Teachers voice concerns after Orange County previews ‘Don’t Say Gay’ impact to classrooms - "According to representatives of the county’s teacher association, teachers and staff members will be disallowed from wearing rainbow articles of clothing, including lanyards distributed by the district last year. Elementary-level teachers reported being discouraged from putting pictures of their same-sex spouse on their desk or talking about them to students.
"'Safe Space' stickers aimed at LGBTQ students may have to be removed from doors, teachers will have to report to parents if a student 'comes out' to them and they must use pronouns assigned at birth, regardless of what the parents allow, the CTA reported."
Queer Animals Are Everywhere. Science Is Finally Catching On.: The animal kingdom isn’t nearly as straight as you think. - "This ['bisexual advantage'] model is supported by a 2019 paper from a group of young scholars that notes that the earliest creatures wouldn’t have discriminated between sexes, because the earliest creatures didn’t have sexes. Therefore, aversion to homosexual sex would have had to specifically arise over the history of life, which this team of researchers finds unlikely, since the opportunity cost of same-sex sex is relatively low. Given that sexual monogamy is more rare than we once thought, having occasional sex or even forming a lifelong bond with a same-sex partner doesn’t mean an animal isn’t also reproducing. As one of the originators of this “ancestral state” hypothesis, Max Lambert, put it to me: 'Biologists told ourselves for so long that it must be unnatural. My research led to a good question: Why do queer things exist? The simple answer is that animal bisexuality is not costly. It was so biologically simple.'"
Supreme Court to review state legislatures’ power in federal elections: The justices will look next term at a case from North Carolina, where Republicans want to restore a redistricting map rejected by the state’s supreme court. - "The Supreme Court on Thursday said it will consider what would be a radical change in the way federal elections are conducted, giving state legislatures sole authority to set the rules for contests even if their actions violated state constitutions and resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering for congressional seats.
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"Judges have reined in Republican gerrymanders in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, for instance, and rejected maps drawn by Democratic-led legislatures in New York and Maryland.
"But the effort to have the Supreme Court examine what is called the independent state legislature doctrine has been a Republican-led effort. The GOP controls both houses of the legislature in 30 states."
Opinion The Supreme Court’s EPA ruling says: We’ll do whatever we want - "At a time like this, intellectual engagement with this court’s rulings, as committed as many liberals are to that project, begins to feel beside the point. We could delve into the flaws in the court’s reasoning, or the myriad ways the conservative justices’ alleged devotion to 'originalism' and 'textualism' has been revealed to be a sham — and many will, including dissenting liberal justices.
"But what the court’s conservative majority and the Republicans who cheer their decisions know is that only one thing matters: power.
"Conservatives have spent decades amassing it, now they have it, and they’re going to use it in every possible way to create the country they want.
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"The reason the court’s conservatives appointed themselves the decision-makers on climate policy is simple: They don’t like what the EPA did. No real constitutional or statutory violation was at issue. They simply believe, as part of their conservative ideology, that the government shouldn’t combat climate change, so they’re going to stop the government from doing it." [ed. note: it's all worth quoting, so just reread it]
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