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      in US Politics

      Republicans are attacking childcare funding. Their goal? To push women out of the workforce | Moira Donegan

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      Last month, the White House issued a proposed budget to Congress that completely eliminated funding for Head Start, the six-decade-old early childhood education program for low-income families that serves as a source of childcare for large swaths of the American working class.The funding was restored in the proposed budget after an outcry, but large numbers of employees who oversee the program at the office of Head Start were laid off in a budget-slashing measure under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday, Kennedy said funding for the program would not be axed, but more cuts to childcare funding are likely coming: some Republicans have pushed to repeal a five-decade-old tax credit for daycare. The White House is entertaining proposals on how to incentivize and structurally coerce American women into bearing more children, but it seems to be determined to make doing so as costly to those women’s careers as possible.That’s because the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.The New York Times reported this week that the White House is now not only looking for ways to make more women have children, but to encourage “parents” to stay home to raise them. “Parents” here is a euphemism. Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.This state of affairs has been worsened by the dramatic rise in the cost of childcare, which is prohibitively expensive for many parents. The average cost of childcare per child per year in the US is now well north of $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, an industry advocacy group. In major cities such as New York, that price is significantly higher: from $16,000 to $19,000 per year. Existing tax credits need to be expanded, not eliminated, to reduce this burden on mothers and their families and to enable women to join the workforce at rates comparable to men and commensurate with their dignity and capacities. Currently, 26% of mothers do not engage in paid work, a figure that has barely budged in 40 years. Largely because of the unequally distributed burdens of childcare, men participate in the paid labor force at a rate that is more than 10% higher than women.One might think that the solution would be to invest more in high-quality childcare, so that providers could open more slots, children could access more resources, and women could go to work and expend their talents in productive ways that earn them money, make use of their gifts and provide more dignity for women and more stability for families. This is not what the American right is proposing: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who promotes traditional family and gender relations, has called such policy initiatives “work-ist”. Conservatives are proposing, instead, that women go back to the kitchen.The Trump administration, and the American right more broadly, wants the rate of women’s employment to be even lower, because it is advancing a lie that women are naturally, inevitably, uniformly and innately inclined to caregiving, child rearing and homemaking – and not to the positions of intellectual achievement, responsibility, leadership, ingenuity or independence that women may aspire to in the public world. “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hardwired to bond with Mom,” says Janet Erickson, a fellow at the rightwing Institute for Family Studies, who once co-authored an op-ed with JD Vance calling on “parents” to drop out of the workforce to raise children. “I just think, why should we deny that?”This kind of vague, evidence-free gesturing toward evolutionary psychology – the notion that babies are “hardwired” to prefer mothers who are not employed – is a common conservative tick: a recourse to dishonest and debunked science to lend empiricism to bigotry. There is in fact no evolutionary reason, and no biological reason, for mothers, and not fathers, to abandon independence, ambition or life outside the home for the sake of a child. The only reason is a sexist one.Over the past decade, the left launched few vigorous defenses of a feminist politics that seeks to advance and secure women’s access to public life, paid work and fair remuneration. The American left has launched vigorous criticisms of the “girlboss”, a figure of malignant female ambition who seemed to make the exploitations of capitalism more offensive by virtue of her sex, and it has instead offered critiques of women’s ambition and romantic defenses of the labor of “care” that just happens to overlap with women’s traditional – and traditionally unpaid – roles in the home. This leftwing rhetoric has at times mirrored the similar romanticization of the unpaid housewife of yesteryear from the right, which has embraced tradwives, homesteading fantasies and an aestheticized rustic simplicity that aims to contrast feminist gains in the workforce with a fantasy of women’s rest. Together, these strains of rhetorical opposition to women in the workforce have made anti-feminism into a new kind of “socialism of fools” – a misguided misdirection of anger and resentment at the rapaciousness of capitalism towards a social justice movement for the rights of an oppressed class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut what is on offer from the political right is not about the refashioning of work and life to be less extractive and exploitative for women, and particularly for mothers. It is instead about a sex segregation of human experience, an effort to make much of public life inaccessible to women. Combined with the right wing’s successful attack on the right to abortion, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to Title X programs that provide contraceptive access, and the rescinding of federal grants aimed at helping working women, what emerges from the rightwing policy agenda is an effort to force women out of education, out of decently paid work and into pregnancy, unemployment and dependence on men.Theirs is an effort to shelter men from women’s economic competition, to revert to the regressive cultural modes of an imagined past, and to impose an artificially narrow vision of the capacities, aspirations, talents and desires of half of the American people.Murray Rothbard, the paleoconservative 20th-century economist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the Trumpist worldview, once vowed: “We shall repeal the 20th century.” As far as the Republican right is concerned, it seems to want to repeal the gains of 20th-century feminism first.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      The Symbolism Behind India’s ‘Operation Sindoor’

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      The name for the military attack on Pakistan brings to mind a woman who became shorthand for the grief wrought by a terrorist attack.Himanshi Narwal was first a symbol of tragedy, then a target of hate.Last month, Ms. Narwal was captured in an image sitting beside her slain husband, who was among 26 people killed in a terrorist attack on the Indian side of Kashmir. As India struck Pakistan on Wednesday in retaliation, Ms. Narwal became shorthand for why India picked the name “Operation Sindoor” for its military action.Sindoor, or vermilion powder, is a traditional marker of the marital status of Hindu women. Married women wear it either in the parting of their hair or on their foreheads, and they wipe it off if they become widowed. During the April 22 terrorist attack, many women lost their husbands, who were targeted because they were Hindu. But few received the media attention that Ms. Narwal has after the image of her by her husband’s side went viral.The Indian government’s choice of the name Operation Sindoor signaled its intention to avenge the widowed women. On social media, the Indian Army announced the strikes with a stark image that included a jar of spilled sindoor, which resembled spattered blood.“Operation Sindoor” also signals to right-wing Hindu groups — many of which favor more traditionally defined gender roles — that the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is listening to their demands for vengeance.Carrying the body of Vinay Narwal, a naval officer who was killed in the attack last month.Bhawika Chhabra/ReutersBut some feminists have criticized the use of the word sindoor.Hindu nationalism is predominantly driven by a male view of the world, said V. Geetha, a feminist historian who writes about gender, caste and class. “Women figure in it as objects to be protected or as mother figures goading their men to prove their heroism,” Ms. Geetha said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      The Trump administration is defending abortion pill access in court. What?

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      The Trump administration on Monday asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit that takes aim at the abortion pill mifepristone – a move that stunned many observers for what seemed a defense of the drug by a president who has overseen the most dramatic rollback of abortion rights in modern US history.At first blush, it may seem a victory for abortion access – but experts worry that, in reality, the move preserves the administration’s ability to play coy about any future plans to attack abortion rights.When Donald Trump first returned to the White House earlier this year, US anti-abortion activists had high hopes for the man who helped orchestrate the downfall of Roe v Wade. They thought he might use a 19th-century anti-vice law to effectively ban abortion nationwide. Failing that, they imagined that he might use the power of the Food and Drug Administration to roll back access to mifepristone or even yank it from the market entirely.Instead, over the last few months, the Trump administration has attempted to dodge the issue entirely. The Monday request, to a Texas judge who has become a reliable vote for abortion opponents, continued that pattern.The lawsuit seeks to roll back several FDA regulatory changes that have, over the last decade, considerably expanded access to mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in US medication abortions. It revives a lawsuit that led to a stinging 9-0 defeat for abortion rights opponents when the court ruled the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors, did not have the legal standing to sue in the first place.Rather than let the matter die, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri moved to take over the case as its new plaintiffs. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the US district court for the northern district of Texas, where the case is being heard, agreed to let the attorneys general move forward.However, in its Monday filing, the Trump administration argued that there is no reason why the case should proceed in Texas.“At bottom, the states cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the states’ own claims have no connection to this district,” the administration wrote.Abortion rights supporters have long pointed to one reason why the case was filed in Texas: Kacsmaryk. A Trump appointee with a track record of abortion opposition, Kacsmaryk once took the unprecedented step of ruling to reverse the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, which would lead to its removal from the market.Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, found it “a little funny” that the Trump administration’s filing seemed to call out its own side for judge-shopping.It is possible that Trump, who was never exactly a true believer in the anti-abortion movement, has now soured on it. While the movement helped propel him to the White House in 2016, it became something of an albatross for him in 2024, as outrage over Roe’s collapse led abortion rights to become one of the election’s top issues.Yet Huberfeld found the filing more notable for what it did not say: namely, it shied away from revealing the Trump administration’s plans for mifepristone. She believes the administration may try to change mifepristone access through the FDA, and that the legal reasoning in Monday’s filing could be used against a future lawsuit by blue states against new restrictions.“They’re basically saying that the states don’t get to just challenge FDA policy because they want to,” Huberfeld said. “Which, in my view, is a set-up for anticipating that blue states may try to challenge any changes on mifepristone rules.”FDA Commissioner Martin Makary could, for example, move to reverse regulations that permit people to dispense abortion pills through telehealth – which accounts for about a fifth of all US abortions – or eliminate mifepristone’s approval. Project 2025, the notorious playbook of policy proposals authored by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, urged the FDA to do exactly that.Last month, Makary told the Semafor World Economy Summit that he had “no plans to take action” on mifepristone. However, he added: “There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.”Decades of studies, conducted in more than a dozen countries, have found that mifepristone is safe and effective. However, anti-abortion groups have repeatedly pushed studies that claimed to find that mifepristone is dangerous. (Some of those studies have been retracted.)“My guess is that the Trump administration is trying to walk the fine line of not looking like it’s threatening access to mifepristone while also, potentially, through the FDA trying to limit access to mifepristone,” Huberfeld said. “In other words, I don’t think the FDA’s actually going to be hands-off.” More

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      in US Politics

      How Trump’s war on DEI is roiling US police: ‘it doesn’t mean work will stop’

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      After the murder of George Floyd, protests pushed some police agencies to bring in a new class of professionals like Colleen Jackson to help make departments more representative of and responsive to the communities they serve.Hired as the first chief diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officer in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 2021, Jackson has assisted in a hiring process that swore in a class of women, Black and Asian American recruits and has surveyed residents on their experiences with the police. She is now organizing an event to bring together young residents and Black officers that she hopes will lead to safer interactions on the street.“I hope what I do touches people’s hearts and that changes their behavior,” she said.Yet, the threat of the Cleveland suburb losing a federal grant because of her work only becomes more palpable as her friends and colleagues in the field of DEI lose their jobs – and the work they’ve dedicated their lives to hemorrhages esteem. “I’m just not the person who’s gonna operate in fear,” she said. “But I am a person who operates in reality.”View image in fullscreenThere is a growing realization among DEI professionals such as Jackson and police officers across the country that a backlash is gaining momentum. Donald Trump, who has called DEI “illegal”, has halted federal programs and encouraged executive branch agencies to investigate and withhold funds from institutions that engage in DEI practices.The new administration has threatened to pull federal funding to compel policy changes in other areas of American life, such as universities, but policing experts are skeptical that a similar tactic would work on the nation’s roughly 17,000 local and state law enforcement agencies, particularly because they draw most of their funds from local taxes.Still, Trump’s actions are already having an impact, contributing negatively to the culture in police departments by “encouraging tension within the ranks”, said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy project director of policing. Opposition to diverse perspectives, she said, can breed an insular culture prone to abuse of underrepresented groups.“This is not merely about the threat to diversity in policing,” Borchetta said. “That threat can spill out into the street.”Increasing diversity among the ranks isn’t a panacea for police abuse – think of the case of Tyre Nichols, a Black man in Memphis, Tennessee, who died after being beaten by several Black officers. Still, policing experts say, hiring a more diverse force combined with efforts to change the culture within departments can help.Trump’s anti-DEI push is not the first time efforts to diversify policing have faced a backlash. Black officers hired in the south during Reconstruction lost their jobs in the late 1800s when the federal government relinquished its control over former Confederate states. Later in the 1970s, after the civil rights movement era, federal efforts to force several big-city police departments to diversify faced opposition from white-dominated police unions. By the 1990s, most of these federal efforts were terminated.According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the rise of DEI in policing, the number of Black officers hit its high-water mark in 2022, constituting 17% of the nation’s rank-and-file cops before falling to 14% last year, which is about the number of Black Americans in the country. In 2024, white people made up more than 79% of police officers and women made up more than 14%.Although law enforcement diversity and inclusion experts such as Nicola Smith-Kea maintain that DEI is about more than race – it’s about including people with different abilities, genders, faiths and ages – Smith-Kea thinks Trump has transformed the acronym into a “code word” for Black, creating a framing that DEI is discriminatory against white officers.Smith-Kea said a backlash could mean “removing programs” that serve “the broader population, not just any one race”, such as accessibility ramps for disabled people or equal pay programs for women.In February, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, dismissed Biden-era lawsuits that accused police departments of hiring discrimination. Bondi dropped a case against the Maryland state police (MSP) before an agreement could be signed that would have required MSP to revise a test that Biden’s justice department found disproportionately disqualified Black and female applicants.In her dismissal, Bondi said police officers would now be “chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety – not to meet DEI quotas”.Phillip Atiba Solomon, the chief executive of the Center for Policing Equity, an organization that collects and analyzes public safety data to improve policing outcomes, said he wondered whether the Trump administration might try to use the Department of Justice to investigate police departments with DEI programs for “reverse racism”. Although Trump might have the power to quickly transform the executive branch, lawyer James Fett believes that it will take more time for the federal courts to turn against DEI. Fett, who frequently represents white officers who say they have faced employment discrimination, is eagerly awaiting the disposition of a case now with the US supreme court filed by a woman who claims she was denied a promotion with the Ohio department of youth services because she is not gay.If the conservative court rules in her favor, experts believe it could lower the standard that straight, white people will have to meet to prove they have faced employment discrimination. “It’s going to be much easier when people want to attack promotions or hiring or even terminations based on a DEI policy,” Fett said.Charles Billups of the Grand Council of Guardians, the umbrella organization for New York state’s African American policing organizations, said he and many of his members fear that Trump’s anti-DEI orders could roll back the progress they’ve seen in hiring and promotions. “A lot of us are preparing for the fair competition fostered by DEI to be eliminated,” he said.Even before Trump, some DEI professionals said they were facing pushback.Delaware county, Pennsylvania, hired Lauren Footman as its first DEI director in spring 2022. Included in her purview were the park police and law enforcement officials within the local prosecutor’s office. She said she felt tokenized right away in a department that was not interested in cultural change and only supportive of hosting parties for identity celebrations such as Black History Month.“Someone in HR actually thought that I was an event coordinator,” she said. During her time, she never worked with the park police or criminal investigation division because she says that Delaware county did not compel them to participate.Footman was fired in the spring of 2024. She says the termination was retaliation for her attempts to address the county’s culture of discrimination and she is currently pursuing legal action. When asked about Footman’s claims, Delaware county said that after her termination, the county worked with a consultant to evaluate its programs and make recommendations. However, county officials vigorously denied her accusations.Even in departments where DEI appears to have support, it can fall short. Veteran Sgt Charlotte Djossou believes that is the case in the DC Metropolitan police department (MPD).View image in fullscreenDjossou is a whistleblower who has been speaking out since the 2010s against the racial targeting in the MPD’s jump-out tactics, which involve plain clothes units accosting and searching people on the street. The courts have repeatedly found jump-outs to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. When Djossou first talked about them in the news media, she attributed their pervasiveness to the lack of Black officers in positions of power.But while she has seen more Black people hired and promoted due to DEI, she doesn’t believe it has altered the way the Black community is policed. “It’s not a Black or white thing. It’s a blue thing. And no matter what your race is, in policing, you have to conform in order to move up,” Djossou said.Djossou has filed a lawsuit against the MPD claiming it retaliated against her for whistleblowing by denying her promotions during a time when the department has been engaged in a high-profile DEI campaign to recruit and hire women. That DEI effort was shepherded by Chief Pamela A Smith, who initially joined the MPD in 2022 as its chief equity officer in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder.“I’m Black. I’m a woman. And all they’ve done is hold my career back,” Djossou said. The MPD did not respond to a request for comment.Smith-Kea understands the frustration some reform-oriented officers might have had with DEI. “Change doesn’t happen overnight,” she said, but there are advances, pointing to the widely used toolkit she helped develop for the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which instructs departments on how to implement interventions for dealing with people in a mental health crisis.Tragic killings like that of Daniel Prude have revealed the interplay between race and mental health in fatal police interactions. Prude was apprehended by Rochester, New York, police in the midst of a mental health crisis in 2020 and died of asphyxia after police put a mesh hood over his face and pinned him on the ground. Smith-Kea believes DEI-rooted solutions can prevent deaths like Prude’s. As an example, she points to the BJA toolkit’s potential to make all people, not just Black people, safer.Despite all the worries about DEI’s fate in policing, the ACLU’s Borchetta said departments have incentives to keep DEI because many learned in the 2020s that to solve crimes they “need to gain the trust of the people and that trust is more easily eroded when police departments don’t reflect the people they’re policing”.Borchetta noted that police departments also learned to use diversity to avoid accountability. She was the lead attorney in the case that brought an end to the New York police department’s unconstitutional practice of stop and frisk in 2013. While working on that case, she said, one of the NYPD’s key defenses was simply: “See how diverse our department is.”However, she also credited that diversity with helping to win the case, including the contribution of Latino and Black officers who raised alarms about stop-and-frisk. “That’s a reminder that diversity is important because it brings in perspectives of people who might be affected by your program in different ways,” she said.In Shaker Heights, where the mayor has vowed to continue its DEI initiatives, Jackson was optimistic about the future of DEI in policing. She believed that her work had touched people, and that kind of personal impact couldn’t just be erased with an executive order. She said she was certain she and other DEI professionals would continue the work, regardless of Trump’s efforts.“I recognize these executive orders could bring the end of this particular name for the work – DEI – but it doesn’t mean the work will stop,” Jackson said. When asked how she could be so sure, she said: “The work of DEI has been going on for generations. It’s the only reason why I, as a Black woman, have a job in the public sector, you know what I mean?”This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. More

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      in US Politics

      These Tennessee lawmakers love the unborn. After birth? Not so much

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      Think of the children? NahYou’ve probably seen this quote from an Alabama pastor called Dave Barnhart. It goes viral all the time. But I’m resurfacing the quote because it is another day that ends with “y” in America, which means it is relevant once again.“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for,” Barnhart said back in 2018, remarking wryly on the movement’s priorities. “They never make demands of you … They don’t need money, education or childcare … They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.”Over in Tennessee, there are a lot of lawmakers who are very proud of how much they advocate for unborn children. In 2022, as soon as Roe was overturned, the state passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans – one without explicit exceptions to save the life of a pregnant person. The ban also made performing or attempting to perform an abortion a class C felony – akin to aggravated assault – which means aiding in an abortion can land you prison time and a hefty fine. That ban has been continuously challenged in court but the bottom line is that getting an abortion in Tennessee is almost impossible.Those Tennessee lawmakers who love unborn children? Surprise, surprise, they’re not so keen on the born ones. Particularly if those kids are immigrants. On Thursday, the GOP-dominated state senate approved a bill that lets public schools check the citizenship or legal immigration status of every student. Undocumented children can be denied enrollment at these public schools or forced to pay tuition. In other words: Tennessee wants to make it legal to deny undocumented kids an education. By requiring school systems to check legal immigrant status, they’re also turning what should be safe spaces into immigration enforcement centers.All of which, to be clear, is blatantly unconstitutional. In 1982, the supreme court decision in Plyler v Doe found states cannot deny students a free public education over their immigration status. The Tennessee bill is not law yet, and if the Tennessee governor does sign it, it will almost certainly face legal challenges. But even if it eventually gets struck down, there is a chance it will stay on the books as a “zombie law” – ready to rise again when circumstances allow.Perhaps you are wondering why all these fierce advocates for the rights of unborn children are so keen on denying kids an education? According to lawmakers who voted for the measure, it’s not because they’re hateful racists who want to punish kids, it’s because they are being fiscally responsible. Their argument is that the state simply doesn’t have enough money for education for undocumented kids, particularly since some will require English language learner classes.There’s a small possibility – just throwing it out there – that one of the reasons Tennessee is finding it hard to find money for education is because its regressive tax policies are heavily weighted towards extracting money from the poor rather than making the rich pay their fair share. Tennessee is one of the nine states in the US that doesn’t have an income tax. It also doesn’t have inheritance tax and has very low business tax. Residents (including undocumented immigrants) pay sales tax, property tax and a grocery tax. Undocumented immigrants are putting money into the system and getting very little out of it. Pretending that this attack on undocumented children is about money is disingenuous. Deep down, I’m sure even the people voting for the bill know that investing in children pays dividends to society.Still, while it is disheartening that a bill like this got as far as it did, it’s also important to note that it faced a lot of opposition. Nearly half of the senate’s members spoke on the bill – many of them, including some Republicans, in passionate disagreement. There were tears and a lot of Bible verses quoted about compassion for children. As the US becomes increasingly dystopian, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of just how much opposition there is to the extremist policies and legislation a hate-filled minority are pushing through. Donald Trump likes to say that winning the popular vote gave him and his cronies a mandate to do whatever they like; that all the policies getting passed have the support of the people. This simply isn’t true. Only around 32% of eligible voters actually voted for Trump.While we must not minimize the amount of misogyny and racism there is in the US (and there is a lot!), we should also take heart from the fact that a sizable number of Americans do not want to live in an authoritarian dystopia where women have no rights and undocumented kids get no education. Sixty-three percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to Pew research from 2024. Most Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay in the country legally if certain requirements are met. Increasingly, the actions of the American government don’t reflect the views of the American people.Which, of course, is why the Trump administration is so obsessed with undermining education as a whole. From trying to stop undocumented immigrants from going to school, to tightly controlling how Ivy League universities operate, to attempting to eliminate the US Department of Education, Republicans are waging a war on critical thinking.The US just made it harder for married women to voteOn Thursday the US House approved the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which requires people to prove they are citizens when they vote. If you changed your birth name – as around 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the US have – you will have to show a lot more paperwork to vote.Mickey Rourke tells JoJo Siwa he will tie her up and make her straightI had to look up who Rourke is because he hasn’t been relevant for a while. Now, however, he is making headlines for being misogynistic and homophobic on Celebrity Big Brother UK. Rourke, 72, recently told JoJo Siwa (a gay singer and social media personality) that he’d turn her straight. “If I stay [in the Big Brother house] longer than four days, you won’t be gay any more,” Rourke said to Siwa in a clip from Wednesday. “I’ll tie you up,” he added. Rourke got a warning from producers for his language but his comments were not censored. This is in stark contrast to a Big Brother “controversy” last year, when ITV, the broadcaster, edited an episode of the show to remove shots of a T-shirt worn by one of the contestants featuring a watermelon, which is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhite House says it will ignore reporters with gender pronouns in email signatureThe amount of time these people spend obsessing over pronouns boggles the mind. Get a hobby! Get therapy! Try thinking about literally anything else!Student found guilty of rape goes unpunished because of promising future in gynecologyA criminal court in Leuven, Belgium, recently found a 24-year-old medical student, who was training as a gynaecologist, guilty of rape but suspended his sentence because of his lack of prior offences and his “promising future”. This has sparked a lot of anger in Belgium and many commentators have drawn parallels to the Brock Turner case in the US.Does sitting behind a screen turn you into a woman?Fox News’s Jesse Watters, who sits behind a screen all day, seems to think so. This profundity comes after he declared public soup consumption unmanly and said that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands”.The week in pawtriarchyRemember those tariffs Trump imposed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins? Those penguins now have their own social media account, @PenguinsAgainstTrump. “What are you going to do, deport us?” one post reads. “We’ve been dealing with ICE for centuries.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration eviscerates maternal and child health programs

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      Multiple maternal and child health programs have been eliminated or hollowed out as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) layoffs, prompting alarm and disbelief among advocates working to make Americans healthier.The fear and anxiety come as a full accounting of the cuts remains elusive. Federal health officials have released only broad descriptions of changes to be made, rather than a detailed accounting of the programs and departments being eviscerated.“Pediatricians, myself included, are losing sleep at night – worried about the health of the nation’s children,” said Dr Sue Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.“The one that stands out to me is the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. There is no way to make our country healthier by eliminating expertise where it all starts, and it all starts at maternal and child health.”The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced HHS would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a restructuring plan. Together with cuts already made by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, HHS is likely to lose 20,000 workers – roughly one-quarter of its workforce.“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy said. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.”Piecemeal and crowd-sourced information, which has filled the vacuum left by a lack of information from the health department, appears to show maternal health programs slated for elimination, many without an indication of whether they will be reassigned. The Guardian asked HHS to comment on the cuts but did not receive a response.The picture of cuts was further muddied on Thursday when Kennedy told reporters, according to Politico: “We’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes.”In the aftermath of the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s been much conservative criticism of public health agencies, particularly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pandemic policy continues to be an animating force within the Republican party, whose supporters are cynical about the value of federal public health programs following federal vaccine mandates.The cuts to maternal health programs may serve a second purpose for Republicans.Such programs have come under fire in some conservative states, in part because the experts involved investigate deaths that could have been prevented with abortion services – now illegal or severely restricted in nearly two dozen conservative states.As part of the restructuring, the administration announced 28 divisions would be folded into 15, including the creation of a new division, called the “Administration for a Healthy America”, or “AHA”.The administration argued the “centralization” would “improve coordination of health resources for low-income Americans and will focus on areas including, primary care, maternal and child Health, mental health, environmental health, HIV/Aids and workforce development”.Meanwhile, experts in HIV/Aids, worker health and safety, healthcare for society’s most vulnerable, and experts in maternal and child health have received “reduction in force” notices, a federal term for layoffs, or have been placed on administrative leave with the expectation of being eliminated.“It certainly appears there was a particular focus on parts of HHS that dealt with women’s or reproductive health,” said Sean Tipton, chief policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, about the cuts.He added: “How in the world you can justify the CDC eliminating the division of maternal mortality is beyond me.”Among the divisions hard-hit was the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an operating division of HHS like the CDC, which housed the the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. HRSA lost as many as 600 workers.The CDC’s division of reproductive health, which studies maternal health, appeared to have been nearly eliminated, according to multiple reports, with some of the division’s portfolio also expected to be folded into AHA.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe entire staff of a gold-standard maternal mortality survey, a program that was called the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, was also put on leave, Stat reported. The epidemiologist in charge of the CDC survey, Jennifer Bombard, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday: “[T]he entire CDC PRAMS team, including myself, has received the Reduction in Force (RIF) notice from HHS today.”A HRSA hotline that had fielded calls from new moms seeking mental health support was also cut, Stat reported. Layoffs at the Administration for Children and Families have jolted providers of federally backed high-quality childcare for low-income families, a program called Head Start.The CDC’s only experts on infertility were laid off, just days after Trump described himself as the “fertilization president” at an event marking Women’s History Month. The team had collected congressionally mandated statistics on fertility clinics’ success rates. Without the workers, it is unclear who at the department will help fertility clinics comply with the law.“I’m astounded, sad, perplexed,” said Barbara Collura, president of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Infertility impacts one in six people globally, and now we don’t have anybody at the CDC who knows anything about infertility and IVF?”A division of the CDC called the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention also appeared to be gutted, with the director Jonathan Mermin placed on administrative leave. Among the center’s many tasks, it worked to curb the spread of congenital syphilis, a debilitating disease that is on the rise in the US.The March of Dimes, an influential non-profit whose mission is to improve the health of mothers and babies, said the cuts “raise serious concerns” at a time when maternal mortality rates remain “alarmingly high”.“As an OB-GYN and public health leader, I can’t overstate the value these resources and programs – and our partners across CDC, HRSA, and NIH – have brought to families and frontline providers,” said Dr Amanda Williams, the interim chief medical Officer at the March of Dimes.“We rely on the data, research, clinical tools and partnerships built by the Division of Reproductive Health (DRH) and HRSA to protect maternal and infant health – especially in communities hit hardest.”Heads of National Institutes of Health (NIH) centers were also forced out – and, apparently, offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service to be stationed in Alaska, Montana or Oklahoma, the journal Nature reported. Such large-scale reassignments are unprecedented, according to Stat.Among those to be placed on leave was one of the federal government’s pre-eminent leaders of research, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr Jeanne Marrazzo. Marrazzo had expertise in sexually transmitted infections and women’s reproductive tract infections – a background that gave health advocates hope of curbing the US’s sky-high STD rates. Dr Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was also forced out.“These cuts are significant,” Kressly said. “And the policy and program changes that are made because the cuts impact real people in real communities, and I’m not just talking about the people who lost their jobs.” More

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      Advertising giant WPP cuts diversity references from annual report

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      The British advertising giant WPP has become the latest company to cut the phrase “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its annual report as the policies come under attack from the Trump administration.The agency, which counts the US as by far its largest market, boasts the storied “Madison Avenue” agencies J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy and Grey among its top brands.In WPP’s annual report, which was released on Friday, the chief executive, Mark Read, told shareholders that “much has changed over the last year” due to political events.“In today’s complex world, a pressing question for brands and organisations is whether to engage on social issues in a more contested public arena, and how to navigate the expectations of different audiences with competing views on sensitive topics,” he wrote.The same document axed all references of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, “DE&I” and “DEI”. The policy attracted 20 mentions in the previous year’s report. The earlier document mentioned three times that the company was seen as a “diversity leader”.The omissions, which were first reported by the Sunday Times, included changes to how the company reports on measuring top executives’ non-financial performance, which contributes to the size of their short-term bonuses. In the new report, the phrasing has switched to “people and culture”.WPP declined to comment on whether the new wording was a response to anti-DEI policy moves by the Trump administration. The company said that, while the phrasing in its annual report had changed, the way in which executives’ short-term bonuses are calculated was unaltered.Within his first few days in office, Donald Trump instructed US government agencies to shut down their DEI programmes and federal employees working in diversity offices were immediately put on paid leave.Trump signed two executive orders targeting DEI programmes within the federal government. The first executive order largely scrapped the DEI efforts that took place under Joe Biden, who had ordered all federal agencies to come up with equity plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA second executive order effectively ended any DEI activities within the federal government. This order overturned a handful of executive orders from past presidents, including one from Lyndon B Johnson that was signed during the civil rights era that required federal contractors to adopt equal opportunity measures.The Financial Times recently reported that more than 200 US companies have removed references to “diversity, equity and inclusion” from their annual reports since Trump’s election. More

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      Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win

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      Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”Since his inauguration, Trump has ended policies giving LGBTQ+ Americans protection from discrimination. He has also restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare, said the US would only recognise two sexes, and barred transgender people from enlisting in the military.Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”When he wrote the TV series Queer As Folk in the late 1990s, he said, it was part of a movement, with writers “fomenting ideas” and putting gay and lesbian characters on screen.Had he been asked to imagine then what life for LGBTQ+ people would be like in 2025, “I want to say it’s going to be all rainbows,” he said, “skipping down the street hand-in-hand, equality, equality, equality.”But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.” More