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Shiftless2
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From a year ago
If you have to reject your own studies when they don’t fit your agenda, it’s time to reconsider your agenda.
If you have to reject your own studies when they don’t fit your agenda, it’s time to reconsider your agenda.
Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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A California city spent years banning the Pride flag and pulling LGBTQ+ books off library shelves. Now it's about to be represented in Congress by one of the most powerful gay men in the country.
Huntington Beach is a conservative Orange County beach town where residents show up to City Council meetings to praise Donald Trump and object to Pride. But new congressional maps - California's answer to Texas redrawing its own - just dropped the city squarely into the district of Robert Garcia.
Garcia, 48, is gay, an immigrant born in Peru, and the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. If his party takes back the House this November, he would lead the investigations into the Trump administration.
He isn't sweating the hostile new turf. "I've been dealing with homophobia my whole life," he told Reuters. "That's OK. That's America."
The city did everything it could to keep the flag down. Now its name sits on a district run by one of the most prominent gay leaders in Washington.
SOURCE with comments
From one of the comments
Shiftless2
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And coming soon .....
Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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A Wisconsin school board’s decision to pull a student performance honoring Marsha P. Johnson sparked backlash and turned a local concert into a larger conversation about art, history, and LGBTQ+ visibility. Students had spent months preparing the instrumental piece before it was removed over concerns about controversial issues. When a local church offered to host the performance instead, the moment became a reminder that attempts to silence history can sometimes make it heard even louder.
Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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Bench Slapped is now one of my favorite phrases ....
BREAKING
Pete Hegseth just got bench‑slapped by a federal appeals court that did something rare: it called out Trump’s transgender military purge for what it is — hatred dressed up as “readiness.”
In a 100‑plus‑page opinion, the court largely blocked the Trump–Hegseth policy of expelling transgender troops, and it did not mince words. Judges walked through Trump’s own statements, where he declared transgender people “categorically unfit” for service and smeared them as “dishonorable, undisciplined, arrogant, selfish liars.”
Those aren’t the court’s adjectives — they’re the president’s, and the panel used them as Exhibit A that this was never about standards or cohesion, just raw animus aimed at a vulnerable group that had already proved it could serve.
Then the court turned to the Hegseth rule itself, and it’s brutal. The Pentagon policy disqualified anyone with *any* history of gender dysphoria, no matter how long ago they were diagnosed, even if they are stable, symptom‑free, and have served for years without issue.
Troops who were diagnosed as kids, who haven’t seen a therapist for it in a decade, still landed on a blacklist: not currently experiencing symptoms, not in treatment, but permanently labeled unfit for military service. The judges pointed out the obvious — you can’t pretend this is about medical fitness when the policy ignores actual medical evidence and individual records.
The line that will haunt this decision came when the court rejected the government’s attempt to spin its motives. “Unless we are going to fall for the old Groucho Marx line — ‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ — we have direct evidence in this case that animus motivated the classifications in the Hegseth Policy,” the opinion reads.
In plain English: you don’t get to spray bigoted language everywhere, craft a rule that surgically targets that same group, and then claim it’s all just neutral “professional judgment.”
Legally, the stakes are massive. The court found that the roughly 4,200 transgender service members targeted by this policy are likely to succeed on their claim that the ban violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. That’s why the panel froze the heart of the policy: the administration cannot kick out currently serving transgender troops while the case proceeds, and those service members can keep doing their jobs instead of scrambling to find lawyers and new careers.
The enlistment ban for new recruits technically stays in place for now, but the judges made clear they see this for what it is — a purge built on prejudice, not facts.
And there’s a deeper message underneath the legalese. For years, Hegseth has gone on TV calling trans troops a “social experiment,” insisting that their very existence somehow undermines the mission, even as commanders in the field report the opposite.
This ruling takes that narrative apart piece by piece: it notes that the Pentagon’s own earlier studies found open transgender service workable, that the military successfully integrated trans troops starting in 2016, and that the government couldn’t point to real‑world failures to justify reversing course. In other words, when ideology collided with evidence, the evidence won.
For transgender Americans who have worn the uniform, this isn’t abstract. These are people who’ve deployed, led units, flown aircraft, treated wounded soldiers — suddenly told they’re unworthy because a president and his defense secretary wanted a culture‑war trophy.
Today’s decision doesn’t fix everything, but it pulls thousands of real human beings back from the edge of forced discharge and says, in black‑and‑white legal text, that their government can’t simply erase them because it finds their identities inconvenient.
SOURCE with comments
BREAKING
In a 100‑plus‑page opinion, the court largely blocked the Trump–Hegseth policy of expelling transgender troops, and it did not mince words. Judges walked through Trump’s own statements, where he declared transgender people “categorically unfit” for service and smeared them as “dishonorable, undisciplined, arrogant, selfish liars.”
Those aren’t the court’s adjectives — they’re the president’s, and the panel used them as Exhibit A that this was never about standards or cohesion, just raw animus aimed at a vulnerable group that had already proved it could serve.
Then the court turned to the Hegseth rule itself, and it’s brutal. The Pentagon policy disqualified anyone with *any* history of gender dysphoria, no matter how long ago they were diagnosed, even if they are stable, symptom‑free, and have served for years without issue.
Troops who were diagnosed as kids, who haven’t seen a therapist for it in a decade, still landed on a blacklist: not currently experiencing symptoms, not in treatment, but permanently labeled unfit for military service. The judges pointed out the obvious — you can’t pretend this is about medical fitness when the policy ignores actual medical evidence and individual records.
The line that will haunt this decision came when the court rejected the government’s attempt to spin its motives. “Unless we are going to fall for the old Groucho Marx line — ‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ — we have direct evidence in this case that animus motivated the classifications in the Hegseth Policy,” the opinion reads.
In plain English: you don’t get to spray bigoted language everywhere, craft a rule that surgically targets that same group, and then claim it’s all just neutral “professional judgment.”
Legally, the stakes are massive. The court found that the roughly 4,200 transgender service members targeted by this policy are likely to succeed on their claim that the ban violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. That’s why the panel froze the heart of the policy: the administration cannot kick out currently serving transgender troops while the case proceeds, and those service members can keep doing their jobs instead of scrambling to find lawyers and new careers.
The enlistment ban for new recruits technically stays in place for now, but the judges made clear they see this for what it is — a purge built on prejudice, not facts.
And there’s a deeper message underneath the legalese. For years, Hegseth has gone on TV calling trans troops a “social experiment,” insisting that their very existence somehow undermines the mission, even as commanders in the field report the opposite.
This ruling takes that narrative apart piece by piece: it notes that the Pentagon’s own earlier studies found open transgender service workable, that the military successfully integrated trans troops starting in 2016, and that the government couldn’t point to real‑world failures to justify reversing course. In other words, when ideology collided with evidence, the evidence won.
For transgender Americans who have worn the uniform, this isn’t abstract. These are people who’ve deployed, led units, flown aircraft, treated wounded soldiers — suddenly told they’re unworthy because a president and his defense secretary wanted a culture‑war trophy.
Today’s decision doesn’t fix everything, but it pulls thousands of real human beings back from the edge of forced discharge and says, in black‑and‑white legal text, that their government can’t simply erase them because it finds their identities inconvenient.
SOURCE with comments
Shiftless2
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Quite the putdown ....
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During a 2023 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, an Arkansas state senator asked a trans woman about her genitalia. The bill being discussed at the hearing, SB199, sought to allow a person who received gender-affirming care as a minor to sue the me
During a 2023 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, an Arkansas state senator asked a trans woman about her genitalia. The bill being discussed at the hearing, SB199, sought to allow a person who...
www.facebook.com
Shiftless2
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Shiftless2
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The new law comes two months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state's previous ban on the dangerous and discredited practice.
The NFL's main social media accounts remained silent about Pride Month on its first day
MLB, NBA and NHL recognized the occasion while NFL posted about footballBy Armando Salguero OutKick / Published June 2, 2026 6:47am EDT
The annual June 1 kickoff to Pride Month came and went on Monday and the NFL's X account that serves over 36 million followers and its Instagram account that serves 32 million followers did not mention the event.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The league accounts that, in the past years, have told fans that "football is gay," that "football is lesbian," that football is queer, transgender, bisexual and, for everyone, were silent on the issue. The National Football League's social media accounts this year stuck to, well, football.
For conservatives, Christians and others, it is a small victory they hope extends throughout the entire month and eventually to the league's individual teams, most of which embraced Pride Month on its first day. Nine of the 32 teams did not recognize Pride Month on Monday.
For some gay activists, the NFL's action (or inaction) on social media on Monday means they're hoping some admin corrects an oversight as early as Tuesday morning. Otherwise, it's a big loss for those activists that want their sexuality celebrated and amplified by the country's most popular sports league.
The NFL's main social media accounts remained silent about Pride Month on its first day
The NFL did not post about Pride Month on its main social media accounts on June 1, breaking from past practice even as most individual teams acknowledged the event.
www.foxnews.com
It's self-defeating to be ungrateful for the diversity such institutions as the NFL provide our culture. Dark-skinned Americans may be ~13% of the U.S. population, but over 50% of its own. BUT !
The NFL can do more.
Let's not ignore reality.
The purpose of the NFL is not to promote Pride Month.
The purpose of the NFL is not to bring entertainment to audiences.
The purpose of the NFL is to make $money.