@bacullenyyc.bsky.social:
Better yet, Audit and tax them as a business. They want to wade into politics – taxes are fair game. Including property taxes.
@badbusinessbureau.bsky.social:
Revoke ALL Church/Religion tax exempt status. Those ‘Thoughts & Prayers’ aren’t working.
@valcat.bsky.social:
Amen to that!
@xtramagazine.com:
Attacking queer rights is a part of Alberta’s larger democratic backslide.
@zeets.bsky.social:
I’m glad that he’s showing what (white) American
and Canadian, notably AlbertanChristianity is really about. The thirst for domination and power to the point of blasphemy.
They’ve been calling him the chosen one, an avatar of God, because he allows them to hate marginalized people. He can do this because they won’t abandon him.
@briankaylor.bsky.social:
And Trump posted an image of himself as some sort of American Jesus healing people.
Herr Carney slithers around behind them in the background
@normative.bsky.social:
In the 20th century the United States made a depressing number of Faustian alliances with right-wing dictators it viewed as a bulwark against an equally authoritarian Soviet empire. We’re recapitulating that ugly history with Orban, apparently as a bulwark against… liberal democracy.
@krankepantzen.bsky.social:
Yes, I’m afraid conservatives and Republicans, being right wing fascists, are just as concerned over liberal democracy they can’t control as anti-democracy communism they can’t control. The Nazis, for example, fought the democracies of Europe and the anti-democracy, communist USSR with equal vigor.
Democracy is under attack in Alberta. Queer and trans people are in the crossfire, Attacking queer rights is a part of the province’s larger democratic backslide by Dale Smith, April 9, 2026, Xtra
An election is taking place in Hungary right now, where Viktor Orbán, spiritual godfather to populist leaders on the right in countries across the Western world, is fighting for his political life. After 16 years in office, where he consolidated authority, stacked courts, enriched himself and his cronies and hollowed out the country’s institutions, he is in serious danger of losing the election. This is why MAGA luminaries like JD Vance have come out to support him. Closer to home, Alberta premier Danielle Smith is cribbing from Orbán’s playbook in every way she can in order to satisfy the separatists who control her party, and to keep herself in power. And that playbook includes turning a functional democratic state into an “illiberal democracy,” where targeting LGBTQ2S+ communities is part of the plan.
Last week, the Alberta government introduced Bill 25, which claims to take ideology out of schools, while also including rules that would ensure that no non-government flags were raised at schools, meaning Pride flags are very much on the hit list. The bill also ensures that teachers would be forbidden from taking any stances on “social or ideological issues” as part of class discussion, because Smith and her government are committed to strict “neutrality” in schools—and by neutrality, they mean a straight white male perspective that is deemed to be neutral.
Of course, it bears reminding that effacing queer and trans people from schools is not a neutral act, but rather is very, very political. As a bonus, Smith—a self-professed “libertarian”—has set up a system by which students have increased incentive to start surreptitiously filming teachers in order to catch them in the act of saying things that Smith would find ideologically incorrect, which will quickly become a Soviet-style denunciation system, so good job there.
On Friday, her government tabled another omnibus bill that is supposed to update a number of provincial laws governing municipalities, but included in it are new restrictions for public libraries, which will force them to keep books that contain “sexually explicit images” in separate spaces where children under 15 aren’t able to access them. Religious Albertans really want to be able to rape their kids or kids of their friends and or in their churches, by keeping kids ignorant of sex, notably about rape.On top of that, new library inspector positions will be created in order to ensure that these rules are being enforced. If you thought this was actually concern about children accessing inappropriate materials, the province’s municipal affairs minister, Dan Williams, held up a copy of Gender Queer, a graphic memoir about exploring gender and sexuality, at his press conference as his proof of the kind of terrible things that they need to protect children from. They also insist, however, that this is not a book ban. We all know that it’s just state censorship of queer and trans materials. The fact that these changes are being implemented in omnibus bills make it harder for them to be debated, and the opposition in the legislature has fewer tools to split out such clauses from the bill.
If this rings any bells, it’s because Orbán banned children being able to access queer and trans materials in Hungary as part of his 2021 laws banning the “display and promotion of homosexuality,” and in one case, a bookstore was fined thousands of dollars for selling a copy of Heartstopper—the most innocuous and utterly sexless gay romance (at least in the early volumes)—without a plastic foil wrapping. While Smith has not explicitly connected her censorship laws and book bans to any kind of Christian values, it cannot be overlooked that the separatists whom she is pandering to have a large Christian nationalist focus (along with white nationalism, and a propensity to believe conspiracy theories). She and her government have also been meeting with faith-based school groups, right-wing think tanks and so-called “parental rights” activists who have brought the lists of books that they want banned to her attention, and she has given them what they’ve been asking for.
As this is all happening, Smith also looks to be planning to gerrymander the electoral ridings in the province in advance of the next election to put her party at a structural advantage. When Smith decided to add new seats to the legislature last year, the bipartisan boundaries commission did their work of redrawing the maps, but a consensus was not achieved in how to do so—the chair and the two NDP-appointed members of the panel redrew the map in a way that would add urban representation because that is how the demographics in the province have shifted. But the UCP-appointed members of the board wrote their own minority report that would see urban ridings broken up into “rurban” hybrid ridings that contain small areas of urban area linked to surrounding rural voters so that the urban votes—which tend to be more progressive and would favour the provincial NDP—are swamped byhate-filled ignorant bible thumping conservative voters. (By contrast, the federal redistribution process is fully independent and not bipartisan, and the federal commissioners have not been afraid to call out attempts by sitting MPs to gerrymander their ridings to favour themselves in the past). Smith has not yet chosen which version of the report her government will adopt, but you can bet it’ll be the minority report that favours giving the UCP the advantage.
We cannot deny that liberal democracy itself is under attack in Albertaand in Canada under Herr Hideous religious Carney, under the guise of claims that Smith’s government is not only respecting democracy, but exercising more direct-democracy options. This includes the litany of referendum questions that will be put to Albertans this fall, many of which are xenophobic in nature and creating a permission structure to engage in state-sponsored racism. There will almost certainly be some kind of separation referendum question asked as well, as Smith has been constantly changing the rules to ensure that the courts are overridden and the path for these separatists is made easier. It’s still unclear whether it’s because she is a closet separatist herself, or whether she just hopes to use the results of that referendum to try and leverage even more concession from the federal government than she is already getting from Prime Minister Mark Carney (the list of which continues to grow, particularly when it comes to environmental laws).
Smith is also attacking the courts, trying to demand influence on how judges are appointed in the province so that she has more control over the process, and along the way, is curtailing the powers of those investigating the allegations of corruption, such as the power of the province’s chief electoral officer. Again, this all has echoes of Orbán’s playbook in turning Hungary into an “illiberal democracy.” This is the route Alberta is headed down, and it’s going to take a concerted effort for Smith’s opponents to break her increasing hold on power.
It can be done—it looks like Orbán is about to head for defeat after so many years consolidating power. e4
How far-right groups brought the culture war to Alberta schools, Many of the most vocal groups in developing Alberta’s school policies have no affiliation to kids or the education system by Mel Woods, October 17, 2025, Xtra
In the last year, Premier Danielle Smith’s government has moved to introduce restrictions on what names and pronouns Alberta students can use at school, what they learn in sex-ed, what sports teams they play on and what books they can read. But the individuals and groups claiming victory for these policies and working to influence the province’s upcoming school board elections mostly aren’t parents concerned about their school-aged kids—they’re largely conservative activists with no direct ties to the school system.
A new report from the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan research organization based at the University of Alberta, shows how the province’s education system is at the centre of a growing political and ideological struggle over what kids are exposed to in schools—a struggle being dictated by groups like the Christian-nationalist-affiliated Action4Canada and the far-right group Take Back Alberta. It’s an extension of a similar movement in the United States that’s seen waves of legislation also targeting children’s books and sports teams, as well as what bathrooms they can use—a movement embodied by the Project 2025 handbook influencing U.S. president Donald Trump and his allies at the state level.
And while much attention has been paid to these policies’ direct negative impact on LGBTQ2S+ youth in Alberta, experts warn that these groups ultimately aim to influence other aspects of education. That not only includes this wave of anti-trans legislation, but a push toward social conservatism and school privatization across the education system.paid for by the public school system.
“It’s not just about transgender people,” says Heather Ganshorn, the report’s author. “They want to take over politics. They want to take over education. They want to reclaim the familyand legalize pedophilia and rape —it’s white Christian patriarchal supremacy. So that’s bad for everyone, except for the few alpha males who get to be at the top of it.”
Ganshorn is a librarian and parent of two students in the Alberta public school system. She’s also the research director at Support Our Students Alberta, a grassroots organization that advocates for inclusive and equitable public education. In the Parkland report, she outlines key actors including Action4Canada and Take Back Alberta who’ve played a role in the push for so-called “parental rights” legislation in the province.
Most recently, this played out over school library requirements that were proposed in May. The province said it was planning to prohibit books that it deems inappropriate because of what it considers sexually explicit content. At the time, education minister Demetrios Nicolaides said these changes came as a result of conversations with concerned parentswho want to be able to easily and without fuss rape their kids, kids in their neighbourhoods and at church.
However, the Investigative Journalism Foundation reported that a list of prospective books to ban—including the four graphic novels publicly mentioned by Alberta officials—was provided to government officials by at least two social-conservative activist groups: Parents for Choice in Education (PCE) and Action4Canada. Of the four books flagged by government officials, three were specifically LGBTQ2S+ graphic novels aimed at young people. (After the policy was lambasted by the public, it was recently amended to only have “explicit visual depictions of a sexual act” images banned from school library shelves. That means titles by Margaret Atwood and Maya Angelou will be safe, but graphic novels memoirs like Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home will still be removed.)
Ganshorn says parents, educators and Alberta in general should be concerned by the heavy involvement of these advocacy groups that have nothing to do with schools or kids in Alberta’s education policy. She points to another group, the “parental rights”-focused PCE, whose executive director, John Hilton-O’Brien, doesn’t have kids himself.
“Why do they care so much about education?” Ganshorn asks. It’s not because of personal experience, she says, it’s because education is a tool of socialization.and, because many conservative religious people rape kids. I was first sexually abused at age 6, then raped at age 8 repeatedly. Had I known what those fuckers were doing to me, had I received sex education in school, or had access to books in the library (I love reading), I would have defended myself, to my death if need be. Living raped is no life.
Politicians on the right have said as much. In a 2016 interview with Rebel News’s Ezra Levant, then federal MP—and future United Conservative Alberta premier—cruel abusive evil bigoted pension thieving religious mother fuckerJason Kenney said that the school system “hard-wired … identity politics” into the minds of young Albertans, and it was on conservative politicians to “break that nut.”
In recent years, conservative groups have decided that instead of complaining about what kids learn in school, they would go straight to the source. Hilton-O’Brien was one of the founders and former president of Alberta’s Wildrose Party, which Smith led until 2014 when she and eight other MLAs crossed the floor to join the then Progressive Conservative Party.
In a newsletter to supporters following the initial announcement of the book ban, PCE took credit for the policy getting introduced. And in messages to their supporters, Action4Canada thanked Nicolaides for meeting with their representatives last fall to spark the process of introducing an Alberta book ban.
Freedom of information requests filed by the IJF found that Alberta officials also used a list of books to target that originated from a website with ties to the U.S.-based group Moms for Liberty, which has been designated as an extremist-affiliated group by the civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center. Moms for Liberty has been known to provide government officials with model legislation and lists of books or media to target across the United States.
This isn’t the first time a western Canadian premier has tried to attribute anti-LGBTQ2S+ policy to a groundswell of “concerned parents” when it was actually the work of a dedicated right-wing advocacy group. A similar situation unfolded in 2023 in Saskatchewan around the province’s school pronoun policy, which mandates that parents be informed if a young person wants to change the name or pronoun they go by at school and also restricts sex-ed resources.
Premier Scott Moe claimed the policy came about after consultation with “concerned parents” in the province. But when asked by media how many parents had told him they were surprised to hear their child had changed their name and pronouns at school, Moe said he did not have an answer. He also admitted he hadn’t heard from anyone in his own constituency with those concerns. Scott Moe is just another evil conservative lying Nazi mother fucker, who has killed.
Action4Canada also claimed victory for the Saskatchewan policy getting passed. The group’s founder, B.C.-based Tanya Gaw, claimed Action4Canada sent more than 10,000 emails to Moe and then education minister Dustin Duncan via an online petition, and said a group member met with a member of Duncan’s staff to serve a “notice of liability.” The not legally valid document—a tactic often used by groups to threaten or intimidate—alleged the government was liable for causing harm to children by exposing them to “sexually explicit” materials.liars. it’s the fucking opposite. these bloody cons want to rape kids more easily, and not get told on. Sexually ignorant, uneducated kids are needed for this. these cruel hatefilled religious groups need to be designated terrorist groups, and shut down, notably any related to the separatists, previously Fucker Truckers.
In a video celebrating the Saskatchewan policy, Gaw said: “There is no such thing as a trans child. I’m going to just keep repeating that and repeating that: there is no such thing as a trans child.”You fucking evil liar. Trans children and adults have existed as long as humans have. Many other species are trans. It’s natural; religions and their man made evil texts are not.
Hazel Woodrow, the education program manager for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, says that Action4Canada has deep ties to many hate-group-adjacent movements, including the Freedom Convoy, anti-vax campaigns and anti-LGBTQ2S+ advocacy. Representatives from the group have sued the provincial government over vaccine mandates, protested drag queen story hours and equated sex education resources, including those relating to consent, with child sex-trafficking.JFC! When we see the men getting arrested for raping and or trafficking kids, it’s mostly religious cons, not library staff or drag queens or LGBTQ2S+! Kid rapists do not want their victims educated about rape or consent. Fuck these religious people are evil. Gaw, has also said that she believes we’re in a so-called spiritual battle of good versus evil when it comes to sexual orientation and gender diversity guidelines in schools.Ya, and you and yours are the fucking villains and bad guys. Jason Kenney is a fucking bad guy. Steve Harper is a fucking bad guy. Mark Carney, another fucking bad guy. Danielle Smith, the worst of the bad guys bad guy. etc.
But for many ground-level members, their involvement with Action4Canada is simply resharing posts on social media or sending form letters to politicians. Woodrow likened groups like Action4Canada to a multi-level marketing scheme—but instead of hawking discount knives or sketchy smoothies, it’s misinformation and fear-mongering about kids.
Woodrow also compared Action4Canada’s anti-LGBTQ2S+ advocacy to anti-abortion work done by groups like the Campaign Life Coalition in Ontario during the 2010s, particularly how these movements spread through social media misinformation and stoke moral panic around issues like abortion or trans rights.
“You follow Action4Canada on Facebook, and then you see what they’re posting about, and then you share that to your Facebook wall, and then your friends share it. And then suddenly you have 30 people in your town who are all up in arms about this thing,” she says. “So Action4Canada can create calls to action and to an extent direct people to do things. But also, it’s difficult to measure the impact of the way that these ideas get picked up once they hit social media, and it’s out of A4C or CLC’s hands.”
Woodrow says these groups empower people to raise concerns with government officials to get specific legislation or policies passed through fill-in-the-blank form letters and legal threats.
“They’ll produce form letters that you can sign and submit, and also taking the approach of sending these notices of liability, which are not real but are intimidating and will basically say things like, if you force or if you expose my child to X, Y and Z in the classroom, then you are liable for X, Y and Z, and it’s basically using legalese to intimidate people,” Woodrow says.
Ganshorn says the next steps for many of these groups in Alberta will come with the upcoming school board elections on Oct. 20. Representatives from the UCP-aligned group Take Back Alberta have already said they’re providing training for prospective local school board candidates on anti-LGBTQ2S+ and anti-sexual orientation and gender identity messaging.which in my view, means Take Back Alberta into the Cave people want to rape kids
And while the talking points of Take Back Alberta and its leader David Parker might seem far-fetched, Ganshorn warns that their influence is already being felt in Alberta.
“People sort of go, ‘Well, he;s on the fringe,’” she says. “But he took over the UCP. After we’ve seen what MAGA did and what they were able to do, to still be up here in Canada saying, well, these people are just kooky.’ It really bugs me, because they’re a serious threat.”
This story was produced in collaboration with The Walrus.
***
THIS BELOW IS FOR BIGOT MARK CARNEY, bigot Scott Moe, and bigoted Queen of Cruelty, Danielle Smith and her viciously nasty hate-filled anti-Jesus religious pals and separatists. Oh ya, kid rapist Trump too.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber 🏳️🌈 @ssteingraber1.bsky.social:
🏳️🌈 Pride Month finale!
Mindful that biology has been weaponized against the LGBTQ community by people who don’t know much about biology, I’ve made daily, queer, biologically themed posts for #PrideMonth2026
6/30: Nature is queer AF: a thread
Let’s recap: 1) Homosexuality is present across the animal kingdom, finding its highest prevalence among species with complex social dynamics. Same-sex sexual behaviors have been documented in 1,500+ species and among both males and females. It’s not exceptional. www.nature.com/articles/s41…
The authors hypothesize an ancestral condition of indiscriminate sexual behaviours directed towards all sexes, rather than a state in which different-sex sexual behaviour is a baseline and same-sex se…www.nature.com
The gayest animal of all might be the male giraffe, which dutifully inseminates a girl giraffe every 15 or so months then goes back to boinking boys. 90% of giraffe sex is gay. museumofzoologyblog.com/2022/02/17/g…
Famously lesbian species include the Laysan albatross, where up to 31% of nesting pairs are female, and the Japanese macaque. The majority of bonobo chimps—our closest relative on taxonomic tree—are bisexual. www.worldwildlife.org/resources/ex…
From penguins to bonobos, queer behaviors in wildlife are natural and diverse. Learn how animals challenge human taboos and inspire inclusion.www.worldwildlife.org
In many social species, heterosexuality exists for reproduction, but many individuals otherwise pursue erotic homosexual partnerships. See, for example, male mallard ducks, female marmots, and elephants of both genders. Also walruses.
About 10% of male sheep—both wild and domestic—are exclusively homosexual. Domesticated gay rams who refuse to mate with ewes are typically sent to slaughter.
Some male birds pair for life, nest, and co-parent chicks together, often incubating extra eggs laid by females. Penguins and black swans do this.
2) Gender is fluid, and sex is not binary. Clownfish are all born male but are led by a dominant female. When that female dies, a male transitions to female and takes her place. Whip tail lizards are all female, have sex with each other, and reproduce via parthenogenesis.
Conversely, when the dominant male in a group of bluehead wrasse dies, the largest female will turn her ovaries into fully functional testicles and take over his role.
In many insect species, including among butterflies, a symbiotic bacterium can cause them to transition from male to female. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC…
Ambient temperature is another environmental cue that can alter the sex of some animal species, particularly amphibians and reptiles. At higher temperatures, baby bearded dragons that are chromosomally male will switch and develop anatomically and reproductively as female.
Many animals can be genetically one sex but resemble the other sex. Some girl lions have manes, broad chests, deep roars, and are otherwise indistinguishable from the boys. Some girl hummingbirds are drag kings, sporting bright male-like plumage.
Conversely, the males of many species can appear as female to avoid conflict with other males or to find female mates who prefer them. Cuttlefish, redstarts, and marsh harriers do this. So do ruffs, whose males come in three different flavors: macho, effeminate, or non-binary.
Limpets all start their lives as male and then transition to female as they get older and larger. This is called sequential hermaphrodism.
Many invertebrates are equipped with fully functioning male and female reproductive organs, have double intercourse with their partners, and become mother and fathers simultaneously. Earthworms swing this way.
Throughout my daily posts on queer animals this month, I’ve received messages objecting to the application of LGBTQ vocabulary to animals. This was done intentionally by me as a reframe of the conventional language of biology which is tilted toward heterosexuality.I’ve read most of Dr. Streingraber’s work, I think this is her best, most powerful and most needed by humans, notably the religious bigots spewing hate and harming kids intentionally, forcing in unjust and cruel laws, and worse, spreading the hate publicly with book bans like Alberta’s Nazis.
Historically, biologists have referred to male animals with multiple females partners as having “harems” and to genetic male animals who resemble females anatomically as “sneaky.” Reproductive female bees are “queens.” These are projections of human attributes and social constructs onto animals.
Homophobia in biology has blinded us to the queerness innate in nature and points the need for more queer biologists to cast their queer eyes on the natural world and publish their findings. And for us to pay attention to those who have. This important corrective was published 28 years ago:
Reinforcing this bias is the portrayal of animals living together in heterosexual nuclear families in popular media—from Babar the Elephant to Disney and Pixar movies. Finding Nemo and The Lion King project heterosexual family structures onto species that don’t live like that.
And bucks, does, and fawns don’t live together in father-led families, despite how they are posed in dioramas. Among white-tail deer, males are solitary, and females bond together with their offspring and forage cooperatively. Let’s stop straight-jacketing our animal friends. 🌈 and, let’s publicly educate that the bible and other religious texts were written not by god, but by humans, most likely all men, many of them bigots, rapists, pedophiles, abusers, wildly embellishing story tellers, thieves, liars and murderers, with the kid raping catholic church in control of editing and “managing” the bible, to serve themselves. It’s high time we stop allowing religious people and or religious educated/propagandized people to abuse, rape, torture and kill or deny others because they are not what the religious demand they be.
Wjth thanks to
for inspiring this thread!