Who Got Our Backs?

Support for us comes from many places and sometimes it out shines the haters.

This Oklahoma school is closed because parents threatened one of its transgender students
Parents in a community Facebook group referred to the 12-year-old as "maggot," "thing," and "it."
Think Progress
By Zack Ford
August 14, 2018

A group of parents planned a silent rally outside an Oklahoma school Tuesday morning on a behalf of a transgender 12-year-old who has been subjected to threats of violence.

The school is closed through Wednesday in response to those threats.

The student, identified simply as “Maddie” to protect her identity, has identified as a girl at school for over two years now, but has typically used the staff bathroom to avoid being harassed. However, when she arrived at the newly-reopened middle school building this year, she was reportedly unable to find the staff bathroom and used the girls’ room instead.

Maddie’s mother, Brandy Rose, later clarified to CBS affiliate KXII that Maddie had only used the girls’ room “one single time.”

But that was enough to get the bigots and haters to crawl out of the woodwork,

“The transgender is already using the girls bathroom,” Jamie Crenshaw wrote before misgendering Maddie several times. “We have been told how the school has gone above and beyond to make sure he [sic] has his [sic] own restroom yet he [sic] is still using the girls.”

Other members of the group piled on with similarly transphobic language. “How old is this thing?” one user asked.

But then…

The comments quickly turned to threats of violence. “If he [sic] wants to be a female make him [sic] female,” one user wrote. “A good sharp knife will do the job really quick.”

“Just tell the kids to kick ass in the bathroom and it won’t want come back!!” another suggested.

And the comments triggered the school to take action.

Those treats are taking a toll on the child and the parents have taken out a protective against ,
According to Maddie’s mother, Brandy Rose, her daughter has gone from being upbeat and positive to being afraid for her life.

Now the parents across the state have stepped up I support of the student, including PFLAG members and the law enforcement agencies have become interested in the case.

The FBI and several other law enforcement agencies have stepped in to investigate the threats against 12-year-old Maddie, in order to determine whether any of the comments “constitute a hate crime,” KXII reported Tuesday. No arrests have yet been made.

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One place they are not going to find support is… you guessed it.

Trump administration signals that it’ll look the other way on LGBTQ discrimination
LGBTQ Nation
By Alex Bollinger
August 14, 2018

A new directive from the Department of Labor encourages the government to allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ people more.

This past Friday, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) at the Department of Labor issued a directive that asked investigators to take religious exemptions into account.

While the directive doesn’t overturn the executive order that bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity among federal contractors, it encourages the people who enforce the ban on discrimination to consider the “religious freedom” of federal contractors.

Specifically, the directive tells OFCCP staff:

• They “cannot act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices” and must “proceed in a manner neutral toward and tolerant of … religious beliefs.”
• They cannot “condition the availability of [opportunities] upon a recipient’s willingness to surrender his [or her] religiously impelled status.”
• “[A] federal regulation’s restriction on the activities of a for-profit closely held corporation must comply with [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act].”
• They must permit “faith-based and community organizations, to the fullest opportunity permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for … [Federal] contracts.”
• They must respect the right of “religious people and institutions … to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by the Federal Government.”

The Department of Labor has also removed information about protections from discrimination and how narrow the religious exemptions are.

This is unbelievable, this is from the lawyers that AG Sessions appointed and they cites the Supreme Court Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling as one of the justifications for the directive. However, the ruling was narrow, it only faulted the civil rights commission’s findings of discrimination because they brought religion in to consideration of discrimination, the court did not find the discrimination law unconstitutional.

But that little pesky detail didn’t stop the Trump administration.