Things continue to get interesting - not attempting any particular narrative here, but throwing out a few possibly significant new bits that people might not (yet) be finding covered elsewhere.
A bewildering variety of claims of election abuse are popping up - from local and small-scale to international and huge.
It's come to this. Trump is willing to start a global trade war just to win a single congressional election.
Michael David Battle is the 29-year old director of the Garden of Peace Project in Pittsburgh.
Garden of Peace Project was created to uplift, uphold, and empower the narratives and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals and to address the lack of education, employment, healthcare, and housing, and the violence that impacts all LGBTQIA+ individuals.
Boyertown, PA. It's not too far from Philadelphia, located between Amityville and Congo on Ironstone Creek in Berks County.
It is the site of the most recent attack by the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom on equal treatment of transgender students in our schools.
ADF is claiming that
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. -- Jesus of Nazareth
On January 27, President Donald Trump issued an order banning entry to the U.S. of persons from certain Muslim-majority countries, and of all refugees. The sudden enforcement of that order drew 1000's of people to the nation's airports, and elsewhere around the world, to stand against religious discrimination and for due process of law, and to support refugees and those blocked by the travel ban. It also drew this comment from one person who has been working to help refugees settle:
“When I see refugees now being shut off like that, I think, ‘How on earth can we be so hardhearted,’ ” said Harley Kooker, who first worked with refugees in Vietnam as a conscientious objector to that war. “I was always taught that we love whoever regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, you know, that’s who my Jesus is, that’s what my Jesus taught.”
The LGBT community in West Philly is reporting that a violent man with a gun is targeting transgender women of color.
This is nothing new. And we've been saying this for years that trans-women of color are in eminently more danger than most of the other folks in the LGBTQ community.
--Deja Alvarez
Three transgender seniors at Pine-Richland High School, near Pittsburgh, have sued their school district over passage of a regulation passed last month that forces them to use the restrooms associated with the gender they were assigned at birth. Previously the district had allowed transgender students to use the restroom corresponding to their gender identity.
New Site
Ari Bowman is 12. He lives in the Wast Penn School District in Lehigh County, PA.
Ninth-grader Sigourney Coyle spoke to the School Board against allowing transgender students to use facilities matching their gender identity on August 24, declaring that her bodily privacy would be violeated is she were required to disrobe in the presence of transgender students.
During the East Penn School Board meeting, Coyle said she had been doing well in physical education in middle school last school year until she learned of the new federal directive. She subsequently refused to dress for gym in the girls locker room, and said Monday that she was given poor marks for failing to participate in the class.
I am a woman, and I identify as a woman, and you can't make me change in front of someone who I don't identify with — who is physically male.
--Coyle
