Happy Hour News

As the late and great Molly Ivins (blessed be her memory) told us,  don’t listen to Republicans words, look a their record. We submit into evidence:

In June 2020, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workplace discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity was illegal, Alaska quickly moved to follow suit.

It published new guidelines in 2021 saying Alaska’s LGBTQ protections now extended beyond the workplace to housing, government practices, finance and “public accommodation.” It updated the website of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights to explicitly say it was illegal to discriminate against someone because of that person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The executive director for the state commission co-wrote an essay describing the ruling as a “sea change under Alaska law for LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights to be free from discrimination.”

But a year later, the commission quietly reversed that position. It deleted language from the state website promising equal protections for transgender and gay Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints. Only employment-related complaints would now be accepted, and investigators dropped any non-employment LGBTQ civil rights cases they had been working on.

The Republican project to roll back everyone’s Constitutional and civil rights continues apace. Don’t take anything for granted, because they are coming for it, and for you. No one predicted at the start of this millennium that abortion rights would be rolled back, voting rights abridged, free speech is in the review window (certainly in Floriduh and likely to be exported elsewhere soon) , and now they are coming after everyone else. The goal certainly appears to be  a straight, white, cis male Christian theocracy.

First the Nazis came for the trade unions, and I punched the Nazis because I already read the goddamn poem and know how it ends. Always punch the Nazi. Always.