Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) order to investigate the parents of transgender youth for child abuse caused behind-the-scenes tumult at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services caused by, according to internal emails.
In February, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R) issued a non-binding opinion stating that gender affirming health care for transgender youth is a form of child abuse. A week later, the governor directed DFPS to investigate parents who support their transgender children and allow them access to gender affirming medical care prescribed by their doctors in a letter sent to the agency.
“I will resign,” one staffer wrote in February in response to DFPS associate commissioner for statewide intake Stephen Black’s emailed guidance on Abbott’s directive. The same employee wrote in a separate email to a colleague, “I have told my boss I will resign before I (report) on a family whose child is transitioning.”
Another employee wrote in an email to her supervisor that the directive was “Effing bull poop.”
Last week, the Houston Chronicle published a report in which several former DFPS employees said they had left the agency because of Abbott’s order regarding the families of transgender children. In April, The Texas Tribunereported that more than a dozen child abuse investigators said they had either resigned or were actively looking for new jobs for the same reason.
According to WFAA, 11 DFPS investigations have been opened related to Abbott’s directive, eight of which have been closed.
“None of the investigations have resulted in a removal of a child,” said DFPS media relations director Marissa Gonzales.
In June, a Texas judge issued a temporary injunction halting the investigations into the three remaining families.
The far-right Christian group One Million Moms has launched a new campaign and the target is a little surprising, even for them. This time they aren’t upset with jewelry commercials or Sesame Street, the source of their ire is… other Christians.
Christianity is a “serious threat,” they warn, when practiced as described in the Bible and modeled by the religion’s namesake.
“Parents need to be warned and informed about a continuous threat, and now we have a powerful resource available to help parents with this serious problem,” they warned followers in an email blast.
The group is an astroturf project of the anti-LGBTQ hate group American Family Association. Despite the name, the group has a single employee, Monica Cole, that is employed by the larger organization.
Cole goes on to warn followers about the dangers of “gay Christianity.”
“Let’s see if you’ve heard any of these statements before,” Cole says in the blast. “‘God made people gay, and therefore being gay should be celebrated and affirmed.’ ‘Jesus never mentioned homosexuality even once.’”
“‘The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about inhospitality and greed, not homosexuality.’ ‘If the Bible were written today, it would be gay affirming.’ ‘The Bible doesn’t say anything about sexual orientation. Christians hate gay people and need to change their theology to be more loving.’”
“If you’ve heard one or more of these statements before – whether on social media, in conversation with a family member, or even promoted by a supposedly Christian pastor – you have just encountered one of the many influences of ‘gay Christianity’,” she warns.
And while it might seem odd for the group to launch the email with all the reasons why their hardline exclusionary brand of Christianity is wrong, the email is actually an advertisement for a book written by one of their employees. It comes with a convenient two-and-a-half-minute video commercial that spends two-thirds of the time reinforcing pro-LGBTQ theology by literally allowing queer people to repeat their positions.
While the group’s nonstop bleating about innocuous things like Oreo cookies, Taco Bell, or children’s magazines has frequently made them a caricature of the hand-wringing judgemental Christian Taliban, this time they accidentally ended up condemning themselves and their anti-LGBTQ hysterics.
Six out, Democratic LGBTQ candidates running for the Florida state legislature all won their primaries this Tuesday. All of them oppose the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
At least 20 states have introduced “Don’t Say Gay” laws this year. The candidates worry that, if left unopposed, Republicans will spread similar laws to harm queer youth and families nationwide with their newfound brand of queerphobia.
Adam Gentle and state Reps. Carlos Guillermo Smith and Michele Rayner are all running for the State House. Eunic Ortiz and Janelle Perez are running for the State Senate. State Sen. Shevrin Jones won his re-election campaign this week. Because he has no Republican competitor, he will retain his Senate seat.
Jones became the first openly LGBTQ Black person elected to the Florida legislature when he was elected in 2020.
On the campaign trail, he shared how publicly coming out as gay at age 30 caused members to leave the south Florida church where his father preaches. Friends stopped talking to Jones, families began making jokes about him behind his back, and even his own father expressed disappointment in his sexuality, he said.
So when he spoke out against the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law — which forbids discussing LGBTQ issues in kindergarten through third-grade classes — Jones noted that it takes courage for young people to be themselves. He also said that LGBTQ issues aren’t being taught in the aforementioned grades, and that state Republicans only passed the law to rally their voting base.
“It’s discriminatory on the surface,” Jones said in an interview. “The problem is coming when young people are being treated in a manner that they now have to question who they are, knowing that they already come from households who do not support them… I think that’s the dangerous part, because LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to commit suicide.”
“I think that this is the time for the LGBTQ+ community to see we’re under attack,” he added. “I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s Black people, I don’t care if it’s Indigenous people, I don’t care if it’s the LGBTQ+ community, because we live amongst each other and I feel that when you come for one, you come for all.”
When Michele Rayner first won her election to the state House in 2020, she became the first openly Black queer woman ever elected in Florida at any level.
“I didn’t run for office just to make history,” she said in a video. “I ran because I wanted to make a difference for people.”
“The way that I show up — I’m a Black, gay woman so I think that inspires a lot of folks,” she added in a May 2022 interview.
While she acknowledges that supporters of “Don’t Say Gay” claim it protects children from age-inappropriate discussions of sex, she said, “I don’t want my child not to be able to say that my moms and I went to Disney World or my moms and I went to the beach.”
Meanwhile, Eunic Ortiz, who is running for a state Senate seat, said the ramifications of “Don’t Say Gay” are detrimental to LGBTQ youth.
“We need to be creating solutions for the issues that everyday folks are actually facing,” she said. “Not playing political theater to try to appease a few wealthy donors in the Republican movement that, frankly, are homophobic and hate the LGBTQ community.”
Her district houses St. Petersburg, a city that has received a perfect score for eight years on Human Rights Campaign’s annual Municipal Equality Index for LGBTQ inclusive.
“We have people in the LGBTQ community living in every single county in the state. They are our neighbors and they are our community leaders…. LGBTQ people are the workers that are making our counties and communities run,” she said. “[Floridians] are tired of seeing them take on this cultural war, instead of addressing real issues,” like the environment or rising rents.
Adam Gentle spoke against the law at a political event in early March. At the event, he began his two-minute speech by announcing, “I’m gay.” He then said that schools are often the only safe spaces where LGBTQ youths feel they can safely discuss their queer identities with others.
“Their ability to talk with trusted teachers and administrators is being ripped away from them,” he said.
Rep. Carlos Smith has used his political office to oppose the law. When he debated against the bill in February, he wore a face mask with the word “gay” printed on it in large letters.
In his remarks, he said the bill was “deeply personal” to him as a queer Latino, especially since the law would prevent teachers from discussing important events, like the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting which mostly harmed other queer Latinos.
“A majority of Floridians oppose this proposal that seeks to censor conversations about LGBTQ people in our schools,” he said.
“This bill goes way beyond the text on the page,” he noted. “It sends a terrible message to our youth, that there is something so wrong, so inappropriate, so dangerous about this topic that we have to censor it from classroom discussion…. To all LGBTQ youth — we see you, you’re loved and your lives are worth fighting for!”
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) press secretary Christina Pushaw defended the law by calling its opponents pedophilic “groomers,” Smith responded, “Bigoted attacks like this against LGBTQ people are the worst of the worst…. Literally, it’s the oldest trick in the book against LGBTQ people.”
Smith said that DeSantis only signed the law to advance his political ambitions. He worries about DeSantis’ likelihood of running for president in 2024. “My concern is that he is much smarter and much more calculating than Donald Trump ever was,” he said.
Janelle Perez agrees with Smith. She’s a mother of two, married to a woman, and, if elected, she would be the first LGBTQ parent and the first queer Latina or queer woman ever elected to the Senate.
She worries that the law will subject her own daughter to bullying and prevent her from discussing her own family in school. But even worse, she worries what will happen to when DeSantis runs for president.
“When people in Hollywood, and New York, and in California are looking at the things that Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida, what they need to understand is that Florida is Ron DeSantis’s guinea pig,” she said.
“He is going to run for president in 2024,” she continued. “So if you don’t like what’s happening in Florida, and you don’t want this rhetoric to become the national conversation in 2024, then you need to help us stop it, now. Because it’s going to come after you, and the rest of the country.”
Although DeSantis and other supporters of the law say that it protects parents’ rights to control what their kids are exposed to in schools, Perez said it basically erases queer parents from schools and tells their children to feel ashamed of their families.
“LGBTQ families aren’t going anywhere,” Perez told The Washington Post. “We want to just receive the same rights as every other parent.”
“Republicans in Tallahassee have failed our state and I cannot sit idly by as they make us less safe, restrict our rights and hurt our children,” she added.
The spread of monkeypox is causing men who have sex with men (MSM) to reduce their numbers of sexual partners, according to survey results released this week by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC’s survey found that 48 percent of respondents had reduced their number of sexual partners, 50 had reduced their number of one-night stands, and 49 percent reduced the amount of sex they had with men that they’d met through hookup apps, The Hill reported.
The publication noted that local public health officials have been hesitant to suggest that people practice sexual abstinence as a key approach to avoiding possible exposure, noting that the strategy may be ineffective even though the federal government championed it during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s.
There are just over 15,000 cases of monkeypox in the U.S. as of Monday, according to the CDC. However, infectious disease experts think this number is likely an undercount. President Joe Biden declared a national state of emergency for monkeypox in early August. The World Health Organization (WHO) also declared monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in late July.
However, one report suggested that the high case numbers among MSM may have to do with the fact that queer men seek medical treatment more often than heterosexual individuals.
The recent increase in cases nationwide has revealed the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have enough vaccine doses available to meet public demand. To help stretch the current reserve, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the vaccine to be administered intradermally — that is, into the skin’s superficial layers — rather than through its usual subcutaneous method which injects the vaccine into the fat and connective tissues between the skin and muscular layers.
The intradermal method could stretch the nation’s vaccine supply fivefold and has been found to be effective when vaccinating against rabies and polio.
However, some LGBTQ individuals have criticized the government for what they say is an inadequate response to the outbreak.
“I’ve been really disappointed in our leaders, especially those who were in office during the onslaught of the AIDS crisis, like President [Joe] Biden and Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi,” nonbinary Queer Eye reality TV star Jonathan Van Ness told USA Today.
“Once again, we’re seeing too little action taken until the situation has ballooned out of control,” they added. “If nothing changes, we’ll continue to experience failures like this response, which has been plagued with too few tests, lack of access to treatments, inadequate vaccine supply, and ambiguous guidance.”
“In many ways, I believe it’s been fueled by homophobia and transphobia,” Ness said. “When an outbreak affects mainly men who have sex with men, some portion of our elected legislators will have no incentive to act… which is obviously messed up because people’s lives are at stake, and there are queer people in all 50 states.”
A state judge just issued an injunction against Utah’s new transgender sports ban, allowing transgender student-athletes to continue to participate in school sports.
Third District Judge Keith Kelly ruled on Friday that the state can’t kick transgender girls out of girls’ sports because the new law harms them by taking away educational opportunities and increasing stigma against trans kids.
The ruling comes in a lawsuit brought by the families of three transgender students this past May who argued that the sports ban was “based on unfounded stereotypes, fears, and misconceptions about girls who are transgender. It is not supported by medical or scientific evidence.”
Judge Kelly agreed that they were likely to win their claims and said that the law is causing harm by “singling them out for unfavorable treatment as transgender girls.”
In one case, the complaints were made by the parents of the second- and third-place finishers in a sport (Spatafore didn’t state the sport or the age group to protect the students’ privacy) against the winner of the event. The UHSAA had to investigate the winner and found that she had always been identified as female in her school records so she was judged to be cisgender.
“The school went back to kindergarten and she’d always been a female,” Spatafore said.
“Quite frankly, this is new ground for us,” he said. “I’m not going to say that we have it down pat, because I have no clue. I don’t think any of us in the office have a clue if we have it down pat. What we want to do is we just want to try to do our job.”
Jenny Roe, a 16-year-old volleyball player, is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at a young age and received puberty blockers.
She qualified to play school sports under the UHSAA’s previous guidelines but was blocked by the new law.
“My last season playing volleyball was one of the best times of my life. I loved my teammates, felt part of something bigger than myself, and finally had a way to socialize with friends after being cooped up during the pandemic,” she said in a statement. “This law devastated me. I just want to play on a team like any other kid.”
Judge Kelly’s injunction allows transgender girls to participate in girls’ sports “only when it is fair,” which will be determined by a commission created by the state legislature.
A federal court of appeals judge ruled Tuesday that transgender people are protected from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
As The Hill reports, the ruling stems from a 2020 lawsuit filed on behalf of a transgender woman who was incarcerated in a Virginia men’s prison despite the fact that she had been receiving hormone replacement therapy for nearly two decades.
Kesha Williams spent more than six months incarcerated alongside men and was periodically denied hormone therapy. After she was released in 2019, she sued Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, as well as a prison nurse and a deputy, alleging that the prison had violated both the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act in failing to treat her gender dysphoria.
While the 1990 law specifically excludes “transvestism,” “transsexualism,” and “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments,” the American Psychiatric Association has since replaced gender identity disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with gender dysphoria, which is the distress a person feels when their gender identity doesn’t align with their sex assigned at birth.
In an amicus brief, attorneys for the GLBT Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) explained that, “In short, the gender dysphoria diagnosis recognizes that incongruence between a person’s identity and birth sex is not the problem in need of treatment—the clinically significant distress associated with that incongruence is.”
“Reflecting this shift in medical understanding, we and other courts have thus explained that a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, unlike that of ‘gender identity disorder,’ concerns itself primarily with distress and other disabling symptoms, rather than simply being transgender,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote in her opinion.
“This is a thorough, well-reasoned opinion recognizing that the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against individuals with gender dysphoria,” National Center for Lesbian Rights legal director Shannon Minter said in a statement. “This decision sets a powerful precedent that will be important for other courts considering this critical issue.”
GLAD Transgender Rights Project director Jennifer Levi called Motz’s decision a huge win. “There is no principled reason to exclude transgender people from our federal civil rights laws,” Levi said. “It’s incredibly significant for a federal appeals court to affirm that the protections in our federal disability rights laws extend to transgender people. It would turn disability law upside down to exclude someone from its protection because of having a stigmatized medical condition. This opinion goes a long way toward removing social and cultural barriers that keep people with treatable, but misunderstood, medical conditions from being able to thrive.”
A journalist for the Manchester Evening News and his companion were verbally and physically harassed last week in the city’s iconic Gay Village.
“He started to get right up in my face, pushing me, shoving me, grabbing me and kicking me in the legs quite hard, then he went to go towards my friend. He said, ‘You are in my space, you are trying to touch me, you queer.’”
Daniel McLaughlin, 28, a podcast producer at Manchester’s largest news daily, was waiting for a taxi with his nonbinary friend in the early hours of Friday morning after a night out in the city’s popular gayborhood centered around Canal Street. McLaughlin, who identifies as bisexual, was wearing a rainbow badge.
McLaughlin told the Evening News he noticed a man who appeared to be in his early 20s heading towards them from nearby Sackville Gardens.
The man was “muttering to himself,” McLaughlin said, then directed “absolute hatred” towards them. “He was calling us nonces, fa***ts, perverts, every homophobic slur under the sun. He fixated on calling us names.”
“I started saying, ‘We’re not nonces, we’re puffs, there’s a difference,’ to which he became more aggrieved, shouting the same slurs. He was clearly inebriated, clearly angry about something.”
McLaughlin recounted that as a taxi pulled up, the “aggressive drunk” pushed him onto the moving vehicle, then continued to hurl abuse and followed McLaughlin as he tried to get into the taxi on the other side.
As the man was shouting “Get in the f**king car right now!” McLaughlin and his friend managed to get inside and pull the door shut. The driver sped away quickly from the ugly scene.
Daniel said the “old slurs” hurled at the pair were “nothing original,” but the young man’s age and level of aggression had shocked him.
“It didn’t particularly hurt,” McLaughlin said. “He was drunk, they were not focused attacks. But the thing I found the worst was the absolute hatred in his eyes, just the aggression and hatred towards us.”
“We hadn’t done anything. We had stood outside. But there was absolute hatred towards us, and the fact this guy was our age, to come up with this vitriol.”
“My theory was, he had all this pent up aggression. I think he went to the Gay Village looking for a fight. He went there with the purpose of starting trouble. The words he was using were recycled, words he had clearly heard elsewhere. Just archaic, older insults.”
“He wasn’t making arguments, he was just using the words, he wasn’t stringing a full sentence together.”
McLaughlin says he didn’t report the incident to police, believing there was “very little they could have done.” While he didn’t suffer any major injuries from the attack, McLaughlin said it did raise concerns about the safety of the LGBTQ community away from the Village itself.
“It’s something that’s not untypical, and that’s the frightening thing really. I moved to Manchester in 2012 for university and one of the big reasons was the Gay Village — I wasn’t quite out the closet at the time, but — having this place where I could be myself.”
“That’s why so many gay people move to Manchester, but in recent years it’s not felt like a sanctuary. It’s not necessarily aggressive, but I feel that the queer community is being pushed out.”
“The village itself I think would be safe, but because we had just left the Gay Village at Sackville Gardens, just a bit further away, that’s where the protection ends. I do feel trepidation when I exit the Village.”
The state of Idaho has been ordered to pay $321,224.50 in legal fees because of an anti-transgender law it passed in 2020 that had already been ruled unconstitutional.
In 2018, U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) to completely block transgender people from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates. That case was brought by a transgender woman who was called a “tra**y” and a “fa***t” at a Social Security office when she showed them her birth certificate.
In 2020, state Rep. Julianne Young (R) introduced a bill to ban changes to birth certificates outside of a narrow set of exemptions. She claimed that the birth certificate is a “historical document” and that allowing transgender people to have birth certificates that reflect who they are threatens women.
“There is an ongoing discussion about this, but I will tell you, as a woman who is aware of the crime statistics related to the vulnerability of females as a group, this concerns me,” Young said at the time.
Later in 2020, Judge Dale ruled that IDHW had to follow her ruling and let transgender people correct the gender markers on their birth certificates.
The plaintiffs not only succeeded in getting the state to follow the Constitution, but they asked the court to have the state pay their attorneys’ fees. Instead of getting the nearly $450,000 that they initially requested, Dale awarded them $321,224.50.
The ruling would not have surprised opponents of the 2020 bill. State Rep. John Gannon (D) said at the time that it would be “a legal disaster” that would open the state up to “an expensive losing lawsuit paid for by taxpayers” since a federal judge had already ruled against it.
The White House will announce today it is zeroing in on the population most at risk currently of contracting and spreading the monkeypox virus: men who have sex with men. A pilot program rolls out this weekend at Charlotte Pride.
The Biden administration’s deputy director for monkeypox response, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, described the new effort to LGBTQ Nation ahead of the White House announcement.
That starts with bumping up the supply of the vaccine for local health jurisdictions where large LGBTQ events are happening. The program sets aside 50,000 doses of vaccine from the Strategic National Stockpile that jurisdictions can request on top of their existing vaccine allocations and supply.
The Administration is working with North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana health departments to determine dose numbers in preparation for upcoming events including Charlotte Pride this weekend, and Atlanta Black Pride and Southern Decadence in New Orleans over Labor Day weekend.
At Charlotte Pride, Daskalakis says, “we’re going to be providing them 2000 additional doses on top of what they’re already allocated specifically for this event.”
State and local health departments are responsible for getting vaccines to where they’ll be administered.
To get doses in arms, “Charlotte is looking at specific events associated with Pride that are going to include, in effect, what will look like vaccine pop-ups, where people entering the event or going to the event will be able to acquire a vaccine.”
The second part of the pilot focuses on education and outreach, along with in-person technical assistance.
“With public health being really local, we’re going to make sure that we provide them what they need in terms of education, outreach materials and any technical assistance to be able to work on the ground to make sure that we’re providing folks with culturally appropriate information about how to prevent monkeypox, and also awareness of the disease.”
“Part of that package is definitely really clear advice around safer sex and safer gatherings. To make sure that it’s extraordinarily clear, given what we know about the data, that this is affecting gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, and that a lot of the transmission has been in the context of sex and sexual activity.”
The pilot also provides guidance to local jurisdictions to develop testing strategies and tools for information-gathering from event participants.
Two weeks ago, New York and California were among several states to declare monkeypox a public health emergency.
CDC data as of August 16 indicates 12,689 total confirmed monkeypox cases in the U.S., with New York, California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Illinois topping the list of highest infection rates.
Seven-day averages show the number of daily reported infections skyrocketed from 45 in the week ending July 11, to 528 the week ending August 10, when 1391 cases were reported on a single day.
Federal officials have allocated 1.1 million doses of the Jynneos vaccine to states and say they’ve shipped about 600,000 of those.
Clark Simon, president of Charlotte Pride, welcomed the administration’s new initiative: “The more vaccines the better.”
But with a caveat.
“I know health departments need to state where this specific virus is predominantly being seen, the pronouncement of it. But just to clarify, in terms of language and messaging, this is not an STI [sexually transmitted infection]. It is not a gay disease. It is a community-spread disease. And in this instance, showcases itself predominantly in men who have sex with men. But we’re also seeing instances in which there are children getting it at daycares and things like that. Much like COVID, it’s about community spread.”
Daskalakis was sensitive to the messaging.
“Monkeypox is a virus, it’s not a sentient being,” Daskalakis said. “It doesn’t differentiate between people based on sexual orientation or gender identity. And so making sure that we’re serving the folks who are in populations that are overrepresented in the outbreak, like gay and bisexual men, and men who have sex with men, is really important, while also making sure that there’s an awareness outside. Infections don’t heed orders, they don’t heed sexual networks or social networks. So being vigilant, making sure surveillance is really good, and that providers are tuned in is the most important thing right now.”
Atlanta Black Pride president Terence Stewart, next in line for the pilot program, added to Simon’s pandemic analogy.
“It is like COVID. We didn’t think it would either hit the shores of the United States or would be coming in as fast as it was. Because you want to vaccinate as many people as possible, but you also don’t want to scare people, right? So it’s a lot going on.”
A school librarian in Louisiana is suing two conservative activists for defamation after they falsely accused her of putting “pornographic” material in local libraries.
“I’ve had enough for everybody,” Amanda Jones, a librarian at a middle school in Denham Springs, Louisiana and president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, told NBC News. “Nobody stands up to these people. They just say what they want and there are no repercussions and they ruin people’s reputations and there’s no consequences.”
Jones’s suit, filed last week, argues that Facebook pages run by Michael Lunsford and Ryan Thames falsely labeled her a pedophile after she spoke against censorship at a July 19 Livingston Parish Library Board of Control meeting. She has also filed criminal complaints with the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office against Lunsford and Thames.
During public comment at the July 19 board meeting, Jones voiced her concern that a motion under consideration to evaluate the content of certain sex education books available at the public library would lead to the banning of books containing LGBTQ content.
“‘While book challenges are often done with the best intentions, and in the name of age appropriateness, they often target marginalized communities such as BIPOC and the LBGTQ community,” Jones said at the meeting according to the lawsuit.
“The citizens of our parish consist of taxpayers who are white, Black, brown, gay, straight, Christian, non-Christian, people from all backgrounds and walks of life, and no one portion of the community should dictate what the rest of the citizens have access to. Just because you don’t want to read it or see it, it doesn’t give you the right to deny others or demand its relocation.”
“If we remove or relocate books with LBGTQ or sexual health content, what message is that sending to our community members? Why is your belief system any more important than others’?”
Lunsford, who runs conservative group Citizens for a New Louisiana, attended the meeting and spoke in favor of restricting books with sexual content. In the weeks following the meeting, Citizens for a New Louisiana’s Facebook page posted numerous posts about Jones.
“Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section?” one post, which featured Jones’s picture, read.
Thames’s “Bayou State of Mind” Facebook page also posted a meme depicting Jones and accused her of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.”
Jones said she has not left her house in two weeks due to comments on some posts encouraging violence against her. At the same time, she has raised $20,000 to fund her lawsuit against Lunsford and Thames via a GoFundMe campaign.
“If this takes four or five years, I’m going to fight these people on this,” she said. “Even if I lose, I could say I stood up to them.”
