Tag: lgbt

NY Pride Group Disbands After Drag Queen Founder – A School Board Member – Arrested On Child Sexting Charges

A New York LGBTQ+ advocacy group has canceled a scheduled pride parade and disbanded after its founder was arrested on child-sexting charges. 

Travis J. Longo, 46, of Cazenovia – a drag queen and a member of the Cazenovia School District Board of Education (of course), was arrested on Thursday and charged with four counts of endangering the welfare of a child after allegedly sending sexually explicit communications to a child under the age of 12. 

In a now-deleted Facebook post, the group Longo founded, Cazenova Pride Inc., announced that it is “canceling this year’s Pride Festival and all associated events, and we are dissolving as an organization.” 

“This decision follows serious criminal charges against Travis Longo, the founder of Cazenovia Pride Fest and a longtime figure in our organization,” the post continues. “Travis Longo has no further affiliation with Cazenovia Pride Inc.”

Longo, who reportedly performed as a drag queen under the name “Anita Buffem,” was listed as a “hostess” at the first Pride festival in Cazenovia in 2021, which was organized by Pride Cazenovia, The Blaze reports.

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Judge rules Scottish guidance for housing trans prisoners is unlawful

A judge has ruled that prison guidance which allows some transgender prisoners to be held in jails matching their gender identity, rather than their sex at birth, is unlawful.

Judge Lady Ross said sex segregation in prisons must be based on biological sex, based on a Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman in equality law in April last year.

Campaign group For Women Scotland challenged the Scottish government guidance through a judicial review, saying only those born biologically female should be held in the women’s estate.

Lawyers for the government had argued this would breach transgender prisoners’ human rights. The first minister said they will take time to consider the judgement.

Lady Ross said the guidance was “in conflict with the requirement that prison accommodation be provided separately for men and women” and constituted “a mis-statement of the law”.

She said: “In all the circumstances, the prisons guidance is unlawful.”

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California-Certified Gay Government Procurement Program Challenged on Legal Grounds

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) runs a procurement preference program for businesses owned by lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender individuals, operating under General Order 156. A business qualifies as an LGBT Business Enterprise if it is at least 51 percent owned and controlled by LGBT individuals.

In California, “utilities” are privately owned companies that hold near-monopolies delivering essential services such as electricity, natural gas, water, or internet and phone service, and are therefore regulated by the state through the CPUC. To operate, utilities purchase goods and services from outside vendors, construction, engineering, fuel, IT, and similar services.

Under CPUC’s Supplier Diversity Program, utilities are given goals for directing a share of that vendor spending to certified women-, minority-, disabled-veteran-, and LGBT-owned businesses, giving LGBT-certified firms a procurement advantage in competing for utility contracts.

There are both indirect and procedural incentives for utility compliance with CPUC’s LGBT procurement goals. The CPUC controls matters that are consequential to utilities, including rate approvals, infrastructure proceedings, and merger approvals.

One example is the Verizon-Frontier merger. A CPUC administrative law judge recommended approval of the $20 billion deal only if new diversity conditions were attached. This recommendation came even after Verizon had already committed to the FCC to eliminate its workforce and supplier-diversity goals.

Utilities that resist these procurement goals risk creating friction in these higher-stakes proceedings.

Compliance is also reinforced through reporting requirements. Utilities must file annual plans, collect demographic data on vendors, and explain in writing any shortfall against the stated goals.

Certified firms enter a supplier database administered by the Supplier Clearinghouse and used by participating utilities for procurement decisions, with certification valid for three years. CPUC’s category-specific contracting goals now stand at 15 percent for minority-owned firms, 5 percent for women-owned firms, 1.5 percent for disabled-veteran-owned firms, and 1.5 percent for LGBT-owned firms.

The LGBT category sits within a broader supplier-diversity framework dating to 1986, when Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, requiring CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual plans for purchasing from woman- and minority-owned companies; CPUC created its Supplier Diversity Program two years later to enforce the law and set contracting goals. In September 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize LGBT-owned businesses as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits, and the CPUC added LGBT businesses to General Order 156 the following year.

Governor Newsom expanded the program in 2019, encouraging energy-sector companies to award contracts to gay-owned firms. The LGBT procurement target phased in at 0.5 percent in 2022 and 1 percent in 2023, reaching the current 1.5 percent goal by unanimous CPUC vote in April 2022. During the rollout, advocacy groups pushed CPUC toward fuller implementation.

BuildOUT California, an LGBT building-industry organization since rebranded, told the commission that homophobia persisted within utility companies’ ranks, and the state legislature’s LGBTQ caucus wrote in 2021 that lowering gay-procurement targets would insult the LGBTQ+ community.

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Christian Therapist Beats State of Oregon, Will Not Have to Pay Eye-Watering Fine for Standing By Christian Beliefs

A Roman Catholic therapist who refused to bow to the LGBT altar is no longer being threatened with a $90,000 fine for being true to his beliefs.

Frank Canepa ran afoul of Oregon’s rules when he refused to get all gushy over a client’s same-sex relationship, according to Just the News.

Oregon’s Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists decided that standing up instead of bowing down required a hefty dose of discipline, and whacked Canepa with a $90,000 fine. The penalty and the disciplinary notice that went with it have both been rescinded.

Then came a March ruling from the Supreme Court that cut the legs out from under Oregon by ruling in favor of a Colorado therapist, Kaley Chiles, who did not fall into line with state thinking by saying minor clients suffered from gender confusion.

During a counseling session with a client Canepa had seen for more than two years, he refused to support her same-sex relationship, as noted by a news release from the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Canepa explained that his faith would not allow him to do what his client wanted.

“The government can’t target counselors for their views and force people to say things that go against their core convictions,” ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Litigation Strategy Jonathan Scruggs said.

“The Supreme Court recently took Colorado to task for censoring counselors and mandating orthodoxy in the counselor’s office, and Oregon should take notice. ADF will continue to ensure that free speech is protected in Oregon — and every state where it’s threatened — and halt states’ attempts to weaponize their licensure systems,” he said.

Although Canepa tried to avoid passing judgment on his client’s relationship, the client persisted until he finally told her what he believed was not compatible with what she was doing.

For that, the Oregon board said Canepa violated Oregon law and the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics. In addition to the fine, he was ordered to undergo six hours of education.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects counselors and that the government cannot then attempt to punish counselors for answering a client’s question about a counselor’s view on a subject,” Logan Spena, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Free Speech, said, according to the Statesman-Journal.

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Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger Picks LGBT Activist Who Fought Girls’ Bathroom Protections for State Board Role

Virginia’s Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger has chosen and LGBT activist who has fought against protections for girls’ bathrooms to sit on a state board that directly influences related policies.

During the election, Spanberger regularly dodged questions on this issue when asked by reporters. No we know why.

Her decision to appoint this person to this role just shows that Democrats have not changed at all. They are not budging on this issue and will go right back to where they were before the 2024 election the instant they retake power.

FOX News reports:

Spanberger taps LGBTQ activist who fought girls’ bathroom protections for state board

Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger appointed an LGBTQ activist who pushed back against efforts to bar biological males from girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms to a state advisory board that helps shape recommendations on LGBTQ-related policies.

Spanberger’s appointment of Kellen MacBeth on May 22, who previously led the LGBTQ nonprofit Equality Arlington, follows a gubernatorial campaign during which she ran as a moderate and sidestepped questions about transgender participation in women’s sports and access to female-only spaces.

MacBeth, the founder of Equality Arlington, has become one of Northern Virginia’s most visible LGBTQ advocates. Under his leadership, Equality Arlington has urged Virginia school districts to implement policies allowing transgender students to use bathrooms that align with their “gender identity” and has encouraged local governments to resist efforts to reverse those protections. The organization also advocated for preserving transgender-inclusive policies in Arlington Public Schools despite federal pressure to change them.

MacBeth has also opposed Virginia legislation that would require schools to notify parents when a student identifies as transgender or permit parents to exempt their children from classroom instruction involving LGBTQ-related topics.

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FTC sues transgender health group for ‘misleading’ parents about necessity of transitioning kids

The Federal Trade Commission followed through on its nearly year-old pledge to crack down on allegedly false and misleading statements about so-called gender affirming care, suing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in a Texas federal court known for friendliness to Republican attorneys general.

Texas, Iowa, Alaska and Nebraska joined the FTC in Wednesday’s lawsuit, alleging state-specific harms caused by WPATH, which was notably not cited by Democrats or their witnesses in a recent Senate hearing on pediatric gender medicine.

WPATH developed its Standards of Care 8 “without regard for scientific protocols,” “knows that its recommendations are not supported by scientific evidence or a medical consensus” and yet “misrepresents the risks and benefits of pediatric medical transition” by falsely claiming gender transitions for kids are “lifesaving,” the suit says. 

The Biden administration was caught after the fact successfully pressuring WPATH to remove age minimums in SOC-8, as the suit documents.

The group has an economic interest in pediatric gender transitions, as it advocates expanding insurance coverage to pay for them, “promotes the purchase of its members’ pediatric medical transition services” and financially benefits “by leveraging its position as the de facto authority on transition medicine in the United States,” the suit says.

“WPATH has provided to clinicians the means by which they deceive children and their parents into purchasing pediatric medical transition services,” it says.

The group also hid side effects from gender-affirming treatments, including “mood disturbances,” vaginal and erectile pain and “inability to orgasm” from cross-sex hormones, according to the FTC.

“For decades, the FTC has taken action against entities that make deceptive and unsubstantiated health-related claims,” Chairman Andrew Ferguson said. “The complaint filed today reflects that same long-standing mandate: when an entity makes a claim about a medical treatment, the claim must be truthful, evidence-based and not misleading.”

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NY Times Says Christian MLB Players Wearing Bible Verses Will Cause Mass ‘Abuse’ Of Gay People

During a Friday pride night game, several San Francisco Giants pitchers wrote Bible verses on their gay-ified hats. One player made clear there was “no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for, and what I stand on: I believe in God.” The same player added that the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant and promise and that he’s ultimately thankful to live in a country where free expression and speech are protected.

But apparently writing a Bible verse on his baseball cap will actually cause gay people to be abused and even incite gays to kill themselves — so says The New York Times’ subsidiary, The Athletic.

Grant Brisbee said the Bible verse inscriptions on the hat were “tone-deaf” and “made the night about ‘us versus them.’”

Brisbee then made the fantastical claim that, apparently, writing a Bible verse on your ball cap will cause gay people to suffer actual harm.

“Without the support of their community at large, LGBTQIA+ individuals are much more likely to be told that they are without value,” Brisbee wrote. “They are likelier to be abused, to self-harm, to get kicked out of their homes, to be bullied, to be assaulted. They are at risk because of a society that still doesn’t always accept them, even after decades of progress.”

There is legitimately zero evidence that baseball players writing Bible inscriptions on their hats will cause any harm, abuse, or the assault of gay persons (or anyone for that matter).

What Brisbee is arguing is that if a player expresses religious beliefs that diverge from the left-wing LGBTQ orthodoxy, then real people could be harmed. At that point the argument is that Christianity causes violence and therefore Christianity is bad unless of course you practice your faith in a way that Brisbee deems fit (he waxes poetic about how the right type of Christianity apparently demands affirming the sexual preferences of others). His argument also becomes: if fans don’t enthusiastically celebrate pride night, they’re contributing to suffering. If someone doesn’t affirm the mental illness of a man thinking he’s a woman, they’re creating a dangerous environment.

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Democrat Politicians Seethe After Baseball Players “Deface” Pride Night With Bible Verses

Recently we reported on the MLB’s angry response to three San Francisco Giants players who scribbled bible verses across their “Pride Night” uniforms in a silent protest.  The incident takes place in the midst of a rising tide of popular opposition to the woke movement’s political authoritarianism.  Gay pride has become synonymous with the liberal “cry-bully”:  Activists who try to assert social dominance over others then play the victim when people fight back.

California State Senator and rabid gay activist Scott Wiener is the epitome of a typical woke cry-bully.  He is perhaps best known as an advocate for the “kink community” and his defense of gender treatments (hormones and sex change surgeries) for children.  He is also a militant supporter of sexualized LGBT propaganda in public schools. 

Wiener has criticized medical facilities that refuse to give gender bending treatments to people under 19 years of age and supported measures to make California a “transgender safe haven”.

It’s therefore not surprising that Wiener is enraged by anything Christian or biblical entering his big gay domain, and he had a lot to say about the Giant’s players who defiled his precious Pride Night. 

“On San Francisco Giants Pride Night — also the tenth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre — several players defaced their Pride caps with a biblical passage that has been hijacked by homophobes to ‘take back’ the rainbow from LGBTQ people. The players could have displayed this passage any night of the year but chose to do it only on Pride Night.

The Giants, sadly, took no action in response, which is inconsistent with the Giants’ longstanding support for our LGBTQ community. Major League Baseball then warned the players that MLB rules bar defacement of uniforms. The Giants should publicly commit to enforcing rules around uniform defacement and should not effectively create a homophobia exemption to those rules…”

The state senator acts as if the players broke some kind of law.  Baseball club rules are private business arrangements, not statutes that require the the frantic complaints of a homosexual Karen.  That said, Wiener’s response to this event is quite revealing. 

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California Has Gay-Certification Program To Tap Into $633 Million For “LGBT” Businesses

Americans are used to handouts for favored groups. Affirmative action in university admissions, corporate “diversity” initiatives, and minority-owned contracting requirements direct opportunities, resources, and contracts to supposedly “oppressed” groups, such as women, Native Americans, blacks, and Hispanics.

In California, state Democrats have embraced another kind of favoritism: contracts for state-certified gay-owned businesses.

The scheme operates through the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates privately owned utility companies. California utilities spent more than $43 billion in 2024 on contractors—fuel suppliers, surveyors, engineers, and others—whose work helps deliver water, gas, electricity, and internet service to California’s 39 million residents.

In 1986, Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, which required certain CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual “plans” for buying goods and services from woman- and minority-owned companies. Two years later, CPUC created its “Supplier Diversity Program,” which would enforce the law and set contracting “goals” for large utilities.

Under a series of Democratic governors, the program has expanded to include gay-owned businesses. In September 2014, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. Five years later, Governor Gavin Newsom expanded the program further, “encouraging” other companies involved in the energy sector to award contracts to gay-owned firms.

In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion. BuildOUT California, a since-rebranded LGBT building-industry organization, sent a letter to the commission arguing that “homophobia” existed within “the ranks of the utility companies.” The state’s legislative LGBTQ caucus suggested in a 2021 letter that even considering lower gay-procurement targets was “an insult to the LGBTQ+ community.”

By 2022, CPUC had fully implemented the expansion. In practice, this meant establishing a “goal” for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state-certified LGBT businesses: 0.5 percent of procurement in 2022; 1 percent in 2023; and 1.5 percent in 2024 and beyond. If “large” CPUC-regulated utilities met these “goals” in 2024, they would have sent roughly $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.

This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an “LGBT organization” attesting to their sexual preferences; proof that a newspaper identified them as “LGBT”; or three letters from “personal contacts” written “on company letterhead” attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who “falsely represent” their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.

Supplier Clearinghouse also accepts gay-certification letters from the National LGBTQ+ & Allied Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has its own list of accepted documents, including human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. As NGLCC states on its website, “Certification is a journey, not a destination.”

Mary Ann Horton has experienced this “journey” firsthand. Horton, an early internet pioneer credited with helping develop the e-mail attachment, is a white male who “transitioned” and is now married to a woman. Horton’s company, Red Ace, is registered in California as a woman- and LGBT-owned business.

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California Gay Business Certification Another Dem Lurch to the Prog Fringe

Our jumping off point is a real doozy, even by California lunatic fringe standards. Had I not read it on one of our sister sites, I probably would have triple-checked it. This is from my Townhall colleague Joseph Chalfant:

A new report from the City Journal revealed the “LGBTBE Certification” process that individuals must go through should they wish to receive preferential treatment in the taxpayer-funded contract bidding process in the state of California.

For those who haven’t updated their Victim Group Alphabet Soup glossaries, LGBTBE stands for “LGBT Business Enterprise.” I don’t know why the “++” was left out or how the “Q” was dropped. Perhaps they were lost during one of the many times that the goal posts were being moved. 

Check out all of Joseph’s post. The state of California requires extensive documentation for businesses to prove that they are gay enough for gay contract money. That’s rich coming from a state that insists that asking for identification to vote is racist and disenfranchises people. 

Don’t they care about gay business owners who may not be able to provide “Proof of domestic partnership health insurance utilization” or any of the other proof of gayness documents that the Golden State wants before it signs any checks?

There are some old school elders of the village in the Democratic Party who freely admit that the party has lost its way on so many issues, most notable among them being former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. He’s exploring a run for president in 2028 and hopes to get his party to focus on issues that matter to regular Americans. 

His party doesn’t seem to be paying attention. Nobody on the left is, they all just keep rushing headlong to the far left edges of the Milky Way galaxy. 

The “you will be made to care” agenda regarding all things LGBTQ++ is still in full swing and continues to manifest itself in ways that would indicate nothing but complete disdain for anything that even glances toward the center. 

Recently, Major League Baseball forced its players to wear caps that had Pride flag rainbows on the logos. Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Blake Treinen didn’t play along, and the enemy of the people media was aghast. Three members of the San Francisco Giants responded by writing Bible verses on their caps, and the San Francisco Chronicle said they defaced them. My Twitchy colleague Brett T. covered that here.

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