Just finished that last night on Hulu and WOW. Anyone else watch it?

Supporters of LGBTQ+ students rallying in Utah were given protection from protesters hurling insults and misinformation over the weekend by allies dressed as angels, who raised huge fabric “wings” to shield queer marchers.

Members of Brigham Young University’s (BYU) queer community were confronted at a pride event last Saturday by anti-gay students and outside protesters, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, but they found they had an unusual and effective security barrier.

The event was held at a public park in Provo, as clubs for LGBTQ+ people attending Brigham Young are not permitted to gather on campus. The conservative university also forbids “any same-sex romantic partnerships or displays of affection among LGBTQ students”, the Tribune noted.

“My older sister, she’s gay and she used to go to BYU, and she had a really hard time here – she got kicked out,” said Sabrina Wong, a student who was among the angels. “During that time, I didn’t even know she was going through this. She hadn’t even come out to our family.

“She also didn’t have a lot of resources, and that breaks my heart so much,” Wong said.

Protesters’ presence at the event came as many US Republican-led states take steps to limit LGBTQ rights, especially in public educational institutions.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/07/angels-with-large-wings-shield-students-from-harm-at-utah-pride-march

Supporters of LGBTQ+ students rallying in Utah were given protection from protesters hurling insults and misinformation over the weekend by allies dressed as angels, who raised huge fabric “wings” to shield queer marchers.

Members of Brigham Young University’s (BYU) queer community were confronted at a pride event last Saturday by anti-gay students and outside protesters, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, but they found they had an unusual and effective security barrier.

The event was held at a public park in Provo, as clubs for LGBTQ+ people attending Brigham Young are not permitted to gather on campus. The conservative university also forbids “any same-sex romantic partnerships or displays of affection among LGBTQ students”, the Tribune noted.

“My older sister, she’s gay and she used to go to BYU, and she had a really hard time here – she got kicked out,” said Sabrina Wong, a student who was among the angels. “During that time, I didn’t even know she was going through this. She hadn’t even come out to our family.

“She also didn’t have a lot of resources, and that breaks my heart so much,” Wong said.

Protesters’ presence at the event came as many US Republican-led states take steps to limit LGBTQ rights, especially in public educational institutions.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/07/angels-with-large-wings-shield-students-from-harm-at-utah-pride-march

Police in Las Vegas visited the home of a county official Wednesday as they continue to investigate the stabbing death of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, the newspaper said.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department only confirmed in a statement to NPR that it was executing search warrants related to the weekend homicide on the 7200 block of Bronze Circle.

But the Review-Journal reported that law enforcement officers and police vehicles were spotted outside the home of Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles on Wednesday morning, and that a section around the home was taped off.

Journalists with the newspaper also observed a vehicle in Telles' driveway matching the description of the red GMC Yukon police say the suspect was driving. The vehicle was later towed.

German, who was found dead with stab wounds outside his home on Saturday, had recently written a series of stories about Telles' mismanagement of the public administrator's office, including allegations of a hostile workplace, bullying and favoritism. Employees also said that Telles had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.

Telles denied the allegations and targeted German on social media. In one tweet, Telles called one of the stories about his office a "smear piece" and said he thought German was "mad that I haven't crawled into a hole and died."

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/07/1121617699/las-vegas-journalist-stabbed-investigation-jeff-german

This could get interesting

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June unleashed a wave of anger at the GOP and lawmakers who’ve been pushing to ban abortion for years.

It also unleashed some of the most unhinged takes on pregnancy, abortion, and how uteruses function that we’ve seen in quite some time.

Despite the fact that conservatives fought for decades for the decision they finally achieved in the Dobbs case, many Republican officials have struggled mightily to rationalize their abortion stances to constituents, some of whom are experiencing an America without Roe v. Wade for the first time.

During that time, state lawmakers have opined that women can control just exactly when men ejaculate and that child rape victims have “options” that aren’t abortion, while gubernatorial candidates and actual members of Congress explicitly compare abortion with genocide.

During a late-August hearing, South Carolina House legislators debated a complete ban on abortion. While lawmakers ultimately included exceptions for rape and incest in their proposed abortion ban, Republican Rep. Doug Gilliam complained about characterizing a child rape victim as being “forced” to carry her rapist’s baby, and suggested that such victims have “options,” such as Plan B.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7v3z9/republican-abortion-comments

Read the whole article. These people are crazier than outhouse rats. You thought Todd Aiken was nuts???????

“The worst parts of this are at the beginning.”

That’s what Laney Dicksion mumbled as she angrily flipped through Gender Queer—a graphic memoir about exploring gender identity and sexuality—for a local Oklahoma TV broadcast last month.

But the interview was not about the book the American Library Association ranked as its most challenged (or rebuked) of 2021. It was about one mother’s decision to complain to Norman High School officials about her daughter’s English teacher, Summer Boismier.

Dicksion suggested the teacher should potentially face criminal charges. Her alleged crime? Providing students like Dicksion’s daughter with a QR code leading them to UnBanned—a Brooklyn Public Library program offering teenagers unlimited digital and audio access to banned or challenged books—on the first day of school last month. Boismier did so after updated guidelines and a restrictive new law inspired her to cover her entire classroom library in butcher paper, which she adorned with the phrase “Books the state doesn’t want you to read.”

“The woman has access to children and to minors,” the Oklahoma mom told Fox 25 after reading parts of Gender Queer out loud and describing it, dubiously, as “pornographic material.” “No one should be allowed to disseminate this to children, much less a teacher in our public school systems.”

Boismier resigned just days after dishing out the QR code. In so doing, she styled herself a defiant champion of free thought in Oklahoma, a state that last year enacted a law—HB 1775—targeting so-called critical race theory. The right-wing bete noire is effectively nonexistent in the classes taught to young American kids, even as rage about it has fed a larger cultural panic over education nationwide.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/summer-boismier-exiled-norman-oklahoma-teacher-faces-cloudy-future?ref=home

Oklahoma is NOT OK!

Virginia is one of several states making it easier for new moms to keep Medicaid in the year after childbirth in a new policy outlined in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

Before the new policy went into effect in the spring, moms on Medicaid would lose access to care within two months after the end of pregnancy.

Doctors say postpartum care is critical for new moms because it’s commonly found to be a time when depression and other health issues can arise.

The extension of coverage includes regular check-ups, behavioral health visits and specialty care, allowing moms to get treated for chronic conditions and avoid preventable complications or death.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports the new option is available to states for the next five years.

https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/virginia-making-it-easier-for-new-moms-to-keep-medicaid-coverage-for-1-year-postpartum/

I'm sure Dumbkin will try to find some way around it.

Marie met her husband, Shaun Varsos when they both worked at a movie theater in Nashville in 2006 or so. A few years later, that movie theater flooded and was turned into a shooting range where the two would go shoot guns together.

That anecdote took on a tragic irony when Marie's brother, Alex Youn, got a phone call the morning of April 12, 2021.

"Shaun had shot Marie and my mother," he says.

Alex lost his mother, Debbie Sisco, 60, and his younger sister, Marie Varsos, 31, the people to whom he was closest - in an instant.

In the month leading up to their tragic deaths, records left by Marie show that she had exhausted every option available to victims of domestic violence to try and prevent what she saw coming.

But the system was not enough to protect her.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/29/1119325730/his-mom-and-sister-were-killed-now-hes-channeling-grief-to-fight-domestic-violen

Tragic and unforgivable. So is the inaction.

State lawmaker tells universities to take down language saying LGBTQ+ people are protected under Title IX

In late August, Representative John Ragan (R-Oak Ridge) sent letters to universities across Tennessee telling them materials they publish saying LGBTQ+ students are protected by federal Title IX laws could be in violation of state law.

The letter asked universities to respond by September 2. It asked them to describe changes they made to remove materials that said LGBTQ+ people were protected under the law. The University of Tennessee and East Tennessee State University received letters from the lawmaker.

Title IX is a federal law that protects people from discrimination in educational programs and activities on the basis of sex. According to the U.S. Department of Education, any college that receives federal funding must "operate its education program or activity in a nondiscriminatory manner free of discrimination based on sex including sexual orientation and gender identity."

The law covers recruitment activities, admissions, counseling, financial assistance, athletics, sex-based harassment, treatment of pregnant and parenting students, and the treatment of LGBTQ+ students. By violating the law, universities risk losing federal funding.

Ragan's letter said that on July 15, a federal court "enjoined and restrained" guidance from the department in June 2021 that told universities they needed to cover LGBTQ+ students under the nondiscrimination law. Essentially, a court told the Department of Education it could not act on its June 2021 guidance.

https://www.wbir.com/article/news/politics/lgbtq-university-title-ix-protected-class/51-f6036a6a-c1c6-4ca8-818e-3381bca60a86

After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state officials in February to launch child abuse investigations targeting parents who helped their transgender kids get gender-affirming health care, a 14-year-old trans girl became so anxious about the prospect of losing access to her medications that she was pulled out of school and hospitalized for days. Some doctors and pharmacies around the state stopped offering teenagers life-saving puberty blockers and hormone treatments. A mental health provider in Austin abruptly withdrew care from a suicidal trans boy, leaving his parents to sleep on his bedroom floor night after night to ensure he didn’t kill himself. Many families fled the state.

Those are just some of the stories in a legal brief submitted to a state court last week on behalf of two LGBTQ-focused nonprofits and 13 Texas families with transgender kids. The families are begging the court to make permanent a prior temporary injunction prohibiting state officials from investigating parents under Abbott’s order. Although Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services hasn’t yet ripped any trans children in Texas from their homes and sent them to foster care, the families argue its investigations have already had tragic consequences.

Since Abbott’s directive took effect, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), one of the nonprofits cited in the brief, has received at least 60 reports from families struggling to obtain health care for trans children. Some doctors reportedly denied prescriptions for kids at the onset of puberty, hoping that it might be legally safer to offer them treatment at a later point. The nonprofit is working with 27 families in two metro areas who could not obtain puberty blockers, reversible prescriptions that give trans kids a chance to explore their gender identity as they grow older while temporarily delaying the puberty changes in their body that could make their gender dysphoria worse. Equality Texas, the other nonprofit in the brief, says kids have been turned away by doctors or denied prescriptions at pharmacies in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and the city of Garland.

Families say they’re also afraid to get their trans children other types of health care, worried that the kids’ gender identity and medical history might become known to the hospital and be shared with state authorities. According to the brief, when one trans kid went to a hospital for emergency psychiatric treatment, hospital staffers reported the mother to state officials, who accused her of child abuse. In another case, a trans child almost slept in a hallway at a mental health facility because the facility, citing legal risks, didn’t want to admit the kid to a ward. TENT intervened.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/hospitalized-bullied-and-denied-care-texas-war-on-trans-kids/

Rot in hell, Hot Wheels.