Iowa Meteorologist Started Talking About Climate Change On Newscasts. Then Came The Harassment
“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically.”
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The harassment started to intensify as TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger did more reporting on climate change during local newscasts — outraged emails and even a threat to show up at his house.
Gloninger said he had been recruited, in part, to “shake things up” at the Iowa station where he worked, but backlash was building. The man who sent him a series of threatening emails was charged with third-degree harassment. The Des Moines station asked him to dial back his coverage, facing what he called an understandable pressure to maintain ratings.
“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
So, on June 21, the 38-year-old announced that he was leaving KCCI-TV — and his 18-year career in broadcast journalism altogether.
Gloninger’s experience is all too common among meteorologists across the country who are encountering reactions from viewers as they tie climate change to extreme temperatures, blizzards, tornadoes and floods in their local weather reports. For on-air meteorologists, the anti-science trend that has emerged in recent years compounds a deepening skepticism of the news media.
In a recent court decision, a judge has blocked an Arkansas law that would have allowed librarians to be criminally charged if they provide access to “harmful” materials to minors. The law, which was set to take effect, has been met with widespread criticism from free speech advocates and library associations, who argue that it infringes on First Amendment rights and imposes undue censorship on public libraries.
FILE – Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), looks at a book in the main branch of the public library in downtown Little Rock, Ark., on May 23, 2023. Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday, July 29.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday.
U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.
A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged.
The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case.
The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.
“The question we had to ask was — do Arkansans still legally have access to reading materials? Luckily, the judicial system has once again defended our highly valued liberties,” Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU in Arkansas, said in a statement.
The lawsuit comes as lawmakers in an increasing number of conservative states are pushing for measures making it easier to ban or restrict access to books. The number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the U.S. last year was the highest in the 20 years the American Library Association has been tracking such efforts.
Laws restricting access to certain materials or making it easier to challenge them have been enacted in several other states, including Iowa, Indiana and Texas.
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in an email Saturday that his office would be “reviewing the judge’s opinion and will continue to vigorously defend the law.”
The executive director of Central Arkansas Library System, Nate Coulter, said the judge’s 49-page decision recognized the law as censorship, a violation of the Constitution and wrongly maligning librarians.
“As folks in southwest Arkansas say, this order is stout as horseradish!” he said in an email.
“I’m relieved that for now the dark cloud that was hanging over CALS’ librarians has lifted,” he added.
Cheryl Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, said the organization is “thrilled” about the decision. She said enforcing this law “is likely to limit the free speech rights of older minors, who are capable of reading and processing more complex reading materials than young children can.”
The Arkansas lawsuit names the state’s 28 local prosecutors as defendants, along with Crawford County in west Arkansas. A separate lawsuit is challenging the Crawford County library’s decision to move children’s books that included LGBTQ+ themes to a separate portion of the library.
The plaintiffs challenging Arkansas’ restrictions also include the Fayetteville and Eureka Springs Carnegie public libraries, the American Booksellers Association and the Association of American Publishers.
Florida is on the cusp of implementing the New Protections of Medical Conscience Law, effective July 1st. This legislation empowers healthcare providers to deny care to patients based on their moral, religious, or ethical beliefs, aiming to safeguard providers’ conscience rights. However, this law carries profound implications, including protections for those claiming conscience exemptions and potential conflicts between personal beliefs and evidence-based healthcare. This article explores the ramifications of this law on patient care and the healthcare system at large.
The New Florida Protections of Medical Conscience Law will take effect July 1st, and will allow providers to deny care to patients based on their own moral, religious, and ethical beliefs. This has far reaching effects, and people claiming conscience exemptions are largely protected from retaliation from their employers and organizations they are involved in. A nurse doesn’t like the med they’re giving? They don’t have to. Pharmacist doesn’t believe in a treatment? They don’t have to dispense it. Your primary care provider doesn’t think mental health conditions are real? No referral to psych for you. The implications of this are far reaching and promote a healthcare system that is based on feelings versus science.
Starting July 1st, Florida is set to enact the new Protections of Medical Conscience Law, a legislation that grants healthcare providers the authority to refuse care to patients when their decisions are driven by moral, religious, or ethical beliefs. This law, while intending to safeguard providers’ conscience rights, is poised to have substantial repercussions across the healthcare landscape. One significant aspect of this law is its provision to protect those claiming conscience exemptions from potential retaliation by their employers or affiliated organizations, ensuring they can act in accordance with their beliefs without fear of adverse consequences.
Under the forthcoming legislation, scenarios could emerge where healthcare professionals, such as nurses and pharmacists, exercise their rights to withhold treatment or medications that conflict with their personal convictions. For instance, if a nurse objects to administering a particular medication due to moral concerns, they will have the legal grounds to abstain from doing so. Likewise, a pharmacist who has reservations about a specific treatment can refuse to dispense it. Furthermore, this law also extends to primary care providers who might, based on their beliefs, decline to refer patients with mental health conditions to psychiatric specialists, raising questions about the balance between individual conscience and evidence-based healthcare.
The implications of the Florida Protections of Medical Conscience Law are extensive, as it introduces a dynamic that prioritizes personal convictions over established scientific practices in the healthcare system. While it offers a safeguard for healthcare providers’ ethical beliefs, it simultaneously raises concerns about the potential impact on patient care, access, and the overall quality of the healthcare system. Balancing the protection of individual conscience with the overarching goal of providing evidence-based and comprehensive healthcare will likely remain a topic of considerable debate and scrutiny in the state of Florida and beyond.
A mob attacked and forced the cancellation of the Tbilisi Pride Festival in Georgia, underscoring the challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community. The incident highlights the ongoing struggle for acceptance and the need for greater protection of LGBTQ+ rights.
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Hundreds of opponents of gay rights on Saturday swarmed the site of an LGBT festival in the capital of the country of Georgia, vandalizing the stage, setting fires and looting the event’s bar.
Deputy Georgian Interior Minister Aleksandre Darakhvelidze said participants in the Tbilisi Pride Fest were safely evacuated from the scene. Festival organizers called on people not to come to the lakeside park where the event was to be held.
Georgian news media estimated about 5,000 people marched toward the site. Many of them waved Georgian flags and carried religious icons.
Animosity toward sexual minorities is strong in Georgia, which is predominantly Orthodox Christian, and some previous LGBT events have met violent disruptions.
Darakhvelidze said police tried to obstruct the protesters but could not hold all of them back.
But the event organizers criticized police as ineffectual, saying in a statement: “The police did not block the access road to the festival site in order to prevent an aggressive group. The police did not use proportional force against the attackers.”
Texas to become largest state in U.S. to ban puberty blockers and other gender-affirming care for teens
Pediatric endocrinologist Ximena Lopez worries for her young patients as she closes her clinic in Dallas that offered gender-affirming care to those under 18. With Texas banning that treatment, transgender teenagers are ‘livid’ and left without options. (Jason Burles/CBC)
From her now near-empty home in the Dallas suburb of Plano, with moving boxes stacked high in the garage, pediatric endocrinologist Ximena Lopez says she never thought she’d see this day.
Fearing violence that could target her family — a response by some to the type of medical treatment she offers — Lopez is closing her health clinic, selling her house and fleeing Texas for California.
“I don’t feel safe,” she said. “With so many people with guns [who] have gone to protest against me, or our clinic … armed.”
She adds, “I’m afraid of leaving my son home alone, and I don’t want to live like that.”
For years, Lopez has operated a clinic at a Dallas medical centre that offers what’s known as gender-affirming care for young people. It’s aimed at aiding and comforting transgender teens.
Treatment includes recurrent counselling and — controversially — medication that temporarily blocks puberty.
In America, it’s an extremely divisive program.
Amid rising anti-trans sentiment in the U.S., protesters rally for the International Transgender Day of Visibility in Tucson, Arizona on March 31. (Rebecca Noble/Reuters)
Nearly two dozen U.S. states, mostly Republican-led, have now taken steps to ban the treatment. (Some of those bans have been successfully challenged in court. Civil rights advocates pledge more challenges will follow.)
Separately, various state legislatures have put forward roughly 500 bills this year alone deemed by the American Civil Liberties Union as being anti-LGBTQ, including restrictions on bathroom use, pronouns, drag performances and education.
Civil libertarians describe it as a growing wave of intolerance in the U.S. targeting that community and medical providers such as Lopez.
Texas passed its bill banning gender-affirming care for teens this spring after a raucous debate, with vocal protests by the program’s supporters.
The new law takes effect in September.
Lopez and others underline that the treatment is decisively evidence-based, and she believes in it deeply. She calls it “one of the most important things I’ve done in my life.”
But opponents have called her a child abuser and a Nazi. Some have said she “should die in hell,” leaving Lopez frightened, frustrated and angry.
“The whole state has become crazy,” said Lopez. It “is right now full of hate.”
“I felt like things were evolving with society, with progress. Now we are going backwards,” she said.
“It has become unbearable.”
Patients caught in the crosshairs
Chief among those caught in the crosshairs are the patients of Lopez. When she moves to California, where her treatment remains legal, her patients in Texas will face dwindling access to medications and no easy path for direct care.
Most of those contacted directly by CBC News said they strongly support Lopez and her work but were afraid to speak out publicly, worried about stigma and violence that could target them.
But on agreement to withhold their surname to reduce the risk, parents Kristen and Wes and daughter Audrey sat down with CBC News at their home northeast of Dallas to talk about all of it. They strongly wanted others to know what Audrey has gained from her time with Lopez and what the new law in Texas now threatens.
In short, they believe Lopez and her program saved Audrey’s life.
In recent years, an Illinois city has emerged as a haven for the LGBTQ community seeking affordable housing options. With its inclusive and supportive environment, the city has attracted individuals and families looking for a place where they can feel accepted and celebrated for who they are. The local community has worked to create safe spaces, organize events, and establish support networks, making it a welcoming destination for LGBTQ individuals seeking both a sense of community and affordable living. As this trend continues, the city’s reputation as an LGBTQ-friendly haven with affordable housing options is likely to grow, benefiting both its residents and the broader community.
The dream of owning a home seems out of reach for millions of Americans, especially those in the LGBTQ+ community. But in Peoria, Illinois, Alex Martin owns a home at age 30 — something she never thought would be possible.
“I’m black. I’m trans, and I’m visibly so, and so having a space that, like, I made that I can just come in and recharge, I’m ready to face the world again,” she said.
And she’s not alone. In recent years, many LGBTQ+ people and people of color, who are statistically less likely to own homes because of discrimination and wealth gaps, are moving to the same city.
At first, they came from places like New York and Seattle, where home prices are sky-high. Now, many are coming from some of the 21 states that have passed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.
Last year, realtor Mike Van Cleve sold almost 80 homes, and nearly one-third were sold to people moving from out of state.
Angie Ostaszewski says she has almost single-handedly grown Peoria’s population by about 360 in three years thanks to TikTok.
“When I first started making TikToks about Peoria, it was about ‘improve your quality of life,'” she said. “But in the last six months especially, people are relocating here more for survival, and that’s such a different conversation.”
Ostaszewski also said she would like for her posts to help spread the word even further.
“I love the idea of shaking up that big cities are the only places that LGBTQ+ people can thrive,” she said.
Renton Sinclair’s mother is a former Miss Illinois who wants to force trans people out of public life. That’s exactly what makes her a rising star in MAGA World.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When Renton Sinclair texted his mom to say that he was transgender, she summoned a curse on the testosterone he was taking.
“I actually went after the medicine, and I cursed it in the name of Jesus, and I said, ‘No, you’re not going to work. I don’t know if you’re going to make her sick or whatever, but she’s going to have to go off that medicine,’” Tania Joy Gibson recounted recently during an episode of her podcast, repeatedly misgendering her child.
Renton doesn’t talk to Tania anymore. But Tania is always talking about Renton these days, on podcasts and livestreams and stages across the country, from California to South Dakota to Pennsylvania. She often tells the story of how God appeared to her in a dream before her first child was born, telling her what to name her child, a name with Biblical origins.
Renton is not that name. Tania refuses to call her son that name. In fact, she refuses to call her son her son. “It’s demonic,” Tania said about the existence of transgender people. “My daughter is in there, my daughter who was born and prophesied over and given the name from God is in there, but the Devil has taken and twisted her mind…”
In Tania’s telling, she is a victim, a mother who lost her child to the woke cult of “gender ideology.” She once told a crowd of 4,000 people that the gender-affirming care Renton and other trans people receive is the work of the literal devil, a scheme of mass sterilization to steal the “seed” of humanity.
She then broke into a rendition of “America The Beautiful,” a sea of middle-aged white people rising to their feet and placing red MAGA hats over their hearts.
Renton knows his mom has always loved the spotlight. She was, after all, a Miss America contestant, having been crowned Miss Illinois in 1996. Renton is horrified that, in a way, Tania has a new, albeit crueler, pageant. It’s a pageant similarly obsessed with gender. For Tania, it has higher stakes than a sash and crown: She believes it’s her divine destiny and duty to take part in the current conservative crusade to force trans people out of public life, a necessary step in paving the path for Christ’s return. As outlandish and self-aggrandizing as that may seem, Tania has allies in high places to help her on this holy mission.
Renton has watched as his mom has started to speak from the same stages as famous right-wing figures — Eric Trump, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and others — calling for laws that would force him to be everything he’s not.
He has watched his mom get on these stages and call him a “prodigal daughter” — a reference to the biblical story of the Prodigal Son, a wayward child destined to one day repent and return to God, return home, return to her.
But Renton is neither a prodigal nor a daughter. He’d like you to know he’s never going home to Tania because that home was hell — the type of hell he’s horrified that Republican legislators are trying to recreate for every trans kid in America.
He has forged a new home for himself. A new family, too. And if Tania Joy Gibson is going to keep giving speeches about him, then maybe it’s time for Renton Sinclair to speak up about her.
Renton Sinclair’s old diary in Kansas City. Renton kept the diary in a hole in his bed to keep it out of his parent’s detection.
Renton Sinclair reads through his old diary on his porch.
Renton was around 6 years old when his mom put him in a beauty pageant. He didn’t take to it. “I just stole a crown off the table,” he recalls, laughing. “We left, and I was in the back seat, and they were like, ‘Where did you get that?’ And I just said, ‘I took it.’”
The crown is somewhere in his place now, a two-story house with a front porch in a working-class part of Kansas City, Missouri, that Renton, 23, shares with his partner Greg Hyatt, their three dogs, and a large orange cat.
He has other artifacts from his childhood stuffed into a Home Depot moving box — old family photos, Christmas cards, and a beat-up blue journal, the first page inscribed with an urgent, all-caps message: “MOM, GO AWAY.” (Tania did not respond to a list of detailed questions for this story. “It would be inappropriate for me to discuss my daughter’s health issues or her experiences as an adolescent,” she wrote in an email where she deadnamed and repeatedly misgendered her child. “My only request is that you respect my daughter’s fragile condition and consider the harm the Huffington Post can bring her by making her problems known worldwide.”)
Court turns away case on law implemented over a century ago with explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting
The supreme court did not say why it was rejecting the case (it takes four votes on the court to grant review). Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA.
The US Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging Mississippi’s voting rights rules for individuals with felony convictions, upholding a policy that was established over a century ago with the explicit purpose of disenfranchising Black people. Those convicted of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose their right to vote, a list determined during the state’s 1890 constitutional convention with the intention of targeting crimes believed to be more likely committed by Black individuals. The convention’s president made it clear that the goal was to exclude Black people from voting. The list of disenfranchising crimes has remained largely unchanged since then, with some amendments made over the years.
It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen per cent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.
Challengers to the law argued that the policy was unconstitutional because it bore the “discriminatory taint” from the 1890 constitution. One of the plaintiffs was Roy Harness, a social worker in his late 60s who is permanently barred from voting because he was convicted of forgery decades ago. Forgery was one of the original crimes included in the list of disenfranchising offenses.
“It makes me feel bad. I’ve served my country, nation … got a degree and [I] still can’t vote, no matter what you do to prove yourself,” Harness told the Guardian in 2022.
Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back. To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications, and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.
Hardly anyone successfully makes it through the process. Between 1997 and 2022, an average of seven people successfully made it through the process each year, according to Blake Feldman, a criminal justice researcher in Mississippi.
Both a federal district judge and the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit upheld Mississippi’s policy. The modifications to the policy in 1950 and 1968, the fifth circuit noted, got rid of any discrimination in the original policy.
The supreme court did not say on Friday why it was rejecting the case (it takes four votes on the court to grant review) and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only two justices who noted their dissent from the denial. Jackson wrote an opinion saying the fifth circuit had committed “two egregious analytical errors that ought to be corrected”.
First, she wrote, even though Mississippi voters removed a crime in 1950 and added two more in 1968, the substance of many of the original crimes from 1890 remained intact. That means that the list is still discriminatory, she wrote in a dissent that was joined by Sotomayor.
“The “remaining crimes” from [the list of crimes] pernicious origin still work the very harm the 1890 Convention intended – denying Black Mississippians the vote,” she wrote.
She also took issue with a conclusion from the fifth circuit that the list of crimes would have been enacted absent discriminatory intent. A taskforce and Mississippi lawmakers studied whether to amend the list of crimes in the 1980s, nearly a century after the convention and chose not to. “Subsequent legislative attention to Mississippi’s election laws indicates that Section 241 was carefully evaluated before the legislature opted to leave it unchanged.
The suspect was killed in a confrontation with sheriff deputies.
Club Q shooting survivor remembers partner
GMA Digital shares the story of drag performer Wyatt Kent who lost his boyfriend during the devastating shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs.
A California clothing store owner and designer was killed allegedly by a gunman who confronted her about a rainbow Pride flag outside her business and shot her after making disparaging remarks about the display, according to police.
Laura Ann Carleton, a married mother of nine children, was killed Friday outside her clothing store in Cedar Glen, an unincorporated San Bernardino County community on the shores of Lake Arrowhead, according to a statement from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office.
The suspected killer, who has not been publicly identified, fled the crime scene on foot, but was found by sheriff’s deputies near Carleton’s store, where he was fatally shot in a confrontation, authorities said. The sheriff’s office said the assailant was armed with a handgun and refused orders to drop the weapon.
“When deputies attempted to contact the suspect, a lethal force encounter occurred and the suspect was pronounced deceased,” according to a statement from the sheriff’s office.
In 2023, anti-trans bills continue to be introduced across the country. We track legislation that seeks to block trans people from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, and the right to publicly exist.
We’re tracking 28 national anti-trans bills in the United States in 2023. This sweeping introduction of legislation at the federal level is unprecedented, seeking to impact access to healthcare, student athletics, the military, incarceration, and education.
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