... Today, our Nation faces another inflection point. In 2023 alone, State and local legislatures have already introduced over 600 hateful laws targeting the LGBTQI+ community. Books about LGBTQI+ people are being banned from libraries. Transgender youth in over a dozen States have had their medically necessary health care banned. Homophobic and transphobic vitriol spewed online has spilled over into real life, as armed hate groups intimidate people at Pride marches and drag performances, and threaten doctors’ offices and children’s hospitals that offer care to the LGBTQI+ community. Our hearts are heavy with grief for the loved ones we have lost to anti-LGBTQI+ violence.
Despite these attacks, the LGBTQI+ community remains resilient. LGBTQI+ Americans are defiantly and unapologetically proud. Youth leaders are organizing walkouts at high schools and colleges across the country to protest discriminatory laws. LGBTQI+ young people and their parents are demonstrating unimaginable courage by testifying in State capitols in defense of their basic rights.
They are not alone: My entire Administration stands proudly with the LGBTQI+ community in the enduring struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. And we are making strides. On my first day in office, I signed a historic Executive Order charging the entire Federal Government with protecting LGBTQI+ people from discrimination — from health care to housing, education, employment, banking, and the criminal justice system. Last December, surrounded by dozens of couples who have fought for marriage equality in the courts for decades, I had the great honor of signing into law the landmark Respect for Marriage Act. This bipartisan law protects the rights of same-sex and interracial couples — like caring for one’s sick partner and receiving spousal benefits. Deciding who to marry is one of life’s most profound decisions, so we etched a simple truth into law: Love is love...
From President Biden's Proclamation on LGTBQI+ Pride Month. The full text is at the link above.
Natalia Hafykina, 60, was so close to her next-door neighbors, Vladislav and Natalya Prykhodko, that they celebrated the young couple’s pregnancy together and then, just over one year ago, the birth of their daughter, Liza.
Until now, their small, suburban town, seven miles north of the bustling city of Dnipro, had been peaceful. But on Saturday night, a Russian missile struck their two-story apartment building, cracking slabs of concrete and shattering walls and windows.
The blast left little Liza dead under the rubble and her mother in an intensive care ward. When Vladislav Prykhodko briefly came home from the hospital on Sunday, Hafykina could not bear to speak to him.
“He looked so vulnerable that I couldn’t go up to him — there were no words,” she said, standing amid splintered furniture as her son and his friends nailed plywood over her shattered windows. “We were a family. This was our community. We never worried about danger,” Hafykina said. “Now I too am scared. Suddenly everything feels different.”
The strike in Pidhorodne, which injured 22 people including five children, was the second attack in just over a week in the Dnipro area.
On May 26, a medical clinic specializing in psychological disorders was hit by two missiles, leaving the old stone building in ruins, four people dead and 32 injured. An adjacent veterinary clinic burned to the ground, though all staff members and animals escaped harm.
The back-to-back strikes in greater Dnipro, a city in central Ukraine that often feels far from the front lines, came as a disconcerting reminder that there is no escaping Russia’s brutal war and that Moscow’s relentless barrage of missiles can deliver death and destruction at any moment...
Each and every Russian responsible for these war crimes, from war criminal Putin down to the sub-morons firing the missiles, needs to end up dangling from a noose.
Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley suggested in an interview that United States forces “need to align” with non-European countries including Russia to enhance global security, a remark her campaign characterized as a gaffe.
Asked by WMUR-TV for a segment Wednesday on regions of the world to which she felt the U.S. could pay more attention, Haley — who served the Trump administration as United Nations ambassador, first said “the Arab world,” saying the U.S. needs Arab countries “to kind of join with us” on opposing Iran.
“You see Saudi Arabia making deals with China, that’s not good for us. We need them to be with us, and then we need to align with others, Russia, Australia, Japan, Israel,” Haley added.
“We need to start focusing on the allies that we have besides the Europeans and make sure that we have more friends — one, for our needs, so that we’re not dependent on an enemy for energy or medicines or anything else, and then two, to make sure that we build those alliances so that the world is more safe.”...
Her campaign later claimed she "misspoke." She's still the hyper- ambitious, resume- building lightweight the Malignant Loser sent to the UN to give her foreign policy cred for her to use at just this campaign moment. Sadly for her, she still thinks and speaks in banal terms that would make a high school Model UN student blush.
