Tag: bigots

Texas wastes million$ on hiding from Mexico

Leave a comment

As Governor Greg Abbott’s scheme to wall off Texas from Mexico quickly and quietly accelerates, the state has now doled out $830 million in contracts to raise over 30 miles of border barrier.

Last week, the Texas Facilities Commission approved its fifth construction contract for the project, worth $137 million, to erect nearly 7 miles of steel-bollard fencing along the border in Webb and Zapata counties. That’s on top of the over 9 miles that the state contracted to build in Webb earlier this month.

As fast as $$$ pour in the door, Abbot and Trump shovel ’em back out. Wonder how many land in whose pockets?

Fascist-minded politicos have decided that LGBTQ folk are as “dangerous” as everyone else they fear and hate

1 Comment


WASHINGTON POST/GETTY

Last November, Cameron Samuels was met with cold stares when they attended a school board meeting to speak out against bans on LGBTQ books and resource websites in their district…

Now [Houston’s] Katy ISD students involved in the movement Samuels helped start are trying to push forward a book review policy, which would ensure at least one student is represented on the committee whenever a book is challenged in the district.

Katy ISD is just one of many school districts where students have begun pushing back against book bans. Recently, schools across the US have begun challenging—and in some cases successfully removing—a growing list of books from LGBTQ and Black authors. Some librarians have found themselves targeted for creating book displays featuring LGBTQ titles. And right-wing groups like Moms For Liberty have been organizing around the country to ban books they deem “obscene” from schools, and even make them illegal to sell or lend to minors…

Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education programs at PEN America says he is seeing youth voices play a critical role in book ban opposition.

“At a time when many teachers and librarians are having their speech chilled, it is often students who are leading the charge and speaking out for their rights—as they should,” Friedman told Motherboard.

I can empathize. BITD, as a night school student in profession-oriented college courses, simple self-interest pushed me into similar activism. Not often; but, often enough to identify me as a PITA to a few teachers and administrators, who felt they had a vested interest in blocking any doorway that allowed the entry of up-to-date textbooks.

Michigan town defunds library that refused to remove LGBTQ books

1 Comment

Another day, another example of grown adults rallying to ban books that could be educational, affirming, and in some cases life-saving for their kids. This one is in west Michigan, where residents of Jamestown Township voted this week to defund their local library following public disagreements about its inclusion of LGBTQ books for young adults.

The vote was against renewing a millage, the share of property taxes that provides 84 percent of the Patmos Library’s operating budget, for 2023. Ron French noted, in an extensive report for Bridge Michigan, that this “may be the first time a community voted, in effect, to close its library” rather than continue to provide LGBTQ books to kids.

When library staff refused to take the books from the library, the effort to defund it began. The library can operate on its current budget through the end of the first quarter of 2023; after that, library board president Larry Walton told French, the library would have to close.

We must be the leading country in the world at using democratic powers to enforce anti-democratic politics.

SCOTUS rightwingers change Roe vs Wade…just because they can!

3 Comments

It’s not just that US Supreme Court majorities upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and overturned Roe v. Wade. The opinion also skewed the crux of the conversation going forward — with just three words.

“Unborn human being” is the term Associate Justice Samuel Alito adopted from the Mississippi statute, thereby replacing the key phrase in the landmark 1973 Roe ruling that spelled out a constitutional right to abortion: “potential life.”…

Alito didn’t write God or Christianity or Bible anywhere in the opinion, but his justification is a veiled “religious narrative,” said Rebecca Todd Peters, a religious studies professor at Elon University. By co-opting the language in Mississippi’s law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the majority opinion gives credence to the notion — embraced largely by the religious right — that life begins at fertilization, she said. The ruling has already emboldened several states to ban and criminalize the medical procedure in almost all circumstances.

“That is an enormous shift,” Peters said. “It erases whole groups of people who have different religious beliefs.”

These egregious pricks stuffed into positions of legal power by the most useless fool who’s ever been president – mean not only to change the course of history; but, jurisprudence…in passing.

A right-wing favorite is back — Banning books confronting bigotry

6 Comments

Attempts to ban books in the United States surged in 2021 to the highest level since the American Library Association began tracking book challenges 20 years ago, the organization said Monday.

Most of the targeted books were by or about Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people, the association said.

Book challenges are a perennial issue at school board meetings and libraries. But more recently, efforts fueled by the country’s intensely polarized political environment have been amplified by social media, where lists of books some consider to be inappropriate for children circulate quickly and widely.

Challenges to certain titles have been embraced by some conservative politicians, cast as an issue of parental choice and parental rights. Those who oppose these efforts, however, say that prohibiting the books violates the rights of parents and children who want those titles to be available…

The library association said it counted 729 challenges last year to library, school and university materials, as well as research databases and e-book platforms. Each challenge can contain multiple titles, and the association tracked 1,597 individual books that were either challenged or removed.

It never ends. To some small extent, all politics are generally accepting of some level of censorship. Everything from science to social group standards offer acceptable reasons for bans. From this small individual outpost that has wandered this nation’s culture and conclusions for more than a few decades, the most common excuses I’ve witnessed are offered to perpetuate someone bigoted birthright.

Which is a constitutional crap rationale!