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ASPartOfMe
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30 May 2023, 9:30 pm

Experts warn against canceling Pride campaigns after extremists threaten Target

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Extremism experts and LGBTQ advocates warned that removing merchandise could be seen as a success by anti-LGBTQ extremists and violent protesters which could lead to copycat behavior threatening the already marginalized community.

Several Targets also received bomb threats over Memorial Day weekend related to the controversy, according to Cleveland 19 News. The threats reportedly called for the return of LGBTQ+ items to the shelves, according to the local news outlet, which said it received the bomb threats.

"I think this will embolden alt-right actors, who now are going to believe that with social media campaigns and targeted actions against retailers that they can proceed in limiting visibility of LGBTQ people," said Sophie Bjork-James, a professor at Vanderbilt University, who researches the white nationalist movement, in an interview.

Drag shows and drag story hours, even children's hospitals, as well as other LGBTQ+ pride events have faced death and bomb threats as well as protesters in recent years. In November, a Colorado LGBTQ+ bar was the site of a mass shooting, stoking heightened fear within the community.

Target's giving into this," said Victor Asal, a professor at Albany and extremism researcher. "Other extremists will say 'hey, that's a great idea. We should do that.'"

Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, believes extremists are making calculated efforts to redefine LGBTQ+ Pride as a "toxic" or dangerous thing.

Bomb threats, he said, are intended to scare the community and supporters into silence.

"It's a real concern," said Hayden. "Bigots feel emboldened largely because of mainstream politicians giving them a pat on the back," referring to some conservative political and media figures who have recently resurfaced harmful stereotypes against LGBTQ+ people.

The Department of Homeland Security said that intensifying waves of threats and calls of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community could lead to a rise of potential attacks against larger targets, such as public spaces and healthcare sites that may be linked to the community.

According to a report by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, anonymous forum websites detailing hate crime fantasies or plans against the LGBTQ+ highlight the growing threat of violence against this community.

National LGBTQ+ organizations, including Family Equality, GLAAD, GLSEN, The Human Rights Campaign, and more are calling on Target and all businesses to stand up against anti-LGBTQ+ extremism.

"When values of diversity, equity and inclusion are tested, business must defend them unequivocally," the organizations said in a joint statement.

Organizations are pointing to the actions of North Face, an outdoor sporting gear company, as an example of how to respond to boycott calls against Pride campaigns. The company defended its ads featuring a drag queen in the face of criticism in a statement and has continued to roll out its Summer of Pride campaign.

“The North Face has always believed the outdoors should be a welcoming, equitable and safe place for all. We are honored and grateful to support partners like Pattie Gonia who help make this vision a reality," the brand said in a statement to ABC News. "The Summer of Pride series, now in its second year, has helped foster a more accessible and welcoming environment for individuals from all backgrounds to gather and experience the joy of the outdoors.

If you are going to take these steps to embrace the LGBTQ+ population in a public way, you have to have the courage of your convictions to see it through," said Hayden in an interview with ABC News.

"Once you make that decision to do that, and you back away in fear, it is those people you are putting at risk, who are frequently a target of harassment, intimidation – as we've seen also, catastrophic violence."


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31 May 2023, 6:20 pm

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/ca ... pink-hell/

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...On May 6, 1933, three months after Hitler’s election as German chancellor, several trucks drove up in front of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Around a hundred students forced their way into the building and began demolishing the Institute. They scattered documents around, destroyed research equipment and material, and carried the books out of the library. That afternoon, other trucks arrived full of Nazi storm troopers who finished the job. Several days later, the Nazis assembled a large crowd to watch the burning of an impressive number of books and documents, and a bust of Hirschfeld, in front of the Berlin Opera...The attack on Hirschfeld’s institute was the first drastic step that the Nazis took against homosexuals and, to a degree, against Jews as well. The destruction of the institute followed statements characterizing it as “an international center for the sale of white slaves” and “an unsupervised breeding ground for filth and contamination.” In 1930, Nazi Reichstag delegate Wilhelm Frick, later internal affairs minister in Hitler’s government, presented a plan for the castration of homosexuals, “that Jewish plague.” Nazi newspapers called for the death penalty for homosexual acts.

Many German gays, like Jews, nevertheless assumed that the Nazis would change their policies once they were in power. The cult of masculinity that the Nazis propagated blinded some...

...Hatred of homosexuals was determined by both party ideology and the personal obsessions of the leaders, and especially of Heinrich Himmler, the main originator of the plan to exterminate homosexuals. For Himmler and other Nazi ideologues, homosexuals—like Jews—were the incarnation of degeneracy. They saw Jews and homosexuals as outsiders and inferior human beings who threatened the purity of der Volk....the nationalist and Nazi typology presented Jews and homosexuals in a highly similar way, treating them as selfish, useless, and sexually aggressive and insatiable to the degree that they could not control their urges. They accused Jews and homosexuals of using the fact that they were different as a weapon against society. Jews allegedly “went mad” over Christian women, and homosexuals over young Aryan men....

...Nazi propaganda accused priests and monks of homosexuality. these accusations reached their apogee in 1937, when Reich Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels proclaimed during a radio broadcast that “the sacristy has become a bordello, and monasteries are places for the growth of abject homosexuality.”...

...Homosexuals were one of the specially selected groups in the concentration camps. Far less numerous than other prisoners, they experienced a hell of a particular kind. The first transport of homosexuals noted by the Nazis arrived at Fuhlsbuttel concentration camp in the fall of 1933. This was a new prisoner category. They were marked with the letter “A,” which was later replaced by the pink triangle...As opposed to the Jews and the Roma, the Nazis intended not to exterminate homosexuals, but to “reeducate” them. The death rate among homosexuals was high, especially when compared to other groups imprisoned for purposes of reeducation. Fifty-five percent of homosexual prisoners died in the camps, as opposed to 40% of political prisoners and 34.7% of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Between 5,000 and 15,000 gays died in the camps...Homosexuals were treated as the lowest of the groups within the prisoner population. As a rule, they obtained the worst labor assignments, and were often rejected by their fellow prisoners and treated as deviants....The prisoners wearing the pink triangle never lived long. The SS murdered them quickly and systematically....

...Homosexual prisoners were forced to sleep in nightshirts and to hold their hands outside the covers. This was supposed to prevent masturbation. One prisoner recalled that “anyone caught without underwear or with their hands under the covers—and there were several checks each night—was taken outside, had several buckets of water dumped on them, and was made to stand that way for a good hour. Only a few survived, especially when there was a centimeter of ice on the windowpanes. Bronchitis was prevalent as a result, and it was rare for a homosexual to come back alive from the hospital.”

A block supervisor in Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp (now Rogożnica, Poland) was notorious for exceptional cruelty. As Józef Gielo writes in his Gross-Rosen camp memoirs, “this German convict and sexual pervert lured young boys into his room and, after several days of having relations, murdered them in cold blood. He also murdered anyone who witnessed his actions, even accidentally.”

Homosexuals were assigned to particularly hard labor in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and other camps...


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RetroGamer87
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31 May 2023, 6:42 pm

Misslizard wrote:
High rates of violence against the trans community.
https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-vio ... ty-in-2022

Yet the right is trying to push the false narrative that trans people are coming after your daughters.


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goldfish21
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31 May 2023, 6:53 pm

RetroGamer87 wrote:
Misslizard wrote:
High rates of violence against the trans community.
https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-vio ... ty-in-2022

Yet the right is trying to push the false narrative that trans people are coming after your daughters.

You would think ppl might pause and think “Hmm, there have been exactly zero trans ppl coming after my daughters to date, so why would there be now that some fringe politician or media personality says so? :?

You would think ppl would pause to ponder this, anyways.


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Jakki
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31 May 2023, 7:17 pm

goldfish21 wrote:
RetroGamer87 wrote:
Misslizard wrote:
High rates of violence against the trans community.
https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-vio ... ty-in-2022

Yet the right is trying to push the false narrative that trans people are coming after your daughters.

You would think ppl might pause and think “Hmm, there have been exactly zero trans ppl coming after my daughters to date, so why would there be now that some fringe politician or media personality says so? :?

You would think ppl would pause to ponder this, anyways.


This is curious to me that ppl might expect the above type of people to be able to hold two seperate thoughts in their head at once . Not to wanting to appear bias agsinst any specific population. But "my experiences" in the bible belt
concerning Alt - right persons and outlier areas persons often thoughout this country have repeatedly only demonstrated a overt beligerant brand of Thought process, That could easily be construed as Ignorance.
And this observation is not just confined to LBGTQ+ topics
(and possibly be considered a danger to themselves and others) . IMHO


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ASPartOfMe
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12 Jun 2023, 11:06 pm

Target stores in at least five states receive bomb threats over Pride items

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Target stores in at least five U.S. states had to be evacuated over the weekend after receiving bomb threats, which tie into the recent backlash the U.S.-based retail chain received for its Pride Month merchandise.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that local news outlets in parts of Oklahoma, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Louisiana received emails from unknown individuals about bomb threats at the stores.

In one email sent to Oklahoma City NBC affiliate KFOR, which is owned by Nexstar Media Group, the individual listed seven locations in and around the Oklahoma City area, claiming that two of the locations already had bombs in them, adding that they hid the bombs inside of products.

“The bombs will detonate in several hours, guess which ones have the bombs. Time is ticking,” the email reads, also ending with the date “4/19/1995,” the date of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Oklahoma City Police Department spokesperson Gary Knight said that several news outlets notified them about the emailed threats, adding that after evacuating the listed stores as a precaution, authorities didn’t find any suspicious items, according to the Post.

South Burlington, Vt. police chief Shawn Burke said that news outlets in Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York all received the same email bomb threat over the weekend, which accused the retail chain of betraying the LGBTQ+ community, also naming the locations of four stores in the three states including South Burlington.

“I think it had quite an impact locally,” Burke said, the Post reported. “It makes people a little bit uneasy to think about what’s going on. We’re more and more seeing this type of behavior in terms of swatting at schools locally and in terms of stores like Target [nationally].”

After the announcement, company stores in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah received bomb threats from people who were claiming to be unhappy with the removal of the Pride merchandise, the Post reported.


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14 Jun 2023, 1:35 pm

https://www.them.us/story/target-pride- ... -explained


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Honey69
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26 Jun 2023, 10:11 am



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w89etN8 ... BenShapiro


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26 Jun 2023, 12:21 pm

8) Thank you for the above Utube Link ...and I do not even like Neil de Grasse. :skull:


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26 Jun 2023, 9:25 pm



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feRHuSZ ... ingAtheist


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Lecia_Wynter
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03 Jul 2023, 8:05 am

AngelRho wrote:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/target-holds-emergency-meeting-lgbtq-pride-merchandise-stores-avoid-bud-light-situation

Ahead of Pride month Target is moving some LGBTQ displays away from the front of the store and reducing how much space is dedicated to it. They are concerned that they'll face similar backlash as Bud Light did with Mulvaney.

Personally, I don't see why Target should be all that concerned. There is a tremendous difference between putting Mulvaney's face on a product used by a large population who don't want to be seen as supporting trans issues and going into a store that might feature Pride-related merch yet won't force you to buy it. Budweiser did that--forced their customers to hold cans with Mulvaney on them, switch brands, or just not drink beer. I mean...I get tired of the same beer ALL THE TIME, so I switched from Bud Light to Yuengling weeks before Mulvaney. For a light beer, Bud ain't bad. But politicizing beer doesn't exactly entice me to want to buy it, either. And Yuengling just tastes better.

But I think reorganizing a Target store when really all anyone wants to do is pick up some new underwear is getting a little silly. Worst case scenario your 13 year old kid sees a swimsuit and asks mom what "tuck friendly" means. If Target wants to support LGBTQ by selling swimsuits at the front of the store, who cares? Unlike the Bud Light fiasco, I have a feeling that the only people who would make a federal case out of it are also the types who'd never shop at Target in the first place.

And Target really isn't all that great, anyway.


Because Capitalism is about appealing to the widest demographic possible. It is a negation of self.

In a utopian economy, a store should put Biden standups in their store if they like Biden. Or none if they don't like his policies. But they won't. They will be apolitical. Because that's what Capitalism is about. Appealing to the widest demographics possible. Capitalists didn't promote LGBT in the 80s and 70s because LGBT wasn't popular. They promote things based on if its popular or not, not based on their own personal moral views. If a capitalist is actually pro-LGBT at heart, but the society they reside isn't, they will wait until society decides for them, and then display it. That's Capitalism, and that's Democracy.



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04 Jul 2023, 8:14 am

https://news.yahoo.com/arizona-attorney ... _test=0_00


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16 Aug 2023, 3:33 pm

Pride Month backlash hurt Target’s sales. They fell for the first time in six years

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/compani ... 010101_1_1


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Honey69
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02 Dec 2023, 9:28 am

Odd--they're STILL going after Target

https://www.thestreet.com/restaurants/f ... yptr=yahoo

But, I'm guessing that most of the people who take this seriously couldn't afford to shop at Target anyway.


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