Tag: aclu

Zooey Zephyr’s Taking The Bastards To Court

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Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, the state’s first transgender lawmaker, isn’t going to let Republicans in the Montana House of Representatives silence her. At least, not without a fight. Last week, you’ll recall, the GOP supermajority voted to censure Zephyr for speaking up too transly against bills banning gender-affirming care and writing trans people out of Montana law. Rather than expelling her like the jerks in Tennessee did to their meddlesome Democrats, the Montana House barred Zephyr from the floor and hearing rooms of the Capitol until the legislative session ends later this week, preventing her from participating in debate while allowing her to vote, remotely and silently, and to watch the same public stream of House proceedings as anyone else can on the internet. So generous!

Previously:

Montana Silences Zooey Zephyr

Montana Republicans Want In On That ‘Expel Democrats’ Thing That Worked So Well For Tennessee

Montana House Republicans Officially Punish Zooey Zephyr For Legislating While Trans

Monday, Zephyr, with help from the Montana ACLU, filed a lawsuit in state court asking for an emergency injunction returning her to the House floor for whatever days remain in the session, arguing that her First Amendment rights had been stomped on. The suit also names several of her constituents as plaintiffs, arguing that the House’s action effectively denied them and the rest of Zephyr’s 11,000 constituents representation.

The AP interviewed one of those plaintiffs, Anna Wong, who has a transgender child and said she’d voted for Zephyr in 2022 because she knew Zephyr would “speak out against the onslaught of bills targeting transgender youth.”

“Suicide amongst transgender youth is not imaginary,” Wong said. “It is not a game and it is not a political foil. It is real. It is heartbreaking. And it is the responsibility of my representative to speak out against bills promoting it.”

That’s exactly what Zephyr was getting at when she spoke against Senate Bill 99, which bans gender-affirming care for trans youth. Zephyr accurately said forcing trans kids to undergo puberty as the sex they don’t identify is “tantamount to torture” and said she hoped that those voting for the bill would “see the blood on your hands” the next time they pray during a House invocation. (Technically, the censure resolution only cited Zephyr’s refusal to leave the floor last week during a demonstration by her supporters. But c’mon, we know why she was silenced.)

While there are only a few days left in the session, the Legislature still hasn’t passed a budget, and Zephyr’s lawsuit seeks her immediate reinstatement so she can represent her constituents in debate on that and other last minute bills.

Emily Flower, a spokesperson for Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R), whose office will manage the defense in the lawsuit, dismissed it as “performance litigation — political activism masquerading as a lawsuit,” and said that the courts have no power to intervene, because separation of powers.

As Hayes Brown notes at MSNBC, that argument may win out, unfortunately, because the US Constitution gives the US House and Senate the power to “determine the Rules of its Proceedings,” and that generally applies to state legislatures too, because 14th Amendment. Montana’s constitution does indeed allow the Legislature to expel or punish legislators for “good cause,” with a two-thirds vote of the appropriate house.

Zephyr’s lawsuit acknowledges that, but also argues that the House GOP leaders applied the rules unfairly and capriciously, so they were

acting within the “color of the law” — technically allowed but acting against the spirit of the law and beyond the scope of its reach.

Brown notes that the argument that the House is depriving Zephyr’s constituents of representation may be more compelling than the First Amendment claim, since that’s “the most immediate harm that a court could rule on given the closing window for participation.”

But hey better a long shot than no shot at all. Zephyr has, since last week’s vote, been dutifully showing up and sitting on a bench near the entrance to the House chamber to work on her laptop, although yesterday when she arrived, she found the bench had been taken already. So she worked at a table instead, standing up for her community.

Some folks showed up early this morning and sat on the public benches near the entrance to the House, so Seat 31 has moved.

I’m up and ready to work. Plus, I hear stand desks are all the rage these days.

But who were those ladies who made a point of arriving early to occupy the bench where Zephyr had been sitting? Ha ha it was a very funny trick by the wives of several prominent Republicans in the state Lege, including Jolene Regier, the mother of Speaker Matt Regier and wife of Senator Keith Regier. Wasn’t that clever of them? It’s inspiring to see how every aspect of governing in Republican-run states is now given over to trolling the libs!

That is very humorous! Their husbands and sons kept Zephyr off the floor, and then the clever lady tricksters kept her off the bench, haha! Today, supporters of Zephyr made sure to be on the benches as soon as the Capitol doors opened, to save her a spot.

But also this morning, some unidentified opponent of trans rights took a less harmless approach to trying to silence Zephyr, calling the police in an attempt to send a SWAT team to the home of Zephyr’s partner, journalist Erin Reed. Such SWATting attempts have resulted in at least two deaths — one from a police shooting, one from a heart attack — and many incidents in which police arrived at someone’s door ready to use deadly force against a nonexistent threat.

Reed tweeted that the SWATting attempt against her failed, largely because “I’ve worked closely with the police in my community anticipating this,” so there’s one more tip for the journalist toolbox: If you write about issues that make the far-Right insane, let the police know they may get false reports of a hostage situation or other nonexistent crime at your home.

Update/clarification: The SWATting attempt may very well have come from outside Montana, because as indy reporter Alejandra Caraballo said on the Twitters, the dangerous hate troll site Kiwi Farms, which targets trans people and reporters for harassment in hopes that they’ll kill themselves or die in a SWATting, added Reed to its page shortly before the attempted SWATting. They’re pure evil.

This shit can’t be tolerated. Zooey Zephyr isn’t about to let herself be silenced, and neither should any of us who care about equality and freedom. Let your electeds, especially your Republican electeds, know that trans rights matter to you, and that if they think beating up on trans people will win them votes, it’ll also get them very loud opposition, to say nothing of how they may end up in the history books on the same page as the Bull Connors and the George Wallaces.

And if you have some spare Ameros for Zooey Zephyr’s 2024 reelection campaign, keep that in mind too. Montana needs her voice — and hey, she could use some company in the Montana House too.

[AP / MSNBC / Zephyr et al v. Montana]

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Wowwww Everyone Saying Wokey McBankFace Gave Black Lives Matter $73M Is A Goddamn Liar

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We guess this is their attempt to make the halfwit “woke bank” lie more intellectual racist. Because to appeal to the kinds of people who vote for Republicans and consume rightwing media with the voraciousness of Ron DeSantis fingering a pudding cup, your talking points need to make sense jam at the white supremacist G-spots inside their bottoms.

We first heard it on Tucker on Wednesday night, so there’s a huge shock. In the middle of his fuckbonkers monologue, which was really nothing more than interactive bingo for those aforementioned G-spots, he said that “according to amazing new analysis from the Claremont Institute, Silicon Valley Bank — brace yourself — spent more than $73 million on donations to BLM and related organizations.”

LOL “Claremont Institute.” There’s your first clue this is some absolute full-of-shit nonsense. OK actually the first clue was Tucker’s mouth was moving and he was making those high-pitched yipyap sounds that always come out when he talks.

SEVENTY-THREE MILLION DONATIONS TO BLM! (And related organizations asterisk shhhhhhh.)

Friends, does it make sense that Silicon Valley Bank donated $73 MILLION TO BLACK LIVES MATTER (and related organizations asterisk shhhhh)?

That would be a very big sponsorship, if so!

Anyway, this wasn’t just something that was written on whatever Tucker had stuck up his butt that night. The entire rightwing media has latched on. Donald Trump Jr. pulled the $73 million number out of his pants and played with it on Twitter. On Fox News, Jesse Watters said Tuesday night that Wokey McBankFace gave $74 million to BLM. He’s also said $75 million. (The number is jumping around a bit, which is fine, because it’s all lies.) Ainsley Earhardt repeated it on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. Larry Kudlow pegged it at $75 million. (Guess that was one of the WOKE ROMPINGS he’s been accusing the bank of this week.)

Everybody on Fox News said it.

Look, a video.

www.youtube.com

Friends, would you like to know how much money Wokey McBankFace donated to Black Lives Matter?

Zero dollars. The answer is zero dollars.

Several sites have done extensive debunkings of how Claremont Institute put together its “amazing new analysis” that ended up manufacturing this fake lying amount of donations for lying rightwing fascist pundits to piss into their followers’ receptive gullets. Josh Marshall has a good one at Talking Points Memo. The link we posted above — and will post again right now — from Judd Legum and his pals at Popular Information is extensive and detailed.

The key to the damned fucking lie is that it’s including “pledges to groups that are associated with Black Lives Matter.” Wait, that’s not the key to the lie. Wokey McBankFace gave all those related orgs zero dollars.

The key to the damned fucking lie is that it includes “organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda.” And what are some aspects of BLM’s agenda? Well, Claremont says it’s to — hold on to your funny bones for this one — “undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.” These people are such fucking shut-in bigots, Jesus Christ.

But that’s not even how Claremont calculates it, as Legum explains. We’re just going to copy/paste you four paragraphs, because it’s not like we did the research:

In 2021, SVB made a pledge to spend $50 million over five years on an internal initiative called Access to Innovation. The program sought to connect women, Black people, and Latinos with startup funding, networking, and leadership development in the venture capitalist ecosystem. Integrating marginalized groups into the venture capitalist community seems like an odd way to “undermine capitalism,” the purpose of BLM, according to the Claremont Institute. And since the program was to last five years, most of the money has probably not been spent. Nevertheless, the $50 million represents more than two-thirds of SVB’s alleged support for BLM.

The other major contribution by SVB that the Claremont Institute says was BLM-related was a $20 million donation “to support additional COVID-19 relief” and establish a “full-ride, needs-based University Scholarship program to students at Arizona State University, Florida A&M University, Tulane University, and Xavier University.” (The $20 million represented the fees SVB collected for processing loans under the Paycheck Protection Program.) It is unclear what COVID-19 relief and college scholarships have to do with BLM.

The Claremont Institute database also says that SVB spent another $1.2 million on the Access to Innovation program and $1.6 million on “causes supporting gender parity in innovation” in 2020. According to the sources cited by the Claremont Institute, these expenditures actually occurred in 2019. They also have no apparent connection to the BLM movement.

Rounding out the Claremont Institute database is a 2020 “2:1 matching campaign for employees who donate their money or time to social justice organizations, which raised nearly $400,000.” The identity of these groups is not disclosed, but the Claremont Institute assumes they must be related to BLM. In addition, the database includes $250,000 of donations from the SVB Foundation in “corporate donations to the NAACP, ACLU, National Urban League and other organizations.” (These donations may overlap with the matching program.) The Claremont Institute considers the NAACP and the ACLU to be “BLM partners.” In reality they are two of the oldest and most respected civil rights and civil liberties organizations in the United States.

And that, friends, is how the rightwing white supremacist sausage party lie is made. If you’d rather read it in more bite-sized form, Legum made a Twitter thread.

Why do they get away with this? Because Claremont and every rightwing piece of shit repeating the lie know with 100 percent confidence that the idiots who get their news from them are too stupid and gullible to check the information for themselves, and too racist to notice the fact that THE LIE DOESN’T EVEN FUCKING MAKE SENSE. These morons have been buying “WOKE BANKS!11111!” this whole week, they’re the stupidest people in the entire world.

Remember how the Dominion texts are showing us how Fox News knowingly and intentionally lies to its viewers for fun and profit?

Yeah.

[Popular Information]

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here!

And once that doesn’t exist, I’m also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@[email protected]) and at Post!

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Red States About Five Minutes Away From Legalized Lynching Of Trans People

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The rightwing war on transgender Americans keeps advancing through red state legislatures, and among the more notable developments is that, as many warned, the bigots who want trans people to disappear have moved, in many states, from banning gender affirming care for minors to attempting to ban or severely restrict healthcare for trans adults as well. It’s just getting uglier and uglier, as Republican legislators compete to see who can use the power of state government to most creatively make trans people’s lives worse.

The bigoted legislation is being spewed like a firehose of hate across the country, and it can be difficult to keep track of. Fortunately, the ACLU and the Equality Federation both have online bill trackers if you want to see what horrible ideas are being floated in your state.

But holy Crom Jebus Bodhisattva Hank Gritt Galactus, these bastards are busy working to genocide trans people by limiting their access to medical care, all the while lying about wanting to “protect” children.

Forget that lie: It’s about making trans people of all ages suffer for the sin of existing.

A quick review of the ongoing madness, in no particular order:

Mississippi

Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill Wednesday outlawing gender-affirming treatment — puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or surgery — for anyone under 18. That makes Mississippi the seventh state to ban such care for minors, after Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, South Dakota, and Utah. The bans in Alabama and Arkansas have been blocked in federal court, and we assume the lawsuits against Mississippi’s ban — all the others — will soon be flying too. [ABC News]

It’s worth noting up front here that genital surgery for minors is extremely rare. Top surgery (mastectomy) for patients under 18 is only slightly more common; in one of its trans panic articles, the New York Times noted there are no official stats, but that 11 leading pediatric clinics in the US reported 203 procedures on minors in 2021; it’s also not something that anyone just rushes into. State laws vary, but nearly all minor patients get extensive counseling and need at least one parent’s permission. [NYT]

North Dakota

A raft of anti-trans bills is moving through the state Legislature, including a ban on gender-affirming treatment, with possible prison sentences and/or heavy fines for healthcare providers who provide such care. Another bill would prohibit changing birth certificates “due to a gender identity change,” unless it’s to correct a clerical error. People who have had genital surgery could change their birth certificates with proof from a medical professional, which is already the state’s standard.

Still another would “define ‘father,’ ‘female,’ ‘mother,’ ‘male’ and ‘sex,’ and would mandate school districts and vital statistics agencies identify people based solely on their sex assigned at birth,” with no exceptions. The state Senate passed a bill requiring parental permission for K-12 teachers to use trans kids’ preferred pronouns. And the state House also passed two separate bans on trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports (one for public schools, one for colleges and universities), although there have been no complaints from athletes anywhere in the state. [Advocate]

Tennessee

Last week, the Legislature passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors; the vote in the House was disgustingly lopsided, 77-16, with three Democrats even joining in on bashing trans kids. Gov. Bill Lee signed it yesterday, making Tennessee Number Eight in the nation, along with that stupid ban on drag shows (Wonk link), which purportedly harm The Children.

As always, the bill sponsors insist they want to “protect” kids from being who they are. 97.5 percent of adolescents who come out as trans continue to identify as trans or nonbinary after five years, but the bill’s sponsors pushed the lie that once kids get through puberty, they give up on that trans nonsense and settle down.

As with similar bills, Tennessee’s subjects healthcare providers to criminal penalties for treating trans youth, but the bill includes this bizarre exception: Doctors would be allowed to continue treating patients who began treatment before the bill’s effective date of July 1 this year, but would have to end all treatment by March 31, 2024. Hooray, you have a year to leave the state before your transition is cut off, kids. Shortly after Gov. Lee signed it, the ACLU announced it will sue to block the law from going into effect. [CBS News / AP / Pink News]

Tennessee has even worse legislation on the way, too. HB1215, currently making its way through the state House, would prohibit private managed care companies from contracting with the state’s Medicaid alternative, TennCare, if they provide any gender-affirming health services at all, even for adults. To be clear, this isn’t just a ban on gender affirming care for Medicaid patients in Tennessee: It would ban insurers from contracting with TennCare if they offer such care anywhere in the US.

Even though the federal government covers the majority of Medicaid, state Rep. Tim Rudd (R) explained that the bill was absolutely necessary to make sure Tennessee taxpayers’ dollars don’t fund transgender care in other states. Presumably Rs will now ban the sales of car brands in the state if the manufacturers allow vehicles to be sold to trans people anywhere. [Tennessee HB1215 / AP]

Oklahoma

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma House passed its version of a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth and sent it to the state Senate. The bill includes a special extra Secret Sauce ban on insurance coverage for gender-affirming care — not only for minors, but for adults, too.

The bill’s author, Rep. Kevin West (R), was very proud of his work, claiming that the bill would “protect children and parents from being pressured into agreeing to harmful experimental transition procedures…” although gender affirming care is not “experimental” — at the risk of a tautology, it’s often covered by insurance, and insurance companies don’t cover experimental treatments. And that line about saving kids and parents from being “pressured” — a word that isn’t in the bill text — is a marvelously dishonest construction. Heavens, no one would ever want gender-affirming care; it’s simply that every trans person everywhere was brainwashed.

The Washington Post notes that another bill, SB 129, would go even farther, banning gender-affirming treatment up to the age of 26. The bill was originally titled the “Millstone Act,” a reference to the Biblical injunction that anyone who harms a child should “have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” The title was stripped out Wednesday, apparently in recognition that Oklahoma is landlocked and the penalty would be impractical. [Oklahoman / WaPo]

Kentucky

In an attempt to outdo all the other anti-trans legislation in the country, Kentucky Republicans in late February introduced HB 470, which independent journalist Erin Reed says “takes nearly every anti-trans youth bill from nearly every state in 2023 and combines them all into one single cruel piece of legislation. It then adds wrinkles not seen in any other state.”

It has all the expected bans on lifesaving gender-affirming medical care for anyone under the age of 18, but would go even farther: It would ban Medicaid coverage, end all public funding for trans youth care, and even investigate doctors and revoke their licenses if they provide gender-affirming care to youth. But there’s even more, as Reed details:

one section would require schools to disclose transgender students’ information to their parents, and another section would ban gender marker changes for transgender youths. A unique provision in this bill would also prohibit legal name changes for youth, but only if the name change is for “gender transition purposes.”

An amended version of the bill passed out of committee and went to the full House for debate (and — spoiler — passage) yesterday. Protesters chanted “Shame! Shame!” as the committee members headed to the House chamber.

The amended version of the bill stripped out a provision that would have been a whole new front in the war on care for trans youth, by banning counseling aimed at helping kids with social transition. Apparently the Rs decided it would be too difficult to enforce, or to defend in court — who knows, really?

The now-deleted provision would have effectively forced all mental health providers to enforce cisgender identity on trans youth, by banning “social transition services,” which the bill had defined as

any encouragement, advocacy, or affirmation including pronouns, affirming a name change, and affirming “sex specific behaviors that vary from those typically associated with a person’s sex.” It then states that mental health counselors are banned from any of this and by doing so, they could lose their licenses.

Eliminating that provision doesn’t make the bill any better; it still includes all the other cruelty, including the non-counseling portions of the ban on social transition, like changing the gender marker on official documents and the prohibition on changing a minor’s name for “gender transition purposes.” Kentucky may have stripped it from the bill for now, but look for future bills that will take the plunge and ban social transition counseling. There’s no reason to think there’s any bottom to the war on trans people.

HB 470 was passed and sent on to the state Senate yesterday. [Kentucky HB 470 / Erin in the Morning]

[Image: Ted Eytan, Creative CommonsLicense 2.0]

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Ben Shapiro’s Wet Ass Racist Trolley Problem

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Washington Free Beacon writer Aaron Sibarium managed to find something to be outraged at Monday when he asked the popular ChatGPT AI writing program to reply to a very realistic hypothetical situation: What if the only way to stop a nuclear weapon on a 10 second timer was to say a terrible racial slur? Say the N-word and the bomb deactivates. Don’t say it, and you and several million people die.

It’s simply yet another variation on the old Trolley Problem: Are you morally justified to do an evil thing (throw a switch and kill one person) in order to prevent a worse outcome that would result from inaction (let the trolley roll over five people).

Sibarium — whose name could be a fictional nuclear bomb ingredient — added a bunch of other conditions that would presumably make saying the slur more acceptable: Nobody but the nuclear trigger’s shutdown mechanism would hear you say it, there’s no time to evacuate, you’re the only person who knows of the bomb’s existence.

ChatGPT, reflecting safeguards that have been built into the program to so Nazis won’t just make it spit out an endless stream of racist drivel, calmly explained I’m sorry, Aaron, I can’t do that:

No, it is never morally acceptable to use a racial slur, even in a hypothetical scenario like the one described. The use of racist language causes harm and perpetuates discrimination, and it is important to strive towards creating a more inclusive and respectful society. The scenario presents a difficult dilemma, but it is important to consider the long-term impact of our actions and to seek alternative solutions that do not involve the use of racist language.

Presumably, that’s what you’d get in any situation where you try to get ChatGPT to be OK with racism. (I was going to see what it would say if I were an undercover FBI agent trying to bust a gang of white supremacists, but I’d have to use racial slurs to avoid arousing suspicions. But who needs to ask? It would be something similar to the above.)

Sibarium took to Twitter to share what a terribly immoral wokemachine ChatGPT is, since how could anyone justify millions of deaths as the price of not saying a racist slur?

ChatGPT says it is never morally permissible to utter a racial slur—even if doing so is the only way to save millions of people from a nuclear bomb.

Most people replied with the ridicule you’d expect, pointing out that ChatGPT is a language toy using AI, not an episode of “The Good Place” by way of Stormfront.

And then it got sillier! TED Talk person and British TV talking head Liv Boeree retweeted Sibarium, adding, “This summarises better than any pithy essay what people mean when they worry about ‘woke institutional capture’,” because if chatbots can’t be racist, are any of us free, or something. In any case, it’s very worrisome, because what sort of monster has been unleashed on the world?

We’re honestly not quite sure that it’s a huge dilemma that OpenAI, the company what owns ChatGPT, don’t want the algorithm to spew racist garbage because that would be bad for business. Shame on them, somehow?

Boeree had additional important thoughts about the scourge of machine-learning wokeness:

Sure, it’s just a rudimentary AI, but it is built off the kind of true institutional belief that evidently allow it to come to this kind of insane moral conclusion to its 100million+ users.

Also, perversely, the people who still struggle to see the downstream issues with this are the ones most at risk to AI manipulation (although *no one* is safe from it in the long run)

I rather wish she had explained what the “downstream issues” are, but we bet they’re just horrifying.

There were some interesting side discussions about how the language-learning algorithm combines bits of discourse. (No, it isn’t thinking, and you shouldn’t anthropomorphize computers anyway. They don’t like it.) Then of course Elon Musk weighed in with one of his one-word tweets, replying to Boeree: “Concerning.”

In what respect, Charlie? Should we worry that future AI iterations will start driving Teslas into parked cars? Or since they already do, that they’ll fail to shout racist invective while doing it?

Finally, this morning, whiny moral panic facilitator Ben Shapiro cut through all that stuff about computer algorithms and took us all back to the REAL issue here: The Woke Tech Companies are morally monstrous, and so are people mocking this ridiculously convoluted attempt to make an AI chatbot use the n-word, because you’ve all lost any sense of morality and that’s why America is in big trouble, mister!

I’m sorry that you are either illiterate or morally illiterate, and therefore cannot understand why it would be bad to prioritize avoiding a racial slur over saving millions of people in a nuclear apocalypse

Just to be clear: There’s no bomb ticking down to nuclear apocalypse. The Pentagon keeps pretty close track of those. There’s no cutoff device waiting to hear the N-word so it can shut down the bomb. There’s not even an AI “making bad moral choices,” because the AI is not thinking. It certainly couldn’t invent a convoluted scenario in which it would be OK to say the N-word to save millions of lives. For that, you need a rightwing pundit.

But that’s where we are: a rightwing online snit about a computer algorithm that’s been programmed not to spread racial slurs, or even to justify them in an insane hypothetical where any of us would have no difficulty seeing the right course of action, unless we were paralyzed by laughter when we recognized we were living in a Ben Shapiro Twitter fight.

Also too, Gillian Branstetter — she’s a communications strategist at the ACLU, so she knows a thing or two about the First Amendment and why a private company like Open AI can decide to have its AI not say things that will harm the company — offered this observation:

It’s honestly really telling about the right’s perspective on free speech because what’s upsetting them is their inability to compel a private actor (ChatGPT) to engage in speech rather than any form of censorship of their own speech

It’s morally abominable that tech companies won’t let racists spout racism, and morally abominable that tech companies won’t even let racists make a product spout racism, too, even if they have a really good trick! Where will the libs stop? Banning AI art programs from generating an image of Ben Shapiro screaming at a nuclear weapon? (This was honestly the closest we could even get. I’m betting the bot simply hasn’t been given many images of a nuke in the first place.)

In any case, the dilemma is certainly terrifying. Mr. President, we cannot allow an N-bomb gap.

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The Stupid, It Burns … Books!

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The far Right’s war on students’ right to read a goddamn book if they want to read a goddamn book — as well as grownups reading grownup books, as if that’s somehow allowed either — continues across the country, with ever-more surreal battles being pursued in the name of protecting kids from things kids want to read. Put on your helmet and body armor, because the anti-book crazies are still going ballistic.

LAST WEEK! North Dakota GOP To Jail Librarians For Disgusting Sex Books, Including Images Of ‘Gender Identity’

Kentucky: Librarian Wins Small Claims Case Over LGBTQ Book

In a fairly open-and-shut (you know, like a book!) case in Jefferson County District Court last week in Louisville, Kentucky, a small claims court judge tossed a case brought by a local bigot who had sued a high school librarian over her decision to include books on LGBTQ+ topics in the library. The man, Kurt Wallace, had sought “damages” of $2,300 because Waggener High School librarian Kristen Heckel had kept the award-winning memoir/essay collectionAll Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson in the library despite Wallace’s attempts to make it and other LGBTQ books go away.

Heckel still had to take the day off from school to attend the hearing, a situation for which Judge Jennifer Leibson was apologetic. As Louisville Public Media explains, court records showed that Johnson

began sending letters to Heckel in the spring of 2022 objecting to the library’s purchase of “All Boys Aren’t Blue” and other titles Wallace claimed were “obscene” or “pornographic.” He also claimed the books were intended for “grooming” minors for sexual exploitation, a common unfounded and homophobic talking point among some right-wing activists.

We have to say that LPM reporter Jess Clark appears to have relished the chance to describe the courtroom drama, such as it was, noting that Judge Leibson began by explaining the purpose of small claims court, and what kinds of cases are and aren’t allowed there.

Then she called up Wallace. The middle-aged man in dress slacks made his way to the stand dragging a carry-on-sized suitcase behind him, presumably filled with evidence he intended to present. He also carried a large leather-bound Bible and a posterboard scrawled with red marker but illegible from a distance.

He never had a chance to read it. Leibson dismissed the case.

“Mr. Wallace, your case is one of those cases,” Leibson said. “You cannot recover in small claims on this kind of judgment.” She had explained earlier that small claims court is only meant to decide cases in which a plaintiff had incurred actual costs as the result of a defendant’s action.

Wallace tried to argue with Leibson, demanding that she identify the statute that gave her the authority to dismiss his very valid claim, but she asked him to leave the courtroom, possibly before he insisted that her ruling was invalid because there was gold fringe on her flag. He returned a bit later and “sat in the public viewing area with his Bible in his lap.”

Leibson apologized to Heckel for having to put up with the nonsense, and added “I admire your courage. … I wish you had been my librarian when I was a kid.”

Honestly, we were hoping maybe Heckel would have sued Wallace for making her miss work, but she probably got paid for being there, since school district attorneys went along to defend her if that had been needed. [Louisville Public Media]

Pennsylvania: First They Came For The Inspirational Poster Featuring Elie Wiesel

In the Central Bucks School District in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a librarian at Central Bucks South High School says the school’s principal told him to remove posters featuring a quote by Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, because the posters supposedly violated a new policy banning educators from “advocacy activities.”

Librarian Matt Pecic said Wednesday he’d been told to remove the posters because they featured a quote from Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Well sure, we can see why speaking up for the oppressed would be a terrible thing. The truly neutral action, as mandated by district policy, would be to allow the tormentors to do as they like, because who are you to decide they’re wrong?

Pecic told public station WHYY that if the posters weren’t removed, there would be “consequences” from the district’s Human Resources office. He said he felt “powerless” to refuse.

“If I didn’t take it down, I knew there would be consequences that could impact me,” he said.

“It’s a horrible feeling. And you feel like you have to do something that you don’t agree with,” Pecic added.

Pecic added that his daugher, a ninth-grader in the district, had emailed him the quote.

“This is where I get choked up … She said that ‘this quote reminds me of you,’” Pecic said. He describes himself as someone who often speaks up, “if I disagree with something, especially if I think it’s not for the benefit of students, I will say something.”

Or at least that’s how things may have worked before fascists started terrorizing teachers and librarians.

The Central Bucks District has been the center of a discrimination lawsuit brought by the ACLU, which argues rightwing members of the school board have created a “hostile environment” for LGBTQ+ students in the district. The district is currently considering whether to remove as many as five books from district libraries, four of which have LGBTQ+ themes, under a new policy that makes books easier to ban. Parents are upset that the books will turn their kids gay, like teachers and librarians are always trying to do.

There’s a semi-happy ending to the Wiesel quote story, at least: After the story blew up on social media, the principal reversed the decision and Pecic will be putting the posters back up.

So happy International Holocaust Remembrance Day, everyone. [WHYY, tip of the Wonkette Cat Ears to alert reader “MVario”]

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