It Is Out There!

The right-wing conspiracy theorists are already stirring up the hate against us (There is that word again, so tell is it justified?). I was on a Zoom meeting yesterday on Monkeypox (The say they are going to change the name but everyone still uses it.) and one of the people on the meeting was from the ADL and he posted this like from their website blog,

Right Wing Lies About Monkeypox Target LGBTQ+ Community
From: Center on Extremism
August 8, 2022


Right wing public figures, notably U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), are sharing homophobic and potentially dangerous lies about the transmission of the monkeypox virus. These false narratives, which paint the LGBTQ+ community as child predators, put that community at significant risk. They are also easily debunked.  

Background 

On July 22, 2022, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was interviewed on Washington Post Live to discuss the current state of COVID and other public health issues. During the broadcast, she noted that two children had contracted monkeypox – both of whom could be “traced back to individuals who come from the men-who-have-sex-with-men community.”  

On July 23, 2022, the World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global health emergency. Later that day at 6:22 pm, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared Walensky's segment about monkeypox in children on several of her social media pages with the caption, “If Monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease, why are kids getting it?” 

[…]

Greene’s post, however, gave the conspiratorial and bigoted theories additional oxygen – and reach. 

By the evening of July 25, 2022, the content had appeared verbatim on 8kun’s Q Research board, TheDonald, GreatAwakening.win, and Telegram (including an official Philippines-based Proud Boys channel).

So do you think that justifies using the word “hate?”

Despite these efforts, the heightened focus on monkeypox being transmitted through sexual contact has been used by extremists in conjunction with homophobic slurs and demonization of gay men, as seen in a white supremacist group’s Telegram post from May 21, 2022. In this post, a forwarded message containing vulgar slurs suggested that “as many gays as possible should get together to contract monkeypox”, conflating the transmission of the virus with pride activities:

On July 28, 2022, another post shared in a QAnon-centric Telegram channel included an article alleging that the mainstream media are distorting the narratives surrounding monkeypox in an effort "to hide the epidemic of pedophilia and grooming plaguing America”. 

How about now?

The rhetoric coming out of the Republican party is getting deadly, there is going to be violence at some LGBTQ+ event.

Monkeypox-fueled hate echoes the HIV/AIDS era, even in rainbow cities
Washington Post
By Petula Dvorak Columnist
August 18, 2022<


It was a sunny day last week when it finally happened, the thing Jay had left his small, conservative hometown in the South to avoid — hate.

He came here to be his full self. But it was the pink mask and Birkenstock sandals the man singled out as he verbally assaulted the 31-year-old on the Yellow Line last week, using slurs targeting gay people, ranting about monkeypox and advancing into Jay’s personal space as the train stopped in a tunnel.

It’s “people like you that can’t stop going to orgies getting the rest of us killed,” the guy screamed into Jay’s face, as Jay balanced his Trader Joe’s grocery bag and tried to keep his composure.

Jay got off at the next stop, and the man who raged at him didn’t follow. But the man’s hatred — and the silence of others in the Metro car and on the platform after he left the scene — is jarring in a nation where same-sex marriage is legal but discrimination against someone based on who they love is not.

For many in the community they have never had to confront this hatred, for the old-timers this in nothing new, they lived through the violence and hatred of the AIDS/HIV epidemic and the hatred of gays. The San Francisco Gate had this to say about back then,

A significant source of Reagan's support came from the newly identified religious right and the Moral Majority, a political-action group founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. AIDS became the tool, and gay men the target, for the politics of fear, hate and discrimination. Falwell said "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals." Reagan's communications director Pat Buchanan argued that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men."

With each passing month, death and suffering increased at a frightening rate. Scientists, researchers and health care professionals at every level expressed the need for funding. The response of the Reagan administration was indifference.

And now we are seeing the Republicans once again stirring up the hate and to add gas to the fire are the social network's conspiracy theorist are spreading the lie. Now we see white supremacist marching in the streets of Boston. Now we see Pride events and Drag Queen's Story Hours coming under threats. 

And people tell me that I am over reacting about the dangers.

As one person in yesterday’s meet said, it could have started in any community. It is just that one person attended the wrong party.

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Another Court Victory.

And another court case that will be going to the Supreme Court!

Court: Arkansas can’t ban treatment of transgender kids

AP News

By Andrew DeMillo

August 25, 2022

 A federal appeals court on Thursday said Arkansas can’t enforce its ban on transgender children receiving gender-affirming medical care.

A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a judge’s ruling temporarily blocking the state from enforcing the 2021 law. A trial is scheduled for October before the same judge on whether to permanently block the law.

Arkansas was the first state to enact such a ban, which prohibits doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18 years old, or from referring them to other providers for the treatment. There are no doctors who perform gender-affirming surgery on minors in the state.

“Because the minor’s sex at birth determines whether or not the minor can receive certain types of medical care under the law, Act 626 discriminates on the basis of sex,” the court’s ruling Thursday said.

[…]

“The Eighth Circuit was abundantly clear that the state’s ban on care does not advance any important governmental interest and the state’s defense of the law is lacking in legal or evidentiary support,” Chase Strangio, deputy director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said in a statement. “The state has no business categorically singling out this care for prohibition.”

Now we will see this going to the Supreme Court mainly I think because other appeal judges have okayed the ban and that will mean the cases will proceed up the chain of courts.

A federal judge in May blocked a similar law in Alabama. A Tennessee ban that was enacted last year on transgender treatments for youth, which is limited to providing gender-confirming hormone treatment to prepubescent minors, remains in effect.

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 It seems to me that the Republicans are trying to force down on everyone some weird version of 1950 “Father Knows Best” morality. They are trying to live a Norman Rockwell painting, a little white church with the father in a suit, the mother in a dress with heels, a boy, a girl in a dress with Mary Jane’s on bobby socks, and their dog spot.