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Anti-Gay Bullying Related Teen Suicides Spike In Bachmann’s District

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The congressional district Michele Bachmann (R-MN) represents has seen a huge spike in anti-gay bullying and related teen suicides — nine teen suicides, overall, in the past two years alone — so many that the area Bachmann represents has been labeled a “suicide contagion area.” This should surprise no one, as Congresswoman Bachmann for the better part of a decade has built her political career on the backs of the very gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens she purportedly represents.

READ: Michele Bachmann’s Top Ten Anti-Gay Quotes

“Some of the victims were gay, or perceived to be by their classmates, and many were reportedly bullied,” reports Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones. “And the anti-gay activists who are some of the congresswoman’s closest allies stand accused of blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish. Bachmann, meanwhile, has been uncharacteristically silent on the tragic deaths that have roiled her district—including the high school that she attended.”

“If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement,” then-State Senator Bachmann said at the EdWatch National Education Conference in 2004, when she created the non-existent “problem” of same-sex marriage coming to Minnesota, advocating to write discrimination into the state constitution in the form of a ban on marriage equality.

 


The Anoka-Hennepin has been fighting GSAs — Gay-Straight Alliances — and anti-bullying programs under the expected guise that they advance “the homosexual agenda,” ignorantly not accepting the fact that research shows that kids who live in these conservative, anti-gay environments are far more likely to attempt suicide — whether they are gay or straight. And GSAs are believed by the same researchers to be an effective weapon against teen suicides. So much so that the federal Department of Justice and Department of Education publicly advocate for them.


 

It wasn’t a one-off statement. There was also this at the conference:

“You have a teacher talking about his gayness. (The elementary school student) goes home then and says ‘Mom! What’s gayness? We had a teacher talking about this today.’ The mother says ‘Well, that’s when a man likes other men, and they don’t like girls.’ The boy’s eight. He’s thinking, ‘Hmm. I don’t like girls. I like boys. Maybe I’m gay.’ And you think, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s way out there. The kid isn’t gonna think that.’ Are you kidding? That happens all the time. You don’t think that this is intentional, the message that’s being given to these kids? That’s child abuse.”

And so much more.

READ: Gay Teens: Sexual Orientation Stigma Can Lead To Health Risk-Taking

So Bachmann advocated to ban same-sex marriage, by speaking out, one might say religiously, against homosexuals and homosexuality. And while her marriage ban failed to pass, as she feared, child abuse — in this case, children learning to hate homosexuals — and possibly, themselves — thanks to Bachmann’s obsession with homosexuality — grew into a raging suicide epidemic.

The Mother Jones piece adds that in addition to the nine successfully-completed teen suicides, at least seven “students at Anoka Middle School have been hospitalized for attempting or threatening suicide,” this year alone.

Anoka-Hennepin has a policy on the books known colloquially as “no homo promo,” which dates in back to the mid-1990s. Back then, after several emotional school board meetings, the district essentially wiped gay people out of the school health curriculum. There could be no discussion of homosexuality, even with regard to HIV and AIDS, and the school board adopted a formal policy that stated school employees could not teach that homosexuality was a “normal, valid lifestyle.”

Later the policy was changed to require school staff to remain neutral on issues of homosexuality if they should come up in class, a change that critics said fostered confusion among teachers and contributed to their inability to address bullying and harassment, or to even ask reasonable questions about some of the issues the kids were struggling with, like sexual orientation. Both policies were put into place at the behest of conservative religious activists who have been among Bachmann’s biggest supporters in the district. They include the Minnesota Family Council (MFC), and its local affiliate, the Parents Action League, which has lobbied to put discredited “reparative therapy” materials in schools.

That’s the sort of counseling reportedly practiced by Bachmann & Associates,the mental health clinics run by Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus. The clinics reportedly counsel people on how to “pray away the gay” to become straight. Before entering politics, Bachmann served as the education advisor to the MFC-affiliated Minnesota Family Institute, a relationship she has continued. This spring, she headlined a fundraising dinner for MFC, along with Newt Gingrich.

The Anoka-Hennepin has been fighting GSAs — Gay-Straight Alliances —  and anti-bullying programs under the expected guise that they advance “the homosexual agenda,” ignorantly not accepting the fact that research shows that kids who live in these conservative, anti-gay environments are far more likely to attempt suicide — whether they are gay or straight. And GSAs are believed by the same researchers to be an effective weapon against teen suicides. So much so that the federal Department of Justice and Department of Education publicly advocate for them.

READ: Sleepover Suicide Pact: Two Bullied Minnesota 14-Year Old Girls Hang Themselves

Bachmann ally Bradlee Dean, the head of the heavy-metal ministry You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International, last year took to the radio to decry efforts to create a more tolerant climate in the public schools. “We were just talking about the homosexual indoctrination,” Dean said. “The state-run media is going after the schools for resisting the homosexual indoctrination. The homosexuals are now blaming—they are playing the victims—the homosexuals are now blaming [the schools’] stance as the reason that young homosexuals are committing suicide because of the schools’ intolerance to the lifestyle of homosexuality.” Another one of Bachmann’s longtime allies, Janet Boynes, an “ex-gay” who works with the ministry Exodus International, has also joined the fight. In May, she spoke at an Anoka-Hennepin school board meeting supporting the neutrality policy.

With all this anti-gay hate coming from Michele Bachmann, her husband Marcus and their Bachmann and Associates Christian counseling practice, which has been proven to practice what every major medical association has labeled as harmful — ex-gay, reparative therapy — is it any wonder that the environment in Bachmann’s district is so toxic?

 


“One of the plaintiffs eventually dropped out of school and later attempted suicide. Another student, who’d been reporting anti-LGBT harassment for two years, was advised by the school district to find another school because they couldn’t protect him. A third student claims that after he was violently assaulted and called a “faggot” in the hallway, a teacher stood by and watched without intervening. After he reported the incident, the school official blamed him for provoking the attack.”

– Mother Jones


 

Mother Jones continues:

The anti-gay climate in the schools in Bachmann’s district has been so extreme that it has attracted the attention of the Justice Department and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which are both investigating allegations of anti-gay bullying. The Southern Poverty Law Center has also been on the ground investigating discrimination against gay students. On Thursday, it sued the school district over its “neutrality” policy, which the group views as a potential violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution. In a letter to the district superintendent in May, SPLC wrote:

The gag policy bears no rational relationship to any legitimate governmental purpose. On the contrary, the history surrounding the policy’s enactment clearly shows that the policy was adopted solely in deference to some community members’ disapproval of, and animus toward, a particular class of citizens—LGBT people. The law is clear that mere animus toward an unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental purpose.

The letter describes the plight of LGBT students, several of whom had been harassed physically and verbally for long periods of time. According to the SPLC, the students reported the harassment to school officials, who ignored the complaints. One of the plaintiffs eventually dropped out of school and later attempted suicide. Another student, who’d been reporting anti-LGBT harassment for two years, was advised by the school district to find another school because they couldn’t protect him. A third student claims that after he was violently assaulted and called a “faggot” in the hallway, a teacher stood by and watched without intervening. After he reported the incident, the school official blamed him for provoking the attack.

Of course. Because, as Bachmann and her ilk falsely believe, if you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, it’s a “lifestyle choice,” and therefore you have control over it, because it’s not “natural,” it’s, as Bachmann has said, “part of Satan, I think to say that this is ‘gay.’ It’s anything but gay.”

 

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‘What First Amendment?’: 140 EPA Workers Suspended After Opposing Trump Agenda

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Roughly 140 Environmental Protection Agency employees have been placed on administrative leave after signing a letter warning of political interference in the agency’s work—prompting critics to accuse the Trump administration of ignoring their First Amendment rights.

Calling the letter “a remarkable rebuke of the agency’s political leadership,” The New York Times reported on Monday that more than 270 EPA employees had signed the public letter “denouncing what they described as the Trump administration’s efforts to politicize, dismantle and sideline the main federal agency tasked with protecting the environment and public health.”

On Thursday, the Times reported that 144 workers had been suspended, other news outlets put the number at 139.

In that public letter, signatories said they are joining in “solidarity with employees across the federal government in opposing this administration’s policies,” and that they “stand together in dissent against the current administration’s focus on harmful deregulation, mischaracterization of previous EPA actions, and disregard for scientific expertise.”

READ MORE: ‘Stop Talking’: Johnson Suggests Jeffries Is Lying in Marathon Budget Speech

They detailed their five primary concerns, including, “Undermining public trust,” “Ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters,” “Reversing EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities,” “Dismantling the Office of Research and Development,” and “Promoting a culture of fear, forcing staff to choose between their livelihood and well-being.”

On Thursday, the 140 or so employees who allegedly had signed the letter with their official titles received emails saying they had been placed on leave for two weeks “pending an administrative investigation,” The New York Times reported.

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” Brigit Hirsch, an EPA spokesperson, said in a statement, according to Bloomberg Law News.

“The letter, addressed to EPA head Lee Zeldin, alleged the agency has used its communication platforms to ‘promote misinformation and overtly partisan rhetoric,'” Bloomberg added. “One example the signatories cited was a March statement laying out the administration’s deregulatory agenda, in which Zeldin referred to ‘the climate change religion.'”

READ MORE: Democratic Strategist Warns Trump Could Try to Impose Martial Law Before 2026 Midterms

Nicole Cantello, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 704, called the move “blatant retaliation,” The Hill reported.

“We don’t swear an oath to the Trump administration, we swear an oath to the Constitution and so we don’t feel like we violated that oath or that we did anything wrong by signing this letter,” she said.

Cantello, on social media, wrote that EPA workers “have the right to freedom of speech, just like every other American.”

Addressing EPA Administrator Zeldin directly, she said: “See you in court.”

Some denounced the administration’s move.

Attorney Mark Zaid, who handles national security and whistleblower cases, wrote: “Apparently retaliation has already begun. This is what defines this Administration.”

He also offered to “provide pro bono consultation to examine current situation.”

The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel asked, “What First Amendment?”

READ MORE: Trump Appeared Unaware His Budget Bill Cuts $1T From Medicaid: Report

 

Image of Lee Zeldin via Shutterstock

 

 

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‘Stop Talking’: Johnson Suggests Jeffries Is Lying in Marathon Budget Speech

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House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in an apparent attempt to prevent the Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, from passing President Donald Trump’s massive budget bill in the dead of night, has been delivering a speech on the floor for over six hours, and may break the record of 8 hours and 32 minutes set in 2021 by then GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker Johnson reportedly allowed minimal time for debate on what Trump calls his “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which cuts Medicaid by about $1 trillion, and forces cuts to Medicare and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, by hundreds of billions of dollars while carving out tax breaks that largely favor the wealthy. An estimated 17 million people could lose insurance as a result of the legislation.

Once Leader Jeffries concludes his remarks—which he began around 5 AM—Johnson will put the bill to a final vote, and he’s anxious to get the legislation to the President’s desk before Trump’s arbitrary July 4 deadline.

READ MORE: Democratic Strategist Warns Trump Could Try to Impose Martial Law Before 2026 Midterms

“What is contemplated in this one big, ugly bill is wrong,” Leader Jeffries said, as NBC News reported. “It’s dangerous, and it’s cruel, and cruelty should not be either the objective or the outcome of legislation that we consider here in the United States House of Representatives.”

Jeffries also called it “cruel” to cut Medicaid.

“Republicans are trying to take a chain saw to Social Security, a chain saw to Medicare, a chain saw to Medicaid, a chain saw to the health care of the American people, a chain saw to nutritional assistance for hungry children, a chain saw to farm country and a chain saw to vulnerable Americans,” Jeffries added.

Speaker Johnson, speaking to reporters, appeared displeased.

“If Hakeem will stop talking, we’ll, we’ll get the job done for the American people,” Johnson, using the Democratic Leader’s first name, told reporters.

“It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the truth,” Johnson claimed. “So he’s really spinning a long tale in there, but we’re excited. The people will see the effect of this bill—the extraordinary legislation.”

Johnson offered no evidence to support his accusation.

READ MORE: Trump Appeared Unaware His Budget Bill Cuts $1T From Medicaid: Report

“It’s going to get the economy humming again, really, at a record pace, and it will help every American,” he added.

“So the sooner we can get to it, the sooner the Democrats will stop talking, we’ll get this bill done for the people, and we’re really excited about it.”

Critics blasted Speaker Johnson.

Walter Kimbrough, a three-time HBCU president, responded by posting a meme quoting the famous historian Alexis de Tocqueville, that reads: “It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Special Place in Hell’: Top Dem Slams ‘Cult’ of ‘People Who Take Food Away’ From Kids

 

Image via Reuters 

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Democratic Strategist Warns Trump Could Try to Impose Martial Law Before 2026 Midterms

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Well-known veteran Democratic strategist James Carville is out with a second dire warning about President Donald Trump and the 2026 midterm elections.

Earlier this week, Carville, a political consultant and strategist since the 1970s and now a political commentator, warned that Trump might try to rig the 2026 elections in one way or another—including, he suggested, by possibly trying to cancel them.

On Wednesday night, he offered up another possibility: martial law.

On NewsNation (video below), Carville predicted a “Democratic blowout” in this November’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and that President Trump will be forced to see the writing on the wall.

READ MORE: Trump Appeared Unaware His Budget Bill Cuts $1T From Medicaid: Report

“I think he’s gonna read the election,” Carville said. “And I think he’s going to see this big, beautiful bill, is about 25 points underwater. It’s going to be 30 points underwater,” Carville added, referring to the Republican budget bill that guts Medicaid and Medicare, and is likely to pass the House and head to Trump’s desk for a July 4 signing.

“He’s going to see a massive defeat coming, and he’s going to try to do anything he can to extricate himself in that defeat,” Carville warned.

“And I would not put it at all past him to try to call martial law or declare that there’s some kind of national emergency in the country, or anything like that, because the hoofprints are coming, you can hear ’em, and they’re gonna get a shellacking in November of ’26.”

READ MORE: ‘Special Place in Hell’: Top Dem Slams ‘Cult’ of ‘People Who Take Food Away’ From Kids

Mediaite noted that “Bill O’Reilly and Stephen A. Smith also joined the panel discussion, with O’Reilly mocking Carville’s mention of ‘martial law,’ calling it a ‘scare tactic’ and arguing the economy will dictate the midterms.”

On Tuesday, Carville spoke about Trump with former CNN journalist Jim Acosta.

“I don’t put anything past him, nothing,” Carville warned. “To try to call the election off, to do anything he can. He can think of things like that that we can’t because we’re not accustomed to thinking like that.”

“You know people come up to me all the time and say, ‘James. I’m really scared,’” Carville told Acosta on “The Jim Acosta Show.”

“I said, ‘you should be, you have every reason to be scared. Don’t kid yourself,’” Carville added.

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump Threatens to Block NYC Democratic Mayoral Nominee He Calls a ‘Communist Lunatic’

 

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