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Arizona Government Thinks It Should Be Able To Decide What You Wear And When
from the injunction-bait dept
"Trying to legislate sexual identity is a fool’s errand. Plenty of Arizona state fools are backing a bill that attempts to do that, though. When you can’t figure out how to stop people from outward displays of their sexual identity, you start getting unconstitutional in a hurry.
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This bill — now being booted about by the Arizona state legislature — is an unconstitutional mess. The First Amendment right to freely associate is on the chopping block here. The law — highlighted by Erin Reed on Twitter — proposes the state government should be able to tell people how they can dress, depending on who they associate with and (squints at bill [PDF]) when they do it.
The bill is a “response” to an overblown concern by performative hystericists — people who somehow believe the (ultra-rare) appearance of drag queens (to use the legislators’ preferred taxonomy) at public venues somehow presents an issue worth violating the First Amendment to address. These fears of “indoctrination” (which apparently involves showing children sexuality isn’t binary ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) have prompted legislators to get stupid. Behold the unconstitutional mess Arizona legislators are pushing forward — one that would basically criminalize plenty of non-“drag queens at libraries” activities.
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The proposed law suggests so-called “drag queens” obtain licenses from the state to perform. Then it limits where they can perform, using language that would outlaw plenty of non-drag queen activity. Please pardon the all-caps, something demanded by the printed copies of proposed alterations to established laws. (Cromulent parts embiggened by the author of this post.)
“DRAG PERFORMER” MEANS A PERSON WHO DRESSES IN CLOTHING AND USES MAKEUP AND OTHER PHYSICAL MARKERS OPPOSITE OF THE PERSON’S GENDER AT BIRTH TO EXAGGERATE GENDER SIGNIFIERS AND ROLES AND ENGAGES IN SINGING, DANCING OR A MONOLOGUE OR SKIT IN ORDER TO ENTERTAIN AN AUDIENCE.
“DRAG SHOW” MEANS A SHOW OR PERFORMANCE FOR ENTERTAINMENT AT WHICH A SINGLE PERFORMER OR GROUP OF PERFORMERS DRESS IN CLOTHING AND USE MAKEUP AND OTHER PHYSICAL MARKERS OPPOSITE OF THE PERFORMER’S OR GROUP OF PERFORMERS’ GENDER AT BIRTH TO EXAGGERATE GENDER SIGNIFIERS AND ROLES AND ENGAGE IN SINGING, DANCING OR A MONOLOGUE OR SKIT IN ORDER TO ENTERTAIN AN AUDIENCE OF TWO OR MORE PEOPLE.
LOL
WTAF
First off, the fuck does “gender at birth” even mean? There’s fluidity in gender and what may be present on a birth certificate doesn’t solidify a person’s gender identity for the rest of their life. And how will law enforcement confirm “opposite of the person’s gender at birth?” Will Arizona residents now be required to carry around their birth certificates in addition to other forms of ID to avoid being rung up on drag queen charges (or whatever the fuck)?
That’s just the logistics side. Then there’s the common sense side. This law, if passed, would outlaw a great deal of heretofore considered “normal” behavior, especially in the field of artistic expression. I mean, if you need to find a marshal for your parade of horrors, there’s no better option than Rudy Giuliani, who once appeared in drag at a charity dinner (for more than two people), an event subsequently covered by TV reporters, spreading his illegal (under this bill) transgression to a wider audience.
The law says a performance like Giuliani’s must be restricted to adult entertainment venues (nightclubs, strip clubs) and only at certain hours legislators think are acceptable for hobnobbing with a future president.
A DRAG SHOW SHALL NOT BE CONDUCTED BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1:00 A.M. AND 8:00 A.M. ON MONDAY THROUGH SATURDAY AND BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1:00 A.M. AND 12:00 NOON ON SUNDAY.
Yep. Can’t have churchgoers being outshone by men who wear their Sunday best dresses better than Arizona’s perpetually angry Republican housewives.
Under this bill, things that compose a vast amount of pop culture history would be treated as illegal. The legislators backing this bill apparently feel the state would be better off by cutting itself out of the artistic loop. “Dressed in clothing and physical markers opposite of gender at birth” would turn Arizona into a state that can’t stomach Robin William’s performance in “Mrs. Doubtfire” or Diane Keaton’s wardrobe choices in “Annie Hall.” Disney’s “Mulan” violates the law. So does the classic film “Some Like It Hot.” With a law like this in place, Tom Hanks would likely never have become a star.
It also would make about 70% of influential sketch troupe Kids In The Hall’s output illegal. (Lord only knows where the “Chicken Lady” fits on the “opposite gender” continuum created by this proposal…)
Yeah, it’s a proposed amendment to address the “dogs participating in co-living arrangements with cats” hypothetical suggested by a very unserious scientist when a portal ushering in a hellish invasion threatened New York City back in 1984.
Hopefully, this won’t become law. But this is Arizona we’re talking about, so pretty much anything is possible. What won’t happen is the law surviving a constitutional challenge, considering it restricts how people can dress, who they can associate with, and when they can do it. There is literally no legitimate government interest being served here. There’s only the interests of people who fear things they don’t immediately understand. And that’s not enough to allow the state to inflict massive damage on residents’ First Amendment rights."
Filed Under: 1st amendment, arizona, clothes, drag, drag show, gender
Independent Reporting Shows Cops Are Still Killing People At An Alarming Rate
from the us-vs.-them-means-they-still-get-to-kill-us-with-impunity dept
"Law enforcement agencies have no interest in tracking how often officers kill people. Despite all the talk about police reform, very few states require accurate reporting on deadly force deployments.
Even the DOJ doesn’t care. The federal face of law enforcement has been required to compile this data for over two decades. It has yet to provide an accurate account of US law enforcement deadly force use. Part of that isn’t the DOJ’s fault. It can’t mandate reporting due to the US Constitution, which limits how much direct intervention the federal government can engage in when dealing with state and local level issues.
The other factor in this perpetual under-reporting is due to the DOJ’s disinterest in obtaining accurate force deployment stats. Doing the job correctly would just turn local agencies with a predilection for killing against the DOJ, which means less cooperation when things the DOJ actually considers important (drug busts, forfeitures, etc.) are on the line.
This means that, for years, the private sector has been forced to do the government’s work for it. Multiple efforts have been mounted to accurately track killings by police officers, utilizing open-source data and public record requests to provide a fuller picture than the DOJ — with all of its billions in funding — has continually failed to provide.
What’s treated as “official” by government agencies is a massive misrepresentation of the actual facts. The private sector doesn’t need billions to accomplish what governments won’t. All it needs is people interested in reporting the truth.
And the uncomfortable truth is that law enforcement at all levels hasn’t been reformed, at least not noticeably. The tally for last year outpaces the years leading up to the supposed law enforcement reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Here’s Trone Dowd, reporting for Vice News:
Mapping Police Violence’s 2022 tracking found that 1,176 people died during encounters with police last year, the highest number the organization has ever recorded. Samuel Sinyangwe, the creator of the project, said the number includes anyone who was killed by police, be it by shooting or other forms of force. According to Mapping Police Violence, police killed the equivalent of 3.2 people per day in 2022—and there were only 12 days in the whole year when a deadly police encounter was not reported.
Suppose you were an idiot. You might respond to this by saying something like, “Well, cops routinely deal with violent and dangerous people, so it’s no surprise they’ve killed [this year’s death total].”
Well, let’s talk about the “danger” and “violence” you (a rhetorical idiot) might present as a supposedly valid counterpoint. Here’s more data… again not collected, compiled, reported, collated, documented, or distributed by any actual government-powered clearinghouse.
More than a third of those killed by police encountered the authorities during a traffic stop, a mental health and welfare check, or a non-violent offense.
Cops turn routine stops into dangerous encounters by engaging in pretextual stops predicated on minor moving violations that soon escalate into full-blown, warrantless, ad hoc criminal investigations that convert “routine stops” into Ralph-Wiggum-on-the-bus without any assistance from those being pulled over.
When you create the danger, you can’t use that danger to excuse your actions. I mean, theoretically. In practicality, it happens all the time. So, if traffic stops turn deadly, it’s probably because officers are engaging in fishing expeditions, rather than getting to the alleged point of the stop.
The other cases are the unhealthy side effects of sending cops out to “help” people. That’s not their job and it’s certainly nothing they’re trained to do. Most training involves securing scenes and neutralizing threats. Mental health issues present cops with people behaving unpredictably. And their training mandates they treat unexpected behavior as a threat to their safety. Consequently, people in need of mental health assistance are often helped to death by officers whose mental health toolkit is composed of bad information and bullets.
The same thing can be said about welfare checks. Cops see welfare checks as an opportunity to happen upon other criminal activity. People in need of a welfare check seldom expect police to react with violence to a secondhand cry for help. Case in point: Ft. Worth police officer Aaron Dean, who was recently convicted of manslaughter for shooting a woman through the window of her house while performing a “welfare check” that involved him walking around in the dark outside of Atatiana Wilson’s home without announcing his presence and shooting her within one second of spotting her through her window.
It’s all broken. And all the efforts to reform police haven’t changed a thing. It’s still the way it’s always been. Cops can kill. With impunity.
According to the data, 98.1 percent of officers involved in the death of a citizen between 2013 and 2022 faced no charges. Less than 0.3 percent of officers were convicted.
There’s a lot that needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, after decades of neglect and rot, a lot of this seems irreparable. But if we could just stop cops from killing people they were asked to help, we might finally see a drastic reduction in annual “killed by cops” numbers. But if cops don’t even want to be honest about killings they assert are always justified, what hope do we have that reform efforts that ignore the root of the problem (entrenched law enforcement culture) will ever succeed?
Filed Under: deadly force, police, police killing, police violence
Saudi Government Narrative Control Efforts Now Include The Jailing Of Wikipedia Administrators
from the evil-no-longer-constrained-by-public-perception dept
from the the-house-select-committee-on-waaaaaaaaah dept
It took a week of nonsense, in which we got to see just how dysfunctional this session of the House of Representatives will be, but late last week, Kevin McCarthy sold just enough of what was remaining of his soul to get the Speaker of the House gavel. And, apparently, part of the many favors he doled out to convince the nonsense peddlers who were demanding “concessions” was to create a panel to investigate the incredibly misleading nothingburgers of the Twitter Files.
The new panel, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, is partly a response to revelations from Elon Musk in the internal documents he branded the “Twitter Files.”
We’ve already discussed how much nothingness is in the Twitter Files so far released, and unless they’re somehow saving “the good stuff” for drop #69 to appease Musk’s sophomoric sensibilities, it seems unlikely there’s any actual meat there. Even in the rare case where the files have turned up something marginally interesting, I have no faith that this new panel will be willing (or able) to present it accurately or fairly. Instead, get ready for months of grandstanding hearings, misleading leaks and releases, and a bunch of other nonsense.
But, as I’ve been saying all along, these are the same Republicans who would be completely losing their shit (rightly so, by the way!) if Democrats set up a similar panel demanding that Fox News reveal its close contacts with the Trump White House, or the details of its editorial decision making process.
The 1st Amendment protects editorial decision making, whether its Fox News pushing bogus stories to help Republicans in the election or Twitter choosing to limit the spread of election misinformation (and, I should note, these are not equivalent, at all).
But, alas, in these stupid stupid times we live in, the party of petty snowflake grievances and no actual policy positions will grievance away.
Filed Under: congress, house of representatives, jim jordan, kevin mccarthy, twitter files
Companies: twitter
Daily Deal: iBrave Cloud Web Hosting
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
If you’re doing anything online, then you need web hosting. Normally hosting costs hundreds to thousands of dollars a year. But iBrave Hosting is changing that by making the best web hosting technology in the world available for the lowest price you’ve ever seen. iBrave has been designed for you by experts with over twenty years of industry experience. You get to enjoy unbeatable load-balanced unlimited cloud hosting through a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), meaning there’s no single point of failure, and your website performance will never be affected by other users’ websites, visitors, or activity. Host one website for $25, ten sites for $50, or an unlimited amount for $100.
Daily Deal: Alpha Z PRO 4K + Flying Fox 4K Wide-Angle Dual-Camera Drone Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
Buy 1, get 1 free! Each order comes with 2 drones. 1 Alpha Z PRO Ultra HD Dual-Camera Drone and 1 Flying Fox Ultra HD Dual-Camera Drone. Both drones are equipped with a 4K front camera and a 720P bottom camera. The Alpha Z PRO comes in a sleek black color, while the Flying Fox comes in a clean silver finish. Both drones will help you capture great shots from above with ease and in style. They’re on sale for $150.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
Techdirt Podcast Episode 341: In Defense Of The Global, Open Internet
from the under-attack dept
There have long been attacks on the global, open nature of the internet. Traditionally these came from authoritarian regimes looking to wall off portions of the internet and exert greater control of them, but lately we’ve also been seeing growing threats from democratic countries in the form of problematic laws and regulations. Recently, we wrote about an article by Global Network Initiative executive director Jason Pielemeier and Annenberg Public Policy Center research fellow Chris Riley that made a case in defense of the global, open internet, and this week both Jason and Chris join us on the podcast to look at the past, present and future of the internet around the world.
Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.
Filed Under: chris riley, global internet, jason pielemeier, podcast, policy, regulation
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