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Yahoo
7 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Voters Ended This State's Abortion Ban. Then Conservative Judges Got Involved.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Missouri voters in November chose to pass a ballot measure establishing reproductive rights in a state with one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation. Last week, because of a decision by the Missouri Supreme Court, abortion is again unavailable in the state. What happened won't necessarily last, but it's reminder that ballot measures won't always be enough to protect reproductive rights. Within days of the passage of Amendment 3, Planned Parenthood and other plaintiffs challenged the vast array of bans and restrictions in the state. Missouri not only banned virtually all abortions from the moment of fertilization but also enforced a variety of what are called TRAP (targeted regulation of abortion provider) laws. Clinics must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 15 miles and comply with state licensure rules and the rules governing ambulatory surgical centers. Other rules make patients wait 72 hours before getting an abortion or prohibit the decision to have an abortion for certain reasons. These laws made a big difference in dismantling abortion access even before the overturning of Roe. At one point, Missouri had more than 25 clinics. Before the state's absolute ban went into effect, only one remained open. In rulings handed down in December and February, a judge in Jackson County, Missouri, Jerri Zhang, blocked most of the TRAP laws ahead of a trial scheduled for early 2026. Abortions soon resumed in the state, even if access remained limited. Only three clinics opened, and these facilities performed only a handful of surgical procedures before the state Supreme Court's order was issued. The attorney general, Andrew Bailey, one of the most committed abortion opponents in the nation, appealed directly to the state Supreme Court, seeking a special order called a writ of mandamus. He agreed that the state's absolute ban couldn't survive under Amendment 3, but argued that other restrictions—the TRAP laws—were different because they protected women from dangerous procedures. He also argued that women wouldn't be harmed if every clinic in Missouri shut down because they could get abortion pills online or travel out of state. The state Supreme Court allowed the restrictions to go back into effect, all because of a technicality—the trial judge had applied an older standard for granting a preliminary injunction that asks whether the plaintiffs have a fair chance of succeeding. Missouri courts, since 2008, have followed a more demanding standard set forth by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals focused on whether a plaintiff is likely to succeed at trial. Because the trial court cited the wrong case, abortion in Missouri came to a stop. The three open clinics canceled appointments and counseled patients on how to go out of state. This is hardly a fatal blow for the plaintiffs. The judge may well already believe that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed, and the plaintiffs might have a relatively easy time making that case. Amendment 3 provides broad protections for reproductive rights, requiring not only that a state law serves a compelling interest but also that the government uses the least restrictive means of achieving its goal. And the state can't discriminate against abortion by treating it differently from other medical procedures. The judge might conclude that there are less restrictive and more effective ways of protecting maternal health, or that TRAP laws don't do much to improve patient health at all, as the U.S. Supreme Court did before Roe was overturned in a case about similar Texas regulations. But what is happening in Missouri is still a sign about the limits of ballot measures. Missouri Republicans already have crafted a new ballot measure that voters will face, most likely in 2026. The proposal asks Missourians whether they want to 'ensure women's safety during abortions,' 'ensure parental consent for minors,' and 'allow abortions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, rape, and incest.' It would ban all abortions from fertilization in every other case—a fact that it doesn't advertise. For good measure, it also asks whether voters want 'to protect children from gender transition,' even though gender-affirming care for minors is already illegal in the state. That voters adopted Amendment 3 less than a year ago is doing nothing to dissuade the state GOP. The ballot effort may fail. Republicans in other states have a poor track record when they ask voters to make it harder to pass ballot measures. If politicians ignore a result that voters just reached, that might not be popular either. But abortion opponents in the state will have a way forward even if Republicans' latest gambit fails. The attorney general can argue that any abortion restriction should survive, even under Amendment 3, just as he has with the TRAP laws. He could repeat that abortion hurts women, or that the state has a compelling interest in protecting fetal life. The attorney general may even seek to establish that an embryo or fetus has constitutional rights. Five of the court's seven supreme court justices were nominated by Republicans, including four selected by the current governor, Matt Blunt, who has made his opposition to abortion central to his political career. The court barely allowed Amendment 3 on the ballot, choosing to do so by a margin of 4 to 3. Voters just ensured that two of the three dissenters will serve another 12-year term. State judges, not voters, are ultimately the ones who will decide what Amendment 3 means. They won't have much fear, when they face retention elections, that an unpopular vote will matter. State judicial incumbents have a high rate of success; the two judges Missourians just retained won well more than 60 percent of the vote. As long as Missouri elects Republican governors and retains judges regardless of their rulings, the Missouri Supreme Court will become more conservative, and Republicans will experiment with new restrictions and bans to see what the state Supreme Court will tolerate. All of this makes Amendment 3 a cautionary tale, even if the effects of the state Supreme Court's latest rulings will only be temporary. For supporters of reproductive rights, ballot measures like Amendment 3 are critical, but what happens after the vote is just as important.
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
You Might Think Trump Has Destroyed Gay Pride in Conservative America, It's Quite the Opposite.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For years, Andy Hansen has wanted Waverly, Iowa, to have its own Pride celebration. The queer and trans people living among the town's 11,000 residents can feel isolated from one another, and Hansen thought a Pride event would give them a chance to gel as a community. As chair of Waverly's Human Equity and Diversity Commission, Hansen wanted to help organize something that would suit the homespun, outdoorsy character of the municipality. 'We struggled with, if we are going to do something, how are we going to do it in small-town style that's uniquely Waverly?' they said. Nothing quite clicked, so the notion sat on the back burner. Then, last fall, a Waverly resident came to the commission with a proposal. What if, instead of a parade, they hosted a boat float during Pride month, with participants paddling in kayaks and canoes down the Cedar River that runs through town? Hansen thought it was a brilliant idea. And hosting Waverly's first Pride celebration began to seem even more urgent in February, when the Iowa governor signed a bill removing gender identity from the state's civil rights law, making Iowa the first state to rescind nondiscrimination protections from a previously protected class—in this case, trans people. That day, Hansen and their colleagues heard from several locals suddenly searching for a way to support LGBTQ+ Iowans. The timing was serendipitous: According to Hansen, the anti-trans turn from the legislature 'created a lot of momentum for the event.' But before the commission could even begin marketing the June boat float, a roadblock emerged. Fifteen pastors from across the county presented a letter to the Waverly City Council urging members to stop the Pride plans. The event stood to 'endorse morals and values that contradict … God-given truths regarding marriage and sexuality,' the letter read. Citing conservative media reports about other Pride events, it expressed concern that the boat float could result in 'indecent' or 'pornographic' behavior in a public place. Hansen was shocked by the pushback. 'My spirits were shaken a little bit,' they said. 'It was a bit of a reality check, because I personally haven't run into a lot of people expressing their disagreement for a long time.' But dozens of other residents spoke out in support of the boat float at a public meeting and in an online forum. The city council stood firm and refused to cancel the event. Then came another blow: A state bill targeting public diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives passed in May, threatening to prohibit Waverly's funding of the float. Hansen and their colleagues scrambled to come up with an alternate plan; local business owners said they'd gladly sponsor it instead. The DEI ban won't go into effect until July, so Waverly's city-funded Pride is safe for this year. But the ambitions of Hansen and their colleagues have grown beyond a single event. Now, they're determined to make Pride an annual happening, with enough private backing to insulate it from external politics. Across the country, a growing right-wing movement is placing LGBTQ+ people under attack. State legislatures have banned trans people from using bathrooms, playing sports, and accessing health care. Right-wing extremists have shown up at drag events with guns to intimidate attendees; one homophobe killed a California woman who hung a Pride flag outside of her business. The current Trump administration is ousting trans people from the military, inscribing their passports with incorrect gender markers, and attempting to make it illegal to help trans children. There is a sense in most queer communities that this is just the beginning, that the national tide is turning against us. Public support for anti-trans legislation has risen among Americans across the political spectrum, and major companies are trying to curry favor with Trump by ending policies that supported LGBTQ+ people. But even in this hostile climate, stories like Waverly's are everywhere. In some small towns and cities, queer and trans Americans are stepping up to organize their communities' very first Pride celebrations, eager to give their neighbors an afternoon of joyous release in a stressful time. In other places, far from the major metro areas with massive queer populations, Pride organizers are taking bold steps to combat local opposition and shore up safety measures amid mounting threats of violence. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive—why would new Prides spring up in small, conservative areas, when even Prides in big, liberal cities have lost corporate sponsors and considered advising trans travelers to reconsider their plans to visit? But you don't need the backing of business leaders to host a Pride event. Nor do you need the majority of your neighbors to endorse it. All you need is a few committed residents with a knack for party promotion and the chutzpah to overcome—or ignore—whatever opposition rears up in response. In Nampa, Idaho, it started out as a plan for a picnic. As volunteers at a local nonprofit for LGBTQ youth, Van Knapp and Tom Wheeler were looking for a way to make the community feel more welcoming for the young people they worked with. Last spring, they settled on the idea of hosting the town's first-ever Pride celebration: maybe 50 to 100 people in a park, some music, low-key vibes. In the three weeks they had to pull the event together, it swiftly snowballed into something bigger. There was a massive show of interest from residents wanting to attend, organizations wanting to set up tables, and vendors wanting to sell goods. Knapp, a queer parent of two queer kids, and Wheeler, a 28-year-old Boise real estate agent, were astounded by how ready Nampa seemed to make something major happen for Pride. They were less surprised by the backlash. With 114,000 residents, Nampa is the third-largest city in Idaho and less than half an hour from Boise by car, but it can feel a world away from the more liberal state capital. Recently, the Boise mayor and City Council voted in near unanimity to make the Pride flag an official city flag to circumvent a state law that would have made it illegal to fly the rainbow banner on city property. Meanwhile, in Canyon County, where Nampa sits, about 72 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election. 'We knew we were taking baseball bat to a beehive, because it's Canyon County,' Wheeler said. Pride events 'didn't happen because no one felt like it would be safe to do so.' Once residents got wind of the 2024 Pride plans, they took to social media and local news outlets to accuse the organizers of promoting immorality. Wheeler got threatening phone calls, and the mayor released a statement declaring that the event 'does not reflect the personal beliefs and convictions of myself, the Nampa City Council, and many living in Nampa.' But Knapp and Wheeler pushed ahead. They signed up performers and recruited local drag queens who'd never had the chance to perform in their hometown before. Their only disagreement was about whether to allow police to provide security for the event. Wheeler thought it was necessary, but Knapp was opposed: It felt ridiculous for such a small gathering and antithetical to the purpose of Pride, which commemorates a 1969 riot against police harassment at Manhattan's Stonewall Inn. Knapp and Wheeler spent hours talking to Nampa police and local FBI agents about how to ensure the safety of their guests. Eventually, it became clear that they had no choice but to involve law enforcement, because the threat of violence was immense. One year earlier, dozens of protesters showed up at a Pride event in Rexburg, Idaho, to falsely accuse drag performers of child sexual abuse. At least one had a loaded gun. The year before that, in 2022, 31 members of the white supremacist Patriot Front were arrested on their way to disrupt a Pride festival in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, armed with a smoke grenade, long metal poles, and a multipage plan to provoke a 'confrontational dynamic.' Knapp and Wheeler agreed to let police monitor the festival, and they didn't announce the drag show—possibly the most incendiary element for contemporary right-wing agitators—until the night before. On the day of the event last June, armed protesters did show up to make a scene, but they weren't allowed inside the fencing where about 4,000 festivalgoers enjoyed the first-ever Canyon County Pride. 'I was hoping to show my kids that we live in a safe space,' Knapp said. 'And the reality was, in the end, we did that.' The day was joyous, colorful, and gay—just what Knapp and Wheeler had hoped for. Many attendees approached Knapp with gratitude, saying they'd only known a handful of other LGBTQ+ people in Nampa before that day. One seventysomething lesbian couple said they'd moved from Nampa to a blue state 30 years ago, seeking a more affirming community. They returned just for the Pride event and were overcome with emotion by what they saw. 'I cried like 50 percent of the day,' Knapp said. This year, Canyon County Pride is going bigger. Instead of a three-hour event, it'll be a full eight-hour day, with three times as many vendors and even more drag queens. But Knapp and Wheeler are also beefing up security. They expect antagonists to show up in greater numbers because they'll have more time to plan, since organizers aren't slapping together the festival in three short weeks this time around. Out of the $30,000 they've fundraised, half is going to a top-tier private security team—more than twice as much as they spent on safety measures last year. And this time, Knapp and Wheeler are no longer hiding their plans for a drag show until the last minute. They're confident enough to advertise it from the outset. But Knapp and Wheeler sometimes struggle with the balance of confidence and caution required to plan a Pride in 2025. They followed a recent defamation case in Coeur d'Alene, in which a right-wing blogger posted a doctored video of a drag performer at a 2022 Pride event, claiming he'd exposed his genitals to minors. (He didn't, and a jury awarded him more than $1.1 million in damages.) So in Nampa, the fencing that surrounds the Pride festival in the park—three times bigger than last year's—will be covered in black privacy cloth, partially defeating the purpose of Pride as a public show of visibility and power. Privacy and safety have to come first. Knapp and Wheeler are also weighing the desire for a Pride that feels free and uninhibited with the knowledge that they're being scrutinized by people who wish them harm. It was seeing a person partying topless at last year's Canyon County Pride festival that gave a local politician the idea for a new bill strengthening public indecency laws, which could be used to target trans people. Organizers don't want to censor attendees, but they recognize that it's an alcohol-free, family-friendly event in a conservative county. So this year, they've established a simple set of rules: 'Wear a shirt and don't bring a gun,' Wheeler said. Still, when right-wing lawmakers show up for the next legislative session, 'there will probably be five more bills based off what they see or hear from Canyon County Pride.' All over the country, just like in Nampa, Pride organizers are doubling down on celebration in the face of right-wing threats. In Franklin, Tennessee, two years after conservative residents tried to shut down a Pride festival held at a local farm, organizers are expecting 10,000 attendees at this June's event. Queers in Morehead, Kentucky, recently held their second annual Pride celebration in spite of a disparaging cancellation campaign from a local church. And in Coeur d'Alene, the site of the most famous right-wing assault on Pride, the annual event has rapidly expanded since the 2022 Patriot Front plot, with paid staff, year-round programming, and more vendors, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees each year. In Prattville, Alabama, organizers staged the first-ever Pride—a small, unpermitted picnic by a creek—in 2023, only to have it ambushed by a white nationalist group. 'So we kind of said, 'Hold our beer,' ' said Caryl Lawson, vice president of Prattville Pride. 'Y'all thought you were gonna scare us and intimidate us into never doing this again in Prattville, and you really just lit a fire under us to want to do it bigger and better.' The next year, they rented space in a public park and held a 2,500-person festival. A solitary protester showed up and began shouting homophobic slogans just as the sound guy was setting up the speakers. He asked Lawson how loud she wanted the music for the day. 'And I said, 'Just loud enough to drown that guy out!' ' Lawson recalled. Each obstacle has only made Lawson and her fellow organizers more dogged in their promotion of Prattville Pride. When the city tried to keep a Prattville Pride float out of the local Christmas parade this winter, they got a federal judge to issue an injunction ensuring their place in the festivities. When officials couldn't promise them they'd be able to tape off an area of the park to keep protesters out of this year's Pride event, they found a different park. The whole experience has 'turned me from an outspoken advocate into a full-blown activist,' Lawson said. For another look at how Prides are adapting to the current political moment, head to Fayetteville, North Carolina. The president of Fayetteville Pride, Krystal Maddox, has lived there for nearly all of her 64 years and began coming out as trans when she was 21. She has weathered all the highs and lows of queer life in a Southern military town. Maddox recalls watching Army gays celebrate the adoption of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' back when requiring queer people to serve in secret was seen as an improvement on a total ban—then reeling with shock when a Fort Bragg soldier shot 10 people in a Fayetteville restaurant, killing four, because he was enraged by the idea of gays in the armed forces. When Fayetteville hosted its first Pride in 2018, spurred in part by Trump's first election, Maddox was elated to attend. Seeing hundreds LGBTQ+ people in her hometown laughing and dancing together felt so deeply healing, it gave her chills. In her trove of treasured memories, she places that day alongside seeing the White House lit up with rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court decision that made gay marriage legal nationwide. Both were 'things I never thought I would see in my lifetime,' she said. For the most part, Maddox said, it got easier to be queer in Fayetteville over the decades, because 'nobody was paying attention to you if you minded your own business.' But today, it seems like the arc of LGBTQ+ progress has folded back in on itself. 'I've seen us have drag shows and clubs and bars that were open seven days a week, to the current situation where we don't have one at all,' she said. 'I've seen lots of support, and I see now where people are scared and don't want to attend events out of fear.' After her joyful experience at the first Fayetteville Pride, Maddox joined the board. This year, she is making some major changes to protect Pridegoers from the likes of the Proud Boys, who have strutted through past years' events with their faces covered, taking photos and videos of drag performers. To maintain operational security, Pride planning meetings are now RSVP-only, and attendees must be personally admitted at the meeting location. And for the first time, in a major departure from other Prides around the country, the festival will be held at an indoor venue. The change-up has a few benefits besides security. (For one thing, no one's mad about air conditioning in the heat of summer.) But, Maddox said, 'safety is the number one reason we're doing it, because it's what we're hearing the most about from festivalgoers—that they didn't feel as safe as they did in years past.' Thousands of guests will traverse metal detectors and carry clear bags to make it past security checkpoints, all in the hopes of keeping out interlopers seeking a fight or photo ops for right-wing propaganda. The advent of extreme security measures at Pride events is a shameful sign of our increasingly repressive times, which have required organizers to make compromises on their ideals and alienate some potential attendees by involving law enforcement. But in a certain light, the adaptation of Prides to the dangers of 2025 looks heartening: The endurance of these annual events that prioritize pure-hearted merriment and connection as highly as political activism is proof of the limitations of anti-LGBTQ+ politics. Legislation and intimidation can make queer and trans lives harder in countless ways. Lawmakers can wrest control of our bodies. Christian nationalist militias can make us fear for our lives. Judges can dissolve our legal bonds to our partners and children. But there are essential parts of the queer experience that those who despise us can't touch. They can't stop LGBTQ+ communities from supporting and sustaining one another with art, whimsy, and a good dance floor. And they can't roll back the cultural progress that has resulted in newly out young people finding more supportive family members, teachers, and care providers than ever before. Trans and queer people are hungry for places to come together, and we don't disperse at the first sign of danger. We find alternative funding sources; we move our gatherings indoors. 'All of the fear, and the anxiety, and the reality of living in constant uncertainty and unsafety—we're going to put all that on hold, just for a day,' Knapp said. We adjust, carry on, and turn the music louder.
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Pride Is Good for Business. But Corporate America Is Not Upholding Its End of the Bargain.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In a quiet, rural enclave, Clark County Pride is a big deal. The annual parade and festival, which is in its fifth year, is held in La Center, a southwest Washington town of 4,300 that doesn't have a stoplight. There are no hotels and only three restaurants . Still, about 100 people attended the event when it was held for the first time in 2021, braving record-breaking heat to march through the city's modest downtown. To accommodate the 100-degree temperature, organizers installed five different cooling tents—complete with water stations and copious misters—along the 0.9-mile walk. Rather than marching, some locals participated in the parade from the shelter of their air-conditioned vehicles. Attendance has since ballooned to nearly 700 people, not including the dozens of vendors who cater the event. For the businesses who provide food and beverages or sell rainbow flags and jewelry, many have reported that the festival is their single most profitable day of the year. 'Our vendors are so excited to come back because they do so well,' said Malerie Plaugher, Clark County Pride's board secretary. 'Folks who come and want to celebrate Pride rurally are so relieved to have a space that feels friendly, open, and safe that they're excited to spend their money among family.' While Clark County Pride is still much too small to survey the event's economic impact on the local community, all available data indicates that its vendors aren't alone in finding Pride to be a lucrative endeavor. Some of the larger Pride events have estimated that their financial footprint spans the tens of millions: A 2019 study tabulated that Los Angeles Pride generated $74 million in revenue for Southern California, and St. Pete Pride, Florida's most-attended Pride festival, brought in an estimated $60 million in 2023. Similar reports have found that Twin Cities Pride, in Minnesota, and Charlotte Pride, in North Carolina, contribute about $13.4 million and $15.8 million, respectively, to their local economies. San Diego Pride, which is typically the city's largest single-day event each year, is estimated to have a $30 million impact. Despite the fact that Pride remains big money, corporate America is increasingly unwilling to return the investment. Prides across the country have reported a sharp decrease in sponsorships for their 2025 events amid threats from the Trump administration against companies that outwardly embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. On the high end, San Francisco Pride and WorldPride—the latter of which is set for the District of Columbia this month—have lost nearly $300,000 and $260,000, respectively, in sponsorships from corporate partners of previous years, and NYC Pride is down a reported $750,000. Some Pride festivals have been forced to scale back their events while they grapple with a new reality, and others worry that, someday in the near future, they may no longer have the money to exist at all. These funding deficits were nearly universal among Pride organizers I contacted for this story, reporting shortages that account for significant chunks of their overall budget. Representatives for Omaha Pride, in Nebraska, and Wynwood Pride, in Florida, each estimate that sponsorships are down by 50 percent in 2025, while a spokesperson for California's Long Beach Pride says that contributions from businesses have plummeted by 40 percent. Hampton Roads Pride, in Virginia, was forced to cut $80,000 from this year's budget—amounting to a little less than 20 percent of its 2024 expenditures—to keep pace with reduced commitments from corporate sponsors. These funding woes simply do not square with the considerable money that Pride groups bring in for their communities. The estimates cited by LGBTQ+ groups themselves are actually on the conservative side: When I contacted a representative for Columbus Pride—which brings in an estimated $16 million to $18 million for Ohio's economy each year—they said that their data is based almost solely on local hotel stays during the month of June. It's hard for them to survey the more intangible externalities of Pride, such as a surge in local restaurant bookings, bottled-water sales, or even temporary job creation. Airbnb, for one, has estimated that Pride festivals bring in $77 million nationally for its hosts each year, while Lyft has reported that Pride has an even bigger impact on the demand for rideshares than a Taylor Swift concert does. 'It's not something that Pride organizations always talk about because, for so long, there's been this diametrically opposed sensibility that Pride can't be something that also impacts revenue generation because it's protest—but it is both,' said Densil Porteous, executive director of Stonewall Columbus. 'Our opportunity as a community to demonstrate our power through the economic impact that we can make in a region is also part of that protest. It says: Look at what we can do. Look at what smart business is. Smart business is being welcoming, open, and inclusive.' Although Durham Pride generates about $2.7 million in annual revenue off 100,000 attendees, co-founder Trey Roberts says that many of the major tech companies based in North Carolina won't even return his calls. This year's weeklong roster of events—which includes a fashion showcase and a poetry open-mic night—is being funded almost entirely through the proceeds from a local charity 5K race. 'It's like a guarded fence,' Roberts said of trying to attract corporate sponsors. 'We have no clue how to break the barricade to get in there. It's crazy, because Pride feels like it every year gets bigger, but we're also trying to get more resources so we could do more. We're building ourselves up where everyone's expecting us to get bigger and bigger, and we're just struggling: Can you help us out? Can we find sponsors and donors? Can we get grants?' The cold shoulder that Pride groups have received is coming from not just Wall Street but also local businesses, establishments that would appear, on paper, to be natural partners for their programming. Although Come Out With Pride is one of the few major draws to Orlando's downtown district—as the city's tourism is largely centered on Disney World, out in the suburbs—organizers have struggled in recent years to get prominent restaurants and bars to sponsor the event. In this case, much of the hostility stems from fear of retribution, not from the White House but from the DeSantis administration: In 2023 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a draconian bill restricting public drag performances (legislation that was declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court this month). Even before the drag ban was enacted, at least one Florida city, Port St. Lucie, pulled the plug on its Pride event to avoid prosecution. As with Clark County Pride, many of the Orlando business leaders who have been hesitant to show up to the table have confessed that Pride is their best day of the year. Tatiana Quiroga, the executive director of Come Out With Pride, told me that after organizers were forced to change the parade route in 2024 due to the challenges of accommodating 230,000 attendees, the organization received 'major backlash' from businesses that were along the old path. Those numerous complaints, Quiroga says, were yet another indication of how valuable Pride is to the very people who don't want to fund it. 'We were like, 'Oh, wow, so you do need us. At the same time, where's your sponsorship? I'm really glad that you were standing room only at this wine bar or this brunch place, but there's no conversation with you. You have absolutely no representation in our festival whatsoever,' ' she said. 'Where is that mutual amount of support? We're the actual nonprofit having to support their business, when it's not a mutual relationship.' These roadblocks affect not merely Pride festivals but entire communities. Mallory Pollock, now the executive director of Wyoming's Casper Pride, joked that when the organization held its first festival back in 2017, she could turn her camera horizontally and capture the whole event in the same photo. But this year, Casper Pride will take over the city's entire downtown area with a week's worth of events—a lineup that will include a drag show, karaoke night, and bowling night. Although organizers have yet to see a reduction in funding this year, any losses in sponsorship or vendor participation would ripple across not just the town but the wider state. The festival is part of the And Let Live coalition, a network by which Pride groups in Wyoming share funding and resources with one another. One organization's being defunded would be extremely detrimental for each of ALL's members. Casper Pride not only brings revenue from LGBTQ+ people and allies to Wyoming, but it also keeps those dollars in the community. The city of 58,000 recently opened its first queer resource center, which offers monthly support groups, a food pantry, and microgrants. 'We've had people say that they moved here because of that, and I would like to think that we also keep people here because of it,' Pollock said. 'The surroundings are really hard, and so a lot of people tend to leave for bigger places with more to offer.' Without that support in place, Pollock worries, members of Casper's LGBTQ+ community might move away—and take their business with them. It goes without saying that Pride is about much more than money. It's about creating spaces where LGBTQ+ people can be visible but also feel safe to be in community, a moment to live without fear and luxuriate in collective joy. But the paradox is that those opportunities will be curtailed unless Pride itself is able to be economically sustainable. Some groups, like Utah's SLC Pride and Ohio's Cincinnati Pride, have pushed to end relationships with businesses that have backtracked on their support for the LGBTQ+ community, shifting to alternative fundraising models to help make up the gap. Jonathan Swindle, board president of the Mosaic Project of South Texas, said that he has never had the backing of Fortune 500 companies to put on Pride Corpus Christi, as there aren't very many in the area. 'That's South Texas,' he said. But Pride organizers say they remain committed to finding long-term solutions that uplift and celebrate the community, while also creating space for the most vulnerable. The first Clark County Pride was thrown together on extremely short notice, after its founders learned that LGBTQ+ students at the local middle and high schools were being bullied. Being in such a small town, Plaugher says, Pride is the only opportunity many queer youth in the area have to find their people and feel as if they aren't alone. At last year's festival, an eighth grader came up to Plaugher and told her, 'I made my very first friend today.' 'It's become so big and loud—in the joyful, happy way,' Plaugher said of Clark County Pride. 'To folks who are ignorant of what it looks like to celebrate Pride and what the meaning of it is, I would like to see them be unable to deny the fact that we are safe, happy, and courageous. I would like the naysayers to be unable to deny the positive impacts that our community has on the area.'
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Let's Unpack One of the More Disturbing Things Stephen Miller Has Said
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Ever since President Donald Trump took office, he's been violating the law left and right to reach his mass deportation goals—and he's faced an onslaught of lawsuits, a majority of which he's losing. In private, Trump has said he wants to deport 1 million immigrants in 2025, according to the Washington Post—but in his first 100 days, the numbers suggested he was not deporting people on a greater scale than past presidents. The judiciary—including judges appointed by Trump himself during his first term—has been the main line of defense against his lawless actions. The courts have particularly been a thorn in the Trump administration's side when it comes to the case of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the administration admitted was deported by mistake. Multiple federal judges ruled Abrego Garcia must be brought back home, and even the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to 'facilitate' his return, yet the father of three remains in El Salvador's CECOT megaprison. The Supreme Court went even further earlier this month, blocking Trump's efforts to continue the illegal extradition flights and declaring that the affected migrants had not been granted their full due process rights during the administration's attempts to rush deportation flights to third-party countries. Instead of respecting court orders, the Trump administration is now eyeing a workaround: Cutting out the courts by suspending habeas corpus. The administration has its eye on habeas corpus because it's a legal principle that requires the government to come before a judge and provide a reason for detaining and imprisoning people. In recent weeks, Trump officials have begun suggesting that they can simply revoke habeas corpus. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters that 'the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that's an option we're actively looking at.' During a recent congressional hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem incorrectly defined habeas corpus as 'a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their rights.' The executive branch, though, does not have the unilateral authority to simply pause habeas corpus as it pleases. In order to understand what habeas corpus is and how it can be suspended—if it can at all, I spoke with Steve Vladeck, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of the Substack newsletter One First. Habeas corpus gives anyone who believes they have been unlawfully detained by the government a way to contest the legality of their detention. It was adopted in British common law and was formally codified under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, where it remains in effect in England today. When the founders established the legal foundation of the United States, they brought this concept along with them. Today, habeas corpus is enshrined under Article 1 of the Constitution. It comes before the Bill of Rights, which, Vladeck believes, suggests that the founders wanted to prioritize establishing the existence of habeas while also specifying the only circumstance under which it could be taken away. 'What habeas really is, it's a guarantee of judicial review. That is, in some respects, more than just a right,' Vladeck told me. 'That is actually a fundamental constraint on the government, where even if you had no other rights, you would be entitled to have a court say so, as opposed to the executive branch.' The Trump administration wants to cut off immigration detainees' pathway for judicial review, essentially clearing the way for deportations without interference from the courts. Suspending habeas corpus is technically possible under the suspension clause, which states that 'the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.' This clause has only been invoked four times in U.S. history: in 1861 during the Civil War; in 1871 when the Ku Klux Klan was committing mass violence against Black Americans in the South; in 1905 during a rebellion against the American military in the Philippines while it was still a U.S. territory; and in 1941, in the midst of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The suspension clause can only be invoked by Congress, not the president, despite what the Trump administration has said. It also specifically limits the circumstances under which habeas can be suspended, rather than revoking habeas corpus in its entirety, because the founders wanted to ensure that judicial review of detention cases could still continue even in a true emergency. The reality is that the Trump administration is likely hoping that 'no one actually pays close attention to the text,' Vladeck said, 'because it's not just that we're not actually being invaded by anyone right now, it's that even the suspension clause does not authorize suspensions by the president, ever.' It's worth noting that even during the War of 1812 when Great Britain invaded the U.S., the suspension clause was not invoked—it's meant only for truly egregious national emergencies. Right now, of course, Trump is trying every potential legal tool in the kit, as further demonstrated by his use of the Alien Enemies Act, a separate wartime law passed in 1798 that's only ever been invoked three times in U.S. history. 'I think what the Trump administration is counting on is that it can sort of discuss suspending habeas corpus at a high enough level of abstraction that it all appears to blur together,' Vladeck explained, 'when the legal authorities are in fact much, much more nuanced and much, much more specific.' Miller said that whether the Trump administration tries to suspend habeas corpus or not depends on 'whether the courts do the right thing or not.' He was basically saying the quiet part out loud: that it's a threat from the executive branch to twist the arm of the judiciary. Since Trump began his second term, habeas corpus has been critical in keeping his administration in check. It is the first and only legal pathway for challenging immigration detention. It's how Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish international student at Tufts University, was able to get out of immigration detention in Louisiana, along with Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who is a lawful green-card holder. Cristian Farias, a courts reporter for Vanity Fair, told Slate's Dahlia Lithwick that 'to file a habeas petition is basically what ensures that you won't be sent to a black site or put in a prison without ever getting out.' Considering also that there have been at least three cases where a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to bring back wrongfully deported immigrants, habeas is the sole lifeline for detainees to get back their freedom. 'Without habeas, there'd be no mechanism by which someone could challenge the Trump administration's designation that they are, for example, an alien enemy,' Vladeck said. 'There's nothing to stop the government from pointing to any of us, citizen or noncitizen, and saying, you know, 'You are an alien enemy'—or an undocumented immigrant.'
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One of Trump's Weirdest Obsessions Is Spiraling Out of Control
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In my 30 years of studying the literature and culture of Louis XIV, I never thought I would see an American president actually model himself on the Sun King, to the point that a recent essay in the New York Times declared the current Oval Office décor a 'gilded rococo hellscape.' Along with the anti-royalist sentiment that used to characterize U.S. politics, I always assumed that most Americans had no real stomach for the hubris and sheer garishness that defined the style and surroundings of France's most famous king. When I've taken students to Versailles, I've noticed that as much as they admire the size and ambitiousness of the château that Louis XIV declared the center of French government, they nonetheless agree with the caustic assessment of the Duke de Saint-Simon, Louis XIV's greatest critic: It's 'a masterpiece of bad taste.' In fact, the White House is the third residence that Trump has tried to make resemble Versailles. Interior designer Angelo Donghia incorporated some gold elements into his initial vision for the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower, and Henry Conversano added much more in a later redesign, with the result being something New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger described in a 2017 talk as a 'pseudo-Versailles in the sky.' But it's less well known that the ghosts of Versailles also haunt Mar-a-Lago, where, when adding a ballroom, Trump ditched the Spanish theme of the original building and chose instead to mimic the Sun King's Hall of Mirrors. A 2007 appraisal of Mar-a-Lago made for the Trump Organization by the firm Callaway and Price described the ballroom as 'in the style of Versailles, in a Louis XIV gold and crystal finish, with huge crystal chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one wall.' Apparently it's this ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, with its $7 million of gold leaf, that Trump wants now to re-create in the East Wing; the gold cherubs have already been brought up from Florida. No doubt, if it's ever completed, this third Versailles revamp will have a ceiling painting to rival the original by Charles Le Brun depicting Louis XIV's military victories. (Perhaps, instead, 'Donald Trump vanquishes DEI'?) More disturbing, of course, than the president's taste is the administration's view of executive authority. This evokes the absolutist rhetoric of Louis XIV's worst sycophants, which Saint-Simon despised. One can almost hear the echoes of the Versailles courtiers in the Trump Cabinet's paeans to the president's leadership, and Saint-Simon's description of the Sun King's appetite for adulation, found in the writer's secret Mémoires, published after his death, surely suggests our own leader's vulnerability to such praise: 'The self-effacement, the self-abasement, the look of admiration, subjugation, supplication, most of all the look of negation except through him, were the sole means of pleasing him.' (That translation is my own.) Saint-Simon knew that when kings embrace their own flattery, they open themselves to manipulation, and the writer viewed Louis XIV as an illusory absolutist who was in fact controlled by fawning scoundrels. Sort of like if an American president were to be hoodwinked by a Russian dictator offering him a complimentary portrait. The irony is that Donald Trump is not governing like Louis XIV, and we would probably be better off if he did. The Sun King massively invested in science, technology, the arts, and intellectual activity; Trump disdains them all. Louis XIV created the Royal Academy for Sciences, the Royal Academy for Painting and Sculpture, the Royal Academy for Dance; Trump cuts the National Institutes of Health, bullies the Kennedy Center, threatens Big Bird. Louis XIV built roads, paved streets, carved canals, constructed ports; Trump freezes infrastructure spending and may decimate the National Park Service. You don't get Versailles by firing state workers. No, in terms of incompetence, ideology-driven decisionmaking, and a deliberate lack of imagination, the president resembles less Louis XIV and more his great-great-grandson—a man who became king by accident, married a woman from central Europe, and was unable to assume the grandeur of his Versailles forebear. He ruled as Louis XVI, and perhaps his finest decision was supporting the rebellious American colonists against France's oldest enemy, the British. Because of this mediocre king, who clung so desperately to the fantasies of absolutism that he was later overthrown and guillotined by his own people, the American experiment with republican government was able to commence. It's an irony of history that Trump's love affair with Louis XIV may mean that this experiment will ultimately be continued somewhere else—in some land we probably now consider backward and uncivilized, and where a gilded hall of mirrors has less attraction than a system of laws and values against authoritarianism.
