Michigan’s 5th congressional district stretches across the far bottom of the state, encompassing cities such as Albion and Jackson and abutting Ohio and Indiana. I don’t have any reason to think that the district is full of merciless psychopaths and mass murderers. Jackson has a famous ice cream shop, The Parlour, where the portions are to say the least generous, and which is pleasant to visit on a hot summer day. The district has a population of 768,000 and a median household income of $64,000 (for the US as a whole it is $74,580). It is about 85% white, with Hispanics, African Americans and mixed-race persons making up most of the other 15%. It has voted for a Democratic president in every election in this century and even favored Hilary Clinton over Trump. That Walberg represents this district demonstrates the axiom that Americans buy peanut butter more intelligently than they vote.

That is, the district is represented in Congress by a cruel would-be mass murderer. His soul lacks any hint of the milk of human kindness. Walberg, a fundamentalist former Christian pastor, once ran the homophobic, far right Moody Bible Institute in Chicago while supposedly representing a Michigan district, Walberg is against everything— a woman’s right to choose, the Affordable Care Act, gay marriage, and any attempt to counter the climate crisis. He went to Uganda to voice support for that country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which prescribes executions for gay people.

So genocidal tendencies were already apparent. Some 14 million American adults identify as LGBT in polling and apparently Rep. Walberg would happily see them all murdered. It should be remembered that some 90,000 gay men were rounded up in Nazi Germany, with as many as 15,000 sent to death camps, where perhaps 60% were killed. The only difference between Walberg and Heinrich Himmler, who created the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, is that Walberg hasn’t yet found a way to implement his sadistic dreams.

At a meeting in Dundee with constituents on March 25, Walberg said that President Biden had spoken of our need to get aid into Gaza. He said, “I don’t think we should. I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel, to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to the feet of Hamas, and Iran, and Russia. Probably North Korea is in there and China, too — with them, helping Hamas. We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”

“Nuking Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.

Unfortunately for Walberg, who likely talks like this all the time with his inner circle of fellow sociopaths, his remarks were recorded.

Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg, pastor and "good" Christian, talks about his solution for #Gaza: Give it the Hiroshima treatment. "Get it over quick."

A sitting US Rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing positively about genocide. Listen. Share.#DemCastMI #DemCast pic.twitter.com/6BQGfWMVjZ

— JMS 🫱🏻✋🏻 #DemCastMI (@WhitchMI) March 30, 2024

It is worth noting the bizarre conspiracy theory that any US aid money sent to Gaza would somehow benefit Russia, China and North Korea or that those three countries back Hamas. I might once have called such paranoid fever dreams abnormal, but I see them and their like normalized all around me these days.

The 2.2 million Gaza noncombatants cannot be blamed for the actions of a small Hamas guerrilla group. These civilians are in imminent danger of mass starvation and some are already dying of hunger. Half of them are children. Most of the rest are women and noncombatant men. Some 70% of them are in Gaza because Zionist gangs chased them out of their homes in 1948 in what became southern Israel, and made them stateless refugees. Now they are being killed on a scale unseen in any conflict in this century.

And, again, mass starvation was a key Nazi technique of war.

Staunchly against bodily autonomy for women, Johnson supports a nationwide ban on abortion which he considers, “a holocaust.” This inexperienced, soft-spoken Ned Flanders suggested that abortion activists want to kill babies that are “half way out of the birth-canal,” and voted against Americans having access to purchase legal contraception. The most powerful Republican in Washington insisted that, if only women would bear more “able-bodied workers,” he wouldn’t be forced to cut trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Hostile towards gay and transgender people, Johnson called them “dangerous” and “deviant” threats to the American way of life and defended laws that criminalized homosexual relations between consenting adults that he called “inherently unnatural.” He warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that would prohibit the use of federal funds for providing education to children under 10 that included LGBTQ topics — a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. He also is working to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

Johnson is a virulent Christian Nationalist, an ideology modeled on Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s program of “illiberal democracy,” and defense of Christendom against Muslims, progressives, and the “LGBTQ lobby.” Johnson “pushed all kinds of hateful anti-LGBTQ bigotry while at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian Nationalist legal outfit that wants to drag this country back to the 5th century,” warns Andrew L. Seidel, civil rights attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American. For nearly twenty years, Johnson served as senior legal counsel and spokesman for the ADF.

Designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADF is a legal advocacy organization that not only supported “re-criminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults,” but has also defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people and contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia. Johnson and the ADF claim that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.

Politicon: “James Carville explains everything about Mike Johnson”

The ADF, according to the New York Times, is the “largest legal force of the religious right.” They would go on to successive Supreme Court victories, most notably rolling back abortion rights in the Dobbs decision, undermining LGBTQ rights in the (purported) same-sex wedding website case 303 Creative, allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control, and twelve other cases related to curtailing the civil rights of women and LGBTQ people.

Johnson’s rise to the speakership is best understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA rather than, as the mainstream press suggested, the quirky, exhausted and embarrassed result of a bickering caucus. Since the rise of the Tea Party, the primary driver for both the GOP’s dysfunction and its incipient fascism is the political might of organized right-wing Christianity, successfully redeployed especially in primaries, to wrest control from establishment “Republicans in Name Only” (“RINOs”).

As the former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer wrote, “the political muscle provided by white Christian nationalism’s extensive church-based infrastructure in congressional districts, and its national reach through Christian broadcasting and national organizations, has turned MAGA into a ruthlessly successful RINO-hunting machine.”

Still, Johnson’s loathsome ideology and religious zealotry were not the main reasons for his elevation to the speakership — most Republicans share his repulsive worldview. Rather, the MAGA cult embraced his tireless advocacy on behalf of despotic Donald’s seditious attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Most House Republicans voted to back the Fabricator’s lies about the election; but few had worked as diligently as Johnson to foist fraudulent conspiracy theories, such as “rigged Dominion voting machines,” on Americans. A constitutional lawyer who uses the law to subvert democracy, Johnson enlisted dozens of fellow-members to support a sham Texas court case seeking to cancel the election results in battleground states.

Johnson’s role, neglected at the time, was such that the Times later called him “the most important architect” of the campaign to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results and thus overturn Trump’s defeat. Circulating his hollow rationale to the party, Johnson reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. Proudly exhibiting a bizarre religious devotion to the Un-Christian Trump, Johnson helped plot the Jan. 6 attempted coup while calling the insurrection a “peaceful protest” and defending the Seditionist at both of his impeachment hearings.

At a time when Trump’s co-conspirators, probably including his Chief of Staff, admitted they lied about the election being stolen, House Republicans handed the reins of power to someone who showed no hesitation to help overturn American democracy. Johnson was given a powerful government position by people in the government who don’t believe in government — and installed an unrepentant election-denier leader two heartbeats away from the presidency.

In his first major initiative as House speaker, Johnson pushed through a bill to provide $14 billion in military assistance to Israel. Before the vote, he declared, “Israel doesn’t need a cease-fire.” However, Palestinians do. Israel’s aerial and ground offensive, ostensibly targeting Hamas infrastructure, has killed over 11,000 people while those who managed to flee Israel’s attack in northern Gaza now encounter a scarcity of food and medicine in the south. “Residents wait hours for a gallon of brackish water that makes them sick,” reported the Times of Israel. Scabies, diarrhea and respiratory infections rip through overcrowded shelters.” 

In addition, Johnson engineered the House censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian serving in Congress. The censure resolution is “rife with propaganda, fake history, and racism,” said Juan Cole on Informed Comment. 

In his first public appearance, the newly-elected Christian Zionist told a crowd of Jewish Republicans in Las Vegas: “We are going to stand like a rock with our friend and ally, Israel.” He boasted that his first act as speaker was passing the pro-Israel resolution in spite of “no” votes from several democrats, including Rashida Tlaib, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar. Their opposition was due to the bill’s failure to recognize Palestinian victims and call for a cease-fire. Johnson maliciously and deceitfully blamed their defiance on an “alarming trend of antisemitism” enabled by “academia and the mainstream media, and fringe government figures.”

The evangelical Christian’s rise to power is the biggest political victory for the evangelical movement to date and his connections to Israel reflect the movement’s deep ties to the Israeli far right. “God is not done with Israel,” said Johnson cryptically. He gushed that his 2020 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount was the “fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.”

This remark references the Christian Zionist end-times belief, derived from a literal reading of the Bible, that Israel is God’s chosen nation and that its 1948 creation will lead to the Second Coming of Christ. In the real world, they rabidly support the state of Israel and its policies, especially regarding the expansion of settlements, the annexation of territories in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

In the biblical narrative, Christ will defeat Evil, or the Antichrist, in an apocalyptic battle that will take place in Israel at Har Megiddo, or Armageddon. Along with Christian believers and converts who have ascended to heaven in the Rapture, Christ will rule from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for a thousand years. Fueled by these fantasies of a cataclysmic war in the Middle East, Christian Zionists maintain that literal war is not something to be avoided, but inevitable, desired by God, and celebrated. These zealots condemn those that oppose Israeli occupation as being evil, aligned with the “Antichrist.”

The Bible becomes a script for those millennial Christians in power, like Mike Johnson — a self-fulfilling prophesy of violence and destruction that portends an apocalyptic foreign policy. In some warped minds, the current battle in Israel may be hastening the coveted dooms-day of reckoning. In a bizarre twist to the end-times prophecy, those Christian Zionists who are the most passionately pro-Israel also believe that those Jews who do not convert to Christianity will not be raptured, and if they don’t convert during the horrific cataclysm at Har Megiddo, they will be condemned to suffer eternally in the “lake of fire.”

Eager to visit the Christian holy land, Johnson traveled to Israel with his pal Gym Jordan. Jordan, who was considered an aggressive and confrontational jerk, was rejected by his party for the speakership. Yet Jordan apparently served as a spiritual mentor to Johnson, who has guest-hosted Jordan’s national radio show Washington Watch, and praised Jordan as a “great friend and leader” and “a guiding light” on his podcast Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.

Along with their wives, Jordan and Johnson’s week-long pilgrimage was sponsored by the New York-based 12Tribes Film Foundation, a small outfit that that describes itself as “online warriors for truth about Israel and the Jewish people.” The organization’s CEO Avi Abelow — an arch-Zionist — lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.

Johnson’s first stop on his Abelow-organized visit was to receive a briefing from the Kohelet Policy Forum, a far-right Israeli think tank that would later help cultivate the Netanyahu administration’s despised plan to weaken the country’s judiciary. The itinerary included meetings with Israeli military officials, business owners, and political leaders including Netanyahu, current Israeli U.N. envoy Gilad Erdan, and other members of the far right Likud Party.

At the Golan Heights, the pair posed and smiled in front of a sign for “Trump Heights,” the name of an Israeli settlement honoring Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Located in occupied territory claimed by Israel, it is widely considered to violate international law.

Johnson also visited the Temple Mount compound — the Palestinian Aqsa Mosque complex — alongside Abelov, a Temple Mount activist, and Yehudah Glick — an Orthodox rabbi and former Likud lawmaker, who has led the fight to change the legal status quo and permit Jewish prayer at this Palestinian national symbol, the third holiest shrine in the Muslim world, and one of the most sensitive flashpoints in the world. In 2023 during Ramadan, Israeli forces repeatedly invaded the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque, in an act of “state terrorism,” where they beat and expelled Palestinian worshipers on behalf of Jewish extremists.

This visit to Israel, led by right-wing extremists, influenced the future speaker’s views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During a video made of the trip, Johnson declares — without traveling to Gaza or meeting with Palestinian leaders or activists — that the Palestinian and Israeli people were “working well together” and that there was a “great cohesion of the people” in the West Bank. He blamed “activists and the leftist groups” for “pushing” the narrative that there was conflict, implying that Palestinians enjoyed life under Israeli occupation.

Johnson called Netanyahu, in his first talk with a foreign leader, during which he echoed the premier’s comments that Israel’s war is one of good vs. evil and light vs. darkness. “I assured the prime minister of our own unwavering support of Israel and the people in our Congress and under my leadership, we will be there until the end, we will be there until the end of this conflict.” He opposes basic human rights for Palestinians as well as many Americans.

In an appearance with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Johnson described himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” and said that to understand his politics, one only need to “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” This is cultish nonsense that threatens democracy.

Democracy means that the candidate ordained by God, in Johnson’s view, lost an election, so he forsook his oath to the Constitution to keep a corrupt, seditious demagogue in power. Democracy also leads to abortions and gay marriage. Under democracy, Johnson also believes that white Christians are being “replaced”— by immigrants, by Muslims, by trans kids, by drag queens, and by a whole litany of scapegoats. So, perhaps, the only way to save the U.S. and white Christians is to end democracy.

In a potentially horrifying scenario, suppose Trump loses the 2024 election but again claims he won and the GOP demands his “victory” to be certified, House speaker Johnson is positioned to do so. A devout apostle to the Pagan Coup Plotter, MAGA Mike is prepared to subvert democracy in deranged obedience to Trump and his biblical fanaticism.

We aren’t convincing the best and brightest to come teach or study here

Diane Roberts

( Florida Phoenix ) – The American Association of University Professors recently conducted a survey of faculty in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, finding the state of higher education in the South is not strong — in fact, it’s in crisis.

One-third of those surveyed say they’re looking for a job in a state that supports academic liberty, citing a political atmosphere becoming more toxic by the day. As one respondent put it, “An overall climate of fear of retaliation and mistrust is the worst I’ve seen in over 20 years in academia.”

Two-thirds of respondents told the AAUP they would not recommend a colleague or a newly minted Ph.D. accept a job in any of these four states.

The number in Florida is much higher: 85% of professors would caution against working in one of our universities and 95% rate the political atmosphere “poor” or “very poor.”

This is not going to go well for the state.

We aren’t convincing the best and brightest to come teach or study here; too many of the best and brightest already in Florida are getting out.

Intelligent, curious people don’t like being told what they can and cannot read or discuss or think.

Instead of promoting the pursuit of knowledge, the state is weirdly obsessed with bathrooms, threatening to punish anyone who uses one that doesn’t “conform” with their gender at birth.

Perhaps DeSantis’ State Guard will deploy as potty cops to check the genitals of faculty, students, and staff before they’re allowed to answer the call of Nature.

Ever since the governor installed a gaggle of Visigoths and Vandals at New College, Florida’s once-celebrated liberal arts college has been hemorrhaging faculty.

More than one third of its professors — a rate its own provost calls “ridiculously high — have fled.

Embed from Getty Images
ORLANDO, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES – OCTOBER 13: Students at the University of Central Florida hold a rally and march in support of Palestinians in Orlando, Florida, United States on October 13, 2023. (Photo by Paul Hennesy/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Students are also going: 27% have dropped out.

Ballplayer U

The regime of Richard Corcoran, the overpaid and under-qualified New College president, counters that with 325 new students, enrollment at New College is higher than last year, totaling 689.

This sounds good until you realize that admission standards have been lowered considerably and the freshman class includes 70 scholarship baseball players.

The University of Florida, with a freshman class of 15,000, almost 50 times as many, admitted 35 scholarship baseball players.

While New College is the most spectacular example of the DeSantis war on education, other institutions are also suffering. We won’t know for a while whether the big research universities will lose an appreciable number of students, but faculty are leaving the state at an unprecedented rate: Over the past year, at least 1,800 have resigned from UF while USF has lost about 200.

The Yale- and Harvard-educated but syntactically challenged DeSantis said liberals and the media will say, “‘Like, isn’t that bad? Is that a brain drain?’ Well, you know, if you’re a professor in like, you know, Marxist studies, that’s not a loss for Florida if you’re going on and, trust me, I’m totally good with that.”

Like, you know, this aggressive, like, ignorance is going to hurt, like, the whole state in the near future.

Totally.

DeSantis is obsessed with remaking education according to his authoritarian tendencies, doing his damnedest to wreck K-12 with his army of book-banning harpies in “Moms for Liberty” and his Scared Karens legislation, and forbidding honest discussion of slavery and racism so as to never make white kids feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”

Now he wants universities to conform to his absurd anti-”woke” hysteria. Any institution he fears he can’t rule, he will disable and even destroy — as he’s done with New College.

Other targets

The rest of the state is in his sights, too. Earlier this year, Florida Atlantic had three well-qualified candidates for president. Suddenly, the search came to a screeching halt: DeSantis’ boy, the combustible Rep. Randy Fine, best known for his war on drag shows and threatening to shut down UCF, was not a finalist.

Fine, supposedly a Harvard graduate, desperately needs a refresher course on the U.S. Constitution.

Democracy Now! “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: Censorship, Harassment Intensifies on Campus Amid Gaza War”

He’s now pitching an epic hissy fit over students and professors exercising their right to free speech in support of Palestinians, demanding expulsions and firings, never mind that good old First Amendment.

The man has no business being on a small-town sanitation committee much less running a university.

The University of Florida, our flagship, is the victim of political assault as well, battered by trustees actively hostile to academic freedom.

We have the chairman of the board, developer and Republican campaign bank-roller Mori Hosseini, to thank for imposing the anti-vax DeSantis lickspittle and quack Joseph Ladapo on UF’s medical school.

UF also hired the nonentity Ben Sasse, a former U.S. Republican senator from someplace far from Florida and even farther from reason, to be president.

In turn, Sasse hired a couple of guys who worked for him in Washington for top positions at UF.

James Wegmann, the new VP for Communications, and Raymond Sass (no relation), now VP for Innovation and Partnerships, have little to no experience in higher ed but will each make around 400 grand a year — the rewards of cronyism.

Whatever

These two perfectly exemplify Florida’s “whatever” attitude to its state universities.

They say they won’t even move from D.C. to Florida.

So, they know nothing about UF or its students: But hell, how hard can it be to make crucial decisions for a large and complex research university from 775 miles away?

Sure, this is insulting; this is stupid; but it makes perfect sense here in DeSantistan, where thinking goes to die.

You will hear Ron DeSantis and his anti-education Department of Education boasting that U.S. News and World Report ranks Florida’s colleges and universities top in the nation.

That sounds great, until you realize it doesn’t mean our institutions are the very best when it comes to pushing back the frontiers of science or winning prestigious grants or changing the intellectual and artistic discourse.

Florida universities are good at all of those things, and excellent in some areas, but we’re not yet scaring the bejesus out of MIT or Stanford.

No, the U.S. News designation is about money: comparatively low tuition, a smaller debt load than most college students nationwide, and overall bang for the buck.

We should, of course, be glad of this. Higher ed should be affordable. But we must not confuse a good bargain with across-the-board academic achievement.

Faculty in Florida want to get to the top and are working on it — assuming we don’t get fired for mentioning white privilege or teaching “The 1619 Project” or maybe falling foul of some bathroom issue.

To the extent we succeed, it’s not because of DeSantis but despite him.

Leaving out the minority of kids who go to college to get drunk, get laid, and avoid at all costs anything that might expand their minds, most of our students hunger to learn.

These students live in the world as it is, not the world DeSantis and his terrified white nationalist friends want it to be.

They know he’s lying to them. They will remember.

Diane Roberts

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.

Published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Via Florida Phoenix

The legislation, which will allow a five-day public comment period, would remove a tribal ban on same-sex marriage.

By: Kalle Benallie, ICT – J

 

( Source New Mexico ) – The fight to have same-sex marriage recognized by the Navajo Nation continues during Pride Month.

Navajo Nation Council Delegate Seth Damon signed and sponsored legislation that would recognize same-sex marriages within the Navajo Nation during the Navajo Nation Pride opening ceremony on June 23.

“The prohibition against same-sex marriages does not uniformly welcome or support the well-being of all Diné,” Damon said. “The purpose of the legislation I’m sponsoring is to ensure that all Diné are welcome within the four sacred mountains and to recognize all marriages within the Navajo Nation.”

The legislation also amends other provisions within the Navajo Nation Code to conform with this repeal, but the traditional Navajo wedding ceremony involving a man and woman shall remain unchanged.

Since 2005, same-sex marriages have been prohibited when the Navajo council overwhelmingly voted to pass the Diné Marriage Act, even a second time to override a presidential veto of the act.

At the time, same-sex marriages were prohibited throughout the country, although there was a growing sentiment to legalize marriages for all. This led to a number of regional ordinances designed to define marriage as between one man and one woman. President George W. Bush would even lean on the definition during his re-election campaign in 2004.

This spurred the Navajo council to pass its Dinė Marriage Act, which has remained intact, even after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

“We feel it’s in the best interest of the Navajo Nation to repeal Title 9 so that everyone can enjoy the full benefits of legal recognition of their marriages within the Navajo Nation, whether our relatives are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, non-gender specific, two-spirit, or Nádleehí,” Damon said in a press release.

However, some progress has been made in recognizing the tribe’s LGBTQ+ citizens with the 24th Navajo Nation Council passing a resolution in 2020 to establish Diné Pride Week to be held every third week in June to protect Navajo Nation citizens from discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and marital status among other things.

“We see ourselves as sacred human beings,” Alray Nelson, Diné PRIDE co-founder and executive director, said. “And with that knowledge, we teach every LGBTQ young person not only is the Navajo Nation on the right side of history, but its leaders also support our community.”

Navajo Nation Council Delegate Seth Damon (far right) sponsored and signed Legislation 0139-23, which aims to repeal Title 9 of the Navajo Nation Code to recognize same-sex marriages. Damon is joined by former 24th Council Delegate Eugene Tso (left). (Photo courtesy of Navajo Nation Council Communications)

Eugene Tso, a former Navajo Nation Council delegate, joined Damon at the signing ceremony. He introduced similar bills in June 2022 and in March 2022. The March bill was voted down in its early committee meetings, ultimately never passing.

“We live with people we love. There should be no discussion about it when this legislation comes to the floor,” Tso said in a statement. “Why would you debate it? This is who we are. We’re Diné.”

Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren was in attendance at the legislation signing where along with Navajo Nation Vice President Richelle Montoya and Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley became the first Navajo leaders to proclaim June 18-25 as Navajo Nation Pride Week.

He acknowledged what Damon introduced and said “…it will be up to everyone here to submit their comments for its passage.”

The legislation began its five-day public comment period on June 23 and will end before tribal council committees will hear it on June 29. Comments can be emailed or mailed. More information is here.

Kalle Benallie, ICT

Kalle Benallie, Navajo, is a reporter-producer at Indian Country Today’s Phoenix bureau. Follow her on Twitter: @kallebenallie or email her at kbenallie@indiancountrytoday.com. Benallie was once the opening act for a Cirque Du Soleil show in Las Vegas.

Via Source New Mexico

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Right-wingers don’t have any answers for the issues that matter, so they’re viciously attacking a vulnerable minority. 

Mitchell Zimmerman

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

Via Otherwords

Demonstrations against the Israeli government’s efforts to radically overhaul the country’s judicial system have become a weekly occurrence. Often rainbow pride banners pop with color amid the sea of blue and white national flags.

LGBTQ allies are hardly the only groups protesting the new government: Secular Jews, liberals and people concerned that the plan will erode democracy have come out to the streets in droves since early 2023. But among other concerns, many Israelis fear that hard-line conservative ministers will roll back LGBTQ rights. And LGBTQ issues are a potent symbol of a chasm fueling debate over the judicial overhaul: secular and religious Israeli Jews’ very different visions of the Jewish state.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition is the most religious and nationalist in the country’s history. His supporters claim that Israel’s Supreme Court, whose rulings guaranteed many of the rights LGBTQ people have today, is interventionist and needs to be reined in. Opponents, however, fear that Israel’s balance of being a democratic state and a Jewish one is tipping away from democracy.

But how did Israel become relatively accepting of LGBTQ people in the first place – especially given the ways religion and state are entangled in its laws? The answer does not rest solely with the Supreme Court. The legislature, popular culture and activist organizations were key – including Orthodox groups known as the Proud Religious Community, a focus of my ethnographic research. I believe the lack of separation between law and religion has at times actually helped advance LGBTQ Jews’ rights. Activists’ carefully picked agenda and its convergence with national interests have also aided the movement.

Thousands of Israelis join Jerusalem Pride parade | AFP

The ‘gay decade’

Chronicles of Israel’s LGBTQ rights often focus on changes that occurred during the so-called “gay decade” that began in 1988, when the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, repealed sodomy laws. The groundwork for that, however, began decades earlier.

Israel’s first LGBTQ organization, The Aguda, was founded in 1975 as a grassroots, volunteer-based human rights nonprofit. In its early years, many members were closeted, but by the early 1980s some LGBTQ activists were willing to put a public face on the movement by sharing their stories in interviews, public hearings and lobbying efforts. A groundbreaking 1983 Aguda pamphlet appealed to scientific evidence and international legal precedents to make the case for ending prejudice and discrimination.

A dizzying array of rights were achieved during the gay decade and beyond. Sexual orientation was declared a protected employment category in 1992, and openly gay women and men were allowed to serve in the military in 1993. Same-sex partners were recognized for welfare in 1994, national insurance benefits in 1999 and pension benefits in 2000.

Because religious authorities have monopoly over marriage and divorce in Israel, same-sex marriage is not legalized. Nevertheless, over the past 20 years, same-sex couples and their families have won many other legal protections, including inheritance, stepchild adoption, divorce and surrogacy rights.

Uneven gains

Beyond the law, LGBTQ Israelis have also benefited from increasing cultural visibility and public acceptance. Municipal and state investments have made the Tel Aviv Pride Parade a top destination for Pride month travelers around the world. Israeli transgender singer Dana International won the Eurovision contest in 1998, and gay characters began to appear in mainstream movies and popular TV by the turn of the millennium. The late 1990s and the aughts also saw a significant expansion of organizations to support LGBTQ people and their families.

Still, access to protections has always been uneven. The early gay “revolution” was predominantly secular, and remains so. It is mostly an urban, Jewish, Ashkenazi affair – referring to Jews whose families were from Europe. Transgender people won employment protections and the right to serve in the military more than a decade after gays and lesbians won the same rights.

Attitudes toward LGBTQ Israelis have been slower to change in conservative religious communities, and same-sex relationships remain taboo in ultra-Orthodox circles. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, Orthodox activists have begun to organize, as I document in my recent book “Queer Judaism.”

Path to acceptance

Although a minority, religious conservatives have been power brokers and members of government coalitions for most of the state of Israel’s history. Yet certain aspects of the country’s political landscape help explain the LGBTQ movement’s successes – as do activists’ strategic choices.

First, the lack of separation of state and religion means that Israel does not offer a civil marriage option, even for opposite-sex couples. The legal system developed alternatives for heterosexual Jewish couples who did not want to or could not marry through the Jewish rabbinate, such as extending many of marriage’s civil benefits to cohabitating couples. These alternatives were relatively easy to extend to same-sex couples.

Second, the goals that the Israeli LGBTQ movement has prioritized – equal rights to parenthood, family and military service – aligned well with Jewish Israeli common values and national priorities. They often avoided alliances with other causes that were considered controversial, especially Palestinian rights.

Third, Tel Aviv’s fun façade as a thriving gay scene served national interests. Politicians from across the political spectrum have used Israel’s liberal record on LGBTQ rights to bolster its democratic credentials while ignoring criticism over systemic human rights violations toward Arab citizens of the state and Palestinians in the occupied territories – a phenomenon sometimes called “pinkwashing.”

Pivotal moment?

The same forces that facilitated Israel’s LGBTQ rights revolution, however, may now undo hard-won gains.

Jewish religious conservatives have long viewed acceptance of LGBTQ people’s rights as an affront to the state’s Jewish character. In the past, ruling coalitions with both political moderates and Orthodox parties guaranteed some modicum of compromise, including on LGBTQ rights. But the current ruling coalition rests on the support of religious ultranationalists, including ministers who have openly opposed LGBTQ rights.

Another factor is the current right-wing government’s unambiguous territorial ambitions. Its guiding document declares that “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” and one senior minister has even hinted at his support for Arab expulsion. With such nationalistic aims out in the open, the state may no longer feel as much of a need to use LGBTQ rights to defend its human rights record.

During research for my book about Orthodox LGBTQ activism in Israel, I noticed how efforts to change conservative communities’ ideas about equality and acceptance were grounded in claims of a shared Jewish experience. However, LGBTQ activists I talked to did not challenge other aspects of far-right politics.

Critics of LGBTQ activists’ approach warn that prioritizing narrower interests, rather than a broader social justice platform, fails to rein in Israel’s broader shift away from liberal democratic norms – which could jeopardize their own hard-won gains as well.

Orit Avishai, Professor of Sociology, Fordham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The ability of LGBTQI+ people to express and live as who they are — without fear — is a fundamental human right

(The Conversation) – After a bitter and hard-fought campaign that went to a second run-off vote, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has retained the Turkish presidency in an election that some deemed as “free but not fair”. Having first won power in 2003, Erdoğan has been able to extend his rule for a further five years by creating an alliance with ultranationalist parties.

A key aspect of the next term is likely to be a hardline conservative agenda. An agreement between the Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and his hardline Islamist New Welfare party (YRP) allies has pledged to reevaluate existing laws to “protect the integrity of the family”.

Turkey’s LGBTQ+ community is likely to be a target. Erdoğan and his allies ramped up anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric during the election campaign. This is by no means a new part of Erdoğan’s programme, but it has intensified in the last few months. For instance, the AKP and coalition partner the YRP signed a declaration which suggested potential discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community could follow. The YRP has previously called for the closure of LGBTQ+ organisations.

Immediately after his victory was announced, Erdoğan accused the opposition of promoting LGBTQ+ rights while stressing that “LGBT forces” had not been able to infiltrate the AKP.

Women’s rights are also at risk. The 6284 law, which aims to protect women, particularly from domestic violence, was introduced by the AKP government in 2012. Both radical Islamist parties within Erdoğan’s coalition – YRP and Huda Par – have called for it to be repealed and made their support for Erdoğan conditional on a pledge to amend this law.

This comes against a backdrop of high levels of violence against women in Turkey. In 2022 at least 116 women were murdered by their partners.

Huda Par has also proposed criminalising extra-marital sex and adultery, getting rid of alimony rights for women and argued for single-sex education.

Global News: Turkish police shut down Pride parade, detain dozens after arrests in Istanbul

The Erdoğan-led majority in parliament was propped up by another of AKP’s coalition partners, the ultranationalist Nationalist Movement party (MHP). And they also received backing from the extreme nationalist presidential candidate, Sinan Oğan of the ATA (Ancestral) Alliance party, who won around 5% of the vote in the first round, before declaring his support for Erdoğan.

When it became clear that anti-immigrant views had been popular in the first round, opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu pivoted to a hardline anti-immigration stance in the second round. Billboards promised Syrian refugees would have to leave the country, if he was elected.

Rising anti-Syrian rhetoric

The whole campaign was marked by rising hostility against the 3.6 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey. Syrians have already been targeted by violent protests that damaged Syrian-owned properties, as well as physical attacks and murders. Just before the second round, the killing of a 28-year old Syrian man living in Turkey raised fears about what might happen next.

It seems unlikely that such incidents – and the near constant hate speech that Syrians are subjected to – will decrease after this election result, especially now that Erdogan is so dependent on the ultranationalists in parliament. The pressure from these parties may cause the regime to target Syrians even more directly. Even before the election Erdoğan vowed “to repatriate refugees” and talked about “resettling” one million Syrian refugees.

Ultranationalists grasp power

The increased power of the ultranationalist right and their rhetoric and ideas is also a threat to Turkey’s Kurdish minority. Kurds have already experienced an increase in repression since Erdoğan adopted a more nationalistic and anti-minority policy direction in 2015. The 2023 election campaign saw him ramp up the nationalist rhetoric further.

He portrayed jailed Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas as “a terrorist” and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic party (HDP) as a front for the outlawed PKK paramilitary group. Erdoğan returned to his attack on Demirtas in his election victory speech while the crowd chanted for the death penalty.

We should expect to see an increase in anti-Kurdish policies. This could include further crackdowns on Kurdish organisations, in particular the possible closure of the HDP.

With an ongoing economic crisis threatening the livelihoods of many Turks and prices rising dramatically, Erdoğan may hope a wave of nationalism could distract his citizens from their financial troubles. With inflation running at around 40% and the lira having lost a fifth of its value over the past 12 months, there’s definitely a lot of distraction going to be needed.

Balki Begumhan Bayhan, PhD Candidate in Politics, Coventry University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.