A business owner was fatally shot Friday after someone allegedly took issue with a Pride flag she had displayed at her clothing store in Lake Arrowhead, California.
Deputies responded at 5 p.m. to the shooting at the Mag Pi clothing store, where owner Laura Ann Carleton was pronounced dead, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department said in a news release. The suspect, who was not identified, ran away.
“Through further investigation, detectives learned the suspect made several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store before shooting Carleton,” the news release said.
The suspect was armed when confronted by deputies and was killed in “a lethal force encounter,” the sheriff’s department said. An investigation continues.
The Mag Pi store website described Carleton as a mother of nine who has been “married to the same man for 28 years.” Carleton, who went by the name Lauri, had studied at the Art Center School of Design and had had a long career in fashion, including 15 years as an executive at Kenneth Cole, the site said.
Mountain Provisions Cooperative, a local grocery store, said Saturday on social media that Carleton had been pivotal in helping organize a free store after a blizzard hit the area this year.
“Lauri was a pillar in our community, an immovable force in her values for equality, love, and justice,” the post said. “If you knew Lauri you know she loved hard, laughed often, and nurtured and protected those she cared about.”
The store encouraged people to “fly your flags in honor of Lauri.”
Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ said on Instagram that Carleton did not identify as a member of the queer community but was an advocate “for everyone in the community.”
“Lauri’s unwavering support for the LBGTQ+ community and her dedication to creating a safe space within her shop touched the lives of many,” the organization wrote in an Instagram Story. “Her untimely passing in a senseless act of violence has left us all deeply saddened.”
Comments on the organization’s social media account offered condolences to Carleton’s family and paid tribute to her contributions around the Lake Arrowhead community. Some said the Pride flag at Mag Pi helped make them feel welcome and safe in the area.
“Bridesmaids” film director Paul Feig was among those in the comment section; he said Carleton would be “sorely missed.”
“Lauri was such a wonderful person, so full of life and love,” Feig wrote. “She always made us laugh and always laughed with us. Her commitment to the community in general and the LGBTQ community specifically was just one of her many wonderful qualities.”
Santa Rosa GayDar Presents: A Big Gay Tea Dance @ Paradise Ridge Winery
Whether you identify as LGBTQ+ or simply love to support and party with this vibrant community, this event is for everyone! Join us at the stunning Paradise Ridge Winery for an unforgettable afternoon of fabulousness at our 2nd Big Gay Tea Dance! Get ready to dance, mingle, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community in the heart of Sonoma County.
Get your dancing shoes on and prepare to groove to the beats of talented DJ Rotten Robbie who will keep the energy high throughout the day. Mix and mingle with like-minded individuals, make new friends, and create lasting memories with your drag host Sonoma County native Mrs. Princess Panocha!
Santa Rosa GayDar’s Big Gay Tea Dance will take place on Sunday, August 27, 2023, starting at 2:00 PM. Don’t miss out on this fantastic event that celebrates love, diversity, and acceptance. Mark your calendars and get ready to have an absolute blast! Proceeds benefit Sonoma County Pride 2024!
Thank you for supporting Sonoma County Pride & Santa Rosa GayDar!
NOTE: THIS IS AN OUTDOOR EVENT – WEATHER IS ALWAYS A CONCERN, THE DANCE IS HOSTED IN THE SHADE. OUTSIDE FOOD IS ALLOWED & GUESTS ARE WELCOME TO PICNIC ON THE PROPERTY DURING THE EVENT. GAYDAR WILL HAVE NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINK OPTIONS. PARKING IS LIMITED AT PARADISE RIDGE & WE KINDLY ASK THAT YOU CARPOOL IF AT ALL POSSIBLE. THIS IS A 21 AND UP EVENT. PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY 🙂ADD TO CALENDAR
Now in its 36th year, Art for Life brings together some of Sonoma County’s best artists who donate their work to support the Prevention and Care Programs here at Face to Face. This online art auction brings together art enthusiasts, philanthropists, and supporters from all walks of life. The event showcases an impressive collection of artworks, ranging from paintings and sculptures to photographs, mixed media pieces and more. You get to bid on your favorite pieces, with all proceeds going towards our programs that uplift and empower individuals in need. It is an event of creativity, compassion and community coming together for a worthy cause.
On Saturday Jordan’s king approved a draconian cybercrime law that was rammed through parliamentand is significantly worse than its antecedent. The law jeopardizes rights online and offline, including free expression and the right to privacy, and contains vague provisions that could target marginalized groups, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
The 2023 Cybercrime Law, under articles 13 and 14, punishes the production, distribution, or consumption of “pornographic content,” which is undefined, and content “promoting, instigating, aiding or inciting immorality,” with at least six months’ imprisonment and a fine. These provisions could target digital content around gender and sexuality, as well as individuals who use digital platforms to advocate for the rights of LGBT people.
The law also threatens the right to anonymity under article 12 by appearing to prohibit use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), proxies, and Tor, which many LGBT people use to shield themselves online, effectively forcing individuals to choose between keeping their identity secure and freely expressing their opinions.
A Jordanian LGBT rights activist told me the new law will “destroy all forms of LGBT expression online” and intensify “interference in people’s private lives.”
Jordanian authorities’ use of cybercrime laws to target LGBT people, intimidate activists, and censor content around gender and sexuality is not new. In a 2023 report, Human Rights Watch documented the far-reaching offline consequences of online targeting against LGBT people, including in Jordan, where LGBT people said they felt unable to safely express their sexual orientation or gender identity online, and that LGBT rights activism has subsequently suffered.
A gay man from Jordan whom I interviewed for the report was sentenced to six months in prison in 2021 based on a provision in the 2015 cybercrimes law that criminalized “promoting prostitution online,” after he went to the authorities for protection from online extortion. Another gay activist said Jordan’s intelligence agency summons him for interrogation whenever content around LGBT rights in Jordan is shared on social media.
The new cybercrime law will only exacerbate these abusive practices and expand censorship of free expression. Jordanian authorities should safeguard the rights of everyone, including by protecting freedom of expression online and the privacy of digital communications. The first step is to repeal the 2023 Cybercrimes Law.
A Russian court has convicted — and possibly detained and beaten — transgender blogger Milana Petrova for allegedly violating laws against spreading “LGBTQ+ propaganda” and “discrediting” the Russian military.
Mizulina wrote via Telegram that Moscow’s Tverskoy Court had fined the blogger 200,000 rubles ($2,061 U.S.) for posting LGBTQ+ content and 50,000 rubles ($515) for “discrediting the army.” However, Petrova wasn’t present in court for the ruling, Mizulina wrote.
Over the weekend, a closed Telegram channel named Lightning Moscow reported that Petrova had been detained by Russian authorities and placed in a “special detention center for 24 hours, according to a pro-LGBTQ+ blog covering developments about the country’s propaganda law.
The post reportedly included “her photo with traces of beatings and an audio message in which Petrova says that ‘Everything is fine, relatively,’” the aforementioned site reported.
Mizulina denied these reports, writing that Petrova tried to “divorce” herself from her audience by spreading fake news about her detention.
“This was done to advertise one of the [Telegram] channels,” Mizulina wrote. She added that Russian authorities should block Petrova’s Telegram and YouTube channels because they violate Russian law.
Petrova left Russia at the end of 2021 to avoid persecution over her identity, the aforementioned blog reported. Previous to leaving, police summoned her to investigate alleged “propaganda” charges. In 2022, she announced her gender transition and launched the Bad Russians YouTube show, where she discussed her life. After the show’s first episode went live, she received many threats and promises to report her to authorities.
Russia’s infamous law against LGBTQ+ “propaganda”
Russian President Vladimir Putin first signed a law banning so-called “gay propaganda” in Russia in June 2013. The law ostensibly sought to “protect children” from any “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships,” as stated in the law’s text. The new law extends the restrictions to not just children but Russians of all ages.
The law has mostly been used to silence LGBTQ+ activist organizations, events, websites, and media, as well as to break up families and harass teachers. It has also been roundly condemned by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, the human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as civil rights activists around the world.
Last December, Putin signed a law expanding the country’s prohibition on LGBTQ+ “propaganda.” The newly signed law effectively outlaws any public expression of LGBTQ+ life in Russia by banning “any action or the spreading of any information that is considered an attempt to promote homosexuality in public, online, or in films, books or advertising,” Reuters reported.
Anti-LGBTQ+ religious leaders and right-wing political figures in the U.S. have praised Putin for his law. Indeed, Republican legislators, so-called “parents’ rights groups,” and right-wing pundits have increasingly moved to ban American kids from accessing any LGBTQ+ content, gender-affirming healthcare, or drag shows over untrue claims that these “sexualize” and “groom” children.
In 2013, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) President Austin Ruse said Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws were a “good thing” that “most of the people in the United States” would support. In 2014, anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical leader Franklin Graham also defended the law.
Early into its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia quickly outlawed any negative coverage of the invasion. To this day, Russia refuses to publically refer to its deadly invasion and the deadly conflict it began as a “war,” preferring instead the term “special military operation.”
LGBTQ+ youth face heightened risk online for sexual exploitation and grooming, according to a new report from Thorn.
Founded in 2009, Thorn is a non-profit dedicated to building the tools and awareness to end child exploitation. Their new survey of over 1500 young people highlights the value queer youth place in online interactions and how queer youth perceive the risks and dangers of online harm.
“There is a perception of increased anonymity and privacy online, and that leads to exploration and more pushing of boundaries,” Melissa Stroebel, Thorn’s Head of Research and Insights, told LGBTQ Nation.
Online platforms, such as Instagram or Twitter, give queer youth a space to be their true selves, with more than three out of four queer youth saying they view their online communities as essential to their lives. These spaces often act as a readily-available substitute for the types of relationships and safe spaces these youth struggle to find offline.
But this over-reliance on online platforms gives rise to bad actors who seek to manipulate and extort queer youth.
1 in 5 LGBTQ+ teens have received a request for nudes and are almost 2 times more likely to indicate prior experience of unwanted or potentially risky encounters online than non-LGBTQ+ participants. LGBTQ+ minors were almost twice as likely to report sharing their own nude photos or videos, reporting higher rates of experiences with sexually-explicit images.
“While there might not be an immediate physical threat in an online interaction, there is an opportunity for manipulation,” said Stroebel. Despite a “physical distance” that gives online users a sense of perceived safety, the risk is still very real for queer youth.
However, this increased risk for grooming is viewed as ‘normal’ among queer youth, with 91% viewing this as at least somewhat common.
To explain why that is, Stroebel shared what one queer young person told Thorn: “Everyone is a stranger at some point.”
Stroebel said that for youth, talking to strangers online is “just the start of the process” to potentially meaningful relationships or exploration even as queer youth understand the risks associated.
Since kids are well aware of the realities of online interactions, Stroebel says the best way to move forward is to share the voices of queer youth to raise awareness.
“Some of the risk we see for queer youth is because they have greater barriers to disclosure,” Stroebel said. “They feel they will be blamed, shamed, in some parts because of who they are.”
Parents and caregivers need to “evolve” the sex talk to include the threats of online platforms, such as grooming and sextortion, rather than leave youth to find out those dangers for themselves. Despite it being an all-around awkward conversation, straying away from those topics won’t “shelter” kids, Stroebel says. It serves as a disservice.
Stroebel encourages parents to have these conversations with their young ones in an “age-appropriate fashion,” so they’re prepared by the time they start going online.
A recent LGBTQ user safety report from GLAAD expands on the risk that queer youth face online, revealing that all five major social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter – received low and failing scores when it comes to safety.
The report found that these platforms fail to implement proper protections against online hate speech and allows misinformation to continue spreading, further harming queer users. Further, many of these lack specific policies to protect LGBTQ+ users and have inadequate content moderation.
“Dehumanizing anti-LGBTQ content on social media such as misinformation and hate have an outsized impact on real world violence and harmful anti-LGBTQ legislation, but social media platforms too often fail at enforcing their own policies regarding such content,” said GLAAD President and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, in a statement. “Especially as many of the companies behind these platforms recognize Pride month, they should recognize their roles in creating a dangerous environment for LGBTQ Americans and urgently take meaningful action.”
By amplifying the voices of queer youth and increasing the data available, Stroebel calls on everyone— not just social media companies— to ground policies in what young people need to be safe and thrive.
“This is not the exclusive responsibility of caregivers, educators, politicians or tech companies, it’s all of us,” said Stroebel. “The entire community needs to do a better job of showing up for young people.”
In Berlin last weekend, a vandal defaced the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under National Socialism with biblical quotations denouncing homosexuality before attempting to set fire to the concrete structure.
Overnight on Saturday, a security guard witnessed a man, still at large, throw a burning object at the memorial. The structure didn’t sustain any lasting damage.
Our activism was born in these forgotten papers—and lies—generated decades ago, retooled and weaponized for our time.
The concrete cube, erected in 2008 at the edge of Tiergarten Park near the main monument to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, features a small opening through which video of a same-sex couple kissing can be seen.
German police have opened an inquiry into the vandalism.
On the same night, another Holocaust memorial in Berlin was also the target of an arson attack.
An unknown assailant set fire to a “book box” containing reading material about the Nazi era, part of the “Platform 17” memorial honoring Jews sent to their deaths from the Grünewald train station.
An estimated 50,000 German Jews were deported to Nazi concentration and death camps at Riga, Warsaw, Auschwitz, and Theresienstadt through the station beginning in 1941.
Police said the display was almost entirely destroyed.
The LSVD German LGBTQ+ rights organization said in a statement it was “shocked by the incitement of hate” behind both incidents.
It noted that the Old Testament verse on the notes affixed to the LGBTQ+ monument, which linked the death penalty and homosexual sex, is “frequently abused for queer-hostile agitation.”
The memorial has been the object of vandalism in the past. Just nine months after the unveiling, the window revealing the same-sex embrace was smashed three times in back-to-back incidents.
Monument designers Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen have said the view to the kiss is at the heart of the memorial’s message.
“It was important to have direct imagery of a love scene, a passionate scene, an emotional scene between two same-sex persons, because that is the main problem in homophobia,” Elmgreen told the Associated Press in 2008. “You can get whatever rights, you can get acceptance on an abstract level, but they don’t want to look at us.”
Nazi Germany considered homosexuality an aberration and a threat to the German Reich. More than 50,000 LGBTQ+ Germans were convicted as criminals, with an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men sent to concentration camps.
That’s me grinning at FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s grave on the cover photo. I am relishing this moment. Like the millions of tourists who annually visit Washington for selfies and pics in front of their favorite attractions, I chose a grave for a feel-good image of my own. I, a citizen “sex deviate”—the pejorative and crime invented by Director Hoover decades ago—returned for a reckoning of my own. It took a lifetime for me to be able to stand here with a smile, no trace of anger, on my face.
I could have chosen other places and moments to tell my story—from White House ceremonies and holiday parties to Supreme Court hearings and events at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution exhibiting our work. Or maybe standing before a bower of plastic flowers with my husband at our marriage at the DC Superior Court. But this place is it—J. Edgar’s neatly fenced grave, a packaged plot for the tourists and dog walkers at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC. Here I can mark the distance LGBTQ Americans have traveled since his creation of the FBI Sex Deviates program in 1951, the year of my birth in Dallas.
I hold my bound copy of the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC’s amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage victory that opened the door for a million LGBTQ Americans to marry those whom they love. That victory is now protected by federal law. This “friend of the court” brief presents our case for same-sex marriage.
Dubbed the “animus amicus” by the Washington Post, it steadies and delights me because it tells stories of endurance and courage we uncovered because they were erased or forgotten. “Animus, therefore, was a culture,” our brief declares. “And with that culture came a language. For decades, government officials referred to homosexuality in official, often highly confidential or privileged communications, as ‘unnatural,’ ‘abnormal,’ ‘immoral,’ ‘deviant,’ ‘pervert(ed).’ An ‘abomination.’ ‘Uniquely nasty.’”
From where I stand, going back in time to J. Edgar’s Sex Deviates program, one can measure the distance between our era and his. I was once so enmeshed and implicated in the long history of hiding that the liberation side of life’s equation would only come decades later, like a late blooming. For me it started atop a rickety pull-down ladder into a dusty attic—and with a new way to converse with history we call Archive Activism.
Provided byUniversity of North Texas Press
We all know the well-worn observation “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” But what if you cannot find the past? What happens when all evidence, every shred, has been erased, deleted, sealed, or purposefully forgotten? What if the past is torched or stuffed into garbage bags and dumpsters? For LGBTQ Americans this has been the way of our world. “This Didn’t Happen” is the sign over the iron gate. Homosexual is an adjective, not a noun. You don’t exist. You are a behavior. Your uncle’s old love letters embarrass the family. No politics for you. History is for a people, not for queers.
Breaking through this was the challenge of the first generation of pioneering LGBTQ community historians and activists who succeeded beautifully at confronting the invisibility and the lies. But it is never over. The historic animus has seeped down into the dark and violent corners of American life. Today, a This Didn’t Happen movement called Don’t Say Gay flourishes.
Archive Activism is a rescue mission for primary archival materials located in archives and libraries, large and small, worldwide. It is preservation-minded movement to recover and protect historical queer memory. Archive Activism is a populist mission to recover the erased past and to document the government animus that continues to course through LGBTQ political and policy history. It is a popular brand of citizen archivery representing those living or passed who were wrongly investigated or silenced, their lives and careers thwarted or destroyed.
Internationally, Archive Activists uncover the names of those killed or “disappeared.” This is not an approach for scholars or professional historians. It is freeing not to hoard research or wait for book deals or seek tenure. Rather, Archive Activists use their discoveries and the power of history to fight for social justice, equality, and even our own safety. We believe it is possible to be armed with library cards. Archive Activists wield documents and let them speak for themselves. The Latin phrase “vox populi,” the voice of the people or public opinion, may be less important than the power of the documentary evidence itself, the “vox docs.”
***
“What it boils down to is that most men look upon homosexuality as something ‘uniquely nasty,’ not just a form of immorality,” wrote US Civil Service Commission lawyer John Steele in his influential 1964 policy memorandum addressing gay and lesbian “suitability” for federal employment. His rationale banned us from earning a living—and a life. From postal clerks and air traffic controllers to postal clerks and soldiers, we were done; “once a homo, always a homo,” he wrote.
Uniquely nasty.
Worse than plain nasty. Really?
How did that happen?
In my youth I did some mean things and had some “nasty” thoughts, but uniquely so?
In Dallas in 1964, I am working on my Eagle Scout, preparing to run for student council president, and starting to crush on a guy in my class. My seventh-grade friends and I are all into British director Richard Lester’s black-and-white film A Hard Day’s Night, especially the Beatlemania shot of the band sprinting through a London tube station. I imagine myself running with them, definitely not on the Elvis side of the continental divide. The Beatles, sucking up to Texas, wore cowboy hats when they arrived at Dallas Love Field. This was probably their gay manager Brian Epstein’s idea. He loved to dress them up. This set my adolescent energy in motion. I join an all-night line with a bedroll at the Preston State Bank in University Park to buy my Beatles tickets. The kid next to me is wearing his Beatles wig, and I like that better than the cowboy hats.
We are in a new world, teen sixties Dallas. Running fast in a mania of our own, past questions without answers, it has been one year since Dallas’s darkest day, the day on which John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Are we truly a City of Hate? Confronted by historic hatreds, it is our teenage time of innocence lost. Taking a lot of our cues and all of our soul off Dallas white radio (white radio? Even radio is segregated) from breakthrough Black DJ Cuzzin’ Linnie, we keep running. Cuzzin’ Linnie is not about Liverpool; he’s playing Memphis. We know it is time, our time for change. Still, so many are dead set against LBJ and his “communist” ideas like civil rights. Our congressman Bruce Alger voted against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960—and he will do so again.
How could we know in such a time that an epithet like “uniquely nasty” struck at one’s core, deeper than just “immorality”? Immorality we could do something about. We realized that, according to the papers we unsealed and the boxes we discovered many decades later in people’s attics, the National Archives, and elsewhere, this insult was an organized, bipartisan federal assault. I and millions more like me, spanning generations, Black and white, invisible and unknown to one another, were assigned to this subaltern place before we even knew the words used to denigrate us.
In the years to come, we would uncover those words to examine them not as lies, but as living things. Still used to shock and stun, a lot of them are rattlesnake ugly, discovered under flipped rocks. We find them inside classified, sealed, hidden files that are part of the vast American archive. We breathe deeply the dust and blood rising off the old carbons with traces of that mimeograph smell that make you dizzy. Words like deviate, pervert, revulsion, suitability, insanity, disordered, dishonorable, disloyal, and groomer anger us—and then inspire our work to ensure none of this is erased or can ever happen again.
Our activism was born in these forgotten papers—and lies—generated decades ago, retooled and weaponized for our time. Whether slimed as perverts in the fifties, compared to “man on dog” years later in Texas, or defiled as pedos and groomers today, it is the same personal and political calumny.
Running still, I hit the intersection of history and memory. It was in Dallas where I first engaged with the idea of history itself.
*For more information on Archive Activism or to purchase the book, visit the UNT Press website.
Military veterans from the LGBTQ+ community have sued the Department of Defense for denying them honorable discharges and listing their sexual orientation on their service records.
Plaintiffs are seeking honorable discharges in a class action lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which would give them access to benefits such as healthcare services, academic tuition aid, and loan resources reserved for veterans who are in good standing when they leave the military, NBC News reports.
Moreover, the plaintiffs are requesting that their discharge documents be amended to remove references to their sexuality. They claim the government is violating their privacy by providing information about their sexuality in such documents.
Several plaintiffs were dismissed under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allowed gays and lesbians to serve if they remained closeted, their lawyers said.
LGBTQ+ veterans and their allies have asked the U.S. government to automatically modify the discharge status of ex-service members following the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” under then President Barack Obama’s administration in 2011.
Despite an existing procedure by which veterans can request discharge status changes, Tuesday’s lawsuit contends it is onerous.
“The currently available discharge upgrade process is burdensome, opaque, expensive, and, for many veterans, virtually inaccessible,” according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. “The process not only takes months or years but also requires veterans to prove that an error or injustice warrants updating their discharge papers to the very entity that caused the error or injustice, despite the Government’s own acknowledgment that DADT was discriminatory.”
The case declares that “the Government’s ongoing discrimination” against LGBTQ+ veterans will continue without DOD action.
“Because of the circumstances and language of my discharge, which served as a painful reminder of the trauma I experienced, I was never able to proudly say that I served my country,” said U.S. Army veteran Steven Egland, one of the plaintiffs.
Idaho’s 2023 Teacher of the Year has fled the state after facing vicious attacks from right-wing parents.
Fourth-grade teacher Karen Lauritzen told the Boston Globeit has been one of the worst years ever in her two-decade-long career. After being honored as Teacher of the Year, conservatives began attacking Lauritzen for her previous social media posts supporting LGBTQ+ people.
The conservative Idaho Tribune called Lauritzen a “left-wing activist” who “follows drag queens on social media, promotes LGBT events, promotes transgenderism, Black Lives Matter, and is active in local politics, promoting liberal ideology.” The article also blasted her for liking posts on social and emotional learning — a style of instruction that encourages healthy self-awareness, decision-making, and interpersonal skills — which the article described as “a left-wing ideology.”
“Would Lauritzen be happy to cultivate transgender ideologies among your children? Probably,” stated an article on Action Idaho, another conservative website. It added, “She is getting her PHD in advanced education at University of Idaho, no doubt learning all the latest trends in queer theory and social and emotional learning.”
Lauritzen taught in a rural area, and the public outrage reportedly led concerned parents to bombard her with emails and accusations about her teaching inappropriate lessons to her students. All of this despite the fact that they had no proof that she had incorporated either her personal beliefs or any topics of sexuality into her lessons. Parents became so alarmed that some told her to stop teaching lessons about the United Nations.
“When it’s, ‘My kid can’t do this because it’s propaganda,’ and ‘My kid can’t do that because we don’t believe in United Nations,’ it’s like, what? It’s not Santa Claus, what do you mean you don’t believe in it?” she told the Globe. “Even if I have certain beliefs myself, that does not mean that I teach kids. It’s not my job to ‘indoctrinate’ or make kids little versions of myself. It’s to make kids into the best versions of themselves.”
Lauritzen fled to Illinois to work at a university.
The Teacher of the Year program is national and was implemented by President Eisenhower in 1952. Every state chooses its own Teacher of the Year, and they then compete in a national contest. But now, many are worried that across the country, the competitions have gotten too political.
In Arkansas, for example, the questions on the contest form were recently updated to require praise for a new education law signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The form reportedly asked teachers how Sanders’s anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ+ laws had positively impacted students.
It’s also happening in blue states, according to the Globe. California, for example, asks teachers to show how their work supports the initiatives of the state superintendent of public instruction.
And Lauritzen isn’t the only winner who has been driven out of town, either. Willie Carver, who is gay, won Kentucky Teacher of the Year in 2021. But parents began attacking his support of an LGBTQ+-affirming club for students. He didn’t receive support from the school district, so he resigned.
“It was affecting me emotionally so much because of having to fight and how tiring that was and the depression that comes with being abused,” he said, “and as much as I wanted [students] to see a queer teacher… I didn’t want them to assume they would have to be depressed and broken as well.”
