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Federal Court Puts New California Law Banning ‘Ex-Gay Therapy’ Back In Action

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A federal court today ruled that a California law banning so-called “ex-gay” or “reparative” therapy — also known as “pray away the gay” — can go into effect as scheduled, on January 1, 2013, despite efforts by anti-gay organizations that challenged its legality, claiming it violates their civil rights. Judge Kimberly Mueller of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California ruled in opposition to U.S. District Judge William Shubb’s decision that had temporarily blocked the ban.

READ: Dr. Oz Condemned By Top LGBT Organizations For ‘Ex-Gay Therapy’ Episode

The law, signed by Governor Jerry Brown in October, protects “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth from psychological abuse at the hands of state-licensed therapists who use dangerous practices to try to change their clients’ sexual orientation or gender expression,” a joint statement from the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Equality California noted.

The Court’s decision was prompted by a lawsuit filed by the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality that challenges the new law protecting LGBT youth from practices—including the use of shame and aversion therapy—that are known to lead to depression and suicide attempts. The group is represented by Liberty Counsel, an anti-LGBT legal group. In rejecting the groups’ request to temporarily prevent the statute from going into effect on January 1, Judge Mueller concluded that the California law “prohibits a therapeutic practice deemed unproven and potentially harmful to minors by ten professional associations of mental health experts.”

The “National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality” referred to is also known as NARTH, and, as regular readers known is famous for one of its now-former board members, George Allen Rekers, who infamously in 2010 took a male prostitute to Europe with him.

“This law will put a stop to one of the most dangerous and discredited forms of discrimination against LGBT youth,” said Equality California Executive Director John O’Connor in their statement. “We are extremely pleased that the court’s decision will allow the law to go into effect on January 1, 2013 as planned, and young people in this state will no longer have to fear that they can be subjected to these dangerous practices by licensed therapists. Every day that licensed therapists are permitted to engage in these dangerous and discredited practices is another day that our youth are placed at risk of depression, substance abuse, and attempted suicide. The state has a duty to protect minors from conduct by licensed health care professionals that is both harmful and offers no benefit to health. We commend Senator Ted Lieu, the bill’s author, the California Legislature, and Governor Brown for taking decisive action to protect California’s young people and their families.”

“Today’s decision acknowledges that the anti-LGBT groups who have filed this case have no viable legal grounds for their attempt to block these desperately-needed protections for California youth,” said National Center for Lesbian Rights Executive Director Kate Kendell, Esq. “Every leading mental health organization has concluded that these practices, which claim to be able to change a young person’s sexual orientation or gender expression, have no basis in science and expose young people to a serious risk of physical and emotional harm. We are confident the courts will continue to uphold this life-saving law, which simply requires licensed mental health practitioners to follow professional standards and to refrain from using practices that have no basis in science or medicine.”

 

Image by Jenny Mealing via Wikimedia Commons 

 

Related:

Leading Gay Activist: Dr. Oz ‘Gave A Pulpit For Quacks To Bully Gay Kids’

Dr. Oz Used ‘Ex-Gay Therapy’ To Spike Ratings — His Own Blog Proves It

Religious Right Vows First Amendment Suits Over Law Banning Ex-Gay Therapy For Kids

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News

Republicans Moving to Give Trump Something He’s Wanted Since 2019

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Claiming President Donald Trump was “wrongfully accused” when he was impeached, twice, based on “withheld” and “false” information, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is leading a move to have both impeachments expunged.

“The fact is that the Constitution doesn’t spell out what to do when you’ve wrongfully indicted somebody,” Issa told Fox News. “An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously where do you go to get your reputation back, is the question.”

Not only does Rep. Issa want to alter the historical record of Trump’s impeachments, it appears he wants to allege “misconduct” on the part of those who were part of the process of impeaching him. Issa added, “the very people who brought it knew was wrong.”

“More importantly,” Issa said, the process of expunging the record will “make sure that the facts and the reality that there was misconduct in the process gets a hearing.”

READ MORE: Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

Issa is sponsoring a resolution to expunge the record of the impeachments, and he already has more than 20 co-sponsors.

Fox News reports that Issa’s resolution “argues that the 2021 impeachment was rushed and procedurally flawed, noting that the House moved from introduction to passage in two days and did not conduct a full evidentiary process.”

“They impeached him for essentially an insurrection, a true high crime, and it’s false,” Issa said. Many have called the events surrounding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol an “insurrection.”

In January, the Trump White House launched a website claiming, “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power.”

Fox News notes that some legal scholars say impeachments cannot be expunged. The House can pass a resolution expressing disapproval with the impeachments, it can “annotate its records,” but “it cannot erase the historical fact of an impeachment or undo the constitutional process once it has occurred.”

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

Image via Reuters 

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Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

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By many accounts, during his first term, President Donald Trump botched the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the latest hantavirus outbreak has some worrying the same thing could happen again if there is another Trump pandemic.

Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff during the first Trump administration is out with a stern warning, offering three reasons why Americans “won’t survive another Trump pandemic.”

Under President Trump, the U.S. response to COVID resulted in far higher infection rates and rates of death than many other high-income nations. The Guardian in 2021 reported that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of COVID deaths.

“Trump won’t just mishandle the next global health crisis,” he’s “prepared to weaponize it,” Taylor warns.

The “worst thing” about Trump’s “first turn at pandemic management isn’t just that Trump failed. Rather, it’s that he failed so spectacularly that he learned all the wrong lessons.”

“Trump broke the pandemic response system,” says Taylor. “And it remains broken.”

Trump threw out existing pandemic response plans, and instead convened “a hastily assembled White House ‘task force,’ made the HHS secretary chair it, then handed it to the vice president, then handed shadow control to his son-in-law.”

READ MORE: Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

Congressional investigations “found that the result was chaos and structural collapse, as agencies scrambled to reinvent pandemic response on the fly,” says Taylor, who relays one example from his time at DHS.

“I remember the phone calls at the time. My friend Olivia Troye, who was helping Vice President Mike Pence run the task force from the inside, would call with a tone of contained terror,” he writes.

“It’s so broken, Miles. You have no idea. He’s getting people killed,” she told him.

The interagency structure remains broken to this day, and the people who were “supposed to save our lives” have been purged from the government workforce.

Calling the situation “dire,” Taylor explains the bodycount.

“Last year, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced cuts of 10,000 employees on top of probationary firings that hit pandemic preparedness offices directly,” he writes. “The CDC lost roughly 2,400 staff — about 18 percent of its workforce. The FDA lost 3,500. The NIH lost 1,200. Entire offices that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease response, and collect surveillance data were then eliminated in a Friday-night massacre during the government shutdown.”

Going forward, those who are being replaced are political hires with less experience.

“So when the next pathogen emerges and the president asks for advice,” Taylor says, “the room probably won’t contain Tony Faucis and Deb Birxs, however imperfect they were. More likely, it will contain podcasters and quacks and vaccine skeptics — and maybe a few terrified careerists.”

It gets worse.

During the next pandemic, “Trump will be motivated by ‘revenge’ rather than ‘response,'” Taylor writes, noting that FEMA has become part of Trump’s “revenge machine.”

If you live in a blue state, you are three times less likely to receive federal disaster assistance than if you live in a red state. Citing analysis, Taylor says that out of 106 federal disaster relief requests, Republican-leaning states received 101 approvals, Democratic-leaning states only five.

Taylor warns that Trump “is always hunting for leverage. What better leverage to hold over a Democratic governor than the lives of his or her constituents?”

“Vaccines, antivirals, ventilators, federal medical teams, surge capacity — all of it can be released quickly… or held back indefinitely,” he writes. “You want help for your people? Play ball, he might say. Agree to join my mass-deportation plan or hand over your voter rolls.”

“The cost would be mass graves. And that would give Trump a lot of leverage, indeed.”

Which brings Taylor to his very specific warning to blue states: prepare for the next pandemic now, and prepare as if there will be no help from the federal government.

“Plan for it like the feds will be a foe,” he warns.

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

Image via Reuters 

 

 

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Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

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President Donald Trump promised work to resurface the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, painting it American flag blue, would cost taxpayers $1.8 million in a no-bid contract to a company that hadn’t worked on a pool at one of the president’s golf courses.

That figure has ballooned more than seven times, to $13.1 million, The New York Times reports. The Interior Department, which awarded the contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, said $6.2 million of that was from doubling the size of the contract.

According to the Trump administration, the work is being done as a no-bid contract because not doing the work would cause “serious injury” to the federal government. The Times notes that the federal government has not specified what that injury would be, but President Trump reportedly wants the pool ready for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration on July 4.

The Times adds that Interior Department spokesperson Katie Martin said the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”

The Reflecting Pool cost increase mirrors another Trump project, his White House ballroom. Originally slated to cost $200 million, the price tag now appears to be over $400 million in donated funds plus one billion in taxpayer funds for security enhancements.

Critics blasted the Reflecting Pool cost increases.

“Trump is robbing American taxpayers blind,” wrote political commentator Tara Setmayer, the CEO of the Seneca Project.

Journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote: “No money for Medicaid.”

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

Image via Reuters 

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