#American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

[benandstevesposts]

CALIFORNIA POLICE OFFICER IN SPOTLIGHT FOR BODY SLAMMING LADY OUTSIDE GROCERY STORE

A police officer’s violent actions in southern California are being investigated after video footage showed the white cop brutalizing an unarmed Black woman for the apparent offense of recording officers detaining her husband.

The video footage recorded by a witness began by showing the woman holding a cell phone and filming officers handcuffing her husband, who can be heard repeatedly asking “why” he was being detained outside the supermarket in Lancaster.

After two officers struggled to handcuff the husband, one walked directly to the wife. When the camera follows the officer, he’s shown grabbing the wife by the back of her neck before violently flinging her to the ground.

The person recording can be heard yelling for the cop to “get off of her” and not to hit her to no avail.

The cop is next shown kneeling on the wife’s neck, evoking horrific imagery from Derek Chavin’s police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

As with the woman’s husband, the officer struggled to place her in handcuffs even though she wasn’t resisting.

Her husband can be heard in the background pleading for the officer to stop. He also said she has cancer. Neither claim prevented the officer from accosting the woman standing at least 20 feet away from the officers when they were handcuffing her husband.

To view the video, you may visit the original report by visiting the site it appeared here.

UPDATED REPORT ADDED REGARDING AREA WHERE ALLEGED ASSAULT TOOK PLACE

[commiepinkofag]

Threat of KOSA Remains Despite Revisions

KOSA now has the support of 60 senators.

The larger organizations for 'respectable gays' like HRC, GLAAD & GLSEN have withdrawn opposition against KOSA in its latest draft.

These national conservative gay organizations continue to throw queer & trans folx under the bus.

American Civil Liberties Union still opposes KOSA

“At its core, KOSA is still an internet censorship bill that will harm the very communities it claims to protect,” said Jenna Leventoff, ACLU senior policy counsel. “The First Amendment guarantees everyone, including children, the right to access information free from censorship. We urge lawmakers to continue to amend this bill so the government is no longer the one determining what content is or is not fit for children.”

From ACLU:

Requiring or incentivizing age-verification chills speech for adults and minors

“Duty of Care” requirements still entice platforms to censor content

Government interference in online speech is unconstitutional

Take Action

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A federal judge in Austin on Thursday halted a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally.

The law, Senate Bill 4, was scheduled to take effect Tuesday. U.S. District Judge David Ezra issued a preliminary injunction that will keep it from being enforced while a court battle continues playing out. Texas is being sued by the federal government and several immigration advocacy organizations. Texas appealed the ruling to the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ezra said in his order Thursday that the federal government “will suffer grave irreparable harm” if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws, creating an inconsistent patchwork of rules about immigration, which has historically been upheld as being solely within the jurisdiction of the federal government.

“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.

Ezra also wrote that if the state arrested and deported migrants who may be eligible for political asylum, that would violate the Constitution and also be "in violation of U.S. treaty obligations."

"Finally, the Court does not doubt the risk that cartels and drug trafficking pose to many people in Texas," Ezra wrote in his ruling. "But as explained, Texas can and does already criminalize those activities. Nothing in this Order stops those enforcement efforts. No matter how emphatic Texas’s criticism of the Federal Governments handling of immigration on the border may be to some, disagreement with the federal government’s immigration policy does not justify a violation of the Supremacy Clause."

Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 4 in December, marking Texas’ latest attempt to try to deter people from crossing the Rio Grande after several years of historic numbers of migrants arriving at the Texas-Mexico border.

In a statement, Abbott said the state "will not back down in our fight" and that he expects this case would eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. On social media, he wrote that he is "not worried" because "this was fully expected."

"Texas has solid legal grounds to defend against an invasion," he added.

State Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office is defending SB 4 in court, said in a statement that he "will do everything possible to defend Texas’s right to defend herself."

The law seeks to make illegally crossing the border a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a punishment of up to six months in jail. Repeat offenders could face a second-degree felony with a punishment of two to 20 years in prison.

The law also seeks to require state judges to order migrants returned to Mexico if they are convicted; local law enforcement would be responsible for transporting migrants to the border. A judge could drop the charges if a migrant agrees to return to Mexico voluntarily.

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project sued Texas on behalf of El Paso County and two immigrant rights organizations — El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and Austin-based American Gateways — over the new state law. The following month, the U.S. Department of Justice filed its lawsuit against Texas. The lawsuits have since been combined.

During a court hearing on Feb. 15 in Austin, the Department of Justice argued that SB 4 is unconstitutional because courts have ruled that immigration solely falls under the federal government’s authority.

The lawyer representing Texas, Ryan Walters, argued that the high number of migrants arriving at the border — some of them smuggled by drug cartels — constitutes an invasion and Texas has a right to defend itself under Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from engaging in war on their own “unless actually invaded.”

Ezra said that he “is not unsympathetic to the concerns raised by Abbott,” but appeared unconvinced by Walters’ argument.

"I haven't seen, and the state of Texas can't point me to any type of military invasion in Texas," Ezra said. "I don't see evidence that Texas is at war."

Immigrant rights advocates around the state celebrated the ruling because they worried that SB 4 would lead to border residents' rights being violated.

"We celebrate today’s win, blocking this extreme law from going into effect before it has the opportunity to harm Texas communities," said Aron Thorn, senior attorney for the Beyond Border Program at Texas Civil Rights Project. "This is a major step in showing the State of Texas and Governor Abbott that they do not have the power to enforce unconstitutional, state-run immigration policies."

Edna Yang, co-executive director at American Gateways, said that SB 4 does not fix “our broken immigration system” and it will divide communities.

“This decision is a victory for all our communities as it stops a harmful, unconstitutional, and discriminatory state policy from taking effect and impacting the lives of millions of Texans," she said. "Local officials should not be federal immigration agents, and our state should not be creating its own laws that deny people their right to seek protection here in the U.S."

David Donatti, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, said the ruling is an "important win for Texas values, human rights, and the U.S. Constitution."

"Our current immigration system needs repair because it forces millions of Americans into the shadows and shuts the door on people in need of safety. S.B. 4 would only make things worse," he said. "Cruelty to migrants is not a policy solution.”

[vyorei]

That's a true statement that needs audible support from the public.

[coochiequeens]

He killed a literal baby. And now he wants to sue the state for damages?!

By Anna Slatz February 14, 2024

A trans-identified male currently serving a 55-year sentence for the murder of his infant stepdaughter has launched a lawsuit against the Chaplain at his prison after he was allegedly denied a hijab despite identifying as a Muslim woman. Autumn Cordellioné, previously known as Jonathan C. Richardson, is seeking $150,000 in damages.

As previously reported by Reduxx, Cordellioné was first arrested in 2001 after his 11-month-old stepdaughter died in his care while her mother was at work. The night of the infant’s death, Cordellioné had been visited by friends who later told police that he had been “acting strangely.”

Despite claiming the little girl was inside sleeping, Cordellioné had loud music playing in the home, and his guests noted that he appeared to have a fresh, bleeding tattoo of the child’s name carved into his arm.

Autumn Cordellioné as of August 2023. Photo Courtesy: Indiana Department of Corrections.

Later that night, after his friends left, Cordellioné went to his neighbor and asked him to call 911, claiming the child was unresponsive. When emergency personnel arrived, they were briefly able to resuscitate the girl, but she died shortly after being rushed to the hospital. 

Cordellioné was interviewed by police, who noted he was “calm and unemotional” during questioning, and his story about what happened to the baby changed dramatically over the course of the two interviews conducted.

At first, Cordellioné claimed he found the baby unresponsive after doing some household chores. But in the next interview, Cordellioné said the child was being “fussier than usual” and he attempted to throw her up in the air repeatedly in an effort to calm her down. He said her “head bopped forward and back up in a rough type of a manner,” and that the child continued to cry so he proceeded to shake her aggressively in an effort to calm her down.

During a failed appeals hearing, detectives from the case recounted how Cordellioné “physically showed” how he had manhandled the girl, getting up out of his chair and demonstrating the action in a rough manner.

An autopsy subsequently found that the baby had died of asphyxiation by manual strangulation. Cordellioné was booked awaiting a court hearing, and would later tell a prison official “all I know is I killed the little fucking bitch.”

Cordellioné was found guilty and sentenced to 55 years in prison for the horrific crime. He is currently incarcerated at the Branchville Correctional Facility, an institution for male offenders.

Last August, Cordellioné joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the Indiana Department of Corrections, citing “discrimination” on the basis of his gender identity. That case is currently in progress.

But Reduxx has now learned that that Cordellioné has also launched a separate suit against the prison’s Chaplain, Tony Gray. Gray has been a Chaplain at the facility since 2014, and volunteered at the institution prior to being offered an official role.

Branchville Chaplain Tony Gray. Photo Source: Indiana Department of Corrections

In the lawsuit, filed on November 3, 2023, Cordellioné accuses Gray of violating his First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment constitutional rights.

According to court records obtained by Reduxx, the incident of complaint took place in May of 2023 after Gray informed Cordellioné that he was not allowed to don a hijab outside of his cell. In response, Cordellioné said: “I wear the hijab in order to cover my head and ears for modesty purposes, as I am an Islamic practicing transwoman.”

At the time, Cordellioné’s registered religion was “Wiccan” and Gray pointed that out, to which Cordellioné replied that he was an “eclectic practitioner who is a member of the Theosophical Society in America.”

The Theosophical Society is headquartered in Chennai, India, and is considered an “esoteric new religious movement.” Founded in 1875, it describes itself as a “unsectarian body of seekers after Truth,” and its practitioners appear to dabble in the philosophy and beliefs of multiple religions simultaneously. One of its founders is Russian mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who stated in 1889 that “the purpose of establishing the Society was to prepare humanity for the reception of a World Teacher.”

Cordellioné is claiming that his equal protection rights were violated when he was barred from wearing a hijab outside of his cell, noting that male Muslims in the facility are allowed to wear kufis or taqiyah — a short, rounded brimless prayer cap.

“Islamic faith mandates the wearing of a kufi for males … Islamic faith also mandates females of the faith wear hijabs when outside the home and when not amongst men of their family. Tony Gray allows male Muslims to wear their sufis, but denies me, a transwoman, the same privilege.”

From the legal complaint filed by Cordellioné.

Cordellioné also alleges that Gray’s refusal to allow him to wear a hijab violated his eighth amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment. In his argument, Cordellioné claims the he was subjected to “harassment and ridicule” by the Islamic community in his prison because he had not been allowed to wear a hijab.

“[Gray] should be aware, as Chaplain, the stigma and shame that is attributed to Islamic women when they go uncovered and without a hijab,” Cordellioné writes in his complaint. “Women are viewed as whores, tempters of men, and adulterators; by Islamic society both in and out of prison. I have been shunned, made a social pariah, and amongst my own religious community.”

He continues: “Without the support of the Islamic community, I will struggle and likely fail to achieve salvation for by [sic] Mohammed’s teachings a Muslim who knows of the teachings, yet strays from them, will never reach heaven.”

In his stated request for relief, Cordellioné is seeking the ability to wear his hijab in prison, as well as $150,000 in compensation.

Since filing, there has been some back-and-forth with the court surrounding Cordellioné’s financial situation, with the court requesting a nominal initial filing fee of $36.55, but Cordellioné claiming he does not have the money to pay it. If he cannot demonstrate deficiency in the time the court has specified, his case might be dismissed.

[archivlibrarianist]

A couple of weeks ago, the ACLU, plus the Missouri Library Association (disclaimer: I am a member of the MLA) and the Missouri Association of School Librarians filed a lawsuit over newly-passed SB 775, that would ban "sexually explicit materials" from schools-- defining "sexually explicit" to mean "materials that acknowledge that queer people exist." It is already illegal in Missouri, as everywhere else in the United States, for people under the age of 18 to access pornography. Additionally, librarians, publishers, and teachers are all trained on how to evaluate and screen materials to help parents find something appropriate for their kids. So this happened: "Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Cody Smith’s budget proposal, unveiled Tuesday, would cut all $4.5 million in state funding that libraries were slated to get next fiscal year.

"Smith said he’s upset that state and school libraries are suing to overturn a new Missouri law that bans sexually explicit material in school libraries. He said the state shouldn’t subsidize the lawsuit with funding." Rep. Smith: the Missouri Library Association is funded with member dues. *facepalm emoji*

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: The Quillette Editorial Board

Published: Dec 23, 2023

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 with a mission to fight poverty and racial discrimination. Its early litigation campaigns, which targeted the Ku Klux Klan and other overtly racist organizations, met with success, and the group soon came to be seen as an authoritative source in regard to right-wing extremism more generally. 

Another form of expertise the organization developed was in the area of marketing—especially when the market in question consisted of deep-pocketed urban liberals. As former SPLC staffer Bob Moser reported in a 2019 New Yorker article, the group has consistently taken on attention-grabbing urgent-seeming causes that its leaders knew could be leveraged as a means to gain publicity and—more importantly—donations. It’s no coincidence that the SPLC’s co-founder and long-time fundraising guru, Morris Dees, had previously operated a direct-mail business that sold cookbooks and tchotchkes. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees told a journalist in 1988.

Dees’ big fundraising break at the SPLC came when he got access to the direct-mail list from the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. The SPLC co-founder went on to maximize the SPLC’s revenues through what would now be known as targeted methods. According to one former legal colleague, for instance, Dees rarely used his middle name—Seligman—in SPLC mailings, except when it came to “Jewish zip codes.”

Thanks to Dees’ slick marketing expertise, the SPLC was eventually taking in more money than it paid out in operational expenses. (As of October 2022, its endowment fund was valued at almost US$640 million.) But over time, his hard-sell tactics began to alienate co-workers, as there was an obvious disconnect between the real class-based problems they observed in society and the fixations of the naïve northern donors whose wallets Dees was seeking to pry open.

“I felt that [Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on,” former SPLC attorney Deborah Ellis told Progressive writer John Egerton. “The Klan is no longer one of the South’s biggest problems—not because racism has gone away, but because the racists simply can’t get away with terrorism any more.”

On March 14, 2019, Dees—by now 82 years old, but still listed as the SPLC’s chief trial lawyer—was fired amid widespread rumors that he’d been the subject of internal sexual-harassment accusations. His affiliation was scrubbed from the group’s web site; and the organization’s president, Richard Cohen, cryptically (but damningly) declared that, “when one of our own fails to meet [SPLC] standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” (Less than two weeks later, Cohen himself left the organization, casting his resignation as part of a transition “to a new generation of leaders.”)

In describing his tenure at the SPLC during the early 2000s, Moser argued that the very structure of the organization betrayed its hypocrisy: Here was an entity dedicated to social justice (as we would now call it), yet which was run by an extremely well-paid, almost exclusively white, corps of lawyers, administrators, and fund-raisers who ruled over a mixed-race corps of junior staff. As far back as the 1980s, Dees was openly admitting that he saw the fight against poverty as passé, and admitted that the “P” in SPLC was an anachronism. Jaded staff began ruefully referring to their own flashy headquarters as the “Poverty Palace.”

Dees and Cohen may have left the Poverty Palace, but the SPLC’s tendency to betray its founding principles clearly remains a problem, as illustrated by a new SPLC report released under the auspices of what the group dubs “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.” (This verbal clunker seems to have been reverse-engineered in order to yield the acronym, “CAPTAIN.”)

The report purports to demonstrate “the perils of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” and “anti-trans narratives and extremism.” Much like the dramatically worded hard-sell direct-mail campaigns that the SPLC started up under Dees, it’s marketed as a matter of life and death: According to the deputy director of research for the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” uncovered by the SPLC has “real-life, often life-threatening consequences for trans and non-binary people.”

At this point, it should be stressed that there is certainly nothing wrong with the SPLC—or anyone else—campaigning for the legitimate rights of people who are transgender. Such a campaign would be entirely in keeping with the SPLC’s original liberal ethos. Just as no one should be denied, say, an apartment, a marriage license, or the right to vote based on his or her race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, no trans person should be denied these rights and amenities simply because he or she experiences gender dysphoria.

But the SPLC’s report hardly confines itself to such unassailable liberal principles. The real point of the project, it seems, was to catalogue and denounce public figures who’ve expressed dissent from the most extreme demands of trans-rights activists—specifically, (1) the demand that children and adolescents who present as transgender must instantly be “affirmed” in their dysphoric beliefs, even if such affirmation leads to a life of sterility, surgical disfigurement, drug dependence, and medical complications; and (2) the demand that biological men who self-identify as women must be permitted unfettered access to protected women’s spaces and sports leagues.

The SPLC’s authors seek to cast their ideological enemies as hate-addled reactionaries whose nefarious activities must “be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right.” And it is absolutely true that some of the organizations they name-check are hard-right, socially conservative outfits that endorse truly transphobic (and homophobic) beliefs.

But many of the supposed transphobes targeted by the report aren’t even conservative—let alone members of the religious right. In a multitude of cases, they’re simply parents, therapists, and activists who argue the obvious fact that human sexual biology doesn’t evanesce into rainbow dust the moment that a child—or middle-aged man—asserts that he or she was “born in the wrong body.”

It’s also interesting to note who gets left out of the SPLC’s analysis. The most influential figures leading the backlash against (what some call) “gender ideology” are women such as author J.K. Rowling and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, both of whom come at the issue from explicitly feminist perspectives. Being successful public figures, neither woman needs a cent from the conservative think tanks that the SPLC presents as being back-office puppet-masters of the alleged anti-trans conspiracy outlined in the CAPTAIN report.

In keeping with the conspiracist motif that runs through the document, the authors have provided spider-web diagrams that set out the connections binding this (apparently) shadowy cabal. In this regard, it seems that Quillette itself served as one of the SPLC’s sources: In a section titled, “Group Dynamics and Division of Labor within the Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network,” the authors footnote “an August 23, 2023 podcast for Quillette,” wherein

it was revealed that [Colin] Wright is in a relationsihp [sic] with journalist Christina Buttons, who is an advisoary [sic] board member of [the Gender Dysphoria Alliance] with Drs. Lisa Littman and Ray Blanchard, an editoral [sic] board member of Springer’s Archives of Sexual Research [a mistaken reference to the Archives of Sexual Behavior] with J. Michael Bailey. Notably, Buttons and Wright are interviewed by host Jonathan Kay. In addition to hosting Quillette’s podcast, Kay serves on FAIR’s board of advisors.

We’ve chosen to highlight this particular (typo-riddled) text from the report not just because of the absurd suggestion that our publication has enlisted in an imaginary “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network,” but also because the above-quoted roll call of supposed gender villains illustrates the intellectual dishonesty that suffuses the whole report.

Let’s go through the references one by one, in the order in which they are presented. The Gender Dysphoria Alliance (GDA) is a group led by people who are themselves transgender, and who are “concerned about the direction that gender medicine and activism has taken.” Are we to imagine that its members are directing transphobia—against themselves? Lisa Littman, formerly of Brown University, is a respected academic who’s published a peer-reviewed analysis of Rapid Onset Gender Disorder. Ray Blanchard is a well-known University of Toronto psychiatrist. The Archives of Sexual Behavior is a peer-reviewed academic journal in sexology. Michael Bailey is a specialist in sexual orientation and gender nonconformity at Northwestern University. Colin Wright is a widely published writer (including at Quillette) with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. (The SPLC’s claim that he is in a relationship with journalist Christina Buttons, who also writes about gender issues, is completely true. But the fact that the group saw fit to report this fact as if it were evidence of sinister machinations says far more about the report’s authors than it does about either Wright or Buttons.) FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a classically liberal group led by a Harvard Law School graduate named Monica Harris. Do any of these people or groups sound like extremists?

The fact that the SPLC is attempting to market its report as a blow against the “anti-LGBTQ+” movement, writ large, is itself quite laughable, since many of the activists who’ve been arguing for a more balanced approach to gender rights are themselves either gay (as with Navratilova and Julie Bindel) or (as with the founders of the GDA) transgender.

Others on the SPLC gender-enemies list are author Abigail Shrier, and therapists Sasha Ayad, and Stella O’Malley. These women openly broadcast their views in best-selling books, as well as mainstream magazines and newspapers. The idea that the SPLC has successfully “exposed” these women through some kind of investigation, as suggested by the title that’s been slapped on the CAPTAIN report, would be ludicrous even if they’d said anything scandalous (which they haven’t).

And what course of future action does the SPLC endorse? For one, it concludes that educators should stigmatize gender-critical views as analogous to “racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.” The report's authors also want academic journals to sniff out groups that “espouse an anti-LGBTQ+ ideology” (as that latter term is speciously defined by the SPLC). And in a final flourish, the group urges reporters to “be aware of the narrative manipulation strategies and the cooptation of scientific credentials and language by anti-trans researchers when sourcing stories about trans experiences.”

With this last point, we get to the real nub: The apparent goal is for this report to be read as a catalogue of people, ideas, and groups that must be shunned. Indeed, the authors explicitly cite the work of one Andrea James, a once-respected arts producer who, as Jesse Singal has documented, now runs a creepy (“stalker” is the word Singal uses) web site called Transgender Map, which lists personal details of anyone whom James deems a gender heretic. When it comes to one-on-one communication, James’ manner of dealing with critics is exemplified by an email sent to bioethicist Alice Dreger, in which James referred to Dreger’s then-five-year-old son as a “womb turd.”

One way to describe the CAPTAIN report is as an SPLC-branded rehash of the information contained on Transgender Map. And one can understand why the authors thought that such a gambit might work. The SPLC already publishes other curated lists of hatemongers—e.g., its “Hatewatch” service, “Hate Map,” and “Intelligence Report.” It wasn’t such a long shot to imagine that this new report might convince readers to treat the listed “Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network” acolytes as equally disreputable.

But if that was the authors’ goal, it doesn’t seem to have been achieved. The SPLC report landed with something of a thud—and has attracted little attention on social media except insofar as it was mocked by its intended targets.

This may have something to do with the report’s timing. For several years now, a backlash against this kind of gender agitprop has been building within many of the same liberal and progressive circles that the SPLC has traditionally targeted for donations. The trend is reflected by the rise of such groups as the LGB Alliance, a coalition of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who are fed up with the ideological takeover of LGBT groups by a militant subset of trans activists.

The same trend is playing out internationally. While the SPLC does its best to heap blame on America’s conservative Christians, many of western Europe’s governments (none of which are in thrall to the Heritage Foundation or the Charles Koch Foundation) have been following a more gender-critical path for years.

Just a week after the SPLC put out its report, in fact, the UK government published new guidelines advising teachers that they have no duty to automatically “affirm” a child’s assertion that he or she is transgender; and that, in considering such situations, teachers should speak with a child’s parents and consider whether the child is under undue influence from social media or peers. Sweden, Finland, and Norway—hardly bastions of Christian conservatism—have also rolled back policies that rush children into transition. In Canada, several provinces have recently enacted rules that require parents to be notified when a child seeks to transition, even in the face of a sustained media campaign that repeats lurid claims to the effect that such policies will cause an epidemic of trans suicides. Are all of these foreign governments also complicit in the vast “junk-science and disinformation campaign” against trans people that the SPLC claims to have “exposed”?

The SPLC would hardly be the first progressive organization whose reputation has suffered by going all-in on the gender issue. The American Civil Liberties Union, which also was rooted in traditional liberal values before succumbing to more faddish progressive tendencies, has attracted ridicule due to its parroting of slogans such as “men who get their periods are men,” and the claim that males have no “unfair advantage” over females in sports.

These organizations have never been shy about angering conservatives and reactionaries; indeed, they wear such anger as a badge of pride. But their cultish refusal to engage with the reality of biological sex also antagonizes progressive feminists seeking to protect female spaces from biological men, and LGB activists who see the attempted erasure of sex-based attraction as a species of progressive homophobia.

Which is to say that the SPLC’s report seems not only intellectually dishonest, but also self-destructive. While the SPLC leaders who green-lit this project once may have been able to bank on the popularity of pronoun checks and esoteric gender identities among the wealthy white coastal progressives who comprise the bulk of their donors, this is an ideological movement that’s decidedly past its peak. It’s a marketing error that the savvy Dees likely never would have made.

The SPLC obviously does a lot more than lend its name to sloppily edited gender propaganda: A review of its press feed shows that it still has staff working traditional legal beats such as voters’ rights, police accountability, and humane treatment for prisoners. But when an organization publishes misleading materials in regard to one issue, the natural effect is to raise serious questions about the group’s values and credibility more generally—questions that SPLC supporters will want to think about the next time one of the group’s fundraisers hits them up for a donation.

==

This is what institutional capture looks like.

[there-goes-trouble]

Do you know your rights when it comes to protesting? Do you know what law enforcement is allowed to do?

[burtlancster]

interesting!!!!! according to the minutes burt proposed changing rbf's name to the aclu foundation in the late 60s. i believe the roger baldwin foundations of the aclu adopted that name nationwide shortly after but idk if he was the first or one of many to push for the name change

[benandstevesposts]

EX-Police Officer Goes On Trial After Delaying Court Hearings For Years. Off-Duty Officer Is Accused Of Choking Man Leading To Death

[doesgodexist]

Displaying the Ten Commandments in Schools

A strange collection of special interest groups has challenged a Louisiana law that requires displaying the Ten Commandments in schools. Atheist groups would be expected, and they include Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. More surprising is that Jewish families have joined in the lawsuit.The…

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Pennsylvania’s public defenders are so underfunded and overburdened that the commonwealth violates the constitutional rights of more than 100,000 criminal defendants every year, the state chapter of American Civil Liberties Union claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday.

For decades, Pennsylvania has left counties to pay for attorneys to defend people facing criminal charges who can’t afford to pay for a lawyer themselves. The result is an inconsistent patchwork in which public defenders are forced to contend with unmanageable caseloads that leave them unable to properly represent clients, the lawsuit says.

The suit was filed in Commonwealth Court on behalf of 17 people, many of whom have been jailed while awaiting trial for six months or longer, claiming public defenders have failed to properly represent them and that the state has neglected its constitutional duty to provide representation.

“The inconsistent and insufficient funding of indigent defense in Pennsylvania makes us less safe,” ACLU of Pennsylvania Executive Director Mike Lee said in a news release about the lawsuit. Lee added that with the exception of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is tied with Mississippi for the lowest funded state public defender system on a per-resident basis.

The U.S. and Pennsylvania constitutions both provide the right to counsel for anyone charged with a crime and facing jail time, ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Witold Walczak said.

“That right means more than a warm body with a law degree at your side; it requires an effective professional who has the time and resources to prepare a defense,” Walczak said. “Pennsylvania’s grossly under-funded system leads to overwhelming caseloads that make effective representation practically impossible, even for the most dedicated lawyers.”

The 152-page suit details the experiences of the plaintiffs and others in criminal cases where they lacked timely and adequate representation from public defenders. Most have only spoken to their attorneys once or twice and one plaintiff claims he only met his attorney because they happened to walk past while he was cutting grass outside the jail, the suit claims.

In one example, a Northampton County man sat in jail for nearly three months on charges of driving an unregistered vehicle without proof of insurance until a public defender argued for a reduction in his bail.

The suit, which is a proposed class-action on behalf of the 17 plaintiffs and others in similar situations, names Gov. Josh Shapiro, state Senate Pro Tempore Kim Ward, and House Speaker Joanna McClinton as defendants. A spokesperson for Ward said she has not received a copy of the suit and would need time to review it before commenting.

Spokesperson Nicole Reigelman noted that McClinton began her career as a public defender, and “knows firsthand the value that indigent defense plays in the judicial system.”

“Since being elected in 2015, she has used her experience as a defender to inform her policy agenda and has been an outspoken champion of legislation to improve access to legal counsel for indigent clients. Speaker McClinton celebrated when funding for indigent defense was finally included in the 2023-24 state budget and continues to advocate for additional dollars,” Reigelman said in a statement.

The current state budget included $7.5 million for indigent defense, the first time the state has provided funding for public defenders. In his February 2023 budget address, Shapiro noted that Pennsylvania is one of only two states that didn’t provide funding for public defenders, which he called a “shameful distinction.”

The suit notes that amount falls far short of providing adequate funding. It also states that every county in Pennsylvania, with the exception of Philadelphia, falls below the national average of $19.82 per resident spent on indigent defense.

Pennsylvania counties spent a total of $125 million on their public defender’s offices in 2020, while similarly-sized Michigan is budgeted to spend $319 million in 2024. Massachusetts, which is considerably smaller, budgeted $331 million.

And because counties are limited in their ability to generate tax revenue, they could not provide adequate funding without significant tax increases. The suit notes that the same factors that limit revenues, such as high unemployment, poverty and limited higher education, are also indicators of higher crime rates.

The ACLU also argues that Pennsylvania agencies have been warning for decades that the state’s delegation of funding for public defenders to the counties results in the systemic denial of counsel to criminal defendants.

A state Supreme Court study in 2003 found that sparse resources and “exploding and unmanageable caseloads” allow public defenders little time, training or assistance in communicating with clients in a meaningful way or to conduct pre-trial investigations, secure expert testimony or otherwise prepare for hearings and trials.

The report recommended that Pennsylvania institute a statewide system for funding and overseeing indigent defense. The state failed to act on the recommendation. Nearly a decade later, a legislative commission reached a similar conclusion. And in 2020 the Pennsylvania Interbranch Commission for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness warned that the underfunding of indigent defense services cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to incarcerate and retry defendants due to failure of public defenders to represent them effectively.

In connection with the funding for public defenders as part of the 2023-24 budget, the General Assembly created the Indigent Defense Advisory Committee.

“As one of its first official acts, one of the Committee’s two proposed standards recognized that “[t]he responsibility to provide indigent defense representation rests with the state; accordingly, there should be adequate state funding and oversight of Indigent Defense Providers,” the lawsuit notes.

[industrybuzz]

Pregnant Woman in Kentucky Challenges Law

A pregnant woman in Kentucky, identified as Jane Doe, has filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s near-total abortion ban. The ban prohibits all abortions after six weeks except when necessary to save the patient’s life or prevent disabling injury. Most pregnancies aren’t discovered until after six weeks. This is the second legal challenge in days against restrictive abortion laws that emerged in…

[coochiequeens]

Another violent man claiming to be the actual victim. This time use gender ideology.

By Anna Slatz January 1, 2024

CONTENT NOTICE: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault committed against both adult and child victims. Reader discretion is appreciated.

A violent transgender sex offender has launched multiple lawsuits against over 20 members of staff at the St. Francois County Jail and South Missouri Mental Health Center after reportedly being denied female undergarments. Kelly McSean, a violent rapist and pedophile, is awaiting trial after escaping jail while in custody for attacking sex offender treatment program staff.

As previously reported by Reduxx, McSean, born Larry Bemboom, has an extremely long and depraved criminal history.

In 2003, while still living under his birth name, he pleaded guilty to the sexual assault of a 39-year-old African American woman. McSean had offered the woman a ride home, but instead took her to his residence where he both orally and vaginally raped her.

During the assault, McSean made racially degrading remarks to the victim, telling her that his ancestors owned slaves and ordering her call to him “master.” The woman managed to escape and fled nude from his residence. For the brutal attack, he was sentenced to just five years in prison.

Before his scheduled 2008 release, a prison psychiatrist reported that McSean met the statutory definition of a sexually violent predator and, after a second evaluating psychiatrist concurred, the state of Missouri filed a petition to involuntarily commit him to its Sex Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Service program. A jury trial subsequently found that he met the legal requirements for civil commitment, and he was sent to reside at Sex Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Program (SORTS) in Farmington.

A SEXUALLY VIOLENT OFFENDER IS BACK IN CUSTODY AFTER MANAGING TO ESCAPE FROM A JAILHOUSE IN MISSOURI. KELLY MCSEAN, WHO IDENTIFIES AS "FEMALE," HAS A DECADES-LONG HISTORY OF RAPING AND ABUSING WOMEN AND CHILDREN AS YOUNG AS 8. HTTPS://T.CO/3J6H40T4VX— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) January 22, 2023

McSean appealed the decision, but evidence presented by the evaluating psychiatrist provided insight into the predator’s extensive history of sexual violence dating back to when he was just a minor.

According to the evaluation — at 13 years of age, McSean molested an eight-year-old girl and forced her to perform oral sex on him. He also fondled and orally copulated a 12-year-old boy. The following year, he was sent to counseling after he was found soliciting other boys to perform oral sex on him in his school bathroom.

McSean was placed in sex offender treatment when he was just 15 years old after exposing himself to a younger relative, but while in treatment he molested another underage girl in his proximity.

Between the ages of 19 and 30, McSean would commit several more sex offenses, primarily against minors. He told the evaluating psychiatrist that he repeatedly raped a 16-year-old girl in 1995, as well as engaged in oral sex with her 11-year-old brother. He also stated that he moved in with two girls aged 14 and 16 in 1998, raped a 15-year-old girl, and molested a 14-year-old.

At age 30, he was arrested for sodomizing a 12-year-old girl after giving her marijuana. He received a suspended five-year sentence and three years probation. McSean said that while in the community, he committed a number of sexual assaults for which he was never charged, including molesting children as young as 8 at the Salvation Army, and raping unidentified male and female children.

In 2003, prior to being charged for the rape of the 39-year-old woman, McSean admitted to having kidnapped two teens and holding them captive at his residence where he forced them to perform oral sex on him.

McSean also said that around the same time, he was molesting a younger female relative and threatening to kill her if she told on him. He would sneak into her room at night, cover her mouth and rape her, as well as penetrating her with foreign objects.

While McSean attempted to appeal his sexually violent offender designation, the appeal was denied in 2010 and he has remained in civil commitment since. Sometime between 2010 and 2023, he began identifying as a “transgender female woman.”

While at SORTS, McSean violently attacked a treatment worker, leading to his transfer to the St. Francois County Jail to await trial on the charges.

On January 17, McSean, along with 4 other inmates, escaped the prison via a plumbing-access hole. Cameras that would ordinarily have tracked their escape were not functioning due to construction being done on the building. The prisoners weren’t discovered missing until a routine inmate count. A wild police chase ensued, with McSean and the others being caught on street surveillance camera footage stealing a car in a nearby parking lot.

McSean was apprehended three days after the escape, and has been at the St. Francois County Jail ever since. But Reduxx has now learned that over the course of the past 5 months, McSean has filed a number of lawsuits alleging mistreatment at the hands of staff both at the jail and at the South Missouri Mental Health Center.

Though McSean is alleging various forms of mistreatment, the majority of his complaints appear to stem from his inability to access “gender affirming” items and treatments, most notably women’s undergarments. He also takes issue with being “misgendered” and “demeaned” while in custody, and having been treated as a male despite his state and prison documentation listing him as a “female.”

McSean has similarly alleged sexual harassment, with these claims stemming from “misgendering” incidents, “discrimination on the basis of sex,” and routine searches not being conducted in the fashion he demands. He has also claimed he was “sexually assaulted” during a strip-search, emphasizing that his penis and “breasts” had been exposed to male officers.

McSean has alleged the various “mistreatments” have caused him anxiety, sleep issues, nightmares, high blood pressure, a los of appetite, migraines, crying spells, and more physical and psychological issues. He has requested damages ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 per defendant and per concern. In one of the filed complaints alone, the total requested damages exceed $14,900,000.

One of McSean’s lawsuits was filed with two other inmates as co-Plaintiffs, both of whom were involved in McSean’s escape from the jail in January – Aaron Sebastian, a sexually violent predator who sodomized a young girl, and Dakota Pace. McSean identifies both of the men as “friends” of his. In their lawsuit, the three criminals allege mistreatment at the hands of St. Francois County Jail staff.

Disturbingly, one of the multiple complaints filed by McSean suggests that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has intervened on his behalf at least once. In a hand-written complaint submitted in August, McSean wrote:

“After being informed that the ACLU and an attorney has contacted the St. Francois county detention center of [sic] the constitutional rights of transgender persons, I submitted an inmate request form as to the status of ability to purchase and have female undergarments.”

While the ACLU has not commented publicly on McSean’s case, the organization has been known to be a strong advocate of transgender inmates, even those who have committed the most heinous crimes.

In Indiana, the ACLU recently filed a lawsuit against the state’s Department of Corrections after a trans-identified male inmate convicted of murdering his infant stepdaughter was denied “gender affirming” surgeries. The suit, which was filed on August 28 of 2023, challenges a recently-adopted policy stipulating that the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) cannot provide transgender surgeries to inmates.

The ACLU has also lamented the criminal penalties of transgender inmates, including the Florida execution of rapist and murderer Duane Owen.

On June 16 of 2023, the ACLU, through their official Twitter account, lambasted the state of Florida for refusing to provide “medically necessary gender-affirming care” to Duane Owen. Using feminine pronouns to refer to Owen, the ACLU claimed the state had caused Owen “enormous suffering” and had violated “her right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment for the more than 30 years she was in state custody.” 

They further stated that Owen, who had raped and murdered two women in an effort to “harvest their hormones,” had argued in legal documents that he “should be afforded the essence of human dignity.”