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Quote:Blair Wallace, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, told NBCNews.com, "We know the brunt of this will fall on our Black and brown communities and our poor communities the most." Only those with the financial resources and ability to take time off work can travel to neighboring states to terminate a pregnancy. Already abortion providers in Louisiana are fielding calls from desperate Texans seeking abortions, leading to longer wait times.
Imani Gandy, senior legal analyst for RewireNewsGroup.com, explained to me in an interview that the Texas law is "really, really pernicious," because it is "using taxpayer dollars to provide a bounty for bounty hunters to go attacking or harassing abortion providers."
In fact, the hundreds of Republican-led state-level legislative attacks against abortion have cost taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees of both pro-choice and anti-abortion forces. According to the Washington Post, "states have paid at least $9.8 million in abortion providers' [attorney] fees," in the last four years alone. This is money that could be put to better use—such as providing health care to low-income residents that includes abortion and other reproductive medical care.
For a party that has been railing in favor of "individual liberties" when it comes to lifesaving masks and vaccinations during a pandemic, asserting that a series of electrical impulses between newly formed cells are more important than a person's bodily autonomy is the height of hypocrisy and reeks of performative politics.
The dirty secret behind Texas' anti-abortion law - Alternet.org
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Quote:During Tuesday night's meeting student representative Mackenzie Atwood (photo), a senior at Franklin High School, tried to address the topic of "protected classes," including LGBTQ people, minorities, and people's religious beliefs. Atwood, who is openly gay, discussed incidents of her fellow students being called "faggot," she said, at school, along with the use of racial slurs. “When kids are coming to theater every single day telling me, 'Oh, I got called a faggot in the hall today,' or 'I got called a racial slur in the hallway today,' that's not something to joke about, though it's become something that we're so numb to that it becomes a joke," Atwood shared. “So I think it's important to understand that yes, everyone is protected at the school, but being someone who is caucasian is not something you're getting bullied about." Parents in the audience yelled, "nope," and expressed disagreement.
“Being homosexual, which may I say I am gay, tell me what you want about that, I am being personally attacked in school about this," Atwood said.
More outbursts from homophobic audience members caused the chair to repeatedly pound her gavel to quell the attacks. It is "extremely disgusting that you can look me in the eyes and say that I'm not being oppressed at the school," Atwood cried. "This has to stop," one homophobic parent yelled from the audience. "This is the indoctrination." Boston.com reporting on the attack notes "indoctrination" is "a common rallying cry on Fox News and other conservative media outlets."
Watch: Parents blasted by superintendent after attacking LGBTQ student during televised school meeting - Alternet.org
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Read this long description of probably the most horrific policy from the Nasty Party ever, the family separations at the border.
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12-28-2022, 12:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-28-2022, 12:40 PM by Admin.)
Quote:Trent Taylor says his cell, in a Texas psychiatric unit operated by the state’s prison system, was covered in human excrement. Feces smeared the window and streaked the ceiling. Someone had painted a shit swastika on the wall, alongside a smiley face. According to Taylor’s allegations in a federal lawsuit, there was such a thick layer of dried human dung on the floor of the cell that it made a crunching sound as he walked naked across the cell. Taylor alleged that he was kept in this cell for four days, where he neither ate nor drank due to fears that the excrement, which was even packed inside the cell’s water faucet, would contaminate anything he consumed. Then, on the fifth day, he was moved to a bare, frigid cell with no toilet, water fountain, or bed. A clogged drain filled the new cell with choking ammonia films. With nowhere to relieve himself, Taylor held his urine for 24 hours before he could do so no longer. And then he had to sleep alone on the floor while covered in his own waste.
The Supreme Court eventually ruled 7–1 that Taylor’s lawsuit against the corrections officers who forced him to live in these conditions could move forward, and that lawsuit settled last February. But the Supreme Court had to intervene after an even more conservative court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, attempted to shut down these claims against the prison guards. A unanimous panel of three Fifth Circuit judges held that it was unclear whether the Constitution prevents prisoners from being forced to remain in “extremely dirty cells for only six days” — although, in what counts as an act of mercy in the Fifth Circuit, the panel did concede that “prisoners couldn’t be housed in cells teeming with human waste for months on end.” This decision, in Taylor v. Stevens, is hardly aberrant behavior by the Fifth Circuit, which oversees federal litigation arising out of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Fifth Circuit’s Taylor decision stands out for its casual cruelty, but its disregard for law, precedent, logic, and basic human decency is ordinary behavior in this court.
Dominated by partisans and ideologues — a dozen of the court’s 17 active judgeships are held by Republican appointees, half of whom are Trump judges — the Fifth Circuit is where law goes to die. And, because the Fifth Circuit oversees federal litigation arising out of Texas, whose federal trial courts have become a pipeline for far-right legal decisions, the Fifth Circuit’s judges frequently create havoc with national consequences..
The Trumpiest court in America
- The rest of the article is full of bizarre and alarming examples, a Court gone rogue..
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Quote:Hospital staff in Kansas called the police on a man dying of cancer who was using cannabis products to cope with his symptoms, in an incident that has since sparked outrage and renewed calls to rethink the state’s strict cannabis laws. The encounter took place in mid-December, when police in the city of Hays say two officers showed up at the cancer patient’s hospital room to issue him a citation for a drug violation. Police also took away a vaping device and cannabis product that hospital staff had already confiscated.
A dying cancer patient used cannabis to ease pain. His hospital called the police | Cannabis | The Guardian
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Quote:Nearly 1,000 migrant children separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the administration of former President Donald Trump have yet to be reunited with their parents despite a two-year effort by President Joe Biden. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday of the 998 children still separated, 148 were in the process of reunification. Biden, a Democrat, issued an executive order shortly after taking office in January 2021 that established a task force to reunite children separated from their families under Trump, a Republican and immigration hardliner, calling such separations a "human tragedy." Advertisement · Scroll to continue The Trump administration split apart thousands of migrant families under a blanket "zero-tolerance" policy that called for the prosecution of all unauthorized border crossers in spring 2018. Government watchdogs and advocates have found the separations began before and continued after the policy's official start. DHS said the task force's painstaking work of combing through "patchwork" information kept by the Trump administration on the policy had so far found 3,924, mostly Central American, children were separated at the border.
Close to 1,000 migrant children separated by Trump yet to be reunited with parents | Reuters
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Quote:Conservative political commentator, Michael Knowles, called for the eradication of transgender people during his 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) speech, The Daily Beast reports. Writer Alejandra Caraballo tweeted a clip from Knowles' CPAC speech, writing, "Michael Knowles is openly calling for genocide against trans people at CPAC." She then included the Daily Wire host's quote: "Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely."
'Hate speech to genocide': Right-wing host uses CPAC stage to call for eradication of transgender people - Alternet.org
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03-18-2023, 07:11 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-18-2023, 07:46 PM by Admin.)
Quote:Former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate and election denier, Kari Lake, recently shared her outrage over an Arizona rancher's arrest after he killed an unarmed Mexican migrant near the U.S.-Mexico border. Per Associated Press, 73-year-old George Alan Kelly opened fire "that day on a group of about eight unarmed migrants who entered the U.S. illegally," according to the prosecutor in the case. Santa Cruz County Chief Deputy attorney, Kimberly Hunley, wrote in the filing, "Kelly shot an unarmed man in the back as he was fleeing, in addition to shooting at other individuals, without warning or provocation."
Kari Lake finds Arizona rancher’s arrest 'appalling' after he murdered 'unarmed' Mexican migrant - Alternet.org
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Quote:My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger. My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse. But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”
My 6-Year-Old Son Died. Then the Anti-vaxxers Found Out.
Not necessarily all rightwingers but statistically they're overrepresented in anti-Vax..
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Quote:According to the Kansas State High School Activities Association, about 106,000 students participate in the organization’s sports and activities. Guess how many of those students are transgender girls? Three. That’s right, just three. Three transgender girls enjoying sports is apparently an emergency for Kansas Republicans. For the last few years they’ve been trying to pass a bill that would ban transgender girls and women from participating in female sports at public schools and colleges. The Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, vetoed the bill but, on Wednesday, the Republican-dominated Kansas legislature finally got enough votes to override the veto. Not only are transgender students now restricted from participating in school sports, parents can sue if they think their daughter didn’t make a team because a transgender girl took their place. (The focus of the bill is very much on transgender girls and doesn’t say much about trans boys.)
Three trans girls playing sports is an emergency for Kansas Republicans | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian
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