Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy 8/19

[SVPete]

Christian Mom Who Spoke Out Against Transgender Policies Blocked From Son’s Graduation: Lawsuit

https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/08/18/christian-mom-who-spoke-out-against-transgender-policies-blocked-from-sons-graduation-lawsuit/

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A Christian mom is suing Portland Public Schools after officials barred her from her children’s elementary school for a year in alleged retaliation for criticizing its transgender policies.

“What the district said was, ‘Be quiet, or we will take your children away from you,’ essentially—at eight hours a day, nine months out of the year, you’re going to essentially take my children from me,” Allison Roberts, the mother, told the Daily Signal in an interview Friday.

Roberts has an elder child who graduated from Meriwether Lewis Elementary School more than a decade ago, and two younger children who both attended the school in the 2025-2026 school year. Yet she missed her son’s graduation from the school this year because police issued a trespass order against her based on what she alleges was a false principal report aimed at silencing her speech against transgender policies.

Roberts is suing Portland Public Schools; the district’s senior director of schools, Chandra Wilson-Cooper; and Lewis Elementary’s principal, Deanne Froehlich. She claims the defendants violated her First Amendment right to free speech by retaliating against her speech and discriminating against her based on her viewpoint, and violated her First Amendment right to free exercise of religion by imposing transgender ideology.
...
On Feb. 5, while picking up her kids from school, Roberts spoke with another mother and her husband, according to the lawsuit. After Roberts revealed that she had voted for President Donald Trump, the husband reportedly shouted, “White people are disgusting!” Roberts told him that he was being racist and left the area.

The next morning, police served Roberts with a trespass order.

Froehlich, the principal, said the school was banning Roberts from campus for one year for “threatening and intimidating members of the school community.”

The order states that “during dismissal, a parent approached another parent and began engaging in racial harassment, intimidation, and threatening behavior.”

That the trespass order was created in 18 hours or less suggests that the previous day's incident was planned and staged, possibly with local police cooperation.

[SVPete]

A VA Woman Went to Get Her Eyebrows Done, but She Mentioned Being Jewish and All Hell Broke Loose

https://townhall.com/news/mattvespa/2026/08/17/a-va-woman-went-to-get-her-eyebrows-done-but-she-mentioned-being-jewish-and-all-hell-broke-loose-n2681322

There’s not much to say here, since the woman posted the full account of the encounter on Facebook. Then the video was uploaded. Jessica Watson just wanted to get her eyebrows done at a salon in Alexandria, Virginia. As is common at these establishments, a conversation started, but when she mentioned her Jewish heritage, the owner of the salon, an Afghan, decided to go full terrorist on her. Jessica got kicked out.

I’m nauseated even having to write this, but I won’t be quiet about it. I want my friends—Jewish and non-Jewish—to know what I experienced at a salon in Alexandria, Virginia, because I refuse to let antisemitism become normalized in our country.

I went to the salon yesterday to get my eyebrows done. The esthetician turned out to be Afghan. I was delighted, since I just finished writing a novel based on true stories that is partly set in Afghanistan. I told her about the amazing Afghans I interviewed for the book. We talked warmly about our shared love of Afghan poetry and food. Then she asked me to tell her more about the premise of my novel.

My story is about a Muslim Afghan refugee and the son of Jewish immigrants who forge an unlikely friendship in post-9/11 Alabama, only to find that their shared gift for languages draws them into America’s shadow war in Afghanistan. I joked about how I went down a rabbit hole studying Islam and Sufism to create the Muslim character, but that I at least had an easier time sketching the Jewish half-Israeli character, since I’m Jewish and half-Israeli myself.

The woman stopped short. Then, “Get out of my shop.”

“Excuse me?”

“I can’t provide service to an Israeli. It’s against my political beliefs. You need to leave immediately. And there is no such thing as Israel. It’s Palestine. A bunch of Jews from New York showed up a few years ago and stole the land from the Arabs.”

Sometimes, the eloquence of hatred and bigotry needs no further comment.

Note the Jewish woman's use of "normalized". I could be wrong, but isn't that Lib-speak? I would use "accepted" or "allowed to be acceptable".