We Don’t Chose Our Parents

Those of you who use Blogger, have you noticed anything strange with the "Stats?" Normally I get around 4 or 5 hundred hits a day, yesterday number of visits was 17385! But so far in today it is 19775 hits! That is way over a months worth of visits in 12 hours.

What's going on? Has anyone else using Blogger seen a jump in visits?

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Sometimes we wonder how the heck they can be the children of those parents. Can you imagine being a child of these parents?

Ex-KKK leader’s child comes out as transgender in new memoir

R. Derek Black, the child of Stormfront founder Don Black and a close family friend of David Duke, documents their journey from white nationalism to antiracism.

NBC News

By Matt Lavietes

May 25, 2024

As a child, Black came out to the world as a white nationalist on the syndicated daytime talk program “The Jenny Jones Show” in 1999. Then, while trying to hide their white nationalist credentials as a college student roughly a decade later, Black was outed in a student-run online forum. In 2013, Black came out yet again: In an article published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Black condemned white supremacy and their famous family’s ideology and came out as an antiracist.

Now, in the memoir “The Klansman’s Son,” the 35-year-old child of former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black and a close family friend of the notorious former KKK grand wizard David Duke is coming out as transgender.

Wow, can you imagine what it was like being trans and living in the house of White Nationalist?

“You can sort of bury these things, and for a lot of my teenage years, it was often feeling like it wanted to burst through,” Black, who uses they/them and she/her pronouns, told NBC News. “But it was also something that I just didn’t talk about with almost anybody.”

Black learned not to talk about their gender identity, or anything private for that matter, from a young age.

They write in their memoir, released earlier this month, that their father — who founded what is thought to be the internet’s first neo-Nazi website, Stormfront — taught them that the notion of privacy was “absurd.”

That must have been so hard growing up… all you hear are negative messages against you, how you’re damn and going to hell, how you are nothing more than a piece of s**t. That realing must have hurt deeply.

As a college student, they continued to host their morning neo-Nazi radio show, “The Derek Black Show,” in secrecy from their peers. Simultaneously, Black formed close friendships with the same groups of people they regularly targeted on the radio: Jewish people and people of color.

“It just became intolerable,” they said. “I couldn’t manage this sort of split that was going on, and I couldn’t even imagine coming back to campus and having to keep doing it, wondering when the shoe is going to drop, when people were going to find out about me.”

Do you remember Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children Campaign?

Another Pie in the Face for Anita Bryant: Her Granddaughter Is Gay

Sarah Green, who is engaged to marry another woman, spoke about her famously homophobic grandmother on a recent podcast.

The Advocate

By Trudy Ring

July 27, 2021

 

It's most likely Anita Bryant's worst nightmare: Her granddaughter is gay and marrying a woman.

Granddaughter Sarah Green talked about her relationship with the notorious antigay crusader on a recent episode of Slate's podcast One Year, hosted by Josh Levin and focusing on 1977, a year when the nation seemed on the verge of great change.

Bryant, a beauty queen and pop singer, was a spokeswoman for Florida orange growers in the 1970s when she gained new fame with her opposition to gay rights. Miami-Dade County's government adopted an ordinance in 1977 banning employment and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation, making it one of the first municipalities to do so. Bryant, who had testified against the ordinance, was outraged at its passage and led a campaign dubbed "Save Our Children" to persuade voters to repeal it.

Along the way, Bryant became a darling of her fellow conservative Christians and an enemy of gay people and their allies; at one point, an activist threw a pie in her face. Miami-Dade citizens did repeal the ordinance, with over 70 percent voting to do so. The city-county government restored the ordinance in 1998 and added gender identity to it in 2014.

I kind of feel sorry for their parents, all that animosity can back to them like a pie in the face.