Lgbtq

Three prominent civil rights organizations in America have launched what appear to be coordinated attacks designed to hobble both Florida’s critical tourism industry and Governor Ron DeSantis’s impending campaign for president.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, and Equality Florida, an LGBT advocacy group, issued advisories warning travelers of the dangers of visiting Florida, a state one Democratic strategist says is becoming a “terrorist state.” The attacks will likely fail, but they illustrate how these groups now function solely as advocates for the narrow interests of the Democratic Party, rather than the interest of the groups they purport to champion.

The State Department sent an all-staff email Friday apologizing for misgendering people with its new pronoun system and offered counseling to parties who may have been offended by the systems error. The Spectator is exclusively publishing a copy of the email: The Washington Free Beacon first reported that the State Department's plan to allow employees to add pronouns to their emails backfired spectacularly. Apparently, the State Department's system began randomly assigning pronouns to employees rather than allowing them to choose their preferred pronouns. This "unfortunate mistake" led to "hurt" and "distress", according to the State Department's chief information officer Kelly Fletcher.

The main reason why I lined up in the pouring rain to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 was that he’d campaigned as a gay-friendly candidate. It wasn’t just his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. It was that he talked about gays as if we were human beings and not demons — fully equal to our heterosexual brothers and sisters. Back then, for gay Americans, every new election cycle meant one thing for sure: we’d have to gird ourselves for a fresh round of gay-bashing by presidential hopefuls. Clinton seemed to promise a new era in politics, when our very existence would no longer be an issue. Well, Clinton won the election. And four years later he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. “Defense” as in defense from us.

We have all seen a sign, usually in a mom-and-pop business, declaring, “We reserve the right to refuse service to you.” In a free society, it is hard to argue with this assertion. Shouldn’t a business owner, landlord, or proprietor have the right to decide whom to serve to and whom to decline to serve? This is the essence of the freedom of association, which includes the reciprocal right to refrain from association. Or does it? In Colorado, cake artist Jack Phillips was threatened with draconian legal penalties for declining to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to his religious objections to such unions. In 2017, the Supreme Court granted Phillips a reprieve from his ordeal, but the litigation continues.

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation. At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.

An antihero, an allegation, a court case, a neo-Nazi. The Kevin Spacey trial has been a hell of a ride and it's barely begun. This week, Spacey has taken the stand as the first witness in his own defense in his sexual misconduct trial, brought forward by actor Anthony Rapp. Best known for his role in Star Trek: Discovery, Rapp claims that in 1986, Spacey, who was twenty-six at the time, invited Rapp, then fourteen, to his New York home. He alleges that Spacey picked him up, laid him down on his bed, grabbed his buttocks and pressed his groin into his body without his consent. Rapp first made his allegation in October 2017. In the eyes of the public, Spacey went from antihero to villain.