St. Johns County Republicans want to shrink government just small enough to fit in the bathroom (or your bedroom).
Following up on my Sunday, July 30, 2017 blog post: Good article in today's Friday, August 4, 2017 St. Augustine Record on demagogic drivel emitted as a furious fulsome fat way from dull Republican dilettante WILLIAM KORACH, local St. Johns County Republican Executive Committee Chair. Citing School Board member TOMMY ALLEN as his source of inspiration, KKK-sounding KORACH attacked a fourteen year old child for nefarious political purposes, days after President DONALD TRUMP illegally tweeted transgender people would be kicked out of the military -- an illegal order ignored by the Pentagon.
Looks like TOMMY ALLEN wanted (and got) plausible deniability.
Looks like LAMDA LEGAL DEFENSE FUND, INC. will need to take ALLEN's deposition soonest.
And KORACH's too. Preferably simultaneously, in different rooms, so the pair can't get their stories straight, so to speak.
Heterosexist Republican perverts are the laughingstock of St. Johns County.
Still waiting on a School Board search for text messages between KORACH and School Board member TOMMY ALLEN.
Remember: ME-PUBLICANS are unAmerican. Republicans want to shrink government just small enough to fit in your bathroom (or bedroom).
Posted August 4, 2017 12:02 am - Updated August 4, 2017 01:38 pm
By JARED KEEVER jared.keever@staugustine.com
County GOP chair, school board member wade into transgender debate
Despite public pronouncements from St. Johns County School District officials that they would not be commenting publicly on a lawsuit filed in June by a transgender high school student, a recent email from St. Johns County Republican Party Chairman Bill Korach suggests one school board member was working to rally opposition to any coming changes in policy.
“St. Johns County School Board Member Tommy Allen asked me to get the word out to St. Johns families, that the school district is being sued to force the schools to adopt a transgender bathroom policy,” reads the opening sentence of a July 30 email, forwarded to The Record, under the subject line “LBGT Bullies Sue St Johns Schools to Force Transgender Bathrooms.”
“Allen said that the policy would mean that any student could say they were whatever sex they wished to be on a given day, and use that bathroom,” the email, which was also posted to the St. Johns County GOP website, continues before asking “concerned parents” to contact Allen at his district email address and “voice their opposition.”
What spurred the email though is unclear, as Allen and Korach, in separate interviews with The Record on Thursday, don’t seem to agree.
The email appears to reference the federal lawsuit filed by Lambda Legal on behalf of 16-year-old Drew Adams, a student at Nease High School who would like to see the district change the policy that has required him to use gender-neutral bathrooms since September 2015, shortly after he began identifying as a male.
According to the filed complaint, Adams has been inconvenienced by having to use any of three gender-neutral restrooms on the 200,000-square-foot campus, and has also been “stigmatized.”
In a statement to The Record after the lawsuit was filed, school Superintendent Tim Forson said that the district disagrees “with the plaintiff’s interpretation of the law.”
“Beyond that, it would be inappropriate for us to try this case in the media,” the statement said. “We had no knowledge of the complaint filed today before a [plaintiff’s] press conference was held. We will work through the legal process with our school board and its general counsel.”
The school district’s attorney, Frank D. Upchurch III, declined to be interviewed in June and school board member Patrick Canan, an attorney himself, told those who spoke at a recent school board meeting that, while the board appreciated the public comments, the panel would not be responding because of the pending lawsuit.
Upchurch told The Record on Thursday that, while he hasn’t given any special direction to board members regarding the current lawsuit, it is “standard operating procedure” to not comment publicly on pending litigation.
Korach, an outspoken critic of what he calls “transgenderism,” told The Record on Thursday that he believed the lawsuit and the news conference referenced by Forson was a coordinated effort to rally people on the other side of the debate.
While they were getting word out to their supporters about the lawsuit, “the community at large wasn’t aware of it,” Korach said. “So Tommy Allen was reaching out to the community to make them aware of this because the board’s position is [that] the boys’ room is for the boys and the girls’ room is for the girls.”
Allen, whose District email has received about 100 responses opposed to any policy change, said he never reached out to Korach.
“[Korach] called me,” Allen said.
Korach doesn’t dispute that. Later in his interview, Korach said that Allen had contacted Korach’s pastor about the topic. When Korach’s pastor spoke with him about that conversation, he recommended that Korach reach out to Allen.
“So I called him myself and we had a discussion about what he was trying to accomplish — what the concerns were,” Korach said. “It gave me a little background.”
But whether Allen specifically requested that the email be sent remains unclear.
In addition to the 100 or so emails sent in opposition to policy changes, Allen also received a handful of others expressing disappointment in his involvement with the letter and his own apparent opposition.
Allen responded to those comments with an email that said: “I am responding to your recent emails regarding the email that went out over the weekend about the transgender bathroom lawsuit, which mentioned my name.”
“That communication was not sent at my request and I do not endorse the author’s statements and opinions,” he wrote. “I will continue to decline to publicly comment while the litigation is pending.”
Allen, again, declined to comment on the pending lawsuit on Thursday during a phone interview.
But when asked about the nature of the conversation he had with Korach, his answers were less clear than his emailed response.
Allen reiterated numerous times that Korach — whom he claims he has never met in person — was the one who contacted him, and that he didn’t ask Korach to send out anything to the thousands of names that he had on his email list.
But he also said that he told Korach, “That if you do anything it’s going to be on public record and folks need to know that.”
Asked if he requested that Korach send out an email asking people to contact him, Allen said: “I’m not sure what you are asking me, if the question is, ‘Did I contact him?’ The answer is no.”
When asked the question again, Allen said he did not ask Korach to do it.
But when asked, then, about the truthfulness of the introductory sentence to Korach’s email that said “Tommy Allen asked me to get the word out to St. Johns families, that the school district is being sued,” Allen said: “I did not request that he do anything, he called me.”
In response to a follow up question referencing that same introductory sentence Allen said, that Korach was “incorrect.”
“But if it’s in anyway connected to the pending lawsuit I can’t answer it,” he added.
Read the sentence again and asked if he requested Korach to send the email notifying people that the district was being sued, Allen said that, “based on the question” and the way it was asked, “I cannot answer it because we are in a pending lawsuit.”
What comes of any effort to oppose changes now appears to be up in the air.
Korach, who suggests that ”transgenderism” should be considered a mental illness, said that he talked to Allen as recently as Tuesday and that Allen told him he had received 80 to 100 emails.
He also said that he heard some petitions had circulated in local churches and that supporters had gathered about 400 signatures opposing a bathroom policy change.
“We in the Republican Party think this is a terrible idea and dangerous for children,” Korach said.
“We will have to see where it goes,” he added later. “This is all early in the game. People need to be aware of this.”
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