Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Shut Up!

Are we going back to the 50’s? Back to a time when anything LGBT was hidden in the closet?

Well one group is trying to do that to a math high school teacher.
Fla. teacher targeted by Kim Davis’s lawyer for promoting LGBTQ ‘propaganda’
LGBTQ Nation
By Dawn Ennis
April 21, 2017

A lesbian who teaches math at a Tampa Bay, Florida high school is being silent on this Day of Silence, in response to accusations leveled at her by Liberty Counsel, the law firm and extremist organization that advocates for anti-LGBT discrimination. Its most famous client by far remains Kentucky clerk Kim Davis.

Lawyers Mary McAlister and Richard Mast, Jr., signed a letter of demand emailed to the Hillsborough County Public School district, demanding action against Lora Jane Riedas by end of the business day Friday.

The allegations against Riedas are in keeping with prior actions Liberty Counsel has made nationwide to earn it a black mark from the Southern Poverty Law Center, under the guise of “religious freedom.” In their letter to Superintendent Jeff Eakins, attorneys McAlister and Mast claim:
Ms. Riedas has prohibited at least three children from wearing Christian cross necklaces in her classroom, claiming on occasion that they are ‘gang symbols.’
So what are their demands?
As of press time, Arja did not address the demands laid out by the Liberty Counsel lawyers:
1) prohibit Ms. Riedas from interfering with student religious expression, by banning cross necklaces, or otherwise appropriate clothing or jewelry containing religious references or symbols;
2) prohibit Ms. Riedas from promoting LGBT political activism during instructional time on April 21, or at any other time, using any of the attached ideas in GLSEN’s “guide;”
3) require Ms. Riedas to remove partisan political LGBT materials from her classroom, and remove all unrequested LGBT stickers from each student’s notebook; and
4) replace her as sponsor of GSA, and appoint a teacher of the District’s choice who can be trusted to be present at non-school-sponsored student clubs like GSA in a supervisory, not activist, capacity.
In other words shut up and go back into the closet!

I don’t know about the necklace incident, it could be a red herring to distract the issue of silencing us to make it more than LGBT rights and make it a religious freedom issue.

The issues of GSA and having LGBT material has been settled by the Supreme Court a long, long time ago, but it looks like to me that Liberty Counsel sees an opportunity to get it overturned by the current Supreme Court.

I feel that this is just the tip of the iceberg that we are going to see many more court cases challenging our rights to exist by the right-wing conservative. They feel that in today’s climate that they can bring back the oppressive fifties with a conservative court and a Republican controlled Congress.



On Sunday I went to the GLAD fundraiser with Stana and you can read about it on her .blog

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