in light of the bounty law, “the day is soon coming when abortion will not only be illegal, but unthinkable.”

Even expressing support for abortion rights could be considered suspect.

Indeed, the Silva lawsuit seems to foreshadow this reality:

It alleges that Brittni and her friends “celebrated the murder by dressing up in Handmaid’s Tale costumes  59 for Halloween,” as if their costumes indicate liberal views on abortion that deserve sanction by the state.

As of this writing, no one has yet been successfully sued under Texas’s bounty law, and other measures that seek to turn citizens into informants have faced challenges in court.

(If reelected, former President Donald Trump is likely to appoint more federal judges who would look favorably upon such measures.)

But these policies have chilling effects whether or not they are strictly enforced.

The mere threat of having one’s privacy invaded and one’s life potentially destroyed is sufficient to shape people’s speech and behavior.

American history shows us where this could lead.

The roots of this political style lie in the state-sponsored efforts of the first and second Red Scares.

During the first, in the years following World War I, a wave of anarchist violence provided a predicate for suppressing free speech, as well as a justification for mob violence against people perceived to be disloyal to the government.

But it was during the second Red Scare, in the 1940s and ’50s, that the informant emerged as a paramount figure in American politics, when the federal government’s attempts to block Soviet espionage metastasized into a national panic.

Dozens of states passed laws criminalizing speech deemed subversive.

Private employers, unions, and professional groups adopted loyalty oaths and administrative tests that inquired about personal beliefs and past associations.

According to the constitutional scholar Geoffrey R. Stone, from 1947 to 1953, more than 4.7 million people were scrutinized as part of the federal government’s loyalty program, leading to about 40,000 “full-field investigations” undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

The bureau relied on allegations from informants, many of which were “unsubstantiated hearsay—mere gossip, rumor, and slander,” Stone writes.

The accuracy of the allegations hardly mattered; federal investigators often did not take the time to verify informants’ claims.

As a result, people policed their own thoughts, actions, and relationships out of fear that someone might tell on them.

Soviet espionage and expansionism were both very real threats.

Many Red hunters, however, were not merely trying to prevent the establishment of Soviet-style communism in the U.S., or to protect U.S. atomic secrets.

At a moment when liberalism appeared to be ascendant, conservative beliefs about economics, labor, race, gender, and sexuality could all be imposed in the name of “fighting communism.”

As historians such as Ellen Schrecker and Landon R. Y. Storrs have argued, the second Red Scare was, in this way, successful at constraining the radical possibilities of New Deal social democracy.

The power of organized labor was curtailed, and the potential for a more generous welfare state was limited.

Even in books, films, and television shows, Americans sought to avoid topics and storylines that might be interpreted as left-wing.

Black workers—who were asked questions like “Have you ever danced with a white girl?” and “Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?”—were among those who “suffered disproportion- ately” from loyalty investigations, Schrecker has written.

Homo- sexuality, or perceived homosexuality, was also punished.

As the historian David K. Johnson writes in The Lavender Scare, at one point during the Truman administration, “in the State Department alone, security officials boasted that on average they were firing one homosexual per day, more than double the rate for those suspected of political disloyalty.”

Ruining someone’s life with an anonymous accusation was, for a time, a relatively simple matter.

During the second Red Scare, communism was frequently described as a plague that infected and transformed unwilling victims.

Modern conservatives use similar rhetoric to justify fighting “wokeness” or “the woke mind virus,” presenting liberalism as a civilizational threat that justifies extreme measures to suppress it—particularly, these days, in the name of protecting children.

But whereas conservatives in the ’40s and ’50s depicted the Soviet Union as a dystopian cautionary tale, their counterparts today openly venerate the oppressive tactics of illiberal societies abroad.

In March, for example, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tenure as “a model for conservative governance.”

In Sep- tember, Trump praised Orbán from the presidential-debate stage.

The contemporary crackdown is different in another crucial respect:

Although many of the people targeted during the second Red Scare chose to withdraw from public service or public life in the face of invasive surveillance and constant suspicion, that is much harder to do in the 21st century.

Today, many of us share intimate details of our personal lives online with friends, loved ones, and, often, total strangers.

Whether we intend to or not, thanks to the data economy, we are all our own informants, sharing our location, reading habits, search terms, menstrual-cycle dates, online orders, and more.

In exchange for using online services and social-media platforms, we make ourselves more visible to those who would become the eyes and ears of the state.

I f y o u l i v e in a part of the country where your very person could attract unwanted attention from the state and its informants, abstaining from social media or even withdrawing from public life may not guarantee safe harbor.

Sometimes, you just need to leave.

Karen Krajcer grew up in a conservative religious family in Houston before moving to Austin, where she and her husband raised their kids.

When their eldest child, who is trans, was in first grade, she came up to Krajcer in the kitchen and said, “Mom, I’m a girl.” Krajcer replied, “You don’t have to be a girl to like girl things.”

“I know,” her daughter said. “But I’m a girl who likes girl things.”

“She just held my stare,” Krajcer told me.

“And I realized that I didn’t understand what she meant, but that I’m her parent, and it’s my job to find out.”

Then, one day when she was in fourth grade, Krajcer’s daughter asked if she was going to die.

“She’s not prone to questions like that,” Krajcer told me. “She wasn’t talking about self-harm or suicide. She was afraid.”

It was February 2022, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott had ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of minors who were receiving gender-affirming medical care.

“The Texas Family Code is clear,” Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a legal opinion that Abbott used to justify his order.

“Causing or permitting substantial harm to the child or the child’s growth and development is child abuse.”

Abbott called upon “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to tell the government about families who were known to have trans children, so that they could be investigated for abuse.

These families were now surrounded by potential informants: teachers, friends, neighbors—even extended family.

Professional medical groups, including the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, objected to the order, noting in one legal brief that “the medical treatments characterized as ‘child abuse’ in the Abbott Letter are part of the widely-accepted treatment guidelines for adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria, and are supported by the best available scientific evidence.”

The portrayal of gender-affirming care as child abuse nevertheless led to a rash of reports.

People called DFPS to report students “even if they’re just simply going by a nickname, or different pronouns,” Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, told me.

DFPS representatives appeared at Texas schools to pull students out of class for questioning, and showed up at children’s homes to speak with their parents.

“As an investigator, when you go in to speak to a child, as easy as you try to be and as kind, it’s traumatizing; it just is. It’s invasive,” Morgan Davis, a former Texas child-welfare investigator, told me.

Davis, who is trans, eventually resigned in protest of the order.

A DFPS employee testified in court that, unlike with other kinds of investigations, she and her colleagues did not have discretion to set aside cases involving trans kids despite finding no evidence of abuse.

One DFPS employee who herself has a trans daughter asked her supervisor for clarification on the new policy.

Would she now be considered an abuser for obtaining health care for her daughter?

And if so, would her child be taken from her?

According to a lawsuit that the ACLU filed on behalf of the employee and her family, she was put on leave hours later, and told the next day that she was under investigation.

A state investigator came to her family’s home, seeking access to her daughter’s medical records.

The order threatened to separate trans children from their parents, which could lead to expensive legal battles for families who wanted to keep custody.

Tracy Harting, a lawyer in Travis County who has been involved in child welfare for more than two decades, immediately grasped the cruel irony:

If trans kids were taken from their parents, she told me, they would be entering a foster-care system “that’s already overrun with kids who were actually being physically and emotionally abused by their families.”

In response to the ACLU’s lawsuit, a judge blocked enforcement of Abbott’s order in March 2022, and two years later, a state appeals court upheld the injunction.

But an exodus of families with trans children was already under way, particularly after Texas outlawed gender-affirming medical care for children in 2023.

“I don’t want to live in this state of terror anymore,” one mother who left for Colorado told Texas Monthly.

Krajcer and her family, who live in Oregon now, felt the same way.

Although her daughter was not undergoing any medical interventions, Krajcer still feared that she could be reported to the authorities by someone who disapproved of her gender identity.

The implications of staying in Texas, Krajcer said, were too terrifying to contemplate.

“What happens if I’m out in a rural area and our trans daughter breaks her arm? Am I going to be able to take her to the ER for basic medical care? Or is there a chance that a nurse or a receptionist or just a person sitting in the waiting room could turn us in?”

“I imagined being led into some small windowless room for my monitored child visitation,” Krajcer said, “and looking at our children and knowing that we could have gone, that we could have left, but we didn’t.”

I n A u g u s t 2 0 2 3 , Michael Troncale, then an English teacher in Houston, was upset about what he saw as the “anti-trans pro- paganda coming from the right wing in Texas.”

Wanting to show support for his transgender students, he put up a poster in his classroom that said trans people belong.

No one seemed to mind at first.

But two months later, a school administrator told him that a parent had complained that the sign was “divisive.”

Troncale didn’t know who the parent was, or if their child was in his class.

“‘Look, I’m sorry, but our legal team says you can’t have this up, because it’s a political message,’” Troncale says he was told.

“I didn’t consider it political.”

Perhaps he should have. In the past few years, Texas conservatives have undertaken a campaign of censorship in schools that longtime educators told me is unprecedented in its breadth and ferocity—part of a nationwide backlash against what conservatives perceive as left-leaning books and ideas, many of them involving LGBTQ and racial issues.

A major means of enforcement for this campaign is tattling:

Parents and students alike are encouraged to report the teaching of forbidden ideas, so that those who teach them may be punished.

The recent spate of regulations against so-called critical race theory in K–12 schools exemplifies this logic.

(Actual critical race theory is an academic framework conceived of by the Black legal scholar Derrick Bell; it is not generally taught out- side higher education.)

In 2021, Texas passed House Bill 3979, which included the provision that educators cannot “require or make part of a course” the idea that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”

Using language designed to sound egalitarian, the law purportedly safeguarded all students’ psychological well-being:

Educators, it stipulated, cannot teach students that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.”

When Representative Steve Toth introduced the bill, he said it was “about teaching racial harmony by telling the truth that we are all equal, both in God’s eyes and our founding documents.”

The alternative, he suggested, was communist indoctrination, “a souped-up version of Marxism” from which children needed to be protected.

In practice, though, H.B. 3979 and the similar Senate Bill 3— which went into effect three months later, replacing the House bill—constitute a de facto government ban on material that conservatives oppose, and essentially mean that the feelings of a certain category of student are the only ones that matter.

In 2023, a school-district trustee in Montgomery County asked for “personal ideologies” to be “left at the door.”

One parent, she said, had told her that their first grader had been so distressed by a poster celebrating racial inclusivity that he moved classrooms.

Another trustee suggested that displaying LGBTQ flags in schools might be illegal.

Texas’s recent cascade of book bans has also been framed as an attempt to protect children from distress.

“Parents have the right to shield their children from obscene content used in schools their children attend,” Governor Abbott has written.

But parents already have the right to tell their kids which books they can and can’t read; what Abbott is calling for is the right to control which books other people’s children read.

Matt Krause, a former attorney for the Christian conservative law firm Liberty Counsel, was a Texas state legislator in the fall of 2021 when he sent a letter to superintendents inquiring about “books or content” in schools that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

He attached a list of roughly 850 books, requesting that the school districts tell him how many copies of each they had.

Krause—who later acknowledged to The Dallas Morning News that he did not believe he had read the books in question—had no power to order any books banned, but his list, and his invocation of the language in H.B. 3979, helped spur an avalanche of challenges across the state.

According to a lawsuit filed by library patrons in Llano County, one woman, who would later be appointed to the county’s library board, sent an email to a county official with the subject line “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.”

Attached was a spreadsheet of books from Krause’s list that were in the libraries.

Another concerned citizen, who herself would also later be appointed to the library board, was more direct about what she found objectionable:

In an email to allies, she referred to Krause’s list as the “16-page list of CRT and LGBTQ book[s].”

Indeed, the titles on Krause’s list, many of which deal with topics such as racism, LGBTQ rights, and abortion, highlight the political nature of his effort.

Soon, the Llano County libraries began removing some of these books from their shelves.

One librarian alleges that she was fired after she refused to remove targeted books.

She is now working as a cashier to make ends meet while she sues the county over her dismissal.

(The county has denied any wrongdoing.)

After a court ordered the books returned to the shelves, county officials appealed the order and considered shutting down the libraries altogether rather than allow community members to access the material.

(County officials said the removal of books had nothing to do with their content. They ultimately decided to keep the library open, and an appeals court later ruled that some of the books must be returned. That court is now reconsidering its order.)

The officials are represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the same attorney who is representing Marcus Silva.

According to Axios, Mitchell has also reportedly drafted hypothetical bounty laws that would provide financial remuneration to those who snitch on librarians for keeping banned books on their shelves— or even just for expressing pro-LGBTQ sentiments

In 2024, the purpose of banning books is not to keep children from accessing disturbing material—the internet exists—but to use the power of the state to stigmatize certain ideas and identities.

Nelva Williamson, an Advanced Placement history teacher from Houston, told me that she sees efforts like Krause’s as part of a right-wing response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the earnest desire of many young white people to learn more about the country’s history of injustice.

At the core of the backlash, Williamson thinks, is a fear that children will leave their parents’ politics behind.

“They just put CRT as an umbrella over everything,” she said.

“What is included in the obscenity standard is actually very vague,” Jeremy Young, a historian who runs PEN America’s anti-censorship program for education, told me.

“And this is something that you’ll see across these bill types. The vagueness is the point; the vagueness is the way that the bills are enforced. Which is to say, when a bill has very vague definitions, it can be either overenforced or underenforced, depending on the person doing the enforcing.”

Texas legislators cannot embed themselves in every classroom to monitor whether forbidden concepts and books are being dis- cussed and assigned.

But they can rely on informants.

According to NBC News, a chief deputy constable in Hood County, recently spent two years attempting to bring criminal charges against a group of school librarians after activists filed a complaint alleging that their libraries were carrying obscene books (the county district attorney ultimately said there was not enough conclusive evidence to charge the librarians).

In October 2021, Rickie Farah, a fourth-grade teacher in the Dallas area who had previously been named Teacher of the Year, was reprimanded by the school board after a parent complained about a book that her child brought home from Farah’s classroom—This Book Is Anti-racist, by Tiffany Jewell.

Farah contested the reprimand and kept her job.

But her colleagues got the message:

Even allowing a student to encounter a book that a parent disapproved of might lead to consequences.

Higher education has also been a target for Republicans, who see universities as sources of “woke ideology.”

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has argued that “tenured professors must not be able to hide behind the phrase ‘academic freedom,’ and then proceed to poison the minds of our next generation.”

A 2023 bill to end tenure at state universities was rejected, but the legislature instead passed a law that gives politically appointed university overseers broad leeway to terminate tenured faculty for reasons of “professional incompetence” or “conduct involving moral turpitude.”

Thus, in Texas, academic freedom may now be contingent on the political approval of state officials.

In 2022, Lauren Miller, who lived in Dallas, was pregnant with twins and suffering from such severe nausea that she found it difficult to eat and had to go to the emergency room twice.

When one twin was diagnosed with a genetic disorder that is almost always fatal, she and her husband struggled to get clear guidance from medical professionals.

No one would even say the word abortion out loud.

“We would have genetic counselors—so, people who don’t even give abortions; they just counsel on options—get midway through a sentence and then just stop, just scared to say more,” Miller told me.

Then one genetic coun- selor, who had lived and worked in New York, let slip that in cases like these, doctors would usually perform a procedure called a “single fetal reduction.”

Miller asked what that meant.

“Sh e i m m e d i a t e l y clammed up and she started apologizing; you could tell she was scared,” Miller said.

“It was truly like we had Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and, you know, other politicians, Texas Supreme Court justices, just sitting in that room taking notes, chewing on a pen cap right there with us.”

Miller decided to have the single fetal reduction— aborting one fetus—to protect her health and that of the other twin.

Afraid to leave a paper trail, she told friends in a group text of the diagnosis, but not about her plans.

She had a quick, careful phone conversation with a friend who was a gynecologic oncologist, who recommended a doctor in Colorado.

As she spoke over the phone with the Colorado doctor, Miller noticed that he made sure to say explicitly that he was not in the state of Texas.

At a party with friends that fall, Miller and her husband were careful not to mention that they were going to Colorado.

“Who was there who would overhear and report us because they want that $10,000?” Miller said.

“We didn’t know everybody who was at the house that evening.”

They also worried about the logistics of their “PEOPLE AREN’T SURE WHAT THEY CAN AND CAN’T LEGALLY SAY.”  

“The first question,” Miller said, was “what kind of digital footprint are we leaving? Do we leave our phones behind? Do we drive? Do we do everything in cash?”

Because of her severe nausea, she didn’t think she would make it 12 hours in a car from Dallas to Colorado, and she was concerned about driving through rural Texas on her way to get an abortion at 14 weeks pregnant, especially if she ended up in an emergency room.

She decided to fly.

Miller was perhaps more fearful than she needed to be about her trip to Colorado.

The Texas bounty law has not been used against people who travel out of state, and women themselves cannot be punished for having an abortion—only people who help them can.

Still, given the political climate in Texas, her cautious behavior doesn’t seem irrational.

What would the ultrasound tech back in Dallas say or do when they noticed there was only one heartbeat instead of two?

The procedure went well.

Miller’s severe nausea subsided, and the remainder of her pregnancy was smooth.

She delivered a healthy baby in March 2023.

As it turned out, Miller’s doctor in Dallas, Austin Dennard, had also recently fled Texas for an abortion because of a pregnancy complication of her own.

Miller recalled that at her first appointment with the doctor after her abortion, Dennard simply said, in a formal tone, “There is only one heart rate. I will note in your file that there is an intrauterine fetal demise of one twin.”

The two women later joined a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sought to set clear standards for exceptions to the state’s abortion ban.

This past May, the Texas Supreme Court issued a ruling leaving the vague exceptions language intact.

Such lack of clarity can have a chilling effect.

“There’s a lot of confusion,” Damla Karsan, a Houston ob-gyn, told me.

“People aren’t sure what they can and can’t legally say.”

In December 2023, Karsan was personally warned by Paxton against performing an abortion for Kate Cox, a Texas mother who was ultimately forced to leave the state to get an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with the same genetic condition as Miller’s. (Karsan was also a plaintiff with Miller and Dennard in the Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit.)

Still, rules that provoke this kind of fear and uncertainty around private choices have flourished primarily in conservative enclaves; when I spoke with teachers in more liberal and diverse areas of Texas, they seemed less afraid of being reported to authorities.

Areas like Llano County, where support for Trump is strong, have so far been most successful in their efforts to root out subversives and promote self-policing.

For the time being, abortion laws like Texas’s, as restrictive as they are ambiguous, don’t stand a chance outside Republican-dominated states; women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox can still travel elsewhere—if they can afford it—to legally receive the care they need.

Similarly, families with trans children can move out of state, and library patrons can go to court when books are removed from the shelves.

But for how long?

In September, Texas sued to overturn federal privacy regulations that prevent investigators from seizing the medical records of women who leave the state to get an abortion.

And just as the influence of the federal government supercharged the first and second Red Scares, it could very well, under a Republican president, expand the reach of the Snitch State nationwide.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, suggests adopting a measure that would allow for a political purge of anyone in the federal government who is not obsequiously loyal to Trump.

The former president, and conservative legal elites, have called for the traditional inde-pendence of the Justice Department to be disregarded, which would allow Trump, if reelected, to use the immense power of federal law enforcement to target abortion providers, political dissidents, and even local prosecutors who do not use their discretion as the administration demands.

In his foreword to Project 2025’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership, Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes that “pornography”—which he describes as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children”—“should be outlawed,” and that “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

He adds that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

Roberts also describes gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and echoes the legal language used to ban “critical race theory” in places like Texas.

The policy blueprint outlines a plan for forcing states to report abortion and miscarriage data to the federal government, referring to the harrowing experiences of women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox with the dismissive euphemism of “abortion tourism.”

Presumably, executing these plans would depend on a steady supply of willing informants.

Conservatives have long railed against the chilling effect of “cancel culture.”

But by encouraging people to tell on their neighbors, Republicans have, in effect, constructed a legal frame- work for socializing the means of cancellation.

Having routinely mocked left-wing college students as “snowflakes” for their use of content warnings and their desire for “safe spaces,” Republicans have now institutionalized their own opposition to points of view they dislike with laws that punish those who disagree with them.

They have attempted to subject teachers, librarians, and educational administrators to harsh punishments should they express—or even make available—ideas that conservatives deem offensive.

They have attempted to criminalize the parents of trans children, and have forced pregnant women to flee their home in order to receive lifesaving care.

All of this has been done in the name of “liberty,” to combat what Roberts has called the “totalitarian cult” that is the “Great Awokening.”

The first and second Red Scares created oppressive societies in the name of preventing America from becoming one.

The version of “liberty” being promoted by right-wing legislators and activists today rings just as hollow, a stifling political and social conformity enforced by the fear that someone, somewhere, might report you.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

After nearly two years of losing elections, Republicans think they have an answer to their abortion problem: If you can’t beat them, pretend to be them. With Americans furious over bans, support for abortion right skyrocketing, and the issue winning every ballot measure since Roe was overturned, conservatives’ new strategy is to propose ‘pro-choice’ amendments of their own. Disguised as initiatives to protect abortion rights, these measures would actually trick voters into codifying Republican bans. In Arizona, for example, Republicans are considering a ‘pro-choice’ amendment to distract from anger over the 1864 ban and to undercut a real abortion rights measure. A leaked strategy document shows that the amendment would claim to protect abortion up until 15 weeks, but be made toothless by restrictions enshrined alongside it. Republicans are even tossing around feminist-sounding names like the “Arizona Abortion Protection Act” and the “Arizona Abortion and Reproductive Care Act.” The goal is to make Arizonans believe they’re voting to protect abortion rights while directing them away from the measure that would actually do so.

Something similar is happening in Nebraska, where a coalition of anti-abortion groups proposed a measure they hope will distract from a genuine abortion rights amendment. After the pro-choice group Protect Our Rights launched a ballot initiative to protect abortion until ‘viability’, conservatives proposed a similar-sounding amendment, Protect Women and Children. This measure would supposedly allow abortion in the first trimester. But the Nebraska amendment wouldn’t actually make abortion more available. Just like the proposal the Arizona GOP is considering, it’s a massive deception. Nebraska already has 12-week ban; that means this ballot measure would codify a Republican ban into the state constitution, making it virtually repeal-proof. Still, to trick voters, anti-abortion politicians are calling the measure “a second, better choice.” (It is not a coincidence that this amendment has been endorsed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Nebraska Right to Life, and the Nebraska Family Alliance.)

Republicans trying to fool voters by using pro-choice rhetoric isn’t new. When an anti-abortion amendment was on the ballot in Kansas in 2022, conservative groups sent voters misleading text messages telling them to “Vote YES to protect women’s health.” (A ‘yes’ vote would have removed abortion protections.) And when Virginia Republicans were pushing a 15-week ban, they insisted the law wasn’t a ‘ban’ at all, but an effort to “keep abortion legal” for the first weeks of pregnancy. In a moment when Americans overwhelmingly want abortion to be legal, Republicans are desperate to sound as reasonable, moderate, and even as ‘pro-choice’, as possible. Their extremist talking points haven’t worked; that’s why they’ve shifted from taking about ‘bans’ and abortion being ‘murder,’ to using words like ‘consensus’ and ‘compassion.’ Conservatives need voters to believe that they’re seeking some sort of middle ground. The truth? They will say anything to ban abortion and to keep it banned. They’d rather craft elaborate, deceptive ballot measures than lift wildly unpopular and unwanted restrictions. And they’d rather frame their policies as pro-choice than risk losing another vote.

The good news is that all of this means conservatives’ current tactics aren’t working. Their messaging is failing miserably, and every effort to stop ballot initiatives has reminded Americans that Republicans are passing these bans against our wishes. 

Jessica Valenti's latest Abortion, Every Day entry sounds the alarm about the GOP's deceptive use of ballot measures to trick people into voting into codifying abortion bans using pro-choice language.

[printedword]

Sitting at her computer one day in late December, Dr. Sarah Osmundson mustered her best argument to approve an abortion for a suffering patient. The woman was 14 weeks pregnant when she learned her fetus was developing without a skull. This increased the likelihood of a severe buildup of amniotic fluid, which could cause her uterus to rupture and possibly kill her. Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who helps patients navigate high-risk pregnancies, knew that outcome was uncommon, but she had seen it happen. She drafted an email to her colleagues on the Nashville hospital’s abortion committee, arguing that the risk was significant enough to meet the slim exception to Tennessee’s strict abortion ban, which allows termination only when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” She pleaded with her fellow doctors to spare this woman the gamble when her baby wasn’t even viable. Then came the replies. One doctor wasn’t “brave enough.” Another urged her to consider the optics — approving an abortion in this case could be seen as “cavalier” and trying to circumvent the law. “I’m saying this because I care about you and your personal liberties,” the doctor said. To Osmundson, the responses reflected just how much abortion bans had warped doctors’ decision-making and forced them to violate the ethics of their profession, which require acting in the best interests of their patients. Most medical exceptions in abortion bans only allow the procedure to “save the life of the mother.” But there is a wide spectrum of health risks patients can face during pregnancy, and even those that are potentially fatal could fall outside of the exceptions, depending on how the law is interpreted and enforced. Without clarification from legislators and prosecutors on how to handle the real-life nuances that have emerged in hospitals across America, doctors in abortion ban states say they are unable to provide care to high-risk pregnant patients that meets medical standards. Under threat of prison time and professional ruin, they are finding their personal interests pitted against their patients’ and are overriding their expert training for factors that have nothing to do with medicine, like political perceptions and laws they aren’t qualified to interpret. As a result, some patients are forced to endure significant risks or must travel out of state if they want to end a pregnancy. Sometimes, their doctors aren’t even giving them adequate information about the dangers they face.

[pashterlengkap]

Viciously anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Mike Johnson elected as new House Speaker

House Republicans have elected anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as the new U.S. House Speaker. In a Wednesday afternoon vote, he received three votes above the 217 threshold needed to assume the role. He was the fourth candidate for the position, following the failed nominations of Reps. Steve Scalise (R-LA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Tom Emmer (R-MN). In response to Johnson’s election, out gay Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus condemned House Republicans, stating, “Extreme MAGA Republicans elected a Speaker who has dedicated his career to attacking LGBTQI+ people and pushing an anti-equality agenda… The House has already taken more than 10 anti-equality votes this Congress. By electing Mike Johnson—a vehement opponent of LGBTQI+ equality—as Speaker, his supporters have signaled they want these attacks against our community to continue.” Related: Here’s where the 8 GOP presidential debate participants stand on LGBTQ+ issues HRC said the candidates are largely “expected to continue punching down on queer and transgender kids to make themselves look ‘presidential.’” A statement issued by Human Rights Campaign President Kellery Robinson said, “The MAGA House majority has selected the most anti-equality Speaker in U.S. history by elevating Mike Johnson — this is a choice that will be a stain on the record of everyone who voted for him.” Get the Daily Brief The news you care about, reported on by the people who care about you: Subscribe to our Newsletter “Johnson is someone who doesn’t hesitate to express his disdain for the LGTBQ+ community from the rooftops and then introduces legislation that seeks to erase us from society,” Robinson added. “Just like Jim Jordan, Mike Johnson is an election-denying, anti-LGBTQ+ extremist, and the lawmakers who appeared to stand on principle in opposing Jordan’s bid have revealed themselves to be just as out-of-touch as their new leader.”  Johnson previously served as a senior attorney and national spokesman for the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), filing lawsuits against same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, and same-sex marital benefits. ADF also led a campaign against GLSEN’s annual anti-bullying Day of Silence. Johnson said the day’s anti-bullying message “cloaked” the “real message… that that homosexuality is good for society.” While serving in the Louisiana state legislature from 2015 to 2017, Johnson introduced a so-called “religious freedom” bill to legalize discrimination against married same-sex couples. He told the Baptist Message that he was “on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage.” Last December, Johnson introduced a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” The bill threatens to cut federal funding to libraries, school districts, hospitals, government entities, or other organizations for “hosting or promoting any program, event, or literature involving sexually-oriented material,” including “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related topics.” In a July hearing, Johnson — who serves as the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, said that parents don’t have the right to provide their children with access to gender-affirming healthcare, something he falsely called a form of “abuse and physical harm,” even though every major American medical association has endorsed it as safe, effective, and essential to the well-being of trans youth. “Mike Johnson wants to criminalize abortion care and impose a nationwide ban. Mike Johnson was one of the chief architects of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Mike Johnson also wants to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it. Those are extreme views,” House… http://dlvr.it/SxzKW9

[usadailyshirt]

Quatinashirt.com - Lyon County Athletics 2nd Region Back 2 Back Champions 2023 5th District Peat Champions shirt

Buy this shirt:  Click here to buy this Quatinashirt.com - Lyon County Athletics 2nd Region Back 2 Back Champions 2023 5th District Peat Champions shirt

I don’t want to criticize Democrats for trying to pass this legislation. The situation is dire. As the Lyon County Athletics 2nd Region Back 2 Back Champions 2023 5th District Peat Champions shirt moreover I love this head of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson put it to me: “The right to make decisions about our bodies and our lives is hanging by a thread, and we need action from our leaders. The Women’s Health Protection Act would help protect abortion access and guard against bans and medically unnecessary restrictions imposed by state politicians in Texas and across the country” We elected these leaders to at least try to protect our rights and interests, after all. But ultimately the Supreme Court is the last word on everything—every piece of legislation. So even if they could get the House bill through the Senate, the Supreme Court could just overturn it, as Rewire news’ senior law editor Imani Gandy told me. “Democrats’ efforts to codify Roe, while commendable, are dead in the water with this Supreme Court. There’s not a chance in hell that the group of 6 Federalist Society-captured conservative justices on the Supreme Court won’t find some reason that any statute cementing abortion rights is unconstitutional.”

The problem once again is that Democrats are deploying traditional tools to fight a Republican Party which has abandoned all democratic norms and is merely just trying to consolidate power by any means necessary. Democrats are once again bringing a spoon to a knife fight. As Gandy puts it: “Democrats’ time would be better spent trying to either nuke or reform the Lyon County Athletics 2nd Region Back 2 Back Champions 2023 5th District Peat Champions shirt moreover I love this filibuster so that they can move forward with expanding the courts.” Democrats need to change the makeup of the Court by adding justices, they need to right the wrongs Mitch McConnell committed by stealing at least two of the nine seats on the Court. In short, Democrats need to act like Republicans. The American people need a Democratic party which will protect their rights with the same zeal that Republicans are focused on taking them away.

Home: Click here to visit Quatinashirt.com