This And That In The News

A potpourri of short news article that have caught my attention…

Opinion: Texas should not deny transgender people their full citizenship
Houston Chronicle
Letters to the Editor
July 25, 2021


Regarding “Senate Panel to Revive Transgender Bill,” (July 13): This is absolutely not about sports. Conservative lawmakers need that small slice of ultraconservative voters to push them over the finish line. This is a strategic decision as they exploit both their conservative Christian voters and LGBTQ+ Texans. Listening to senators talk about “a child’s genitalia” is one of the most disturbing experiences of my life.

Just as women were denied their rights because of their bodies, the transgender population is also being denied their full citizenship. When your opportunity to participate in society depends on your body — whether that is skin color, your physical ability or your private parts — instead of your inherent worth as a human being — that is the foundation for discrimination. Make no mistake: This isn’t about sports. It’s about power.

Molly

She got that right it is all about energizing their base and to force us back into the closets.

Then the next two articles are about the courts.

Federal judge grants injunction in lawsuit involving transgender Bridgeport [West Virginia] student-athlete
12WBOY
July 21, 2021


An 11-year-old transgender student-athlete from Bridgeport has gained an early victory in a federal lawsuit filed against state and local education officials over the state’s law banning transgender athletes from competing in female sports.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin granted the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, meaning that while the suit, on behalf of Becky Pepper-Jackson, continues, the state cannot enforce the law and Pepper-Jackson will be allowed to sign up for school athletics, as any girl would.

Pepper-Jackson was hoping to join the school’s cross country and track and field teams.

The judge said…

Judge Goodwin wrote that he has “been provided with scant evidence that this law addresses any problem at all, let alone an important problem” and that “this law both stigmatizes and isolates” Pepper-Jackson and that she “will be irreparably harmed if this law were to take full effect.”

Goodwin also found that there is a likelihood that the suit will be successful in its claim that the law violates the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX.

I believe that the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia last year paved the way for this ruling, in the court’s ruling they said that sexual orientation and gender identity are components of “sex.”

The other article is about federal courts overturning the draconian state laws against us.

Federal Courts Keep Shooting Down Anti-Trans Laws. Will That Hold at SCOTUS?
Slate
By Mark Joseph Stern
July 22, 2021


At the start of his Wednesday order blocking a West Virginia law that prohibits transgender girls and women from playing many school sports, U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin observed: “A fear of the unknown and discomfort with the unfamiliar have motivated many of the most malignant harms committed by our country’s governments on their own citizens.” He may have understated the problem. The tidal wave of anti-transgender state laws enacted in 2021 are motivated not just by fear, but also by sheer hatred toward gender minorities—a hostility rooted in a rigid conception of sex that aligns with neither scientific fact nor lived experience. So far, most federal judges who have assessed these laws see that discriminatory impulse. But the battle will soon reach the Supreme Court once again. And it is far from clear that a majority of the justices, some of whom share this anti-trans animus, are prepared to halt this nationwide assault on trans equality.

BINGO! “A fear of the unknown and discomfort with the unfamiliar have motivated many of the most malignant harms committed by our country’s governments on their own citizens.” That is the reasons so many discriminatory laws are on the books… people being afraid of people who are different. People who look different, people who talk differently, people who worship differently, and people who sexual orientation or gender identity is different from them. What they really want it to turn back the clock to the mythical world of “Father Knows Best.

None of these laws arose organically out of a mass movement against transgender Americans. It was, rather, manufactured by anti-LGBTQ groups working hand in glove with Republican politicians in search of a new wedge issue. The law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, which supports imprisonment as a penalty for same-sex conduct, led the charge; ADF’s attorneys drafting the model legislation that countless Republicans copied, pasted, and pushed onto the statehouse floor. These lobbyists, along with their GOP allies, focused primarily on transgender youth, passing off their campaign as a compassionate effort to “protect children.”

These hatrers are generated by the wedge politics that the conservatives hate politics that the Republicans push.

In an article in Psychology Today they write,

Peer-reviewed research shows that conservatives are generally more sensitive to threat. While this threat-bias can distort reality, fuel irrational fears, and make one more vulnerable to fear-mongering politicians, it could also promote hypervigilance, perhaps making one better prepared to handle an immediate threat.

Now you know what drives the ring-wing conservatives… fear.