History!

They say history repeats itself and it is becoming true. Have you heard of Project 2025?

Project 2025: A blueprint for the oppression of LGBTQ+ Americans
Far-right activists have put together a series of directives for the next conservative president. Here's what it would mean to the LGBTQ+ community.
The Advocate
By Trudy Ring
June 21, 2024

If you’re looking for yet another reason that Donald Trump shouldn’t be elected president again, we have two words for you: Project 2025.

You’ve probably been hearing these words, but you may be sketchy on what they mean. We’re here to fill you in on the details thanks to a report by Accountable.US.
What is Project 2025?

Basically, Project 2025 is a blueprint of what far-right activists want from the next conservative president — and Trump is the conservative who’s running. It includes plans to fire as many as 50,000 career federal employees and replace them with people who have unquestionable loyalty to the president; restrict access to contraception; possibly implement a national abortion ban; cut federal health care programs; and much more, designed to make the U.S. an authoritarian nation. And LGBTQ+ people are directly in its crosshairs.

“Project 2025 couldn’t make its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda any more clear. With far-right extremists at the helm, the project is a power grab by conservatives attempting to turn back the clock on hard-fought progress and fundamental rights,” Accountable.US President Caroline Ciccone said in a statement to The Advocate. “Project 2025 doesn’t just pose an existential threat to our democracy but seriously threatens the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ communities across the country.”

The clock has been set back to 1950s, to the land of Father Knows Best, where the wife is barefoot in the kitchen, and pregnant! It was illegal for us to step out the door and the government looked into our bedrooms.

My friend Stana had a comment on her blog about the history in the fifties…

Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963–86
Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2023

Abstract

Scholars are still unsure why American cities passed cross-dressing bans over the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By the 1960s, cities in every region of the United States had cross-dressing regulations, from major metropolitan centers to small cities and towns. They were used to criminalize gender non-conformity in many forms - for feminists, countercultural hippies, cross-dressers (or “transvestites”), and people we would now consider transgender. Starting in the late 1960s, however, criminal defendants began to topple cross-dressing bans.

There were many raids on bars where crossdressers hung out pre-Stonewall. Including the most famous uprising at Compton Cafeteria,

Narratives attached to events in LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) history like the Stonewall riots and other uprisings often de-emphasize the work of transgender people, particularly transgender people of color, in the fight for LGBTQIA rights. Within California, however, the role of transgender women, particularly those of color have thankfully been acknowledged in one of the watershed events in LGBTQIA history, the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot.

Before Equal Protection goes on to tell of a story of…

In the early afternoon of March 24, 1964, John Miller was approaching his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He had just crossed the intersection of West End Avenue and Ninety-First Street when a police officer stopped him and asked his name. When he replied “Joan Miller,” he was taken into custody. Miller, later described by The New York Times as a “tall, burly man of 58,” was a father with a military record. He was also a transvestite, or cross-dresser, which meant that he enjoyed dressing as a woman. His crime was violation of Section 887(7) of New York State's vagrancy law, by then over a century old, which made it illegal to appear in public with one's “face painted, discolored or concealed, or being otherwise disguised, in a manner calculated to prevent. . . being identified.” While the law did not explicitly reference clothing, police often used it to punish cross-dressing, and courts usually accepted that interpretation. Most of the time, people arrested under such laws did not mount expensive legal defenses, and those who did rarely appealed past the trial court level.

That is what we had to face going out in public so we kept to sleazy bars. Before the Connecticut law you could find crossdressers in bars in Hartford on Maple Ave. and Wethersfield Ave. We didn’t have a law but we had a ruling by the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) GLAD writes...

Attorney Goldberg successfully petitioned the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) to issue the Doe Declaratory Ruling which determined, in 2000, that Connecticut’s non-discrimination laws protect individuals from discrimination based on gender identity and expression.

She had client referred to by another lawyer in the firm and attorney Rachel Goldberg asked the CHRO a simple question: Are trans people covered by existing laws?"

Doe seeks a ruling from the CHRO that the statutory prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of sex encompass discrimination based upon a person’s apparent gender, specifically discrimination against transsexual individuals. Doe requests that the CHRO find such prohibitions in CONN. GEN. STAT. ' '  46a-60(a)(1), 46a-64(a)(1), 46a-64c(a)(1) and 46a-66(a).

And the answer was a lot more than she hoped for. They included not just transsexuals but also all trans people!

In 2011 that ruling was codified in PA11-55 AN ACT CONCERNING DISCRIMINATION.

But that was in 2011 and before that crossdressing was still illegal in Connecticut because as the lawyers from the CHRO like to say… That is only our opinion. It takes a court to crave it in stone (But with the current Supreme Court nothing is carved in stone.)

The Cambridge article goes on to say...

Laws banning cross-dressing were ubiquitous in urban America by the middle of the twentieth century. Most were more explicit than New York's Section 887(7), like the law in Columbus, Ohio, which criminalized any person who “shall appear upon any public street or other public place . . . in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.”Footnote 10 Starting in the late 1960s, however, criminal defendants began to successfully undermine cross-dressing bans in a range of cities, from New York and Los Angeles to Toledo and Champaign-Urbana.Footnote 11 Hoping to challenge their arrests, these defendants argued that anti-cross-dressing laws were facially unconstitutional, or unconstitutional as applied to them. As their successes mounted, gender outlaws began to bring civil lawsuits against cities to enjoin them from enforcing their anti-cross-dressing ordinances, marking a shift from the defensive posture of the criminal defendant to the offensive posture of the civil litigant. By 1980, criminal defendants had successfully challenged cross-dressing arrests in at least sixteen cities, introducing many courts to transvestite and transsexual people in the process.

Jacobin writes about the drag ban in Tennessee,

During the second half of the nineteenth century, multiple cities across the United States passed laws against public cross-dressing. The first appeared in St Louis, Missouri in 1843, followed by Columbus, Ohio in 1848 and Nashville, Tennessee in 1850. Over forty US cities passed similar laws before the end of the nineteenth century, and by the 1920s nineteen additional cities had adopted cross-dressing laws of their own.

Most anti-cross-dressing laws banned public appearance in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex” or “wearing the apparel of the other sex,” although some towns and cities passed laws against “indecent dress” or the wearing of “disguises” instead. Anti-cross-dressing laws were typically passed as part of broader anti-vice campaigns that also targeted prostitution, vagrancy, public drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. San Francisco’s 1863 law was typical of the time, outlawing cross-dressing as one manifestation of the broader offense of indecency, alongside public nudity, indecent exposure, lewd acts, and immoral performances.

[…]

Anti-cross-dressing laws were the exclusive province of local governments, and no state or federal legislature directly outlawed this type of dress. Several states did, however, pass anti-disguise or masquerade laws that encompassed cross-dressing when enforced. In 1845, for example, New York’s state legislature passed an anti-disguise law that made it a crime to appear in public with a painted face or when wearing a disguise designed to prevent identification. Passed in response to rural workers who wore women’s dresses and masks while participating in anti-rent protests, the law was later used to criminalize a wide range of cross-dressing practices.

But you have to realize that a President of the United States defended a crossdresser. What you say? You probably never heard of the court case Gray vs. Pitts, Assault and Battery, it was a little before your time… in 1771 hired lawyer John Quincy Adams, you might know the name he was the sixth president of the US.

In 1771, Lendall Pitts physically assaulted John Gray outside a barbershop in Boston. Pitts had initially been attracted to Gray, mistaking him for a woman due to Gray's appearance and dress. Upon realizing Gray was male, Pitts struck him in the scalp with a walking stick, causing a wound. Gray decided to press charges against Pitts for assault and battery. The case was first heard in the Suffolk Inferior Court in July 1771, where Gray sued Pitts for £300. John Adams served as the attorney for Pitts, while Josiah Quincy Jr. represented Gray

Wait a minute are you telling me that this was the first case of “Trans Bashing”?

So now we are back again with the Republicans wanting to make us illegal again! They want to keep us off the streets, they want to must us criminals.

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Update: July 4th @ 6:00AM

USA Today wrote about a congressional hearing on Project 2025

Project 2025 head says 'second American Revolution' will be 'bloodless if the left allows'

By Rachel Barber

July 3, 2024

The president of The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, said the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling is encouraging and that the group, known for Project 2025, is already in the process of “taking the country back.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts said in an interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court granted former President Donald Trump limited immunity from prosecution for official acts in the ruling that split the justices 6-3 along ideological lines. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling dangerously expands the chief executive’s power and makes presidents “a king above the law.”

I would like to point out that the Supreme Court did not grant total immunity but only for "official acts" as president... staging a coup is not an "official act" of a president. Fudging the company books are not an "official act" of a president.

James Singer, a spokesperson for the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, responded in a statement drawing attention to the Fourth of July.

“248 years ago tomorrow, America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” Singer said. “they are dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.”

In a statement to USA TODAY Wednesday afternoon, Roberts alleged that it is organized groups on the left that “have the capacity to carry out violent riots.”

“Americans in 2024 are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats,” Roberts said. “These patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box.”

This election is going to hinge on who can "get out the vote" you can't sit this one out!