00:00Tell me about Moms for Liberty, because they're this group with a very innocuous sounding name, like they're going to be moms, but they're not.
00:11Like they're really leading the charge against, I mean, for book banning and book banning primarily of books with LGBTQ content.
00:19Yeah. I mean, we saw this back in the day around marriage equality as well, which was what was it? A million moms or one million moms.
00:31And I think that this is a small but well-funded and highly organized group that is using fear as a lever to ban books.
00:51And, you know, this is some moms for some kids, not all moms for all kids.
00:57And I think the distinction is really important because their whole premise is parental rights.
01:04Yes. And they should have a voice. And it's like, yes, parental rights for some parents, but not for all parents, because I don't have rights.
01:11I'm not considered part of that. Right.
01:14And the rights are at the expense of a marginalized community.
01:20And the rights aren't where they should be focused is on social media companies and holding them accountable for what they're doing to our youth.
01:31Instead, they're focused on targeting trans youth, targeting books in schools.
01:37We've never seen book bans like this in in recent history.
01:41So, you know, they are a dangerous but small force.
01:50And I think that we honestly, as an LGBTQ community, didn't expect this and got caught off guard on this one.
02:01So I think we're going to, you know, we're organizing and we're going to come back.
02:07And I think the biggest indicator for all of this is going to be the election.
02:11And it's only going to heat up over the next year around this because the the the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and organization has been bolstering political careers.
02:29And they're going to continue to try and utilize that until we make them lose at the ballot box.
02:35What are you doing? I agree with you.
02:37They're going to keep it up when they think it's working.
02:39And what I read, this group just started in 2021.
02:44Like it clearly some other organizations behind it, funding it, training it.
02:49What are you doing to organize your community and the and allies to show up at the ballot box for like every kind of election?
02:59You've got to go for school boards.
03:01You've got to go. You've got to go state, federal, like everything, everything.
03:06Nothing's off the table.
03:07So I will tell you this, that the LGBTQ movement has never been more coordinated and in collaboration.
03:16So we are putting our plans together.
03:18But we will be and and the LGBTQ community is.
03:25Is the second most important voting bloc for the Democratic Party.
03:32Absolutely. So we we have a lot of weight in terms of at the ballot box.
03:39And then if you add our allies, it's it's unbeatable.
03:46So I think there's a few things that we're doing.
03:49One is we need to get the stories of transgender and gender nonconforming folks out there.
03:55We need America to understand and be educated who these people are and that they're not, you know, lurking in the corners, that they are just people who want to have a job and family and live their life like every other person in this country.
04:11So we need to do that and that's really about, you know, the narrative and helping to introduce Americans to more transgender folks.
04:22Secondly, we really need to fight back and litigate against these these unconstitutional bans on LGBTQ people.
04:32These are human rights, human rights issues.
04:35And then thirdly, we need to organize and get people to the ballot box who are pro equality and get pro equality candidates in every seat possible who understand the value of an education, a full education and not just a white supremacist education and and who understand how what a humanities issue this is.
05:01And so I think those are the three places that we're focused as an organization and as a movement moving forward.
05:09Right. Yeah.
05:10I think the point you just made about we have to get people to understand that our students need a full education, not a white supremacist education, because so much of this seems to be caught up in white, whether it's white Christian nationalism or white supremacy.
05:25It's all women's rights, women's bodily autonomy, trans bodily autonomy, all of the you know, we have a minority community in America that is on the verge of being the majority community in America.
05:48That is all of the minority, you know, whether it be Hispanic or Latinx or women or LGBTQ and that this fight over power right now is sort of like the last the last stand.
06:04And I do feel that this culture war that we're living in is a new civil is a modern day civil war where, you know, social media is is weaponized.
06:16But now we're seeing all of the weaponization that has taken place, you know, in on the Internet really come to life on the street and get quite violent.
06:28So I think we're silly to think that we're not living through a civil war at this moment.
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