Three LGBTQ people in Honduras were reported killed on Feb. 2.
Reportar sin Miedo reported Jonathan Gabriel Martínez, and his partner, César Gustavo Zúñiga, were killed in San Pedro Sula’s Ticamaya neighborhood. The Washington Blade’s Honduran media partner also noted María Fernanda Martínez was shot to death in La Libertad, a municipality in Comayagua department.
Reportar sin Miedo cited witnesses who said men dressed as police officers shot Jonathan Martínez and his partner in the liquor store that he owned. María Martínez, according to Reportar sin Miedo, had previously joined a migrant caravan that had hoped to reach the U.S.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Honduras office condemned the murders.
“The office expresses its concern over the attacks, threats and harassment that LGBTI people in the country face,” it said in a statement posted to its Twitter page. “The Honduran state must guarantee truth, justice and reparation for these crimes and ensure they don’t happen again.”
Cattrachas, a lesbian feminist human rights group based in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, notes 405 LGBTQ people have been reported killed in the country since 2009.
Thalía Rodríguez, a prominent transgender activist, was killed outside her Tegucigalpa home on Jan. 11. Authorities have arrested a suspected MS-13 member in connection with Rodríguez’s murder.
The percentage of Americans who say they are satisfied with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people in the country has reached a new peak at 62%, according to a poll released Wednesday. Gallup’s annual Mood of the Nation poll asks people about their satisfaction with aspects of U.S. life and policy areas, ranging from the overall quality of life to the nation’s military strength and environmental issues.
In 2022, 62% of survey respondents said they are very or somewhat satisfied with the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the nation, up from 55% in 2021 and 56% in 2020. Jeff Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told USA TODAY that the question shows whether gay and lesbian people are “being considered not an outsider group but a normal, mainstream group of people in the U.S.”
Read the full article. Perhaps notably, Gallup’s wording of the question specifies “gays and lesbians” – and not the more inclusive LGBTQs.
Sometimes, when the news comes on your screen, you think: this must be from Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. Until, a few seconds in, you realize: this isn’t satire, it’s all too real.
That’s how I felt when I heard about the Stop W.O.K.E Act. I’m not making this up or satirizing the news. I wouldn’t even try to be like the fabulous Samantha Bee.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has introduced the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (a.k.a. the Stop W.O.K.E Act) to the Florida Legislature.
DeSantis, like many Republican politicos nationwide, including Virginia’s new governor Glenn Youngkin, is a good culture warrior.
Months ago, Florida, like some other states, banned the teaching of critical race theory. Earlier this month, for instance, Virginia Gov. Youngkin in his first week in office issued an executive order prohibiting the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.”
Never mind that critical race theory hasn’t been taught in our country’s elementary, middle, or high schools. It’s a theory taught to graduate students. It says that historically laws and policies have created systemic racism.
But that wasn’t not good enough for DeSantis. The Stop W.O.K.E. Act would take things even further. If passed, the legislation, “will give businesses, employees, children and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination,” said a DeSantis office press release.
“The Stop W.O.K.E. Act will be the strongest legislation of its kind in the nation,” the press release said, “and will take on both corporate wokeness and Critical Race Theory.”
DeSantis wants us to believe that he’s on the side of the angels – that he wants to make the world more just. To prove how righteous he is, DeSantis talked about the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Washington Post reported. “You think about what MILK stood for,” he told an audience in Wildwood, Fla. “He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character.”
“You listen to some of these people nowadays,” DeSantis said, “they don’t talk about that.”
It’s horrifying and enraging to hear DeSantis quote the words of King, a civil rights icon who inspired many to work for racial justice. DeSantis was using King’s work as part of a culture war against everything King stood for.
“I was right about ‘The Politics of the English Language,’” George Orwell, the author of “1984” who taught us about “Newspeak,” is saying to himself, “this is more Orwellian than even I would have imagined.”
Unfortunately, if passed, the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, would have even more draconian consequences than polluting the language. DeSantis has decided to follow the example of the Texas abortion law, which allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion.
If enacted into law, the Stop W.O.K.E. Act would give parents or other private citizens the right to sue if they think critical race theory is being taught in schools or workplaces.
This should set off alarm bells for everyone, Black, white, hetero, LGBTQ+ — from parents to teachers to authors to students.
It’s fine for parents to complain to teachers or school boards. Or for employees to seek redress from their supervisors or human resources departments.
But do we want private citizens to enforce the law? What would it be like to have to worry whether about your neighbor or co-worker would sue you if they felt you were espousing critical race theory?
If you’re LGBTQ, you should be especially concerned.
In plain, non-Orwellian English: Republican politicos know that some folks don’t want to learn about our country’s history of racism or about LGBTQ sexuality, gender identity, culture and history.
We can’t afford to throw up our hands on this.
Let’s do all we can to prevent the erasure of racism and LGBTQ culture from the teaching of our country’s history.
A new highly-infectious and damaging strain of HIV, resulting from a mutation in the virus, has been discovered in the Netherlands.
Scientists working on the BEEHIVE project, a study of HIV genomics and virulence across Europe and Uganda, published their findings in the journal Science on Thursday (3 February).
According to UNAIDS, 38 million people around the world are currently living with the most prominent strain of the virus, HIV-1, and it has caused, to date, around 33 million deaths. HIV-2 is the other most prominent type of HIV, and is most commonly seen in West Africa.
The newly discovered mutation, a subtype of HIV-1, has been named “virulent subtype B” or the “VB variant”, and it showed “significant differences before antiretroviral treatment compared with individuals infected with other HIV variants”.
Measuring the viral load, or level of virus in the blood, of those with the VB variant, scientists found that it was between 3.5 and 5.5 times higher than those with other variants of HIV.
The new strain also damaged the immune system twice as fast, “placing them at risk of developing AIDS much more rapidly”, and those with the VB variant were at a higher risk of transmitting the virus to others.
Thankfully, scientists found that after starting treatment, “individuals with the VB variant had similar immune system recovery and survival to individuals with other HIV variants”.
But they emphasised the need to get tested often for early diagnosis, because of the rapid progression of the variant.
Lead study author Dr Chris Wymant, from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute and Nuffield Department of Medicine, said: “Before this study, the genetics of the HIV virus were known to be relevant for virulence, implying that the evolution of a new variant could change its impact on health.
“Discovery of the VB variant demonstrated this, providing a rare example of the risk posed by viral virulence evolution.”
Senior author professor Christophe Fraser, of the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute and Nuffield Department of Medicine, added: “Our findings emphasise the importance of World Health Organization guidance that individuals at risk of acquiring HIV have access to regular testing to allow early diagnosis, followed by immediate treatment.
“This limits the amount of time HIV can damage an individual’s immune system and jeopardise their health.
“It also ensures that HIV is suppressed as quickly as possible, which prevents transmission to other individuals.”
According to the Terrence Higgins Trust, one in 20 people with HIV are unaware they have it, which increases the risk of damage to the immune system, and of passing it on to sexual partners.
Stephen Balch, a former professor who also has opposed the 2015 Supreme Court ruling overturning state bans on same-sex marriage, is a content adviser for the revision of the standards that will guide social studies courses from kindergarten through 12th grade.
The Texas Freedom Network, a liberal group promoting religious freedom and education, is calling on the State Board of Education to withdraw Balch’s appointment, citing his writings calling the 2020 election a “literal coup,” among other things.
The group also pointed to Balch’s support of a letter urging officials to disregard the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against bans on same-sex marriage as an example of another “attack on our constitutional system of government”.
The national LGBTQ advocacy group GLSEN has appointed Melanie Willingham-Jaggers as its executive director — the first Black and nonbinary person to lead the organization.
GLSEN was founded by a group of teachers in 1990 with the goal of making schools safer for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer K-12 students. It has 38 chapters in more than half the states, and it has registered thousands of gender-sexuality alliances, or GSAs (formerly known as gay-straight alliances).
Willingham-Jaggers, 39, who joined the group as deputy executive director in 2019, is taking on the new position at a time when LGBTQ students have become part of a larger culture war taking place at school board meetings and in classrooms around the country. More than 30 statesconsidered bills last year that would ban transgender students in middle schools, high schools and colleges from playing on the sports teams of their gender identities. Ten states — nine in the last year — enacted such measures.
More than half of all the statesalso considered legislation that targets curricula, by either limiting how schools can teach race or barring LGBTQ topics from classroom discussion. Some school districts have also banned books that discuss race or LGBTQ topics.
The fights are continuing this year. But rather than focus on or respond to those efforts, Willingham-Jaggers, who uses both “she” and “they” pronouns, is excited about supporting young people in schools across the country so they have the power to make their schools safer.
“LGBTQ+ young people in schools and their student groups, like GSAs, have always been the hub, kind of the breeding ground, the soil from which these sparks of activism come up,” they said. “What we understand is that young people — period — are going to help us understand the vision forward and the way forward to the future.”
She noted that the group was founded to stop harassment, discrimination and bullying of LGBTQ youths. In the 1990s, she said, LGBTQ young people were often told that bullying is just a “part of life” and that they simply shouldn’t be gay. Over the last 30 years, the group has shifted the narrative so bullying LGBTQ kids is no longer culturally accepted, she said.
Since 1999, the group has also conducted extensive research and released its National School Climate Survey, a national survey of LGBTQ middle school and high school students’ experiences with harassment, bullying and discrimination. It uses the findings to suggest school policy solutions.
More recently, the group has changed its approach from “getting rid of the bad stuff” to “building safety,” Willingham-Jaggers said. The organization plans to do that by centering its three new pillars, which it created in a strategic refresh in 2020. They are advancing racial, gender and disability justice outcomes and education; building digital connections to extend reach; and unifying the organization and its 38 chapters to ensure that its grassroots work is effective.
“We know that our young people are not little rainbow-colored stick figures,” they said. “They are Black and brown and Indigenous and white. They are cis and gender expansive. They are kids living with disabilities and folks who are not. We know that they come from families and communities that have immigrant experience, that experience violence from various systems.”
She said that most of the group’s chapters are in the South and the Midwest and that the network is disproportionately white but that that’s where she sees beauty in the work.
“Now, imagine a Southern and Midwestern, largely suburban, largely white network that is deeply connected to making sure that education advances racial, gender and disability justice outcomes,” she said. “That is beautiful to me. That is exciting. That is deeply powerful.”
Intersectionality has always been central to Willingham-Jaggers’ work. She said she identifies as both a Black woman and a nonbinary person, in part because she was raised and socialized as a girl and because Black women are her “political North Star.”
She noted that GLSEN was founded by a white man who is cisgender — a word that describes people who identify with their assigned sexes at birth — and that he was succeeded by a cis white lesbian.
“And then here I come, and it’s not by accident, and it’s not inevitable,” she said. “So I just want to honor the journey that this organization has taken and the on-purpose choice that it took to hire a person of my identity and of my life experience.”
Eliza Byard, the group’s former executive director, said Willingham-Jaggers’ experience as an organizer and “deep connections across movements” are invaluable to its future work.
“The world of K-12 schools has been turned completely upside down over the past few years, and Melanie’s vision and experience will provide the essential ingredients of new strategies for a new time,” she said.
Willingham-Jaggers has been working with LGBTQ youths unofficially since they were a camp counselor in Southern California when they were 17 years old. But officially, they began the work in 2009 when they moved to New York City from Cincinnati to work for an organization that supported runaway and homeless youths whose family and caregivers had rejected them because they identified as queer or transgender.
Their experience in that job continues to inform their work today, they said. After a year on the job, Mosey Diaz, a young person whom they were close to, died by suicide, during a time when an increasing number of LGBTQ youths were dying by suicide — many in connection to harassment.
“It was really kind of a formative moment for me to understand that, yeah, I was working with runaway and homeless kids, but this is part of a larger LGBTQ+ movement to really change the world so that these young people know that the world is worth sticking around in,” they said.
Willingham-Jaggers said Diaz also helped her understand that people who work in service of other people have to come with more than their “good intentions.”
“We can’t just come with a pocket full of hope,” she said. “We have to be good at our work, because the stakes are incredibly high.”
A teacher at a Christian K-12 school has resigned and pulled her own son out of the school after the administration asked parents to sign a contract condemning homosexuality and comparing it to bestiality and pedophilia.
“Not only could I not sign that as a parent, I couldn’t agree to be a teacher in a school that had that vocabulary and language around some of the most vulnerable kids that we interact with,” Helen Clapham Burns, who worked at the Citipointe Christian College in Brisbane, Australia, said on the news program The Project, while close to tears.
Burns also expressed devastation that she had to pull her son from school and away from his friends.
“We have been in trauma and stress this weekend as I am having to blow my son’s world apart, because he’s not going to get to do year 11 and 12 with his mates. I have to find him a new school,” she said.
The contract says that “any form of sexual immorality (including but not limiting to adultery, fornication, homosexual acts, bisexual acts, bestiality, incest, pedophilia and pornography) is sinful and offensive to God and is destructive to human relationships and society,” and says the school has the right to “exclude” any student from the school who doesn’t agree with these principles.
The contract also includes a refusal to acknowledge students’ gender identities other than the sex they were assigned at birth.pedophilia%2F&sessionId=df86bf620bd25003d0dae8b1a52d02400722bd6b&siteScreenName=lgbtqnation&theme=light&widgetsVersion=75b3351%3A1642573356397&width=500px
But Burns isn’t the only angry one.
Over 80,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the school amend the enrollment contract.
“Citipointe is using their religious beliefs to openly discriminate against queer and trans students,” the petition states, “as well as threatening to take away their education. Sign the petition to show Citipointe that we will not stand for such blatant transphobia and homophobia.”
The school’s principal pastor, Brian Mulheran, defended the contract in a statement, saying that Citipointe has “always held these Christian beliefs and we have tried to be fair and transparent to everyone in our community by making them clear in the enrollment contract.”
LGBT+ people in Ukraine are afraid of what’s to come as tensions escalate between their country and Russia.
Ukraine and Russia have been at war with each other since 2014, but there are fears that conflict could spill over after Russia deployed tens of thousands of troops to its border with Ukraine in recent days.
Since then, the United States has put 8,500 of its own troops on alert to send to Ukraine if the war worsens, and NATO announced that it was sending ships and fighter jets to eastern Europe in preparation for a potential conflict.
A Russian attack, or potential invasion, would spell disaster for Ukraine’s LGBT+ community. Queer activists are worried about what could happen if the war escalates and if Russia was to ultimately seize additional Ukrainian territories. They fear that progress on LGBT+ rights would grind to a halt and that, in the event of a Russian invasion, they could see their freedoms restricted and rolled back.
Many are ready and willing to fight if they need to – they feel a patriotic sense of duty to their country – but they’re also painfully aware that the fight for LGBT+ rights could end up on the back burner.
Lenny Ensom, director of Kiev Pride, tells PinkNews that LGBT+ people, and wider Ukrainian society, is prepared to “step forward against the aggression” if the need arises.
“On this point we are united,” Ensom says. “It doesn’t matter what your gender identity is, your sexual orientation – all together, we are stepping forward.”
The effects of the conflict are far-reaching for queer people, Ensom says. Fear and aggression “accumulate” in society in times of war, and people inevitably look to minority groups to scapegoat. He is worried that LGBT+ people could end up bearing the brunt of aggression, and their movement for equal rights could ultimately be set back.
“On one hand the Ukrainian LGBT+ movement is very successful. We have a very successful Pride march, 7,000 people marched with us in September last year. We have Pride marches in a few other cities in Ukraine. We have over 30 LGBT+ organisations working in different regions of Ukraine. But the community is really threatened, and what we see now is that all members of the community are currently under threat, every day.”
LGBT+ people are already dealing with discrimination in Ukraine’s army
Edwards Reese, another LGBT+ rights activist working with Kiev Pride, says that queer Ukrainians are “ready to fight” if the war escalates – however, they’re also concerned about the potential for discrimination.
“There are a lot of LGBTQ people in the army right now, and also there is a problem that if the war gets bigger, then there will be more discrimination to LGBTQ people in the army, because there is discrimination – we know about it, but if there is a massive call to the army, there will be more queer people in the army and more discrimination,” they point out.
The Mayor of a Mississippi city is accused of withholding $110,000 from a public library because they carry LGBTQ+ books, according to the Executive Director for the Madison County Library System.
Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee reportedly said that he had received complaints from citizens about three children’s books and one adult book at the Ridgeland Public Library, according to NBC affiliate WLBT of Jackson.
The books either had titles referencing the LGBTQ+ community or depicted them in the book, executive director Tonya Johnson said, according to the news station.
NBC News could not immediately reach McGee for comment on Friday, but the mayor told WLBT that his decision in withholding the funds was because of complaints he received from Ridgeland residents. He did not say if the complaints were about LGBTQ+ books.
Madison County Library System, which oversees the library, released a statement on its website saying that its mission is “to provide library resources and services necessary to meet the evolving informational, recreational, and cultural needs of the public, thus enhancing individual and community life.”
“Madison County Library System has earned a strong reputation for award-winning, best in the state library service because of the outstanding services, programming, and collection of library materials it provides for all the residents of Madison County,” the library system said. “As such, we remain committed to excellence in all aspects of public service, which means that everyone can depend on us for their informational needs. All members of our community are represented and welcome in our libraries.”
The library system went on to say that the library’s collection of books “is for people of all ages, races, gender identities/expressions, and orientations.”
“Our books are not only a mirror to reflect our community but a window into different worlds and different experiences that enable us to learn. Our materials are available for all. Censorship has no place here in Madison County Library System. Our library is for everyone,” the statement said.
A defiant but still very much defeated Donald Trump vowed to ban trans athletes nationwide if elected to a new term as president.
Trump, the former firebrand Republican president, took to Conroe, Texas Saturday night (29 January) for his first Texan MAGA rally since 2019.
In a meandering speech that stretched more than an hour-long, Trump laid out a string of promises certain to roil his critics – LGBT+ people included – at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds.
“We will ban men from participating in women’s sports,” he told his toadying supporters dressed in “Trump 2024” t-shirts and hats. “So ridiculous.”
“Have you heard about the man who is on the swim team that I know well?” he said, misgendering Thomas and doing so as he mention how Thomas shattered two women’s records with a 38-second margin against her closest competitor.
Trump then took aim at trailblazing trans weightlifters such as Laurel Hubbard, who, like Thomas, saw their wish to compete in the sport they love turn them into walking targets for a snickering right-wing media.
“But the best is the weightlifting records – they’re going,” Trump said. “One guy walks in with one hand [and] he broke the record that held up for 20 years.”
“Take a look at the weightlifting record,” he told bystanders, “two ounces is unacceptable. They beat ’em by many, many, many, many, many, many pounds.”
Hubbard, who became the first openly trans woman to compete in the Olympics, raised alarm among right-wing weirdos for existing last year. She bowed out of the competition after failing to lift 125kg in the +87kg women’s weightlifting final.
Donald Trump promises to pardon 6 Jan rioters in roiling rally speech
To Trump, a second term in the White House would be a return to law and order. To squash undocumented migrants, criminals and, er, those not prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on 6 January last year.
“If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan 6 fairly,” he said near the end of his inflammatory and vastly incoherent speech. It’s Trump, after all.
“And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Speaking of unfair treatment, Trump singled out immigrants with a level of vitriol all too typical among populist leaders, saying they are “invading” the US and causing the death of “countless” Americans.
Thousands of onlookers cheered after.
In what amounted to a MAGA Reddit user bingo card, Trump rattled on about critical race theory, his controversial tax dealings, Joe Biden and his completely debased claims of electoral fraud.
“We will take back America and in 2024 we will take back this beautiful, beautiful home that is white,” Trump ended. “He’s so great. We all love him.”