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bill aims to silence accusations of racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, or any other allegations of discrimination, making them “defamation” under the law and potentially costing the person who made them up to $35,000 in the state known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law.The sweeping legislation also appears to void journalists’ right to not reveal sources, and, chillingly removes the long-standing requirement that a public figure needs to show “actual malice” to win a defamation lawsuit.“In cases of alleged homophobia or transphobia, defendants charged with defamation are not allowed to use the plaintiff’s religious or scientific beliefs as part of their defense. If they are found liable for defamation, the defendant could be fined at least $35,000,” The New Republic reports, noting it “would silence basically any accusations of discrimination.”“The bill applies to statements made in print, on television, or on social media.

Mediazona. The club, which opened in 2021, regularly hosted drag parties.

Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, currently the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for governor, launched an attack on transgender women years after the Tar Heel State’s last GOP governor cost the state millions – and possibly billions – of dollars, and cost him his political career over the very same issue.“We’re going to defend women in this state,” vowed Robinson, according to WUNC, at a campaign stop earlier this month.

U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville says Democrats “hate” women and want them to be “extinct.”The Alabama Republican freshman lawmaker made a name for himself by blocking hundreds of critical military promotions last year over the military’s policy of reimbursing service members who are forced to travel out of state to obtain reproductive care and abortion services.

smoke-filled back rooms, targeting their political opponents – like Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Eric Cantor did on January 20, 2009, just hours after Barack Obama was sworn into office.“On the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration, a group of top GOP luminaries quietly gathered in a Washington steakhouse to lick their wounds and ultimately create the outline of a plan for how to deal with the incoming administration,” PBS’s “Frontline” reported a decade ago, in 2013. “After three hours of strategizing, they decided they needed to fight Obama on everything.

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is promoting his far-Christian right beliefs in his latest fundraising email, which asks, “Does America Need More God, Patriot?”Johnson, who last year was the lead sponsor of a federal “Don’t Say Gay” bill, lamented in his email that an increasing number of high school students identify as LGBTQ+. He also claimed “America is hanging on by a thread,” “I fear America may be beyond redemption,” and said, “we live in a depraved culture.”“I’m uneasy, Patriot,” Johnson’s email, sent via the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), begins, as Insider reported.

KFile, on Wednesday uncovered Johnson’s remarks in support of so-called “ex-gay” conversion therapy, which major medical institutions and government agencies have pronounced dangerous, possibly deadly, and likened to or defined as torture.Johnson had collaborated with an “ex-gay” ministry and his employer before he entered politics in the mid-2000’s, a Christian legal organization that is now designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.Wednesday evening, as Mediate reported, CNN played audio of Johnson talking about an annual event he worked on with his employer, the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom) and Exodus International, a now-defunct and debunked “ex-gay” organization that claimed gay people could become heterosexual through conversion therapy.That event was targeted toward school children.READ MORE: Johnson Mocks Reports GOP Plan to Defund IRS Will Cost US Taxpayers Up to $90 Billion“Our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and cannot change. But what these adult advocacy groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network are promoting is a type of behavior.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), who House Republicans unanimously voted for last week, has scrubbed his personal website, apparently deleting all 69 weekly podcasts he and his wife Kelly began recording last year.Kelly Johnson’s business website, Onward Christian Counseling, has also been scrubbed. HuffPost reports she “runs a counseling business that advocates the belief that homosexuality is comparable to bestiality and incest, according to its operating documents.” Attempts to access both websites now result in an “Error” message, although those web addresses have been archived.Speaker Johnson has been described as a far-right Christian nationalist and Christian dominionist.Last week, after Johnson was elected the third-most powerful official in America, Politico published a profile on “the Christian nationalist ideas that shaped House Speaker Mike Johnson.” The New York Times wrote, “The new House speaker has put his faith at the center of his political career, and aligned himself with a newer cohort of conservative Christianity that some describe as Christian nationalism.”An MSNBC columnist last week wrote, “Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalist track record isn’t a mystery — it’s a tragedy,” and added, “The new speaker cut his teeth trying to erode the separation of church and state and abortion and LGBTQ rights as a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund.”On Thursday, in a Daily Beast opinion piece, David Rothkopf wrote, “Here’s Why Mike Johnson Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump.”“In interviews he has spoken of the fact that ‘We don’t live in a democracy’ we live in a ‘Biblical republic,'” Rothkop said.

Fox News co-host Jessica Tarlov, the lone liberal on the the right-wing cable channel’s very popular afternoon show “The Five,” destroyed her conservative co-hosts’ talking points on a wide variety of culture war issues.Behind a chyron of “Tyranny of the Minority” – related to remark made by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy – Tarlov on Wednesday fed facts to the conservatives who tried to claim the majority of Americans oppose the right to choose an abortion, and the majority of Americans do not support transgender people.“On the trans issue, for instance,” Tarlov offered, “our own Fox polling shows that 57% of Americans think that trans kids and their families being the target of political attacks, as in these anti-trans bills, is a major problem.”“When you look at the actual numbers of kids that are, for instance, they have gender dysphoria, and they’re getting top surgery. How many kids do you think got top surgery last year?” she asked, not receiving a response from any of her co-hosts.READ MORE: DeSantis ‘Shuts Down’ Question of How He Would Handle His Kids Being LGBTQ: ‘We’ll Leave That Between My Wife and I’“Under 300,” answered Tarlov, who “holds two Master’s degrees in political science and public policy, as well as a Ph.D.

generated lots of media coverage by making appearances before North Carolina school boards to rant about the supposedly “perverted” books that are available in school libraries. He’s so pleased with himself that he’s taking his bigotry-promoting show on the road.Amanchukwu is a pastor at Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is overseen by virulently anti-LGBTQ pastor Patrick Wooden, who also happens to be Amanchukwu’s father-in-law.

six-page letter, dated July 5, also appears to promote a form of Christian nationalism, suggesting right-wing boycotts over the LGBTQ Pride products harmed the company’s market value, and then stating: “It is likely more profitable to sell the type of Pride that enshrines the love of the United States. Target’s Pride Campaign alienates whereas Pride in our country unites.”The letter also refers to reports from right-wing media including the National Review, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Daily Caller, along with articles from Reuters and Axios.It denounces Target’s financial support of GLSEN.

Ron DeSantis is now personally defending the anti-LGBTQ ad his official 2024 presidential campaign promoted last week, which drew massive outrage from the left and the right for being homophobic and transphobic. The ad wrongly attempts to paint Donald Trump as being pro-LGBTQ by using some of his remarks from years ago, rather than his long record as president and presidential candidate of targeting and attacking the LGBTQ community.“Identifying Donald Trump as really being a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream, where he was having men compete against women in his beauty pageants — I think that’s totally fair game, because he’s now campaigning saying the opposite,” DeSantis said Wednesday to  right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren, as NBC News reports.The video, which went viral on Twitter and currently has nearly 25 million views, includes this message from the DeSantis campaign attacking Trump: “To wrap up Pride Month, let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it.”READ MORE: ‘Disgusting’: Pro-DeSantis Former GOP Lawmaker Pulls Support and Slams Florida Governor After Anti-LGBTQ AdTrump’s anti-LGBTQ record is extreme, despite his pre-presidential remarks and actions.

303 Creative vs. Elenis, was argued on First Amendment free speech grounds.“The First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees,” the Court ruled on Friday, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines.On Friday, Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, ruled in favor of the Colorado designer who claims she would like to expand her business to include producing wedding websites, but also claims her Christian faith requires her to refuse to do so for same-sex couples getting married.

Club Q, a Colorado LGBTQ nightclub, and wounding 19 others with an AR-15 style assault rifle last year has been sentenced by a judge to life in prison, including over 2200 years behind bars.“Anderson Lee Aldrich, 23, was sentenced Monday to five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole for the 2022 massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” CNN reports.“Judge Michael McHenry also sentenced Aldrich to an additional 2,208 years in prison for the attempted murder charges. Aldrich also received a four-year sentence for bias-motivated charges, which are akin to hate-crime charges in other states.”RELATED: Watch: Club Q Owner Testifies Before Congress About ‘Hundreds’ of Messages of Hate He Received After Anti-LGBTQ AttackColorado does not have the death penalty.Unarmed patrons in the club took Aldrich down.Cheryl Norton, whose daughter Ashtin Gamblin survived after being shot nine times, urged Judge McHenry, “Please your honor, I’m pleading with you: Lock this animal away to the depths of hell.”Extremism expert Mark Pitcavage on Monday noted Aldrich “had prominently featured on his website an accelerationist white supremacist video urging killings and terrorist attacks.”Calling it “one of the worst mass killings in Colorado history,” NBC News adds that “Aldrich, 23, who identifies as nonbinary and uses Mx.

declared Donald Trump the President of the United States and Joe Biden a “wannabe dictator,” Fox News once again is under fire, this time for an article and corresponding social media post that claimed “critics” say the LGBTQ pride flag “promotes grooming and pedophilia.”The White House in a rare move slammed the far-right wing propaganda network, which focused its article on an LGBTQ Pride flag hanging from the White House portico during President Biden’s LGBTQ Pride event this past weekend.Today, the People’s House – your house – sends a clear message to the country and to the world.America is a nation of pride. pic.twitter.com/ZZS9oTpDww— President Biden (@POTUS) June 11, 2023According to multiple reports, the initial headline on the Fox News article written by Kerry J.

American Family Association publicly attacked U.S. Senator Ted Cruz over the Texas Republican’s opposition to the “Kill the Gays” law in Uganda.

The American College of Pediatricians, a small, right-wing extremist group of physicians who for two decades has struggled to gain traction finds itself for the first time with more power than it has ever had as the far-right takes greater hold on America.But along with their new-found power comes a deep dive into at least 15 years worth of their internal documents, the result of the group reportedly publishing a link to its own unsecured Google drive in April, which WIRED uncovered and reported on back in May.The Washington Post combed through 10,000 of the group’s documents, and on Thursday publishing its exposé on the American College of Pediatricians, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.“The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a fringe anti-LGBTQ hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBTQ junk science, primarily via far-right conservative media and filing amicus briefs in cases related to gay adoption and marriage equality,” SPLC writes in its extensive report.READ MORE: ‘Lying Through Their Teeth’: White House Slams Fox News Over ‘Grooming and Pedophilia’ LGBTQ Pride Flag ArticleAccording to The Washington Post, the American College of Pediatricians is a “small group of conservative doctors” that “has sought to shape the nation’s most contentious policies on abortion and transgender rights by promoting views rejected by the medical establishment as scientific fact.”The American College of Pediatricians promotes the discredited practice of “conversion therapy,” which has been called “torture” by some who have been subjected to it.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg slammed Republicans over their repeated attacks against the LGBTQ community, claiming that conservative politicians are seeking to exploit populist anger over culture-war issues in order to distract from the more unpopular parts of their party’s platform.Speaking to MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing during an on-air interview on Tuesday, Buttigieg offered an explanation for what appears to be an onslaught of attacks targeting the LGBTQ community or displays of LGBTQ visibility.“I think it’s being done out of the perception that it is politically convenient to target vulnerable groups,” Buttigieg said of the GOP attacks, which take the form of both screeds by anti-LGBTQ pundits and legislation seeking to restrict LGBTQ rights or censor expressions of LGBTQ identity.In the past six months, more than 75 anti-LGBTQ bills have been signed into law in more than 20 states, prompting theHuman Rights Campaign to declare a national state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans.

Nikki Haley is under fire for what some are calling “outrageous and fact-free,” and “unserious, untrue, and hateful” statements during her CNN town hall Sunday night, where at least one of her more attention-getting remarks is drawing anger and upset.Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper to define the term “woke” as conservatives see it, Haley, according to Mediaite, replied: “There’s a lot of things,” which seemed to define her responses to several of the questions she was asked.“You want to start with biological boys playing in girl sports,” said the former Trump Ambassador to the United Nations, referring to transgender girls. “That’s one thing.

The Orlando Sentinel reports.Lyman High School’s 256-page yearbook includes two pages that highlight the school’s LGBTQ students and features gender identity terms such as “genderfluid” and “nonbinary.”The Seminole County Public Schools in response to the criticism is offering to issue refunds or reprint the yearbook without the LGBTQ section that the conservative Seminole County Moms for Liberty claims is offensive.“They shouldn’t have any sexual definitions in a yearbook,” the group’s chapter chair Jessica Tillmann told The Sentinel.“This is a yearbook that goes to every student as young as 14.”The school’s yearbook is stirring controversy for a second straight year after the district in 2022 considered putting stickers over photos of a student walkout protesting the so-called “don’t say gay” law, the report said.The Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reports that “An LGBTQ+ section in this year’s yearbook includes a picture of members of the student’s Gay-Straight Alliance, definitions of key LGBTQ+ terms, a passage on the evolution of pronouns and a profile of a student who advocates for the LGBTQ+ community.”Danielle Pomeranz, the school yearbook’s faculty advisor, isn’t on board with the district’s decision to remove the LGBTQ content.“They are definitions,” Pomeranz told The Sentinel.“They are not teaching anything about sex at all. … Nobody is teaching anybody about sex acts.

Joe Scarborough and Donny Deutsch mocked conservatives for running the “woke” hysteria into the ground.Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have screeched about the so-called “woke agenda,” which they warn will undermine American values and put children at risk from all manner of threats, but the “Morning Joe” host said most voters simply don’t care about that manufactured issue.“Joe Biden, 350 pieces of bipartisan legislation signed, and Ron DeSantis and everybody else is talking ‘woke, woke, woke, woke, woke,'” Scarborough said. “Again, something that I said on this show and I heard a lot about from liberals, even, in 2021.

Turning Point USA, is being widely mocked for posting a video attacking Chick-fil-A over claims the conservative, privately-owned, faith-based fast food restaurant chain recently hired a diversity officer.“So I’m grieving,” the video, apparently by Morgonn McMichael (below), begins. “It’s lunchtime.

Governor Ron DeSantis insists his recent remarks attacking U.S. Senator Ted Cruz should not be viewed as an endorsement of the biblical call for gay people to be executed.

The Washington Post calls the investigation’s conclusion “a move that could affect how schools handle book challenges.” The Forsyth County, Georgia school district has “agreed to offer ‘supportive measures’ to students affected by the book removals and to administer a school climate survey,” according to a letter from the Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).The extensive and detailed letter notes that the district weighed multiple methods to handle parents’ complaints about several books, and took steps, albeit insufficient, to attempt fairness.

dissected then disintegrated Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and the Republican Party in general, for their authoritarian lunge and overall hypocrisy.For nearly eight minutes Thursday evening, Hayes explained to viewers how DeSantis peddles fake claims about freedom, while enacting some the most hypocritically “authoritarian” and “dystopian” laws in the country.Hayes says that “in Ron DeSantis’ Florida, the state will decide what books your child can or cannot leave their school library by threatening teachers and librarians with time in prison if they do not comply with vague laws about instruction on race, gender and sexuality. The state will decide what women can do with their own bodies by banning abortion at six weeks.

U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has been linked to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, an incel, white supremacist and white Christian nationalist who promotes antisemitism, Holocaust denialism, racism, and misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ extremist beliefs.

pushing schools to adopt junk science painting transgender youth as carriers of a pathological disorder,” and files detailing methods to indoctrinate pre-teens into a culture of “sexual purity” and opposing same-sex relationships.The august-sounding American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is not the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The American Academy of Pediatrics is the highly-respected and largest group of pediatricians in America.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) says that women who are stepmothers are not real mothers, because they are not a child’s “biological” parent.The Georgia Republican delivered that claim during a congressional hearing on Wednesday to a woman who happens to be the head of the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, and who also happens to be a lesbian: Randi Weingarten.“Miss Weingarten,” Rep.

Governor Ron DeSantis, though his Department of Education and its chair, Manny Diaz, has officially expanded his “Don’t Say Gay” law to include all public school grades, from kindergarten through 12th. DeSantis had promoted the highly-controversial and possibly unconstitutional law originally as applying only to children through third grade.“DeSantis has not commented on the proposal.

first state in the nation that effectively all but bans that medically-necessary and widely-approved care for both minors and adults.“Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced plans to restrict health care for transgender people weeks ago,” the Associated Press reported last week, “when protesters rallied at the Capitol to urge lawmakers to pass a law banning puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries for children. But the discussion was focused on minors, not adults.”The Attorney General’s spokeswoman, Madeline Sieren, “clarified in a statement later in the day that adults also would be covered” by his order.The New York Times this week cites Bailey’s “temporary order severely restricting gender-affirming care,” and observes: “this means gender-affirming medical care has been restricted by law or other means in 13 states, with another two under judicial review.”Bailey has been very vocal – and very partisan – about his targeting of one of the smallest and most vulnerable populations in his state.“There’s a woke left-wing ideology that’s masquerading as medicine,” Bailey told Fox News in March (video below), when he announced his emergency order putting in place heavy restrictions on gender-affirming care that all but ban treatment.

an extensive and wide-ranging travel advisory for anyone considering moving or traveling to Florida.Calling it an “unprecedented step,” Equality Florida says their travel advisory “comes after passage of laws that are hostile to the LGBTQ+ community, restrict access to reproductive health care, repeal gun safety laws and allow untrained, unpermitted carry, and foment racial prejudice.”Equality Florida also warns that Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has “weaponized state agencies to impose sanctions against businesses large and small that disagree with his attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”READ MORE: ‘This Is Very Serious’: Judge Sanctions Fox News, Likely to Appoint ‘Special Master’ in Dominion $1.6 Billion LawsuitThe advisory notes that “Florida has recently adopted a slate of hateful laws, and is fast-tracking additional measures that directly target the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals and basic freedoms broadly.

signed legislation Tuesday prohibiting transgender people from using public school facilities that match their gender identity. Later that same day, Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, posted a video crediting his organization for the legislation.Rapert, a longtime religious-right activist and ardent Christian nationalist, bragged that this piece of legislation was first proposed by Arkansas school board member David Naylor during an annual NACL meeting, endorsed by the organization, and finally brought to the Arkansas state legislature by state Rep. Mary Bentley, who serves on the board of the NACL.“The NACL has seven working committees,” Rapert said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is publicly denouncing Uganda’s latest Anti-Homosexuality legislation, which is being called a “Kill the Gays” bill for its capital punishment penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”The legislation passed in a nearly-unanimous vote and now heads to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni‘s desk.“The Anti-Homosexuality Act passed by the Ugandan Parliament yesterday would undermine fundamental human rights of all Ugandans and could reverse gains in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Joe Harding, the now-former Florida Republican lawmaker who authored the extremist “Don’t Say Gay” bill could face up to 35 years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday afternoon to federal felony fraud charges in a scheme to obtain $150,000 in COVID-19 relief funds, according to Florida Politics‘ publisher Peter Scorsch.Harding, 35, was a construction project manager who started his own lawn care company. He quickly became a right-wing darling after his anti-LGBTQ legislation, officially the Parental Rights in Education Act, was embraced by Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed it into law.Harding was charged in a December federal indictment with six counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements in his plot to obtain $150,000 in COVID funds.He resigned from the legislature the following day.

Governor Ron DeSantis is hitting back at President Joe Biden, who slammed the Sunshine State’s anti-transgender policies as “cruel” and “close to sinful.” The far-right Florida Republican is using a far-right extremist, one has been accused of promoting stochastic terrorism, to make his point.In a “Daily Show” interview with former Obama White House aide, actor Kal Penn, President Biden denounced Florida’s anti-transgender policies.“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, ‘close to sinful,'” President Biden told Penn. “It’s just terrible what they’re doing.”READ MORE: DeSantis and Far-Right Falsely Blame Wokeness and Diversity as Reason Silicon Valley Bank Collapsed (Video)“It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘You know, I decided I want to become a man or I want to become a woman,” Biden added.

seven broad issues including schools and education, healthcare, free speech, access to accurate IDs, public accommodations, weakening of civil rights laws, marriage, and more. The number of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced has more than tripled since mid-January, and far exceeded the total number of bills introduced in all of 2022, which was 278.Oklahoma has the most anti-LGBTQ bills so far at 35, followed by Missouri (34), Texas (29 bills), Tennessee (26), Iowa (28), Mississippi (24), Indiana.