Republican lawmakers want to stop businesses in a small Florida town from displaying rainbow stickers to show they are a safe place for LGBTQ+ people
Republican lawmakers want to stop businesses in a small Florida town from displaying rainbow stickers to show they are a safe place for LGBTQ+ people
Don't just talk about it next time the topic of government overreach comes up, get angry about it. If you're talking to someone you know, make them feel stupid for supporting a party that's afraid of stickers.
I would love to rub the average republican's face in this sort of hypocrisy, but they don't care. You can't play chess against someone playing calvinball.
Nothing matters to them except power. No reasoned arguments. No past events, statements, or beliefs. Only power.
They're an existential threat and we should treat them as such.
You mean red Starbucks cups?
Democrats are against free speech because people on twitter will tell me I'm being racist or sexist when I post funny jokes.
Republicans are pro free speech because they don't ever tell me I'm a bigot, they just pass legislation that prevents me from publicly stating my political viewpoints that they do not agree with.
This is unironically how conservatives think.
they're so brave, they are willing to go to war with stickers
Wtf is even their argument for this?!
Edit: I obviously know their motivation, what I wanna know is their excuse for why this is supposedly justified.
"Freedom of speech unless you're saying something that I don't like."
To a Republican, a safe space for people who aren't straight, white Christians is akin to a safe space for pedophiles/Satan/dark-skinned foreigners (all the same thing in their terms). The people they hate with everything in their being must not be allowed to peacefully exist. This is the very foundation of Republicanism/conservativism.
This comment needs to be put on top. I am not American but I did live there for a short time installing very big machinery, and I'm glad to be out of there.The Republicans who are doing this think a pride flag is equivalent to putting up a sign that says 'kill kids'. Which you can't do, free speech doesn't cover overt threats to crime or violence.
That's how far gone these people are, they have drank so much of the kool-aid they perceve every pride flag as an overt call to crime and violence. They perceve the existence of LGBTQ+ as an overt threat to crime or violence. At this point they're too far gone to bring back. They're so full of misinformation and vitriol that they only things they can feel anymore are fear, pride, and rage; it's kind of of like Ingsoc in 1984 using those exact emotions to manipulate their people. It's bad.
They want non straight (and non white) people dead. Thats it.
They're claiming it could cause boycotts and hurt the local economy. Which even if it were true, wouldn't make much sense
So much for the "free market" 🙄🙄🙄
Imagine being such a coward that who someone else loves scares the shit out of you.
Not everything is about rich people. Exploitation exists, but ending it, does not end queerphobia. Yes, poor people are vulnerable to religious indoctrination, but so are ^middle and owning class people. Ending religious indoctrination also isn't enough as we saw in several Eastern European countries with extensive lock-down on religious communities, where the countries continued queerphobic discrimination.
Eat the rich, but don't expect that to end queerphobia.
The party of "Small Government" at it again.
Party of Free Speech for individuals and businesses too!
Im not american so i dont know all the freedom of speech laws work but its so fucking convenient that republicans can just decide what is and what isnt freedom of speech.
You can put anything in your window that isn't fraudulent, straight pornography or otherwise illegal on its own.
"Kill x" would likely be illegal as it's incitement to violence. "x need to die" would likely be legal.
FYI their law is federally illegal
While this article implies they want to restrict freedom of speech of the businesses, the actual threat is against the town who is distributing the signs. I still think it's abuse of the state's oversight powers, but it's not the 1A violation the article makes it sound like.
Until recently the politicians didn't really have abuse their power to do this. But since the Republicans have no spine whatsoever, they decided if it'd possible - who's stopping them.
This is exactly the thing that should be stopped by the first sane person in the chain of rolling this out - but the Rep did a really good job infiltrating most of it.
Republicans will not stop until they have the ability to legally shoot and kill anyone they perceive to be gay.
They won’t stop until they have the legal ability to shoot and kill anyone they disagree with. They just starting with gays to normalize it.
What republicans fear most is losing control, especially of their narrative.
s/gay/progressive/
We should never, ever at face value take claims from Republicans or anyone that they're doing this for the children or whatever (not that we should have been in the first place regardless). Because they've been making it more clear than ever that they want to erase the entirety of the idea of LGBT+ people from existence.
Because they’ve been making it more clear than ever that they want to erase the entirety of the idea of LGBT+ people from existence.
And then they whine when people point out who they're acting like.
"The assholes doth protest too much, methinks"
The Republicans seem to spend most of their time thinking about LGBTQ+.
Hmm.....
No "hmm...", don't do that shit to lgbtq people, they do it because they see them as less than human, full stop.
It's not them angry at others getting to be themselves while they have to suppress their true nature, it's just heirarchy.
Come on Desantis, no one’s voting for you. Stop being such a tryhard.
Slightly more than half of Florida voted for him to be governor, and it was clear he was a piece of shit then.
4.6 million out of 21 almost 22 million.
~21% of the state of Florida.
More than half the state didn't even vote. (Not saying that's better)
Slightly more than half of the people who Florida allows to vote you mean.
With gerrymandering coupled with voter suppression, it's easy to keep power in a state. You pack all the blue voters into as tiny of an area as possible, then make sure they get fewer voting machines and longer lines. This gets you fewer blue voters overall. Tie in a few other tactics, and you have yourself a solid republican majority in what should be a swing state.
Got to purge those voter rolls every chance you get, but only in the cities. You wouldn't want to accidentally purge a likely republican voter.
Spoiled brat and his cadre need to show how angry they are at that "woke culture"
Buncha snowflakes
How does this not violate the First Amendment?
The same way that all of these anti-gay, anti-minority bills work:
They absolutely violate the Constitution. The Republicans just don't care.
I mean the SCOTUS basically signaled last year that they don't give a fuck either, or at the very least are willing to twist any interpretation of it to fit whatever the Republican's agenda is. Hell, Clarence basically said after the Roe repeal that gay marriage and reinstatement of sodomy laws was next.
The point of this push is to get a case in front of the supreme that more or less outlaws any expression of queerness.
So you're saying them carrying around their little pocket constitution and showing it everybody was performative?
As a 🦅Conservative®🦅, I think people should be left alone to do what they want.
That is why I support this policy, Because Ron M. Desantis should be allowed to do what he wants.
But Ron Desantis isn’t a person. He’s a greasy nylon stocking stuffed full of purulent, rancid ground pork that somehow learnt to stand upright and wear high heels.
Strangely accurate.
Please tell me the misspelling in your username is intentional
You got a problem with the Trueth©?
Smells like a parody account, but Poe's law, etc.
It's not. It's more shit education. Thanks yank Tories
I don't know, is he Trump enough?
But I thought god owned the rainbow™️? Now the good Christians are disavowing it??
When the rainbow stopped being a reminder that god won’t genocide the world AGAIN and started being a reminder of love and inclusion, man that was too much for those great purveyors of xtian love.
Maybe that's why it's so traumatic
Every time they see a rainbow it's a reminder that the god they worship is a petty, insecure, loser who will happily murder people, including children, just because his feelings were hurt
Technically, it was a reminder that god won't genocide the world again by flooding. No word on climate change or nuclear holocaust in the Bible.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Some central Florida lawmakers said they were considering "all legislative, legal and executive options available" to stop business owners in a small town from voluntarily displaying rainbow decals in their windows indicating that they are a "safe place" for LGBTQ+ people who feel threatened.
Four Republican lawmakers wrote a letter to officials in Mount Dora two weeks ago warning that the new, optional city-sponsored program could put the central Florida community outside Orlando "in the crosshairs of potentially detrimental and absolutely unnecessary economic harm."
The lawmakers cited boycotts of Bud Light and Target, which followed the brands' efforts to promote diversity and inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community.
Mount Dora's city council approved the Safe Place Initiative last month.
Safe Place programs are visible throughout metro Orlando — as well as throughout the US — including ones sponsored by the Orlando Police Department, Orange County Sheriff's Office and Osceola County Sheriff's Office, all in central Florida.
The council's decision to approve the program has coincided with an uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ incidents, including vandalism last month at two LGBTQ+ centers in Orlando.
The original article contains 339 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Thanks bot
Ah the good ol’ “I’m not transphobic I’m just thinking of the pooor economy!”
I don't understand why this is a headline, constitutionally, lawmakers can't do jack fuckin shit to forbid that.
Why wouldn't the article name the Republicans that signed the letter? Seems like poor journalism?
As a non-Anerican I read that Florida is being awful to a lot of people and I wonder, if people there notice a difference in rural or urban areas? Do people start to migrate to other states? Does it have an impact on the state and its economy? Or are these just impotent talking points designed to engage voters but with no effect on public life? Would love to hear from residents how to relativize all those horrible headlines..
It's quite interesting from some who lives out of state. Florida seems to be a testing ground for all of these terrible policies, as if they aren't afraid to pass a law no matter how shit it is. Maybe it's because they know people are going to be moving out of Florida because of climate change so they might as well see what kinda shit they can get away with. But maybe it is all talking points.
Tourism to Florida is down across all fronts but the only thing you'll hear from right-wing news is that Disney is "too woke" now so people aren't visiting anymore. Of course that's complete bullshit but that doesn't matter to the talking heads.
People aren't going to just upend their family for a short term political climate, even as bad as it is. DeSantis is heading down a path that he won't win the next election. It's easier to vote him out, then to move your family, and start a new life elsewhere. But, businesses will stop coming, and that is already happening. Businesses have stopped expansion plans. Florida is a huge place for conventions, and large meetings (corporate vacations), and those have been getting cancelled. Florida is losing Millions of dollars over this.
These are complicated questions with answers that lack solid data at the moment. People think the “woke” war is too much when it has govt telling corpos what they can and can’t say. So the GOP doesn’t care about free speech of their opponents unless it is their business opponents. Desantis is backing off the Disney fight.
I give you the party of small government. /S
This is really crazy. What's going in the US? Aren't LGBT groups protesting this?
Yes they are, but they're being stalked by the Proud Boys who do things like show up at drag shows with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, and the cops don't have a problem with that. It's scary.
Why aren't the Free Speechers protesting this?
I don't live in the US, but we are really fragmented - both geographically and politically. I guess some are exhausted, from the last ten years. I also guess that there in fact are queer groups making noise, but they're likely not being heard enough. They do important work, but it's hard to keep up, even without the violence and formal political landscape.
When can we stop them [Republicans], preferably forever? Should the rest of the world be involved to make sure they don't cause any domino effect of some sort to other countries?
We're on the cusp of making them nationally unviable. With demographics and the D/R split in generations, they're fucked. If we turn out en masse, we can eliminate their national power for good. We'll still need to weed them out from deep red states, but one thing at a time.
Yes, we can stop them.
If we have the resolve.
Who with any sense could respect this idea? "Oh no, those icky people are all going in there where I don't have to see them! That's somehow worse than the horrible, unbearable nightmare of having to see them in public!" People like that don't want us gone, they just want to torture us for fun. I have a reasonable amount of rule-breaking things to say about anyone like that.
... And of course it's not people actually from there. City council voted this in but these garbage want to counter it from the state level, because screwing with more-local governance from above is totes cool when they do it. Then of course they'll attack lower levels to counter anything insufficiently evil at a higher level, whatever it takes to get their way because evil must always get its way in this vile hell-world. (Not meant in any kind of religious sense, or whatever. Just... they're fuckin' evil)
This shit's exhausting.
People like that don’t want us gone, they just want to torture us for fun.
Of course. They have decided that LGBT+ is a choice and that it means you're a pedophile and they're big on vengeance.
I think that's just an excuse. Where are the bodies of all' those religious-guys who are known for that? That keeps actually happening. I knew a guy in high school who was attacked by one and nobody cared. Others just get shifted around or ignored just the same; they're all doing fine even if they have to move away for a bit. Our bodies get left in the street. We get the hate because we're easy for them to torture, and when we die we're easy for them to laugh at. Then they just find someone else to torture or kill, because we can't leave. They won't let us, because they don't really want us gone. They're just feeding a deep-seated cruelty some of them probably don't even realize they have.
I tried to find some sources but now I'm kinda sick. Turns out scrolling around looking at articles about people murdered for being like me can be bad for my mental state! Who knew!
Edit to clarify some awkward wording. Still a lil weird but maybe less ambiguous, at least.
Uneanted rainbow stickers for cars and homes owned by state legislature sounds wonderful.
Can we just sell it back to Spain already???
So, carrying guns os freedom of speech, but showing rainbows is not?
Ah yes the party of free speech.
And small government...
And “pro business”
Then again, stuff like these stickers are only needed due to the type of idiotic assholes who would remove them, existing.
You can't expect these people to be able to identify their own hypocrisy. Or to care if they do.