(LONDON) — The Islamic Republic of Iran said it executed three men Friday morning on charges of “waging war against God” and collaboration with terrorist groups.
The judiciary’s website Mizan claimed that Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi and Saeed Yaghoubi’s charges were based on their confessions that they were involved in killing three members of the regime’s forces during protests in Isfahan last November.
Protests in Isfahan and other cities across the country erupted in September after 22-year old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not fully abiding with the mandatory hijab rule of the country, died in police custody.
At least 22,000 people had been arrested across the country in the ensuing protests, as the Islamic Republic News Agency confirmed. Iran Human Rights reported that at least 537 people were killed by the regime which never accepted the responsibility of what happened to Amini.
After Iran’s Supreme Court upheld the execution sentences of Kazemi, Mirhashemi and Yaghubi, families of the men executed Friday and members of the Iranian public pleaded with international bodies to take any action to stop the Islamic Republic from carrying out the sentences.
Amnesty International said the men’s fast-tracked trial was flawed and then pointed out there were significant procedural flaws, lack of evidence, and torture allegations that were never investigated.
In a last message that the three men reportedly signed and smuggled out of the prison, they asked the public to help them stop the regime from executing them.
“Hello, we ask you dear fellow citizens not to let them kill us. We need your help. We need your support,” the message signed on May 17 reads.
In December, Mohsen Shekari was the first person hanged for alleged crimes related to the protests after allegedly holding up traffic and assaulting a guard. Less than a week later, 22-year-old Majid Reza Rahnavard, who had been convicted on charges of “waging war against God” amid protests, was executed.
According to the Iran Human Rights group, 13 executions were recorded on May 18 and at least 90 people have been executed since the start of the month.
United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said on May 9 that Iran is executing a “frighteningly” high number of people, with over 209 executed so far since January.
“On average so far this year, over 10 people are put to death each week in Iran, making it one the world’s highest executors,” said Türk.
Protests against the regime erupted across the country Friday in response to the executions.
(NEW YORK) — Mildred Mahazu, the aunt of Jordan Neely, spoke exclusively in an interview with ABC News’ Byron Pitts about her nephew’s death after a former Marine placed him in a chokehold on a New York City subway train.
Neely, whose funeral is scheduled for Friday, was described by his aunt as a “diamond.”
“Jordan was a very, very sweet person,” Mahazu said in the interview that aired Friday. “He liked to be loved and he loved people. He was very, very, very friendly.”
She said she’s “not a judge,” but offered that Daniel Penny, the man who is charged in Neely’s death, “should be punished.”
“Why would you put your arm, your head around someone’s neck and choke him when you know you would die in less than 2 or 3 minutes? That means murder,” Mahazu said in the interview.
On May 1, Neely was on a Manhattan-bound F train making outbursts, according to what witnesses told investigators. He didn’t appear to threaten anyone specifically, according to witness accounts in court documents.
Penny, 24, engaged with Neely, allegedly put him in a chokehold and held him down for several minutes, according to investigators and bystander video of the incident. At least two other people are seen holding Neely down during the ordeal.
Neely was taken to a hospital and declared dead. The medical examiner would later rule Neely’s death a homicide.
Police sources told ABC News that Penny was not specifically being threatened by Neely when he intervened. Sources also added that Neely had not become violent and had not been threatening anyone in particular.
Neely had been previously arrested for several incidents on the subway, though it’s unclear how many, if any, led to convictions, sources close to the investigation told ABC News.
Although Penny was initially questioned by police, he was not arrested and was released later that night.
News of the incident sparked protests from New Yorkers and some leaders who called for Penny to be charged. On May 12, Penny turned himself in to the police as he was charged with second-degree manslaughter in Neely’s death.
He pleaded not guilty and was released on bond.
Penny’s attorneys have maintained their client never intended to kill Neely and was just trying to protect himself and others as Neely was allegedly threatening him.
“Mr. Neely had a documented history of violent and erratic behavior, the apparent result of ongoing and untreated mental illness,” said the statement from the law firm of Raiser and Kenniff.
Penny’s next court appearance is scheduled for July 17. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison.
“He needs to make some time for that,” Mahazu said. “You don’t need to walk a free man.”
The other persons in the video holding down Neely have not been publicly identified or charged in connection with his death.
(NEW YORK) — A 17-year-old girl has been charged with murder in the overdose deaths of two of her classmates, authorities said Thursday.
Two teenage girls were found dead Tuesday at Fayette Ware Comprehensive High School in Somerville, Tennessee, after overdosing on fentanyl. A third teenager was transported to the hospital in critical condition. One of the girls was 16 years old and the two others were 17 years old, according to the school district.
District Attorney Mark Davidson told ABC News the surviving girl was charged with two counts of second-degree murder and one count of possession of a controlled substance.
All three girls were juniors at the high school, which held its graduation ceremony just hours after the overdoses.
The school held a balloon release vigil for the students in the school’s parking on Thursday. The school also made counselors and religious leaders from across the district available to the community through next week.
“We want to send our thoughts and prayers to the families of the young ladies who lost their lives. A common thread throughout our district is family. This situation has rocked our family,” Versie Hamlett, Fayette County Public Schools’ superintendent, said in a letter to the community.
Murder charges for someone involved in overdose deaths are “unusual,” Davidson said.
“I’ve never seen it; not in a situation of this gravity,” he added, saying his office has charged adults for providing deadly drugs but never a juvenile.
The girl, who has not been named by officials, will appear in juvenile court June 7 for a status hearing.
(NEW YORK) — An additional person has died in an outbreak linked to contaminated eye drops and more people are reporting they’ve lost their vision.
The number of deaths has risen to four, according to an update issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday and first reported by ABC News.
At least one of the deaths occurred in Washington state, but the CDC did not provide any information on the other victims.
Additionally, at least 14 people have gone blind, up from eight reported during the last update in March. Four people have had their eyeballs surgically removed but that number has not risen.
Patients reported using at least 10 different brands of artificial tears but most cases have been linked to EzriCare and Delsam Pharma eye drops, made by India-based Global Pharma Healthcare.
The eye drops were contaminated with an antibiotic-resistant form of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an aggressive bacterium, according to the CDC.
Pseudomonas are a type of bacteria found in the environment, with P. aeruginosa being the most common to cause infections in humans.
The infection is common in health care settings and spreads from improper hygiene either due to unclean hands or medical equipment and surfaces not being properly cleaned.
P. aeruginosa is resistant to multiple types of antibiotics and has caused about 32,600 infections among U.S. hospitalized patients and an estimated 2,700 deaths, according to the CDC.
The strain that has been linked to the outbreak, however, had never been reported in the United States before, the CDC stated in its update.
As of May 15, 81 people across 18 states have been infected with P. aeruginosa, an increase of 13 patients since the last update.
Symptoms of their infections include yellow, green, or clear discharge from the eye; eye pain or discomfort; red eyes or eyelids; feeling of something in the eye; increased sensitivity to light; and blurry vision.
In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning, backed by the CDC, urging clinicians and the public not to buy EzriCare Artificial Tears or Delsam Pharma’s Artificial Tears due to potential bacterial contamination.
After the warning, Global Pharma Healthcare issued a voluntary recall of both products, notifying distributors and advising wholesalers, retailers and customers who have the products to stop usage. Global Health Pharma has also issued a recall of Delsam Pharma’s Artificial Ointment.
The CDC and the FDA are warning that anybody who still has these brands immediately stop use and discard. None of the products appear to be able to be bought online.
Among the 13 new cases that were reported to the CDC, six had specimens collected prior to the February recall.
“These cases were confirmed after the recall date due to the time it takes for testing to confirm the outbreak strain and because of retrospective reporting of infections,” the CDC wrote in its update.
Of the seven patients with specimens collected after the recall, they either were living in long-term care facilities with other known cases or were using a recalled brand of artificial tears.
(WASHINGTON) — A ticking clock in Washington to avert default by raising the nation’s borrowing limit is drawing attention to the $31.4 trillion debt already accrued by the United States government.
The country hit its current debt ceiling in mid-January and is expected to run out of cash to be able to pay all its bills as soon as June 1, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned Congress, while cautioning that the exact “X-date” for default remains fluid.
As President Joe Biden and leading lawmakers including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy work to hammer out a deal, here’s what to know about how the U.S. amassed its debts so far:
What is the national debt?
Nearly every year, the government spends more than it collects in taxes and other revenue, resulting in a deficit. (The debt ceiling, set by Congress, caps how much the U.S. can borrow to pay for its remaining bills.) The national debt, now at a historic high, is the buildup of its deficits over time.
Only five times in the past half century has the U.S. run a surplus, the most recent being in 2001.
“Each side of the political aisle can blame the other, but the debt is mathematically just a mismatch,” Kent Smetters, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business who formerly worked at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, told ABC News.
The U.S. has had debt since its founding and has only been completely debt-free once, in 1835.
How did it grow to $31.4 trillion?
The national debt has grown significantly since the early 1980s under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The largest percentage increases to the debt occurred under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom enacted tax cuts that led to large deficits.
Flashpoints that greatly contributed to the debt over the past 50 years include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic — the latter two prompting sweeping stimulus measures from Congress that cost trillions of dollars.
“Some of the debt is definitely policy-driven, such as in the case of tax cuts. Some of it’s reactive: We had a pandemic, we had a financial crisis, and the government’s going to take a position and step in,” said David Thomson, the director of Sacred Heart University’s history program, who has written about the U.S. debt.
“When you add all those things up, it leads to some pretty significant chunks of change. And that’s gotten us up to that $31.4 trillion mark,” Thomson said.
Who owns the debt?
Much of the debt — $24.6 trillion — is held by the public in the form of financial securities issued by the Treasury Department. Another $6.8 trillion is held by various parts of the U.S. government.
The public debt is held by individuals, corporations, foreign nations and entities, state or local governments and Federal Reserve Banks.
The amount of publicly-held debt has doubled over the past decade, Smetters said, and is considered by many economists to be the most important measure of debt.
Will the debt keep growing?
One model from Wharton estimates that if the government wanted to balance its budget sheets, it would have to either permanently and immediately reduce spending or increase tax revenue.
All spending, including for popular programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, would need to be slashed by 30%, according to the Wharton model. Or the federal government could permanently increase all sources of federal tax revenue by roughly 40%.
“Or some combination of the two,” Smetters said. “Right now, the discussions happening in Washington on both sides are so far away from the actual math of what needs to happen. They’re still dancing around some much bigger issues.”
However, many economists believe some government debt is a good thing. Thomson noted that growing public debt speaks to the fact that many view U.S. bonds and and other securities as among the safest assets in the world.
(WASHINGTON) — A D.C. police lieutenant was arrested and charged Friday with obstruction of justice and making false statements over allegations that he leaked information to then-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy last month for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
The Justice Department announced Friday that Shane Lamond, 47, was indicted by a grand jury in D.C. with one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements.
Lamond was repeatedly mentioned throughout the course of the nearly four month seditious conspiracy trial over his ties to Tarrio.
The indictment unsealed Friday alleges he obstructed the government’s investigation into Tarrio for his burning of a Black Lives Matter flag in December 2020 by telling the Proud Boys leader law enforcement had a warrant out for his arrest.
Lamond is further alleged to have given confidential law enforcement information to Tarrio that in turn was passed along to other Proud Boys members.
When Lamond was interviewed in June of 2021 by law enforcement, he allegedly lied about his contacts with Tarrio multiple times, the indictment alleges.
(NEW YORK) — An Illinois mom is opening up about how she advocated for her teenage daughter to get the correct diagnosis and treatment she needed after she started experiencing life-changing symptoms over a year ago.
Lindsey Sutherland told Good Morning America her daughter Ayli started having unusual symptoms, such as a stiff hand, trouble walking and hallucinations, after she underwent jaw surgery.
“She did not know us. She was seeing things,” Sutherland recalled.
The symptoms were aggressive, according to Sutherland, and kept getting worse, leading to seizures, tics and parts of her 14-year-old daughter’s body freezing in place.
For months, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
At times, Sutherland said her daughter’s behavior was psychotic.
“This was not my child anymore. It was like she wasn’t even in there,” Sutherland said.
Eventually, a friend of Sutherland’s told her Ayli’s symptoms reminded them of a movie called Brain on Fire, which recounts the true story of a young woman with psychotic episodes and seizures who was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis, a condition where the immune system attacks the brain.
“It was that story almost to a T. And so I thought, ‘OK, what do I have to lose? I’m calling those doctors from that movie,'” Sutherland said. “I begged and I said, ‘Please just see my child.'”
Doctors eventually diagnosed Ayli with both autoimmune encephalitis and stiff person syndrome, another rare debilitating disorder that iconic singer Celine Dion revealed she had last December. They think stress from Ayli’s jaw surgery may have set off her autoimmune encephalitis.
At Northwell Health’s Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, pediatric neurologist Dr. Juliann Paolicchi started treating Ayli with a couple medications, including steroids.
“The effect was miraculous,” Paolicchi told GMA.
“Our child was starting to come back to us. She could walk down the hall by herself,” Sutherland added.
Paolicchi said the right treatment for Ayli was like night and day.
“It was so striking that it was almost challenging to believe from a medical perspective,” Paolicchi said.
Although there is currently no cure for either autoimmune encephalitis or stiff person syndrome, Ayli’s symptoms are now under better control with the appropriate medications.
Ayli has now also returned to school and is looking ahead to her future.
“I’ve always wanted to work in the medical field but I think now, I’m leaning more towards helping patients that have this,” the 14-year-old said, referring to her conditions.
Sutherland said she encourages other parents to fight for and advocate for their kids’ care.
“If something’s not right in your gut, keep fighting,” Sutherland said. “Don’t stop.”
Jill Smokler, left, is shown during an interview with ABC News’ Janai Norman. — ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A year after “soft swinging” allegations embroiled a group of Mormon TikTok influencers in Utah, one of them is opening up about the aftermath of being unwittingly swept into the ensuing scandal, and the effect it had on her mental health.
“I experienced my first real panic attack, which I had never had before, just like rocking back and forth hyperventilating,” Miranda McWhorter said in a recent “Impact x Nightline” interview on Hulu. McWhorter denied participating in the alleged swinging.
The episode explores the industry known as “mom-fluencing” — where mothers amassing huge social media followings by sharing an often curated version of their families’ lives, posting everything from their kids’ hair routines to back to school hacks, while monetizing their content with lucrative brand deals.
Influencing is a multi-billion dollar industry, and moms are said to make up about 30% of that total, according to data from the Center on Digital Culture and Society at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication.
“When you have a mom influencer who has over a million followers, who is incredibly dedicated to her content creation, that’s when you can really start seeing the big money and the million dollar a year contracts. They’re essentially running media empires,” Piazza told “Impact.”
But there’s more than meets the eye with some of these seemingly perfect lives. The big business of influencing also goes hand in hand with the scandals and controversies going on behind the screen — something McWhorter knows firsthand.
When fellow mom-fluencer Taylor Frankie Paul announced she was getting divorced last May, Paul claimed she and her husband had a non-monogamous lifestyle and seemed to implicate other Mormon “MomTok” influencers in her group.
“I don’t know what you would call it, if it’s like soft swinging, but you don’t fully switch if that makes sense and go all the way, and to be honest, I did. We had an agreement, like all of us, and I did step out of that agreement, and that’s where I messed up,” Paul said during a livestream. She added, “No one was innocent, everyone has hooked up with like everyone in this situation.”
All members of the group targeted by the speculation quickly denied their involvement, including McWhorter, who posted that she had “nothing to do with [Paul’s] divorce” and “never soft swapped” with anybody.
McWhorter now tells “Impact” she has since moved away from Utah back to her hometown in Idaho.
“I’ve seen so many people say, ‘Miranda just moved out of Utah to get away from everything and everyone in Utah.’ And though that wasn’t the sole reason, I’m like, ‘I have no shame admitting that I was, like, ‘See ya. This is toxic for me and my mental health,'” McWhorter said.
Paul did not respond to a request for comment.
“Impact” also explored the controversy surrounding 31-year-old mom-fluencer Kathleen Sorenson, who was found guilty after falsely accusing a Latino couple of attempting to kidnap her children in 2020.
Meanwhile, a growing movement of mothers on social media seem to be ditching the idea of posting pristine images of their “flawless” family. Breaking out of that picture-perfect mold are mom influencers like Rosie Nguyen, who’s creating content about the “invisible labor” some moms take on, cracking jokes and writing skits about the messy side of motherhood.
“What blew my mind was that brands started reaching out. And they were like, ‘We want you to be just you.’ And I was like, ‘Stop. And you’re gonna pay me?'” Nguyen told “Impact.”
But when Nguyen first entered the mom-fluencing world, she says she didn’t see many moms who looked like her.
“Being an Asian creator, and an Asian mom content creator, I definitely see that we’re not represented well. There are brands who, you can scroll through their feed and it’s like, not a single diverse person is on there,” Nguyen said.
ABC News’ correspondent Janai Norman spoke to attendees at a conference called “Mom 2.0,” including Jill Smokler, who founded the popular site “Scary Mommy” in 2008.
Smokler, a mom of three, said she created the blog with the goal of documenting “the real side of parenthood.” She sold the blog to a major media company in 2015. Now that her children are older, she’s working to create a new brand called “She’s Got Issues.”
“It’s sort of where Scary Mommy left off, with where we are, where I am now, with older kids, with aging parents, with physical changes,” Smokler said.
But the rules have changed and Smokler is just trying to get back in the game.
“I felt like it shifted from natural, organic content into more calculated content. And my life is not that way. So I couldn’t even — even if I tried — could not portray that type of image. And I wouldn’t want to,” Smokler said.
(LONDON) — A year since Russia took control of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, plans for reconstruction are under way but former residents aren’t convinced.
The siege of Mariupol started the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and ended on May 20, 2022. The battle ended with the surrender of the last Ukrainian fighters at their final stronghold — the Azovstal steel plant.
Katya Plechystova got a call on that day from an unknown number. It was her husband Oleg. For three months he had been defending their hometown while fighting for the Ukrainian army. They hadn’t spoken — except for the very occasional text message — since before the invasion.
“He said that they are leaving the plant, that this is just an evacuation through Russia and that they have guarantees that everything would be fine,” Katya says. That was the last time Katya spoke to Oleg. “There has been no information about his whereabouts for this whole year”
Dmytro Kozatsky was at Azovstal with Oleg. He struggles to talk about his experience. “In general, these three months passed like a whole separate life,” he told ABC News.
He says the worst moments were after airstrikes and having to call out to make sure everyone was still alive.
“Any time someone died during these strikes, that was probably the toughest,” he said.
Dmytro surrendered with Oleg on May 20 and was held in prison barracks with other Azovstal fighters before being exchanged in a prisoner swap in September.
Neither Dmytro nor Katya can picture what the future looks like for Mariupol. Russia has used their efforts to rebuild the city for positive press, with President Vladimir Putin visiting a new apartment building as an example back in March.
But Dmytro is unimpressed.
“I would love for the city to be rebuilt and reformed, but it’s very difficult for me now to imagine how that could be done,” he said.
Russia put together plans for Mariupol’s future as a Russian city almost immediately after the siege ended. In July 2022, local Russian-backed authorities signed into law a sweeping new bill outlining the reconstruction of Mariupol up to the year 2035.
The plan — published in full by Russian media outlet The Village — breaks down reconstruction by neighborhood, and projects a return to the city’s pre-war population by 2030. The Russian construction ministry announced in January that there were no plans for Azovstal to be repaired as the steel plant it once was. Instead, it is being envisioned as a vast business park with sprawling green spaces.
Satellite imagery indicates that the neighborhood next to it, which was severely damaged in the fighting, has been almost completely demolished in preparation for development.
To Katya, even a Ukrainian-controlled Mariupol would not be enough for her to go back.
“I can’t imagine returning to the city because of all the pain and suffering I associate with it, because of all the pain my husband lived through in that city,” she says. “I have this feeling inside of me that Mariupol was wiped out. There is nothing they could do to bring it back to me.”
Maria Vdovichenko, however, is one former resident who does dream of returning.
Having just graduated from high school, she lived through the siege of Mariupol as a civilian and when her apartment block came under fire in early March, her family moved to the basement for two long weeks.
“The shelling continued every day, every night. And every night we thought maybe we would die, maybe we wouldn’t survive because we were also without food, and without water,” she says. On March 17, her father decided they couldn’t wait any longer and they started the dangerous drive out of the city.
They passed through a Russian “filtration camp” where soldiers checked their documents for any sign of support for Ukraine before violently assaulting both Maria and her father. After 27 checkpoints, they finally arrived in Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Since then, Maria has been in Kyiv but she dreams of returning to Mariupol.
“I want to see all the streets, my drama theatre, my home. My home is destroyed in Mariupol, but I want to see it because I miss my city so much,” she says.
Maria wants to go to university to study something that would help her give back to her country. She says her family used to have big dreams before the war, but things have changed now, “We want to just live, in our home, our country, our land.”
Buildings in Maria’s neighborhood have slowly been demolished over the last year, though no new apartment blocks have been built in their place. In March of this year, a sign was put up on Maria’s old apartment block in Mariupol telling residents to leave the building by March 17 — exactly one year since Maria’s family fled.
The building was demolished just three days later and the ground has now been prepared for a new building to take its place.
(NEW YORK) — A middle school teacher in Illinois says she was forced to resign from her job after parents called the police on her for including the book This Book is Gay in a slate of books made available to students during a reading activity.
Sarah Bonner, who has been a teacher for roughly 20 years, says she is just one of many teachers facing pressure from certain parents to shun LGBTQ identities from classrooms.
“I think the day that we give up on public education is a very sad day,” she said. “I feel like this particular incident has empowered me to do more.”
She told ABC News that she and her students had Reading Mondays, when they celebrate independent reading and the love of reading.
Students get to share and swap ideas about what they love to read and what they’re reading, she said.
In March, Bonner said she held a “book tasting,” so students can see what books are out there and available to read. She teaches in a rural setting, and said “sometimes access to books can get shaky.”
She said she went to a local library to gather almost 100 titles based on the interests her students had expressed and on the recommendation of several young adult literature lists.
“I thought about my student interests and the questions that they had been asking around some of the research things that we’d been working on in class, and I developed a whole entire list of young adult reads at the library that day,” Bonner said.
However, several parents filed a report to local police over that one book, claiming Bonner was “grooming” students with the book. Opponents of the book criticized the book’s reference to sexual activities. This Book Is Gay is one of the top targeted books, according to the American Library Association.
ABC News confirmed with police that the information was recorded by them, and a fact finding investigation was to be pursued. Bonner was to then be placed on leave with pay by school officials, according to the police report.
The report states that the police were “not aware of any student that had actually been affected by the book being in the classroom” except for one student who was instructed to take pictures by their parent. None of the parents wanted to pursue this criminally by the end of the police investigation, the report states.
When Bonner spoke with her husband regarding the report, “we both looked at each other and just said I had to resign, there was no way I was going to be able to go back and be the teacher that I want to be or could be with my students having this now be put in place.”
Although she believes the police report would not have gone anywhere, she said she worked with administrators to draw up settlement agreements for her resignation following the accusation.
As a teacher, Bonner said she has fought to include a diverse set of reading materials so students who grew up in her predominantly white, rural town can learn about different perspectives and experiences.
“I did that through literature. I did that through bringing in books that not only the students can see themselves in, but also to see others as outdoor windows into spaces that they had never seen before,” Bonner said.
She urges parents with concerns to reach out to teachers: “Dialogue between parents and teachers are so key because we both want the best for your children,” she said.
Bonner, who won an award from the National Council of Teachers of English for “Outstanding Middle Level Educator” in 2018, said she fears for the state of public education amid attacks on different identities.
“The importance of representation — it’s needed now more than ever,” Bonner said. “We need more inclusivity, we need more access, and the books, literatures, texts — they are so key to supporting our students’ ability to read the world.”
Jamie Gregory, a librarian in South Carolina, has been facing similar backlash for tweeting about her teen child’s defense of a highly-banned book called “Gender Queer,” and his opposition of its removal from local schools.
The book has been criticized for its depiction of nudity and sexual references.
Book ban efforts have risen dramatically across the U.S., with a record-breaking 1,269 demands made to censor library books and resources in 2022 alone, according to the American Library Association.
These efforts primarily target books written by or about people of color or who are LGBTQ, according to the ALA. Librarians and teachers continue to face immense pressure from political groups about what they can and cannot talk about — with laws across the country restricting content about race, gender identity, sexual orientation and more in schools.
“You certainly have the right as a parent to tell your child what they can and cannot read, but explain to them how that doesn’t mean, though, that you actually remove the materials so that no one else can access it,” Gregory added.
Once Gregory’s tweet was spread online by conservative extremists, she told ABC News she began receiving threatening messages and had her personal information shared online.
“It’s not just political rhetoric. I’m a real person. And this has really happened to me. In my life,” Gregory said she told a representative from a conservative group backing book bans. “You’re saying things that are not true, and making people paranoid and making people angry. You’re accusing people like me of felonies.”
Gregory and Bonner say their experiences represent a growing hostility towards public education and its inclusion of marginalized identities. The increased scrutiny has come amid growing fears of teacher shortages, and empty positions plaguing school districts nationwide.
Shelly Fitzgerald, who was fired from her teaching job at a Christian school in 2018 for being a lesbian, believes her firing was a sign of what was to come, and what people are experiencing now.
She believes laws that restrict content in classrooms in Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere are designed to “stop teaching empathy,” “support” and “history.” She fears how laws restricting discussion on gender identity and sexual orientation in the classroom will impact her daughter, who has two mothers and could be restricted from talking about her home and family life.
Bonner, who now teaches pre-service middle school teachers, urges her students to prepare for a fight ahead.
“The more we ban, the more we erase,” Bonner said. “My heart just aches for the LGBTQ students in my classroom that have questions.”
