How a Nashville suburb’s LGBTQ pride festival became a bitter flashpoint

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [How a Nashville suburb’s LGBTQ pride festival became a bitter flashpoint]( How a Nashville suburb’s LGBTQ pride festival became a bitter flashpoint, Mike Hixenbaugh and Daniel Arkin, NBC News For the past two years, thousands of people have descended on a public park in Franklin, Tennessee — a suburb 30 minutes outside Nashville — for an LGBTQ pride festival featuring live music, food trucks and crafts vendors. Clayton Klutts, the president of the Franklin Pride organization, viewed the event as a glowing symbol of how far a small, conservative community had come in terms of LGBTQ acceptance. But this year, Franklin Pride’s attempts to obtain a city permit have been met with fierce resistance. What had been a procedural formality in past years has become a bitter flashpoint that mirrors similarly heated debates roiling the United States. [...] The conflict came to a head during a public forum at City Hall late last month, one day after a 28-year-old shot and killed six people at a private Christian school in Nashville — a massacre that some on the right blamed on the suspect’s gender identity. More than 30 people, many of them wearing circular “Choose Decency” stickers, pleaded with Franklin’s mayor and the city board’s eight aldermen to deny the pride permit. [...] In the end, Franklin’s city board voted to delay the decision until it could take up a separate “community decency” policy that would, among other things, ban “sexually suggestive behavior” and excessive “displays of affection” from public spaces. Votes on both issues are scheduled for Tuesday. - [The extreme abortion ruling shows how a total ban was always the plan]( The extreme abortion ruling shows how a total ban was always the plan, Jordan Rubin, MSNBC No one believes that Kacsmaryk, a longtime anti-abortion activist, cares about the nuance of U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol. His order purporting to halt the FDA’s decades-old approval of mifepristone is rather a means to the end of banning abortion. The Trump judge’s opinion is full of anti-abortion rhetoric that’s in lockstep with the fetal personhood movement — which promotes the idea that a fetus has the same rights as a person, thus making abortion murder. For example, he approvingly cited the notion when he referred to the “unborn humans extinguished by mifepristone — especially in the post-Dobbs era.” For judges like Kacsmaryk, the Dobbs ruling didn’t return the abortion issue to the states — it placed health care in the hands of right-wing jurists to outlaw by any means necessary. Women in blue states who voted for politicians who support abortion rights can still be thwarted by a red-state judge’s power grab, if Kacsmaryk’s order goes into effect. (Remember, he put it on hold for a week while the government appeals, and on Monday the DOJ filed for a stay in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most extreme appeals court in the country.) Now, the Trump judge’s unprecedented order, backed by shoddy legal reasoning — if you could call it reasoning — is poised for a Supreme Court resolution. Whatever happens in the 5th Circuit, the justices might have the last word, especially with Friday’s ruling out of Washington state that contradicts Kacsmaryk’s, making high court intervention even more likely. - [2023 has gotten off to a rough financial start for Daily Kos. Can you help by donating $3 a month starting now?]( - [The Thomas-Crow Affair]( The Thomas-Crow Affair, John Ganz, Unpopular Front, Substack Collecting sculptures of dictators and Nazi knick-knacks reveals more than bad taste, which, unfortunately, still cannot be counted as a crime. It is downright creepy. The reason it is creepy is that it shows an unwholesome fascination with power and domination. Crow might earnestly think he is buying this stuff to provide some kind of object lesson about the perils of tyranny, but there is an unavoidable suggestion of idolatry and vulgar power-worship just under the surface. The reason such objects would be impressive and interesting to a person like this and to his guests is that they are almost occult talismans: they are fetish objects, redolent of the power of evil. A certain hocus-pocus attaches to these things that says, “I am competent to handle and own these objects, because I am one of the rulers.” It’s similar to the attitude revealed by Crow’s membership in secret societies like the Bohemian Club: pretensions to membership in the world’s hidden elite. The belief that by privately owning these objects, rather than giving them to a museum or archive, one is somehow helping the world is pretty dubious. He clearly feels the need to hold these baubles close to his breast. Such are the peccadilloes of the ruling classes: like cult practices, they both are a little bit silly and a little bit sinister. The other notable and even quite funny thing is the total consensus among conservatives in publicly defending Crow. I haven’t seen them this together on anything since the Kavanaugh hearings. They clearly know who butters their bread: again, Crow is a major donor to conservative causes. Marco Rubio held a fundraiser at the Crow mansion and now is dutifully returning the favor with stentorian defenses of his patron. Members of the right-wing intelligentsia, surely not all of whom can be direct benefactors of Crow, are mounting the barricades for this magnate. Whatever notions they have of their own little missions and independence, these intellectuals know when their real masters are in need, they must come running. The entire movement and party exists to do the political work of this class. Harlan Crow is a member of the regional, closely-held, and family business fraction of capital that has long been the central constituency of the G.O.P. These are the DeVoses, the Uihleins, the Mercers, the Kochs, the Kohlers, the Millikens, and, the Crows, of the world. Justice Thomas, of course, attacks all the things that bedevil these oligarchs, most especially labor unions and federal regulations. - [Tennessee's attack of first amendment right to protest turns attention away from real issues]( Tennessee's attack of first amendment right to protest turns attention away from real issues, Tameka Greer, The Commercial Appeal Why are there more and more efforts to block protests by criminalizing, terrorizing and surveilling demonstrators? Why are policymakers attempting to label those who seek rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution as domestic terrorists?[...] When policymakers criminalize peaceful assemblies, they change the conversation. Rather than dialogue focused on lives lost, the conversation shifts to property damage, and ‘law and order’ debates. But criminalizing protests will have far reaching consequences, including increasing the number of people who have contact with the penal system, and silencing dissent. - [Doesn't matter if you're a coffee or tea person, whatever you're drinking tastes better out of a Daily Kos mug. Get yours now!]( - [On the Tennessee expulsions, and a week of local stories that went national]( On the Tennessee expulsions, and a week of local stories that went national, Jon Allsop, Th Columbia Journalism Review The expulsions were not the first national news story to emerge from Tennessee this year; indeed, the state is in the midst of a particularly brutal news cycle. In January, police in Memphis killed Tyre Nichols, a Black man, during a traffic stop (five officers were later charged with his murder); late last month, tornadoes and severe storms hit the state, nine soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash just over the border in Kentucky, and there was the school shooting. All this, of course, has been exhausting for a state press corps—on Friday, Melissa Brown, a reporter at The Tennesseean, noted the feeling that the state had lived through a “century” in the last ten days alone—that has also been on the frontlines of important recent stories that have made fewer national headlines. Last week, the state lost its Title X certification, and with it millions of dollars in family-planning funds for low-income residents, while the state Senate passed a bill protecting teachers who refuse to use their students’ preferred pronouns. Earlier this year, a Republican lawmaker proposed that the state allow “hanging by a tree” as a method of execution. (The lawmaker apologized “to anyone who may have been hurt or offended.”) [...] Still, in recent years, newsrooms in Tennessee—including those owned by Gannett—have faced cuts. Some local outlets have used national wire copy to cover the expulsions; Allison, in her article for Politico, noted that the press corps covering the state’s Capitol is now “a fraction of the size it was decades earlier,” even as it has increasingly been tasked with covering “a non-stop stream of befuddling scandals and unforced errors.” Recently, the state legislature considered a bill that would end the legal requirement for foreclosure notices to be placed in local newspapers—a significant potential blow to the revenue of smaller outlets in the state. (Other states have pushed through similar bills.) And journalists in Tennessee would seem to have faced threats beyond the financial. Last weekend, hours after he covered a gun-reform protest that followed the school shooting, the family home of Justin Kanew, the founder of the progressive site the Tennessee Holler, was shot at. No one was hurt and the culprit, and their motive, remain unknown. Yesterday, Tennessee’s attorney general condemned the shooting. According to one local journalist, he was the first Republican in the state to do so. - [The Meaning of an Awesome Employment Report]( The Meaning of an Awesome Employment Report, Paul Krugman, The New York Times Remember all that talk about Americans dropping out of the labor force? At this point the employed percentage of adults is at or above early 2020 levels for every age group except those 70 or older. (And they should probably get out of the way, anyway. Oh, wait, I’m 70.) The overall unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent; we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969. Black unemployment is at a record low. There’s good news everywhere you look. So whaddya know: Provide enough job opportunities, and lazy video-game-playing Americans will take those jobs and, apparently, demonstrate enough skill that employers want to keep them. Furthermore, it turns out that there are large benefits to full employment beyond the fact that people have jobs. Full employment also turns out to be a powerful force for equality, on multiple dimensions. The gap between Black and white unemployment is now a fifth of what it was when Ronald Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” A tight labor market has led to big gains for low-wage workers, sharply reducing overall wage inequality. The big question now is whether the good news on jobs is somehow a mirage, based on an unsustainably hot labor market that will have to cool off drastically to contain inflation. ICYMI: Popular stories from the past week you won't want to miss: - [Trump hire causes civil war between MTG and another white nationalist]( - [Colorado conservatives resign from school board after CRT hysteria swallows them up in harassment]( - [We're about to witness something that could vastly change the future, and absolutely no one is ready]( Want even more Daily Kos? 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