It has been very important for Gay people to pick their doctors carefully. Although things have gotten better over the years although remaining the same in some places, whether or not to tell your doctor you were Gay in order to get the correct health care often led to medical rejection, settling on a less competent doctor, or lucking out and finding a doctor with an open mind. The practical consideration was that few doctors had any training in the medical needs of non-heterosexual people.
As a result of this search for a good and openminded doctor who would not treat you like a disposable stereotype meant that people often found the right doctor through word of mouth and there were a number of doctors who, because of this, had large Gay clienteles.
When there is a disease among the majority community it can go unseen for a while because the number of available patients is spread over a huge number of doctors throughout the country. Not so with Gay people as the number of doctors was limited, and this made any group anomaly easier to detect.
That is why when AIDS was first detected it was by a doctor with a number of Gay patients experiencing a medical crisis that would not be as readily observable because of the spread-out nature of the number of heterosexual patients.
The result was that while people were concentrating on why Gays were getting sick with the final medical conclusion being it was a punishment from God, unless you were a medical outlier as a doctor and assuming it would affect no one but the Gays, it was already spreading in then heterosexual population undetected because of the bias.
In retrospect in the 1980s a doctor went back over his patients’ medical records paying close attention to those who died because of Pneumonia when it was so easily treated. Having looked at the records together and not individually over time medical, he discovered that as unrelated as the patients were tom each other, many of the patients who had died of pneumonia also displayed other anomalies common in each and realized that had he only had these patients or they were the majority, he would have found his heterosexual patients were dying from Pneumonia because their immune systems were oddly suppressed and this meant they had had some exposure to HIV that went undetected and untreated.
The realization that Straights were getting the virus toom led to the designation of “Innocent Victims”, non-Gays who were getting a disease they should not be getting while it had been okay to let the Gays die. Had the Punishment from God foolishness that was magnified by politicians who had discovered a new religious political base, things would have been better for everyone.
The support systems so prevalent today to deal with AIDS and other communicable diseases are based on those that had to be established within the Gay Community to address the disease in spite of it being ignored by the government and the medical field, and adopted to address the needs of the non-Gay population. Interestingly, for religious reasons, some places would refuse people with HIV/AIDS from access to the system they were responsible for.
In Texas, four complainants filed a class action lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act’s authority to mandate access to free vaccines, PrEP, birth control, cancer screenings, and other preventative services.
“Because the media coverage of this case has triggered a wave of threats and cyberbullying directed at the current first-listed plaintiff and his family and business, which would be alleviated if Braidwood were designated as the first-listed plaintiff going forward,” the complainants’ attorney has asked the name of the case be changed from Kelley v Xavier Becerra et a, to Braidwood Management, inc. v Xavier Becerra et al.
Negative treatment resulting from treating other people negatively is deplorable and so very wrong.
In this case.
The attorney in the case, Jonathan Mitchell, is the former solicitor general of Texas who put together the law that put a bounty on anyone in Texas believed to have aided in an abortion after six weeks.
In the suit which bore his name before the change, John Kelley, an orthodontist is described as a Christian who is unwilling to support certain forms of contraception or PrEP on religious grounds because they “encourage homosexual behavior and intravenous drug use.”
Joel Starnes, another complainant, claims he objects to the mandate on principle.
“As an adopted son of God, a husband, a father, Texas Native, and patriot of the USA, I am fighting for our Natural Rights – Life, Liberty, and Property.”
Briarwood, the management company and the name on the new title objects to mandatory coverage of STI screenings and counseling for those engaged in non-marital sexual behavior.
According to the attorney,
“The government cannot possibly show that forcing private insurers to provide PrEP drugs, the HPV vaccine, and screenings and behavioral counseling for STDs and drug use free of charge is a policy of such overriding importance that it can trump religious-freedom objections.”
He also claims that the mandates make the plaintiffs complicit in “conduct that is contrary to their sincere religious beliefs.”
The baker making a wedding cake excuse for free exercise of bigotry.
Needless to say, if the complainants win this case, this will spread to other states and the frenzy will begin.
I would venture to say that most of us have had that embarrassing moment when things did not do as hoped, so our parents jumped in to set things straight.
Not enough time on the court, someone else got the lead in the annual school musical, a referee missed a foul and this by itself could be enough to reduce college scholarship possibilities.
The one thing they had going for them was that at least our parents based their complaint or defense on something tangible. They saw us sitting on the bench for most of the game, know we have a better voice than the lead, and, in spite of no foul being called, something made us fall down.
Then tiara for complaining from left field goes to the parents of the two girls who had placed second and third in an athletic event who claimed the first-place winner only won because she was Transgender and that gave her the advantage.
This was news to the first-place athlete and her parents, but the district carried on an investigation and did so secretly without the athlete or her parents knowing about it.
The Utah High School Activities Association decided not to inform them in order to spare them embarrassment and “to keep the matter private,” as the high school went through her school records dating back to kindergarten.
Many Republican run states are passing laws banning Transgender women and girls from sports because the claim is they have had testosterone, even if they are prepubescent, have developed along male lines, and, therefore, possesses an advantage over other women and girls. This ignores the reality that if girls and boys weren’t artificially divided along arbitrary boys and girls things, young kids could choose their sport and begin honing their skills equally from a young age. It also speaks to misogyny as the fear is a Transgender girl will bring her skills and abilities with her which have had the advantage of not being limited by assigned gender limitations, admits to unequal training and the inherit weakness of the fairer sex, yet says nothing about Transgender boys being a threat as their being brought up as girls also makes them inherently weaker.
My cousin’s daughter wanted to play hockey as a little girl. At first it was cute to the adults, but this kid was serious. She was often better than the boys, played on coed teams, and is now an assistant coach to a boys’ college hockey team. She developed according to the opportunities she was allowed to take.
The laws banning Transgender women and girls from playing in the correct sports is based on nothing as there have been almost no cases of potential competitive advantages in K-12 sports in those states.
The parents of the second- and third-place finishers had complained to the athletic association because the winner won first place in an event by a wide margin.
The school then reviewed her high school record and determined she was registered as female, but was advised by the Utah high school association to “double check,” so officials contacted her middle and elementary schools.
A school spokesperson reported that,
“The school went back to kindergarten and she’d always been a female.”
The school may have declined to reveal the student’s grade, school or sport to protect her identity, and may have kept the student and her family in the dark because the investigation might be offensive to them and that the parents would have been contacted “if needed” but it isn’t hard to find out who was so secretly and bizarrely investigated.
Will every female athlete who has done very well in an athletic event now have to go through tests and investigations before they can receive a trophy because some parent wants her child tom be the winner always?
The Utah athletic association has received a few similar complaints since the law was passed in July with at least one based on an athlete not looking feminine enough, but the investigations have concluded that all subjects of complaints have been female from birth.
Lawmakers who learned about the investigation during a hearing on Transgender females in sports didn’t question the process that had the Utah High School Activities Association going through the personal medical records of a student without notifying the student’s parents that this was being done because some Helicopter Parent got her nose out of joint because her princess was bested.
This procedure allows non-medical persons to go through a child’s health records without parental knowledge or consent, and with the basis of the complaints so far being someone won an event, or someone did not look feminine enough, anyone can accuse any athlete who is successful of being Transgender in hopes of taking away a trophy.
And for those who say it is okay because my daughter is not transgender so we will never face such an intrusive and secret investigation, you have seen parents at athletic events going after the refs, coaches, and, sometimes, rather shamefully, the athletes on the field, so you know that as baseless as the angry parent’s claim in order to get her kid the trophy, all it takes is the complaint regardless of known realty to start a secret investigation in which the parents will be involved as needed.
This whiney tactic can be used against any female athlete.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican whose veto of the Transgender ban was overridden, said that the parents’ complaint about the girl had crossed a line.
“My goodness, we’re living in this world where we’ve become sore losers, and we’re looking for any reason why our kid lost. Making up allegations like that are pretty disturbing to me.”
The parents of three transgender girls in Utah have filed a suit against the ban as it wrongly keeps their children from participating in the sports and subjects them to the discrimination prohibited by the state constitution and to the denial of equal rights and due process that the state constitution protects
Their attorneys argue it violates provisions of the state constitution that prohibit discrimination and guarantee equal rights and due process.
Whether handwritten on the chalk board or, thankfully, later projected from a laptop to a white board, these were quotes from the written and spoken word that the students had most likely already heard people say and would now know the source or, if hearing the quote later in life, they will know its source and meaning.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood….”
“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
“When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station…”
“Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”
The quotes were generally four lines, or sentences long that the students copied into their notebooks at the beginning of class each day. As they wrote I would explain the quote, perhaps something about the author, or use the quote to review material they should remember from the past regardless which class they had learned it in.
They were also random, so they were not necessarily part of the main lesson for the day but besides using the quote to educate and review, the simple task pf copying off the board got their minds out of the hall and into the classroom.
Because of the panicky need to test at every opportunity and if there weren’t any, one must be created, school districts learned the fine art of test manipulation.
I taught in a district whose central administration, rather than admit that No Child Left Behind was new to all of us and we all had some learning to do, pretended, instead, to appear in total control having the knowledge to implement whatever was entailed when in public while they panicked behind the scenes.
Rather than look internally for teachers who had already developed methodologies that would be effective district-wide, the district, like so many, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for experts to come in and introduce their consulting companys’ high-priced methodologies, and based on perhaps attending a training session, administrators who had no experience in teaching certain subjects became experts in the field.
The pressure was on to appear that all the new methodologies they introduced, no matter how useless or outlandish, were working, and that could only be proven by testing.
This district began the year testing all students within days of the beginning of a new school year to see what they had retained from earlier grades. This established where the students were at the beginning of the year and, added to the results of tests taken at each subsequent quarter, would be used as the starting point for any measurable progress.
I was teaching American literature to Honors Students and according to the district set curriculum was not to cover Walt Whitman until the second semester, but when a quote from Leaves of Grass popped up as one of that year’s first Quotes du Jour, I explained who he was and read some examples of his work, leaving the bulk for next semester before getting down to the days business.
Yet here, the first district generated districtwide Junior Class Benchmark test of the year had questions on Whitman the answers to which the American Lit students district wide would not learn until months later, and, as it was the district’s own curriculum, the test makers knew that.
Many of my Honors Students concerned about their grades told me they knew the Whitman answers whereas their friends in honors classes in other district high schools didn’t.
There is a whole lot of history between that accidental discovery and its being brought up in a district court case. Suffice it to say that it was clear that the district personnel who created the tests and chose what would be on them included questions based on second semester material on the first test of the year to give the impression that students were achieving great progress throughout the year as their test scores rose.
The reality was that the first test was based on what the students would learn not on what knowledge they were expected to have brought with them that school year, and the test creators knew this would mean that with initial low scores, as the tests began to align with the curriculum, the impression would that be that great things were being done and the genius of the administrators revealed.
Like any teacher I was aware that the all-important testing caused anxiety with some students even the good ones, like my Honors Students, who just had a problem taking tests, and I attempted to ease it.
I explained my three simple rules to all my classes regardless of their achievement designation, Honors, Special Ed, and the general students if they found themselves panicking over an answer to a question or just the thought that they were facing a test and potential failure.
If they did not know an answer but had to answer as many questions as possible to get a good rating and, perhaps, the answer is on the tip of their tongue but just sits there, 1) the shortest answer is usually the correct one, 2) answers with double negatives are to confuse you. Ignore them, and 3) if you whittle your choices down to two, just pick one. Your 50/50 odds are better than Vegas.
This, of course, was after applying the important first step.
If students read the selection in order to answer questions, they will be attempting to take note of everything they read whether or not it is important. They will attempt to remember every detail as they read the selection which can increase test anxiety, or simply give up because it is just overwhelming. My advice was to have the students read the questions first so they would have an idea what the test makers considered important, and this would automatically eliminate the detritus. They may not be word for word expressed a certain way in both the reading and the question, but the substance is there in both.
A student may remember every detail about setting only to find the questions are about the characters, and, while the student could have answered any setting question did poorly with questions on characters.
These rules along with paying attention in class and doing the work will result in good grades as they will be showing what they know not how well they dealt with a test.
My students did consistently well.
Every year at the first gathering of the faculty before students arrived, the principal would get up and announce those classes and teachers who had done well on the statewide end of the year tests the past spring. These were teachers whose class test scores had risen even mildly. The year my students had not only topped the school’s previous annual scores on the Junior Class level test but the whole district’s, this was not mentioned and later in the court case the principal explained that as my students were Honors Students, they were expected to be that good but could not explain why in earlier years she had praised teachers with Honors Students who class scores only rose a little and were not what my students had done. She also could not explain why after my test scores were ignored by administration, I was not allowed to use my Quotes du Jour as I had been using them. but had to simply have the students write down what they thought the quote meant.
I continued using them for review and got reprimanded for insubordination.
The following year I was teaching English Literature to seniors. We had gone through all the facts about Shakespeare with the students having to learn the usual Shakesperean terms like soliloquy and aside, with the usual descriptions of the Globe Theater, and references to his most famous lines.
To bring meaning to all the technical jargon, I was about to play a video of a play by the Bard, when I was stopped by an administrator who had seen that my students knew the terms and Elizabethan details and that was enough to do well on standardized tests asking Shakespeare questions.
Taking time to watch the play would take away from moving on to learn more things that could be on the test and take time away from test prep which consisted of practice tests each quarter to prepare for the battery of district generated tests, a week’s practice testing to get ready for the state tests, and then the big weeks’ long practice tests period leading up to the End of Instruction Standardized tests.
Each academic quarter instruction time was replaced with practice testing. That was a total of four weeks each year for practice and another four for the actual tests. Instead of learning more things, the students practiced how to take tests on the little they were allowed to learn.
They could, however, answer all the meaningless questions on Shakespeare and graduate without ever having seen a play by him.
Teachers, like myself, collected the reprimands for showing plays or reading from a selection that would be interesting to students but wasn’t in the textbook.
I got to tell Edward Albee once that I was not allowed to cover him in class because he wasn’t included in the textbook so according to my school’s administrative team, he was not relevant to American Literature, the class I taught.
A signed copy of Who’s Afraid of Virgia Wolfe had an honored spot above my chalkboard and although never mentioned, Albee was a constant presence in my classroom.
And since every kid has to be convinced that they must go to college as opposed a school where they could hone their skills in a trade they are drawn to, and as school districts have to look good, a matter of image over substance, as long as the students bubble in the right answers regardless how rote that is and how soulless the students’ education, it makes the higher ups look good.
Every year the students in New York schools, which was my first fulltime teaching assignment, took the New York Regency exams, the end of the year standardized tests required to get a diploma. One go-around, my principal had been on the committee creating the high school language arts and literature section but quit with submitted complaint when the members of his committee kept coming up with questions on factoids that may have been mentioned in class or not that they knew the students would most likely miss.
Obviously, this was a flawed approach to such an important exam.
While people may lament the loss of elementary school recess time because it cuts into test preparation practice, and while still more lament the cutting of art and music classes, they can rest assured that these have actually been replaced, at least for a time, with the fun activity of first through third graders learning how to bubble in the correct answers on scantron answer sheets through fun coloring activities.
Having taken standardized tests as a teacher taking courses and exams to qualify and continue to qualify for certifications in various subject areas and grade levels, the need to erase any stray marks made by a dropped Number 2 pencil or a test-taker’s careless and unnoticed action of making a pencil mark that could be read as an answer, or a poorly erased corrected answer, I was used to the standard instruction to review all answer sheets for such stray markings and removing them before passing the test paper in.
Adults can easily follow this direction when reminded by the exam proctor if they do not do it automatically, but little kids below the age of 8 may need a little help.
One year in a district in which I taught a charge was made that the only reason tests scores had gone up at a certain school was not because the teachers had developed methods that resulted in higher achievement, a positive thing that showed the teachers’ effectiveness, but, because the teachers must have somehow cheated, most likely by changing answers.
As she and many other teachers of lower grades knew that stray marks could influence test scores, one month before retirement, as she did with every test, a third-grade teacher looked over her students’ test papers before sending them to the office, erasing any obvious stray marks the children might have missed or a doodle they just barely erased. A parent passing by her room saw her. She was not hiding but sitting at her desk with the door open. The teacher got reported, and the district had found a scape-goat, and this actually allowed the administration to end any future discussion of the matter by agreeing with the parents and sacrificing this teacher on the altar of appeasement. The union had to fight to have her benefits restored or she would have ended her career with nothing having been “found” committing a crime that cost her her profession, her standing in the community, and her retirement and all related benefits.
Inspection of her papers found a few erasers of stray pencil marks but no changed answers.
I have seen standardize tests misused, results manipulated, exams created in such a way as to create desired results as part of a wider image creating tactic, results ignored for political reasons by administrators who had no idea how ignoring at least one class’s achievement of which they were proud resulted in their feeling like the school did not care.
I have seen and experienced the limiting of what students should and could learn because the powers that be assumed they had the best idea of what would be on the test and teachers must only teach that.
If teachers taught a hundred things knowing only some will be on the test, they know that while the kids learn a bunch of stuff, more than will be on the test, they could ace any test based on any number of those 100 things.
Limit what you teach because someone has decided what most likely will be on the unseen test and demands only that be taught, and you run the risk of a test based mostly on the things you omitted.
I have seen teachers, one a State Teacher of the Year because of her innovative approach to math and her having shared her methods with many other math teachers whose test scores went up, told they could no longer use their successful methods but had to use the one some consulting firm had come up with in theory, and because their test scores were not as high under the new prescribed method, they were put on plans of improvement for poor performance and failure to master the new method which in one case had been the bastardized corrupting of the teacher of the Year’s method.
She got a plan for improvement.
She quit.
Since Covid hit in 2020, the regular school schedules and the established assumption that all kids will learn the same things at or about the same time with no way to later show they have learned what they had not previously because all kids take the same tests with no acknowledgement that people learned at different levels and in different ways.
If the object is to get to the top floor of a building, it would be nice if everyone got there at the same time having taken the same elevator. But, in some cases along the way there might be too many people already on the elevator so some wait for the next one, some use the stairs as a good option, or, perhaps while ascending the stairs, the elevator door opens revealing some passengers had gotten off and now there is room for a ride. In any case, everyone arrives at the top eventually and they can all go on from there.
The expected foolish miracle after the closures of schools was that somehow, in spite of trying to teach and learn under never before experienced conditions that some actually pretended they were experts on handling, followed by obstructing teaching for political reasons, disrespecting teachers, parental attacks based on the baseless, and coming out of a 100-year pandemic and figuring out what needs to be fixed and how to fix it, has produced the desire to test the kids to find out where they are, put them all on some fast track, and test them periodically and often to see if the frenzy is working.
It is necessary.
Just ask the companies that design, print, and correct the tests at great cost and have a willing, multi-million dollar spending clientele who will pay anything to look good, and the consulting firms whose methods school districts can have their teachers learn at yet even more money that should go to books in the library and supplies in the classrooms.
In Massachusetts, to make sure students have caught up to some artificial number, the Board pf Education has raised the level of test scores required to graduate because college and all.
Not only is this an artificial move based on nothing really, but it will put stress on students and teachers to attain a created goal. Parents will assume the good grade their kid got before the artificial inflation is no longer good enough to get into college and they will go after the teachers from one end, while the logical under the circumstances poor test scores will be seen as teachers letting the parents, students, and districts down because they did not meet the requirement for Dorothy to now go and get the witch’s broom, and the district will come down hard on them.
I had a student transfer into my twelfth grade Language arts/English Literature class. Although he knew a lot about English Literature and was eager to let that be known, he was woefully deficient in his knowledge of eleventh grade American Literature resulting in a dismal performance on the seniors’ first yearly district generated test based on the curriculum as the district divided it through the grades. ‘
The reality was that in his previous school district, Juniors took English Lit while the seniors took American Lit, so, although he was behind the new district’s expectations of where he should be according to itself, he was right at grade level had he stayed in the other district.
It took some work to get this reality accepted so the school allowed him to change his English class from Senior to Junior while retaining the rest of his senior schedule.
But as I said this was after some work.
This is gamesmanship regarding tests and the arbitrary raising of test score requirements for the toddler reason “Becuz” is not fair for the students, the teachers, parents, or reality.
Why not suspend the tests until all the “experts” decide the students have overcome all the Covid trauma they were told they were experiencing and have learned all things that are artificially placed on arbitrary grade levels so they catch up.
Slow it with the testing,
Even a dog gets tired of performing for a treat especially when the owner rips a large portion of the promised treat off for self-consumption.
On May 1, 2020, when the ICE Detention center at the campus of the Bristol County (MA) House of Corrections erupted after the inmates had reached their tolerance limit for the cruelty of the Sheriff of Bristol County, Thomas Hodgson, the man who had attempted since Trump’s presidential inauguration to catch his eye, stood at a self called press conference to explain how, as the only adult present and the great man that he is, he had been able to fend off the attack on him, his deputies, and his unmuzzled dogs by those unreasonable people in his Detention Center who destroyed the place.
The narrative had been simple.
He wanted to give the inmates of his detention center a covid test but, rather than cooperate, they went crazy throwing things, attacking deputies, and destroying property.
The fault was on those ” Criminal Illegal Aliens”, the sheriff’s subliminally charged term for immigrants, who do not respect America, its laws. and its law enforcers.
He launched into a description of the rioting inmates and the calm and reasoned response of his crew. and declared that, although it would be submitted to those who would carry on the investigation he welcomed, but until the investigation the public would just have to accept the video existed, but we could not be seen.
He did, however, mention those Senators and Congressional Representatives he would not allow on any investigative panel, as if the subject of one can set the parameters. He repeated his narrative at every opportunity always painting the inmates as the aggressors and he and his deputies the victims of their unreasonable behavior.
After a quiet, leakless seven-months long investigation involving inmates, House of Corrections staff, deputies, inmates, and at least one attorney who had been talking to his client on the phone when the riot began and heard most of it as his client relayed what was happening over the background noise until the sheriff, by his own admission, took the phone and hung it up.
The investigation also looked at the videos that the sheriff had been telling the public would show what had actually happened and would justify his actions.
It is one thing to claim that there is a tape that shows the details of an event that cannot be shown to the public in light of a possible investigation, it is another to claim that such a tape exists assuming that no one would ever see it so the stated contents will be assumed true.
The tape showed otherwise.
What was on the videos did not match the story the sheriff had been telling during those months of the investigation, the story that the sheriff hoped would become so accepted by the general public, he could use that acceptance to deflect his crimes by convincing the public, as he actually attempted, that this investigation was being done by bleeding heart, pro-Immigrant/anti-American, anti-trump, personal political enemies, who were out to destroy him.
Instead it showed
“Our investigation revealed that the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office violated the rights of detainees by using excessive force and by seriously risking their health and safety.”“In the end, so much pepper spray was used that two detainees were taken to the hospital with symptoms of 2 respiratory distress, a third required the administration of emergency chest compressions to be revived, and many detainees reported breathing difficulties in the days and weeks after the May 1 Incident. Many of the detainees also were not given adequate medical attention following exposures to pepper spray, nor were they provided with a timely and sufficient opportunity to decontaminate.”The report stated.
“The violations of the detainees’ civil rights included the use of excessive force disproportionate to what was warranted and acting with “deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of serious harm to the health of the detainees.
Showing up with the equipment as the sheriff and his deputies did for an incident that came as a surprise showed a calculated use of force by their showing up with a variety of weapons including flash bang grenades, pepper ball launchers, pepper spray canisters, and K-9s, among other tools, and this was all used on detainees who had “exhibited calm and nonviolent behavior for at least an hour before this operation.”
“The BCSO deployed these weapons both indiscriminately upon entry and also specifically against particular detainees who were not combative, assaultive, or otherwise actively resisting staff. Informing our conclusion that the BCSO’s use of force was excessive, we identified myriad violations of the BCSO’s policies and procedures, as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) National Detention Standards.”
“We are particularly troubled by the BCSO’s unlawful use of canines, lack of attempt to de-escalate the situation or otherwise avoid further conflict, and failure to warn the detainees, including those who may not have understood verbal directives because of language barriers, before using substantial force against them.”
The tapes also helped to determine that “riot” had started with the non-violent refusal of 10 detainees to take a Covid test when being told to gather their stuff implied it had been determined before the results of any test that they were being moved but not told where or when, and confusion was caused because the sheriff does not employ any professional translators fulltime, parttime, or as needed in a detention center housing immigrants, but instead uses untrained detainees as translators, so instructions, already viewed with suspicion, became more confusing.
Where did the money for a House of Corrections interpreter at a detention center for immigrants go?
It would appear that contrary to his claim that,
“The motto of the left-wing activist groups, abolish-ICE advocates, Prisoners’ Legal Services and plain anti-Trumpers has always been, and continues to be, ‘Don’t let the facts interfere with your political agenda,”
the sheriff has to accept he confused us with himself when it comes to facts.
His video evidence was not what he had represented it as.
In the past, it was the sheriff following Trump’s lead in his attempt to gain favor. He echoed Trump’s words, pushed Trump’s lies, attempted, and may again attempt to make Massachusetts a red state, say one thing in public to endear himself to the citizens while in the shadows works against them or uses them to promote himself, he turned in his church to Stephen Miller for being Christian in the real sense, and believes people accept whatever he says as the truth, assuming most won’t fact check and claiming those who do hate America and its people.
But it could be, now that the FBI has retrieved stolen national documents of various classified levels from Mar a Lago whose owner, resident, and our former president claimed he had totally cooperated with the federal government having previously handed all such documents over to it, Trump has to face the security camera tapes that will show if anyone moved a box of documents out of or into that room and when they did it.
It is as if they both, two birds of a feather, are in a bubble that does not connect the spoken word and verbal descriptions with the statements both made on audio and video recordings which clearly show the truth vs their filtered presentation of it.
The tape’s the thing to prick the conscience of the kings
In April, Florida’s Department of Health proposed a rule that would deny people under 18 gender-affirming surgical procedures, medications like puberty blocker and hormone therapy, and “any other procedure that alters primary or secondary sexual characteristics for the treatment of gender dysphoria”.
To do this, the Department had to ignore the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and misrepresent the contents of reports by 10 researchers in order to justify denying gender-affirming care.
They would also, as it turned out, misuse a study.
Ron DeSantis is all in with this as it would prohibit gender-affirming surgical procedures, medications like puberty blocker and hormone therapy, and “any other procedure that alters primary or secondary sexual characteristics for the treatment of gender dysphoria” for patients under 18.
Gender-affirming care for both adolescents and adults has been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and many other professional groups as necessary and frequently lifesaving for transgender individuals.
At a press conference at the beginning of this month, DeSantis compared gender-affirming surgical procedures to castration saying that doctors who perform the procedures should be sued.
He is willfully ignorant of facts available to him, or he has found the facts as he presents them according to his own biases and political aspiration to be better for his agenda than presenting the facts as he knows them to be. In the process he not only gains adherents by promoting falsehoods, deliberate misrepresentations of facts, and selective application, but he also keeps the truth from Straight, cisgender people. While he condemns Gender Affirming Care (GAC) in general terms, Desantis is careful not to define it as it would lose its effectiveness as a ploy.
If he were to speak in specifics and define terms, he would let people know that Gender Affirming Care also includes breast augmentation, butt lifts, tummy tucks, plastic surgery, and testosterone therapy utilized by both cisgender males and cisgender females of whichever sexual orientation. That would affect straight people.
Florida could be losing a lot of businesses and one of the reasons people retire there and seem to get younger.
GAC is also important for dealing with Body Dysmorphic Disorder that affects people to varying degrees as they are obsessed with one or more perceived defects or flaws in their appearance whether or not that perceived flaw appears minor or isn’t even noticed by others resulting in such feelings of embarrassed, shame, and anxiety that a person may avoid many social situations.
And so, we have diets and programs that help in the easiest cases with whole industries built around dealing with BDD,
with more serious cases needing medication, therapy, and the occasional medical altering of one’s appearance to be more acceptable to oneself.
And no one has a problem with society creating model images that cost money to imitate and companies making fortunes out of dealing with actual problems with legitimate or quack approaches, or people dealing with a flaw they never knew they had until someone on television told them they did.
DeSantis throws out Hormone blockers and Hormone therapy in such a way that they sound nefarious.
In reality, Hormone blockers, also called puberty blockers, prevent puberty from starting while a person is basically figuring themself out. They do not cause sterility or have permanent effects but have been found to lead to better mental health outcomes in trans people who receive them.
Puberty is rough enough as those who choose not to suppress the memory will admit with all those things that happened to our bodies that surprised us, scared us, or were seen by us as just something new, next!
Some got through it okay, others to varying degrees did not for many reasons. We have all seen one kid enter puberty only to come out a totally different adolescent whose ideas and attitudes seem out of character for who the person once was pre-puberty.
Why not slow the process a little to let the questioning child and the parents figure things out as the blockers are temporary but the changes of puberty are permanent. As an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, let the kid and the parents take the simpler route rather than to later have to undo what should never have been done.
People like DeSantis label but do not define.
The use of the so called “Gay Lifestyle”, if you wanted to sound normal, or “Homosexual Lifestyle” if you wanted it to sound more clinical, was a common tactic for a while until Gays had to move away from the ever increasing rents and property taxes of the Gay Ghettos in the cities, the slums they had reclaimed and gentrified, to the less expensive suburbs and America saw the “Homosexual Lifestyle” and the “Heterosexual Lifestyle” were pretty much the same and not like people had been led to believe.
They will use “late term” abortion to imply that after 15 weeks the pregnant woman will bring the child to full term while having endured all that a pregnancy brings with it only to have the child killed at the very last minute when there had been plenty of things to accidentally smash the belly up against or stairs to fall down.
While DeSantis plays fast and loose with his chosen area of facts, the Health Department played fast and loose with supporting “evidence”.
In 2018 Dr. Ken Pang, a clinician and scientist at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia, and his team published one of the first large-scale analyses of gender-affirming care on transgender children which among its findings and suggestions based on them was that hormone blockers and hormone replacement therapy could help alleviate gender dysphoria and make transgender youth feel more at home in their own bodies.
Being one of the first such reports, there were only 13 studies that his team could use in a study published five years ago, and this was noted when the report was published in Pediatrics, one of that field’s premier medical journals.
“Hormonal treatments for transgender adolescents can achieve their intended physical effects, but evidence regarding their psychosocial and cognitive impact is generally lacking.”
This reference to the need for more studies did not claim or even suggest that what had been found in those that existed was either inconsistent or lacking in numbers enough to validate glaringly consistent findings, and there have been studies done between this one from 2018 and the statewide Florida health memo, but these newer studies were ignored.
However, in 2022, the Florida memo misused this admission when denying gender-affirming care to kids.
Dr. Pang, who along with his fellow researchers, had not been aware the study was being used as a basis for going against what the study found, made his objections clear.
“It seems rather disingenuous for the Florida Department of Health tobe using what they presumably know to be an out-of-date statement to support a blanket ban on gender-affirming care, while at the same time ignoring the more recent evidence which shows, for instance, that gender-affirming medical care is associated with improvements in mental health.
There is a lot more emerging literature. This is a fast-moving space. And increasingly, the evidence shows that the provision of gender-affirming medical care is helpful.”
He also lamented,
“One of the first principles is to do no harm. So, to be seeing the research we’ve done being utilized in this way—I was just dismayed by that.”
A number of years ago, having driven with a friend from Oklahoma to Boston to a teacher union convention, being a native of the Bay State and the South Shore, I showed her the many historic sites, and among them was Plimouth Plantation.
Some of the details of the Pilgrim part were well known and a few new things learned, but what was of special interest to someone from Oklahoma was the Wampanoag village. There were comparisons to be made.
At the recreated village there were a number of local indigenous people doing various tasks with everyone in historic native dress who were willing to stop what they were doing and answer questions. The person who was cooking something in a large pot did not stop and give a lecture but continued cooking while having a conversation with the tourists and answered may questions before they could be asked.
It wasn’t a huge village set up but looked more like a decent start of a larger project.
A few years later, I was back in Massachusetts for Christmas with a more intimate friend from Oklahoma, and on the way to show this person from a landlocked state Cape Cod, we stopped in at the Plimouth Plantation knowing it was closed but wondering how much of it we could see before getting shooed away. We surprisingly were able to wander for quite some time and eventually arrived at the Wampanoag village that was basically a skeleton upon which one assumed things would be added to make the village more complete during tourist season.
Recently, I was at the Plimouth Plantation with a group of people. The Pilgrim village was all abuzz with tourists and Pilgrim re-enacters driving them nuts by pretending not to understand 21st Century things like cellphone cameras and certain jargon. The Wampanoag Village, though, looked like it did during the winter trip minus the dusting of snow and really cold temperatures.
There were no identifiable indigenous people. One seemingly young, Caucasian woman in a uniform not unlike the one I wear as a docent at the museum at which I volunteer answered questions as she stood by the communal food preparation area, but everything else you needed to know about the rest of the village was on little signs placed near an example of something that would be part of the village with the one describing the paltry garden as a good food source leaving you to wonder if the villagers really expected to make it through the winter with what little was growing.
I was hoping to take pictures to send to friends in Oklahoma, but it looked too much like something under construction if not abandoned, and as much as I credit the young woman answering our questions with doing a good job as far as she was able, I could not get the image of the tour guide at the Alamo explaining to the tourists among whom was Pee Wee Herman that Aynez is shucking corn.
Obviously, this apparent lack of doing more than at least have an afterthought does not sit well with the people in cultural parentheses. Members of the state’s Wampanoag community and their supporters say Plimoth Patuxet Museum, a “bi-cultural museum”, needs to do a better job of treating the story of the European and Indigenous peoples that lived there equally.
There was a whole cultural existing before the Pilgrims showed up, and people in that culture kept the Pilgrims alive, but somehow have been reduced to the neighbors nearby who are nice enough but are a little different. Historic Pawtuxet Village, the other half of the exhibitmeant to focus on traditional Indigenous life is in need of repair, is obviously too small, and is staffed by workers who aren’t from local tribes.
As part of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing, the museum changed its exclusionary title, Plimouth Plantation, to the more inclusive one, Plimouth Patuxet and promised it would reflect the importance of the Indigenous perspective.
A new name is good, but there has been little interaction with the tribes to bring substance to it.
It would seem that the nice Wampanoag lady who was making some concoction with strawberries, corn, and sunflower seeds many years ago was not there so I could find out what ingredient I was missing when I tried to make it myself, may have left as other Native employees did because of having their suggestions for modernizing and expanding the outdoor exhibit ignored and because of low pay and poor working conditions.
The consulting group of Native Americans, Wampanoag Consulting Alliance, has claimed that with the steps that had been taken to provide equal representation being removed and with the village falling apart, or just there, the museum has lost the important connection with the Wampanoag Community.
The Pilgrims did the best they could with what they had both in material and knowledge, but in building a European village they introduced certain things like types of livestock and vegetation that were not native and could have replaced something from here, and using the land and its produce as if it was unending and automatic, this among a people who almost perished their first year when it became obvious that this was not Europe and should have learned they needed to respect the land.
The Indigenous people had found a way to live in the area for centuries and seemed to have done so successfully without a lot of European waste and disrespect for the land, so there are lessons to be learned in regard to the environment and interracial relationships and why they are beneficial.
This can’t be done as upon entering the village it appears another European plague has decimated the tribe who, like the tenant who sneaks away, left a lot of things behind.
This is not an equal presentation and there are those who want it addressed.
