Tag: land of the free

11-Year-Old Gifted Student Arrested, Jailed After Refusing to Recite Pledge of Allegiance

In the land of the free, little boys can and will be thrown in jail after refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school. Now, a mother is speaking out after this exact same scenario happened to her child who is in the gifted program at Lawton Chiles Middle Academy in Lakeland, Florida.

The incident unfolded earlier this month when Dhakira Talbot’s 11-year-old son politely refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The class had a substitute teacher that day who felt it was her duty to force this student to pledge his obedience to a flag that he feels is racist. So a conflict began.

When the boy refused to stand for the pledge, the teacher gave the standard statist response of “Why if it was so bad here he did not go to another place to live?” This is the more polite version of “move to S’molia!”

But the boy had an answer ready, saying, “they brought me here.”

Despite the entirely inappropriate conversation with the 11-year-old, the teacher kept pressing the issue, telling the child, “Well you can always go back.”

After instigating the entire debacle, the teacher then called the office to remove the student from class for daring to assert his freedom of speech.

“Then I had to call the office because I did not want to continue dealing with him,” the substitute teacher said.

“She was wrong. She was way out of place,” the boy’s mother said. “If she felt like there was an issue with my son not standing for the flag, she should’ve resolved that in a way different manner than she did.”

When the student refused to be bullied by a system he feels is out to get people of color, like him, the system then proved his claims. The school police officer then responded to the classroom and arrested the child.

He was arrested and charged with multiple misdemeanors and brought to juvenile detention.

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Constitutional ban on legal cannabis advances in Idaho

As legal marijuana becomes a reality in every corner of the U.S., Idaho is putting up a fight.

State lawmakers on Friday moved forward with a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar the legalization of marijuana in Idaho in an attempt to keep the growing nationwide acceptance of the drug from seeping across its borders.

Idaho is one of only three states without some sort of policy allowing residents to possess products with even low amounts of THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. Residents can cross the state border in nearly every direction and find themselves in a place where marijuana can be bought for recreational or medicinal purposes. Support for medicinal marijuana use is growing among some residents — with legalization activists trying to get an initiative on the state ballot in 2022.

It’s made some lawmakers in the deep-red state nervous, particularly after voters in the neighboring state of Oregon decriminalized the personal possession of drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine last November.

The joint resolution to ban all psychoactive drugs not already legal in Idaho won approval along a 6-2 party-line vote in the Senate State Affairs Committee. The list of substances would change for drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

But the primary target over the two days of testimony on Monday and Friday was marijuana as Idaho finds itself surrounded by states that have legalized cannabis.

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A woman who parked her tiny house on her parents’ property in New Hampshire was forced to move out after the local government said it was illegal

On August 22, 2019, O’Brien presented her case to the Hampton Falls Zoning Board of Adjustment. But the board denied her request, blocking her path to legalizing her tiny house.

The meeting notes said the board denied her request for a variance because it “would be contrary to the public interest because the structure is currently existing, therefore the modifications are not in compliance and should have been discussed prior to the particular building of the structure.”

Additionally, the board felt that the tiny house could diminish property values.

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