I didn’t realize the Confederate States of America still had a Justice Department

Canadian doctors obeying a U.S. executive order that doesn’t even apply to Canada is deeply offensive to both trans people and to Canadian legal sovereignty.

I’ve barely posted all weekend and there are STILL random Christians in my replies arguing about Pharisees.

This reminds me of the time I went to city hall with my moms to register their civil union, and the clerk looked confused and then asked if I was marrying my mom. That made more sense to her than me being their son.

It’s apparently the name of a guy named Yeshu that some rabbis discuss in the Talmud and some people think that because his name is Yeshu Ben Stada and Yeshua is a Hebrew rendering of Jesus and rabbis say some mean things about him that they were talking about the Christian Jesus.

Whereas I have a fairly robust Jewish religious education and briefly considered going to rabbinical school and regularly attend synagogue and had literally never heard of Ben Stada or whoever until I googled it to try to understand your post

sure, but the antisemitic aspects in the NT, while not currently central teachings, were prominent in Christian culture for significant periods of time and directly motivated deadly persecution of Jews in Easter pogroms etc. & are still prominent enough that Hegseth says stuff like that.

but like…the vast majority of Jews never read the Talmud and most random passages in the Talmud do not hold any place of prominence in Jewish religious observance unless they specifically dictate particular religious rituals or whatever.

Ok I googled and apparently there is a random passage in the Talmud about a guy named Yeshu Ben Stada who Christians think is a reference to Jesus and that some Christians think was an attempt to make fun of Jesus?

Like, I’m sure that there are some rabbis who once wrote something rude about Jesus, but there is simply nothing about Jesus, positive or negative, that is particularly important to or prominent in 99.9999% of normal Jewish religious observance. We just…don’t really talk about Jesus in any capacity.

If that is accurate, it is literally so obscure that most Jews have never even heard of it. I don’t even know who Ben Stada is.

My Purple Rain shirt shrunk and it's almost a crop top now. But I think that's how Prince would have wanted it

In his first appearance, Superman beat a domestic abuser so hard his sleeves disintegrated

sometimes we get a lil high and go on the iinternet

*cue a sea of people showing up in my mentions to quote “Hath not a Jew eyes” etc. with zero familiarity with the surrounding context, story, or how the play ends, in order to claim that Shakespeare was actually defending Jews and advocating for our rights.

free advice: we don’t like how you use Pharisees and we don’t like how you use Shylock either.

“but old dead British people used to say that shit all the time” is not a defence against a claim of bigotry

Yes, and do you know what ELSE was mainstream Anglophone Christianity for centuries, including in Shakespeare and Dickens and Agatha Christie? Being blatantly antisemitic!

It can’t be antisemitic, the guy who INVENTED Fagin used it!

Peas, an orange and a glass of ice?

But then, on Nov. 12, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops overwhelmingly passed a total ban on trans care throughout all of its healthcare network. This was, and remains, the most extensive and draconian trans healthcare ban in the U.S., and one that has gotten far too little attention for how much damage it's done. The bishops' ban includes not just hospitals but many clinics and doctor's practices as well. It bans hormones and surgeries, for adults as well as trans youth. While individual Catholics have a wide range of beliefs, the church hierarchy itself is incredibly reactionary, abusive and a longtime enemy of trans people's very existence. While the church had never been friendly to trans healthcare, the ban eliminated grey areas that more pro-trans Catholics and others working in their networks had previously used to provide healthcare anyway. This also didn't just impact a few charity hospitals. The church's network is massive, and in recent decades has grown constantly, including by taking over existing, previously secular practices. This means that even trans people who currently get their care elsewhere may fall under the ban as the church's healthcare holdings continue to aggressively expand. In some states, a third to nearly half of all healthcare beds are run by it, even in places like Oregon and Washington that — on paper — have protections for trans healthcare access. It includes not just hospitals but also a multitude of clinics and doctors' practices, including plenty that aren't obviously religious.

When she went back for her first appointment in January, after the ban, suddenly everything had changed. “They were very careful to avoid stating the exact reason. The way they phrased it was 'I thought we could, now it turns out we couldn't,'” she said. “They'd had trans patients before. I got the feeling they were willing to help.” The practice wasn't advertised as a Catholic Church-run one. During her initial appointment, she saw no signs of it, and “the staff clearly knew how to interact with a trans person.” But even if she'd wanted to find another clinic, for a working class trans person in her area that's nearly impossible, because “where I live, there's exactly one network that's not Catholic and that one network is not covered by a lot of insurances because they're more expensive.” This is a problem around the country. A 2025 article from healthcare access advocacy org Community Catalyst on the “growing crisis” of the Catholic Church's healthcare networks notes their record of “acquiring more and more independent hospitals.” “Despite their non-profit status and because of their Catholic directives, they're leaving devastating impacts on access, affordability and basic rights in their wake,” the piece noted. As of that year, Community Catalyst found, Catholic systems comprised four in ten of the largest health networks in the entire country. Their “directives limit access to critical health care, often going against evidence-based medical standards and clinical guidelines,” especially when it comes to reproductive health and gender-affirming care.

While it's gotten far too little attention, the trans healthcare ban imposed by the Catholic hierarchy late last year is the most extensive and draconian in the U.S.

In many areas, its networks — which are rapidly expanding, taking over previously secular practices — are the only option...

‘It’s a Nightmare’: The Human Toll of the Catholic Church’s Trans Healthcare Ban Missing hormones. Canceled surgeries. Bureaucratic denials. Late last year the Catholic Church banned all trans healthcare across its sprawling networks. The impact on trans people's lives is devastat...

Crossing state borders for HRT. Insurance denials. Missed surgeries.

U.S. Catholic bishops imposed a ban on all trans healthcare throughout the church's massive networks. That's left working class trans people struggling even more.

Our latest, by @davidforbes.bsky.social are some of their stories:

What offensive Jewish traditions about Jesus exist and are central and prominent to Jewish theology and religious observance, exactly? I don’t think I’ve ever heard Jesus mentioned in a sermon at any synagogue.

me: “Pharisees aren’t just characters in the Christian Bible who embody negative traits they were an actual group and are essentially the only surviving form of modern Judaism”
him: “ah so then it is an accurate use of the term because, just like biblical Pharisees, modern Jews reject Jesus.”

I don’t even know how to respond at this point tbh this logic does not compute at all

Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history

When Christians use the term Pharisees as the rhetorical prototypical example of self-righteous hypocrites who twist religion for their own ends, they are effectively attributing that to all modern Jews.

aka Pharisees are the only group of Jews whose religious observance and cultural practices survived the Roman conquest and destruction of Jerusalem and continued into the modern day. Functionally speaking, all modern forms of Jewish religious observance are Pharisaic.

Pharisees are not just characters in Christian Biblical texts! Pharisees were an actual existing group of Jews - specifically the group of Jews who focused their religious observance around study and prayer and synagogue attendance rather than priests and animal sacrifices at the temple