Category: No Hate In Our States - PACG - Progressive Action for the Common Good

Tennessee book bans - No Hate in Our States

6/17/2025

Hundreds of books purged from Tennessee school libraries

No Hate in Our States

PEN America

A mind-boggling list of hundreds of books purged from some Tennessee school libraries includes works by Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne, children’s poet Shel Silverstein, and Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson. Banned titles include American classics like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Among the most disturbing bans are books focused on the Holocaust, including Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus, The Hidden Children of the Holocaust by Ester Kustanowitz, which tells the stories of teens who hid from the Nazis, and Secret Holocaust Diaries: Nonna Bannister, which details the experiences of a Russian girl from a wealthy family who survived the German labor camps and lived out her life in Tennessee. The book explores how she “learned the value of human life and the importance of forgiveness,” but students there can no longer share in her lessons.

About PEN America: PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Follow them here on Instagram and sign up for their bi-weekly newsletter here.

The Bathroom that Ends the World-No Hate in Our States

6/10/2025

The Bathroom That Ends the World

Rev. Sean substack.com/@civicgrace

How a Single Gender-Neutral Bathroom Revealed the Gentleness Hidden Behind All Their Fear
Our new church building has a gender-neutral washroom, and before we opened the doors, we held our breath. Would people accept it? Would they understand?

In many ways, this single room represents everything certain politicians claim to fear most: gender boundaries dissolving, children exposed to "confusion," traditional values under siege. Here, in one modest space with sinks and stalls, we've apparently built the apocalypse they've been warning about—a place where the rigid categories that once seemed natural and eternal simply... don't matter.

And you know what? They're right to be afraid. Not because our bathroom poses any actual danger, but because it reveals how unnecessary their fortress walls really are.

Read the rest of this article on Substack.

Kat Fitzgerald (she/her)

Afghan refugees told to leave Iowa - No Hate in Our States

5/6/2025

Afghan refugees told to leave Iowa

Civil Rights Forum

From Axios Des Moines

Afghan refugees in Iowa are receiving emails that appear to come from the federal government ordering them to leave the country immediately, a local advocacy group tells Axios.

Why it matters: The notices have sown fear and confusion among Iowa's Afghan community, many of whom believe that returning to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan would result in their torture and death, Shir Agha Safi, executive director of Afghan Partners in Iowa, tells Axios.

Driving the news: Afghan refugees began receiving emails from the Department of Homeland Security this month notifying them that their immigration status had been terminated and they must leave the U.S. immediately, Safi said. Read the full article here.

Celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility - No Hate in Our States

3/10/2025

Transgender Day of Visibility
Monday, March 31st

Gender Equity Forum

From GLAAD

Each year on March 31, the world observes Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) to raise awareness about transgender people. It is a day to celebrate the lives and contributions of trans people, while also drawing attention to the poverty, discrimination, and violence the community faces.

International TDOV was created in 2010 by trans advocate Rachel Crandall. Crandall, the head of Transgender Michigan, created TDOV in response to the overwhelming majority of media stories about transgender people being focused on violence. She hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while still acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible. Read more here.

Know your rights to support immigrants - No Hate in Our States

3/6/2025

Know your rights! Talking to people about their rights

ACLU Iowa

In response to increased attacks on immigrants’ rights organizations and many others who provide know your rights information to people, our national office has put together a short guide on your rights in advocating and sharing information. Read more here from the ACLU. The guide begins this way:

You have the right to share truthful, lawfully obtained information about law enforcement and tell people about their legal rights—even if they’re in trouble. You can also advocate for changes to laws without fear, as long as you’re not directly inciting or aiding and abetting illegal activity. Understanding these protections can help you navigate conversations about our constitutional rights with confidence.

It gives five choices which include sharing info about a law enforcement incident, how you can decrease your risk when talking to people, how to support people who are fearful of law enforcement, and more.

Cindy Garcia
Communications Manager
American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa

"Respect our existence or expect our resistance" - No Hate in Our States

3/6/2025

"Trouble" or This Fight Isn't Over.

from Lily Jayne (a trans woman) on Substack:

Respect our existence, or expect our resistance.
This past week, Iowa went full fascist with their poorly conceived and sloppily troublesome bill narrowly defining “man” and “woman” in a way that completely flies in the face of known science, biology, sociology and neurology understandings of the trans and intersex experience. In the case of intersex people, they’ll have to choose one of the two arbitrary boxes up to six months after birth via sex testing.

This is troublesome for a multitude of reasons and I will not elaborate on some of them because I don’t have enough understanding. But as far as the intersex community goes, that will put them in one of those boxes before they even understand who they are. As I’ve put in posts before, we know our true gender identity by age 3.

Read more here and please consider subscribing to Becoming Lily.

Chilling trans military order - No Hate in Our States

2/7/2025

The Chilling Line Trump Just Crossed On Transgender People

With the latest trans military executive order, the administration has given up all pretense of "evidence-based care," and has moved to the kind of dehumanization meant to justify atrocity.

From Erin in the Morning

President Trump, in justifying his transgender military ban, leaned on a new argument for why such an action restricting the rights of transgender people was necessary: that transgender people are lesser human beings, dishonorable liars, and worse.

See from the executive order:

Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.

This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned. The thin veneer provided by New York Times op-eds, SEGM’s pseudo-scientific “reviews,” and the disingenuous claims of debate is no longer required. Instead, the justification is laid bare in black and white: transgender people are “dishonorable,” “liars,” “false.” The language is stark, deliberate, and unmistakable—it dehumanizes us. This is the very rhetoric historically used to justify atrocity.

Read the article from Erin Reed's Erin in the Morning substack

Please consider signing up for Erin's Substack. She is a trans woman and a journalist covering trans rights.

Passport Gender Marker suspensions - No Hate in Our States

2/7/2025

Marco Rubio Orders Suspension of Passport Applications From Anyone Seeking to Change Gender Marker

from Them.us

Newly minted Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reportedly directed his agency to freeze passport applications that contain a request for an X gender marker or a change of gender.

According to an internal State Department document obtained on Thursday by The Guardian, Rubio told staff that “sex, and not gender, shall be used” on documents like passports and overseas birth certificates. The document instructs workers to “suspend any application requesting an X sex marker,” as well as “any application where the applicant is seeking to change their sex marker,” citing President Trump’s anti-trans executive order this week: “The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable.”

Read the article from Them.us here and consider signing up for their terrific newsletter here.

Bishop Budde stands against hate - No Hate in Our States

1/29/2025

Bishop Budde stands up to Trump where she laid Matthew Shepard to rest

from Them.us
Amid the launch of the second Trump administration on Monday, one thing marred the new U.S. President’s week: a sermon of compassion from Bishop Mariann Budde, held in the same place she once laid Matthew Shepard to rest.

Read the article from Them.us here and consider signing up for their terrific newsletter here.

Erasing Trans people via Executive Order - No Hate in Our States

1/29/2025

What you should know about the recent Executive Order erasing trans people

from Them.us

...Trump’s anti-trans order, which was widely anticipated in the early hours of his second presidency, marks a dramatic shift from the previous administration. Among its many provisions, the document seeks to redefine gender at the federal level, erase recognition of trans people in government communications, cease the issuance of gender-corrected U.S. passports, bar incarcerated trans women from being housed in women’s prisons, deny gender-affirming medical care to trans inmates, embolden transphobia in the workplace, and block federal dollars from being used to “promote gender ideology.” It’s unclear how far the administration intends to push these policies, as many of the specifics are left undefined.

Read the article from Them.us here and consider signing up for their terrific newsletter here.