Posted by:
anybody
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Date: November 26, 2023 12:35PM
There's an infamous cartoon meme depicting a rainbow steamroller crushing "christians," "traditional marriage," "the family," and so on. I won't post a link for it as it is not only disgusting, but also unfortunately easy to find. Just because something exists does not mean it is a threat to you.
This type of propaganda isn't new. The same things were said of Jews, African Americans, Irish, etc. On any given Sunday, there are crazy pastors whipping their flocks into frenzies of fear and ecstasies of hatred. It doesn't matter if it's a crazy shaman, a mad ayatollah, or Father Coughlin. The hate is the same. Just pick a vulnerable minority as scapegoats and blame every evil in existence on them. Outlawing people, turning them into non-persons, or banning or burning books doesn't get rid of them.
Why are people driven by hatred? That's a question that has no answer, but religious fanatics do not seem to be able to live in a world without fear or fear of -- something. If they don't have any "enemies," they create them. They want everyone and everything around them to be just like them. That's not only wrong, it also makes for a very, very boring world.
Remember the Scopes Monkey Trial? What is it with these people? Do they know no other way of living beyond trying to stop the world and live in the past?
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/26/tennessee-homosexuality-lgbtq-book-bans-florida‘Archaic’: the Tennessee town that made homosexuality illegal
For five months this year, homosexuality was prohibited in a Tennessee college town.
In June, the city council of Murfreesboro enacted an ordinance outlawing “indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct”. The rule did not explicitly mention homosexuality, but LGBTQ+ people in the town quickly realized that the ordinance references 21-72 of the city code, which categorizes homosexuality as an act of indecent sexual conduct.
The ordinance was essentially a covert ban on LGBTQ+ existence.
Erin Reed, one of the first and only national journalists to cover the ordinance earlier this year, noted that Murfreesboro isn’t “the only community that has these old archaic bits of code that target homosexuality.
Earlier this month, following a legal challenge from the ACLU of Tennessee, the government of Murfreesboro removed “homosexuality” from the list of acts defined as “public indecency” by the city code. The small victory came after officials repeatedly refused to issue permits for the BoroPride Festival, citing the new ordinance.
Despite the ACLU’s recent win, advocates warn that the story of Murfreesboro represents a new frontier in anti-LGBTQ+ lawmaking. Republican state and local leaders across the US south are reviving vague, sometimes decades-old rules on “indecency” and “obscenity” as a bludgeon against queer life.
Kasey Meehan, the program director of the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, said the organization has seen “several threats to free expression all under the guise of obscenity prevention” in “Tennessee and Florida especially”.
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