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Prominent Texas LGBT Voice Joel Burns, Who Gave Hope To Millions, Resigns

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You may not remember Joel Burns. You may not have noticed the handful of stories noting that Burns, a 45-year-old Fort Worth, Texas councilman announced his resignation from civic service earlier this week, noting that he was planning on enrolling in Harvard’s Masters of Public Administration program. You may have wondered why there was any coverage about a Texas pol not named Wendy Davis or Rick Perry, and whether, in light of the recent coverage of Davis’s (conditional) backing of a 20-week ban on abortions, there was much force remaining in Texas progressivism.

Indeed, if there is, it may lie, and return, in Burns. Because while Burns turned down the opportunity to replace Davis on the Texas Senate, his belief in at least one progressive cause is known throughout the state. And it’s likely why his name rings familiar.

Four years ago, Burns sat in a Fort Worth City Council meeting. Donning a pink polo, he adjusted his microphone, and looked out at his colleagues. Flipping on the projector, he began.

“Tonight, I ask my colleagues’ indulgence in allowing my announcement time to talk briefly about another issue that pulls at my heart.”

//www.youtube.com/embed/ax96cghOnY4

A photo of a young boy — Asher Brown, 13 years old — lit the screen. A Houston-area teen, Asher experienced more bullying and intimidation that most kids will know. Bullied for the way he acted. Bullied for the way he was perceived. His parents called and cajoled school officials to help quell the harassment. Nothing. There was nothing done, and nothing put in the way of the bullies and Asher. Years, this continued, without end.

In late 2010, as Burns told his audience, Asher went home. He found his father’s gun, and he killed himself.

Another photo splashed on the screen, and then another, and more teens, and more suicides, piling on top of one another, impacting in their number and threads of similarities. Burns detailed these deaths. These kids. And then he paused. “Teen bullying and suicide has reached an epidemic in our country – especially among gay and lesbian youth, those perceived to be gay, or kids who are just different,” Burns said. Addressing the adults in the room, and those listening at home or online, he added: “There’s a conversation for the adults in this room, and those watching to have, and we will have it – that this bullying and harassment in our schools must stop, and that our schools must be a safe place to learn and to grow.”

But he wasn’t there to talk to the adults. He wasn’t there for the parents, or the administrators, or those shaping the laws and the state. He wanted to address the teens — the teens like Asher, and the others, whose stories he had just shared. “Tonight, I would like to talk to the 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds in … any school in Fort Worth, or anywhere across the country,” Burns continued. “I know that life can seem unbearable, or that the people in your household may not understand you, and that they may even physically harm you. But I want you to know that it gets better.”

It gets better. This, too, shall pass, Burns said. And then he turned inward, and began to share his story. Or tried to. “I’m going to have too hard a time with the next few sentences. I don’t want my mother and father to have to bear the pain of having to hear me say them. … The numerous suicides in recent days have upset me so much, and have just torn at my heart. And even though there may be some political repercussions … this story is for the young people who might be holding that gun tonight, or the rope, or the pill bottle.”

Growing as an LGBT Texas teen can be difficult enough in this second decade of the 21st century. Decades prior, it was that much worse. But you’ll get out, Burns said. Beyond that world of forced normalcy and unmitigated bullying. Of backward mores. To those teens listening, Burns said, “There is so, so, so much more.”

Twelve minutes after he’d begun, Burns had created one of the largest — and most surprising — civic bursts of support for LGBT teens this decade has seen. Not only was Burns a councilmember from the most conservative of Texas’s major urban areas, but he was commenting at time when LGBT rights were far from assumed. 2010 can, and does, seem a world away. DOMA remained stuck on the books; only an isolated handful of states had passed same-sex marriage; Pres. Obama’s views on gay marriage were still evolving, and not yet finalized. Four years ago, there was anticipation, but no certainty, that dominoes were set to soon fall. The notions and realities of momentum hadn’t yet solidified.

But to Burns, the status of that momentum didn’t matter. And while his statement didn’t carry any political fallout — he’s remained on the council, now in his sixth year representing the city –  there was tremendous risk in his stance. Nor is that risk necessarily lessened now, in Texas. After all, the likeliest candidates for Texas’s lieutenant governor, one of the most powerful offices in the state, have further ensconced themselves into the state’s Christianist wing.

One of the front-runners, Tea Party-backed Dan Patrick, demonized Houston mayor Annise Parker’s recent same-sex marriage, noting, “I am not shocked that Mayor Parker decided to elope to California for a marriage that is unconstitutional in Texas. This is obviously part of a larger strategy of hers to turn Texas into California.”

Texas, though, has been warming to same-sex marriage. And while it remains far further than, say, Oregon or Nevada, hope remains. And it’s a hope that stems from people like Burns. It’s a hope that Burns needed as a teen, and which he hoped to share with those teens in his state, and in Oklahoma, and in Alabama, and anywhere adults and administrators and bullies seek to convince children that there’s only one way, and only one normalcy. Because, as Burns said, things change. Things get better. For them. And for the country.

“To those who are feeling very alone tonight, please know that I understand how you feel,” Burns finished. “That things will get easier. Please stick around to make those happy memories for yourself. It may not seem like it, tonight. And the attitudes of society will change. Please, live long enough to be there to see it.”

Casey Michel HeadshotCasey Michel is a graduate student at Columbia University, and former Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Talking Points Memo, and he has contributed multiple long-form investigations to Minneapolis’s City Pages and the Houston Press. You can follow him on Twitter.

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OPINION

Noem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’

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April 26, 2024

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Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a top potential Trump vice presidential running mate pick, revealed in a forthcoming book she “hated” her 14-month old puppy and shot it to death. Massive online outrage ensued, including accusations of “animal cruelty” and “cold-blooded murder,” but the pro-life former member of Congress is defending her actions and bragging she had the media “gasping.”

“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem writes in her soon-to-be released book, according to The Guardian which reports “the dog, a female, had an ‘aggressive personality’ and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.”

“By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going ‘out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life’.”

“Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, ‘grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another’.”

READ MORE: President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off

“Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like ‘a trained assassin’.”

Except Cricket wasn’t trained. Online several people with experience training dogs have said Noem did everything wrong.

“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling the young girl pup “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”

“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”

“It was not a pleasant job,” she added, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

The Guardian reports Noem went on that day to slaughter a goat that “smelled ‘disgusting, musky, rancid’ and ‘loved to chase’ Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.”

She dragged both animals separately into a gravel pit and shot them one at a time. The puppy died after one shell, but the goat took two.

On social media Noem expressed no regret, no sadness, no empathy for the animals others say did not need to die, and certainly did not need to die so cruelly.

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But she did use the opportunity to promote her book.

Attorney and legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold says Governor Noem’s actions might have violated state law.

“You slaughtered a 14-month-old puppy because it wasn’t good at the ‘job’ you chose for it?” he asked. “SD § 40-1-2.3. ‘No person owning or responsible for the care of an animal may neglect, abandon, or mistreat the animal.'”

The Democratic National Committee released a statement saying, “Kristi Noem’s extreme record goes beyond bizarre rants about killing her pets – she also previously said a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to carry out her pregnancy, does not support exceptions for rape or incest, and has threatened to throw pharmacists in jail for providing medication abortions.”

Former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a co-host on “The View” wrote, “There are countless organizations that re-home dogs from owners who are incapable of properly training and caring for them.”

The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson blasted the South Dakota governor.

“Kristi Noem is trash,” he began. “Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO. Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent.”

“She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog,” he added. “Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable. We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch. You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit. Unsporting and deliberately cruel…but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”

Melissa Jo Peltier, a writer and producer of the “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan” series, also heaped strong criticism on Noem.

“After 10+ years working with Cesar Millan & other highly specialized trainers, I believe NO dog should be put down just because they can’t or won’t do what we decide WE want them to,” Peltier said in a lengthy statement. “Dogs MUST be who they are. Sadly, that’s often who WE teach them to be. And our species is a hot mess. I would have happily taken Kristi Noem’s puppy & rehomed it. What she did is animal cruelty & cold blooded murder in my book.”

READ MORE: ‘Blood on Your Hands’: Tennessee Republicans OK Arming Teachers After Deadly School Shooting

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OPINION

President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off

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April 26, 2024

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President Joe Biden gave an nearly-unannounced, last-minute, live exclusive interview Friday morning to Howard Stern, the SiriusXM radio host who for decades, from the mid-1990s to about 2015, was a top Trump friend, fan, and aficionado. But the impetus behind the President’s move appears to be a rare and unsigned statement from the The New York Times Company, defending the “paper of record” after months of anger from the public over what some say is its biased negative coverage of the Biden presidency and, especially, a Thursday report by Politico claiming Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is furious the President has refused to give the “Grey Lady” an in-person  interview.

“The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau,” Politico reported. “Getting the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview.”

“In Sulzberger’s view,” Politico explained, “only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”

But it was this statement that made Politico’s scoop go viral.

READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

“’All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,’ one Times journalist said. ‘It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.'”

Popular Information founder Judd Legum in March documented The New York Times’ (and other top papers’) obsession with Biden’s age after the Hur Report.

Thursday evening the Times put out a “scorching” statement, as Politico later reported, not on the newspaper’s website but on the company’s corporate website, not addressing the Politico piece directly but calling it “troubling” that President Biden “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”

Media watchers and critics pushed back on the Times’ statement.

READ MORE: ‘To Do God Knows What’: Local Elections Official Reads Lara Trump the Riot Act

“NYT issues an unprecedented statement slamming Biden for ‘actively and effectively avoid[ing] questions from independent journalists during his term’ and claiming it’s their ‘independence’ that Biden dislikes, when it’s actually that they’re dying to trip him up,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch.

Froomkin also pointed to a 2017 report from Poynter, a top journalism site published by The Poynter Institute, that pointed out the poor job the Times did of interviewing then-President Trump.

Others, including former Biden Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, debunked the Times’ claim President Biden hasn’t given interviews to independent journalists by pointing to Biden’s interviews with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and a 20-minute sit-down interview with veteran journalist John Harwood for ProPublica.

Former Chicago Sun-Times editor Mark Jacob, now a media critic who publishes Stop the Presses, offered a more colorful take of Biden’s decision to go on Howard Stern.

The Times itself just last month reported on a “wide-ranging interview” President Biden gave to The New Yorker.

Watch the video and read the social media posts above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Doesn’t Care if Pregnant Women Live or Die’: Alito Slammed Over Emergency Abortion Remarks

 

 

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CNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial

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April 26, 2024

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Donald Trump’s Friday morning claim Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is “heavily guarded” so his supporters cannot attend his trial was torched by a top CNN anchor. The ex-president, facing 34 felony charges in New York, had been urging his followers to show up and protest on the courthouse steps, but few have.

“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! Getting ready to do my Courthouse presser. Two minutes!” Trump wrote Friday morning on his Truth Social account.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins supplied a different view.

“Again, the courthouse is open the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on trials days, is easily accessible,” she wrote minutes after his post.

READ MORE: ‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’

Trump has tried to rile up his followers to come out and make a strong showing.

On Monday Trump urged his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, while complaining that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”

On Wednesday Trump claimed, “The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present. If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”

After detailing several of his false claims about security measures prohibiting his followers from being able to show their support and protest, CNN published a fact-check on Wednesday:

“Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away ‘thousands of people’ from the courthouse during his trial; only a handful of Trump supporters have shown up to demonstrate near the building,” CNN reported.

“And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that ‘for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.’ In reality, the designated protest zone for the trial is at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and, in addition, people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings.”

READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

 

 

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