This one is pretty fucking serious. It’s not about voter fraud, it’s about shitcanning everyone’s ability and right to vote.
Instead of being elected by the people, Senators would be chosen by the State legislatures, guaranteeing that the majority party would pick Senators of their own party.
If there is a vacancy the Governor would appoint a Senator for the remainder of the term. The pick could not be changed by the legislature or the public.
State legislators can recall a Senator at any time.
.If successful, they will reverse one of the great strides toward democracy in American history: the 1913 decision to end the corrupt practice of letting state legislators barter off Senate seats in backroom deals with campaign donors and lobbyists.
It seems gerrymandering the House is not enough for Republicans who want to completely shut out opposing voices. Yet, gerrymandering does fit with a long-term plan to turn America into a permanent single-party-rule nation.
With control of 32 state legislatures, the GOP would have an easy time hand-picking fascist-conservatives to fill up the senate.
WHAT. THE FUCK
This means, as long as one party can gerrymander their statehouses, they can pick their senators too.
See, they call themselves the “silent majority” which is a lie they very much are the political minority.
Usually, the only way they’re able to win elections (whether they be national or state wide) is by dishonesty, lies, trickery, double speak, and making voting polls difficult to reach.
I’ve seen these posts saying, in the words of one of them, “If your job requires you to go against your religious beliefs then perhaps it is time to change careers?” in reference to healthcare workers and government employees who want to deny services to lgbt ppl or others whom they condemn, and i just feel like those posts don’t attempt to understand internal logics at all
like, fundamentalist christian doctors don’t deny trans people medical care because they believe that somebody should provide the care but they just don’t want to be the one to do it. they deny the care because they don’t believe the person should receive care. Their refusal to provide care isn’t just “oops you’re in the wrong field,” as if they were a person with a peanut allergy working in a peanut factory. It is an intentional and calculated part of why they are in the field in the first place — to extend religious control and condemnation to the medical realm.
the pediatrician who spent an entire consultation telling one of my friends at 16 or 17 that he would go to hell if he kept choosing to be gay wasn’t just “not cut out for the job,” he was specifically in that job in order to do that particular thing. Kim Davis didn’t deny the gay couple a marriage license because she couldn’t personally do it, she denied them a marriage license because she thought that people like them should not get marriage licenses and that a clerk should deny them and by god she was going to be that clerk
Saying “if you can’t provide services then why are you in that job!!!” to fundamentalist christians almost always misses the point — that they are in that job specifically so they can selectively deny service
More Info: Statistics Show Exactly How Many Times Trans People Have Attacked You in Bathrooms
Surprise: There are zero reported cases of this happening.
“Several states, including Arizona, Florida, Texas and Kentucky, are considering enacting so-called “bathroom bills,” which restrict transgender people from using the bathroom in line with their gender identity, and are framed as “protective” measures against “sexual predators.”
But these bills are not protective. They’re vehicles for instilling fear of trans and gender-nonconforming people. For example, Florida State Representative Frank Artiles ®, who sponsored the Single Sex Public Facilities bill (HB 583), did not provide any evidence that a trans person has ever attacked cisgender (non-transgender) people in public restrooms when pressed by BuzzFeed in February. On his blog, Artiles wrote that this bill is a “preventative” measure and was not spurred by a specific incident.
Big fat zero:Spokespeople from the Transgender Law Center, the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union told Mic that no statistical evidence of violence exists to warrant this legislation. Vincent Villano, the director of communications for the National Center for Transgender Equality, told Mic in an email that there isn’t any firm data to corroborate these lawmakers’ claims, and that NCTE has “not heard of a single instance of a transgender person harassing a non-transgender person in a public restroom. Those who claim otherwise have no evidence that this is true and use this notion to prey on the public’s stereotypes and fears about transgender people.”
The Advocatenoted the same glaring fact last month regarding Texas’ bathroom legislation: “There has never been a verifiable reported instance of a trans person harassing a cisgender person, nor have there been any confirmed reports of male predators ‘pretending’ to be transgender to gain access to women’s spaces and commit crimes against them.”
“Trans panic”: Media Matters’ Luke Brinker and Carlos Maza wrote an in-depth report of the widely circulated narrative that trans people are predators, and how this myth is used to justify hate crimes against trans people. In fact, in most criminal courts, a defendant can legally use their fear of transgender people as their defense for assaulting or killing them. The results of Brinker and Maza’s survey of 15 “law enforcement officials, government employees and advocates for victims of sexual assault” from 12 states yielded no incidents of trans people harassing or assaulting cisgender people in public restrooms. They declared “the claim that sexual predators will exploit non-discrimination laws to sneak into women’s restrooms is a lie, plain and simple.”
The truth:Bathroom bills perpetuate violence against trans and gender-nonconforming individuals. According to the most recent National Transgender Discrimination Survey report, a whopping 63% of respondents “had experienced a serious act of discrimination” in their lifetime. Mic’s Derrick Clifton wrote that “roughly 70% of trans people have reported being denied entrance, assaulted or harassed while trying to use a restroom,” according to a 2013 Williams Institute report.
I have recently come to a conclusion about the trans panic and these idiotic fear based bills: The lawmakers enacting them ARE sexual predators or are close to someone who is. To be able to come up with this without mental gymnastics you have to have the brain of someone who would do anything to grope or assault women and so to them and their assault-happy cronies these ideas don’t sound far fetched. If they could lock a woman in a bathroom where she thought she’d be safe without attracting attention, they would. To trans people just living their lives and trying to have basic access to a bathroom these sound so stupid because they are stupid.
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