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A Polish court on Tuesday acquitted three gay rights activists who were accused of offending religious sentiment after they put up posters of the Virgin Mary with a rainbow halo.
The defendants -- Joanna Gzyra-Iskandar, Anna Prus and Elzbieta Podlesna -- were found not guilty because they lacked the required intent to offend, according to the regional court in the central city of Plock.
<p>"The goal of the activists... was to show support to LGBT individuals, to fight for their equal rights," Judge Agnieszka Warchol said.</p><p>She added that the court had received many letters from practicing Catholics, and even clergy, that said the rainbow halo images did not mock the religious icon.</p><p>The women had faced up to two years in prison under article 196 of Poland's criminal code, which prohibits offending religious sentiment.</p><p>Poland's influential Catholic church and the governing nationalists oppose gay rights, which the rainbow flag symbolises.</p><p>One of the defendants, Podlesna, described the church as "a formidable force in Poland" and told AFP she was crossing her fingers that the institution would change.</p><p>"Everything now depends on what form that force will take: will it encourage diversity, solidarity and empathy?" she said.</p><p>"Or will it be destructive, politicised and centred around money, as is the case now?" she added.</p><p>A group of LGBT activists gathered outside the courthouse holding a banner that said "The Rainbow Doesn't Offend", a slogan that was also circulated on social media by supporters and opposition politicians.</p><p>The prosecution said it planned to appeal the verdict.</p><p>The case dates back to April 2019, when the posters and stickers at issue appeared on rubbish bins and portable toilets near a church in Plock.</p><p>They showed a likeness of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, a revered icon of the Virgin Mary located in the devout Catholic country's Jasna Gora monastery.</p><p>Earlier that week, the leader of the governing PiS party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, had denounced LGBT rights as a "threat" and called on Poles to respect the Catholic Church regardless of personal beliefs.</p><p>Describing the defendants as "brave", Amnesty Poland took to Twitter on Tuesday to "call on authorities to refrain from targeting and harassing any other peaceful activists".</p><p>The NGO Love Does Not Exclude, which fights for LGBT rights in Poland, hailed the acquittal as a "breakthrough".</p><p>"It's a big win on the part of the LGBT+ resistance movement and the leftists fighting for equal rights in Poland, the most homophobic country in the European Union," the NGO said on Instagram.</p><p>© 2021 AFP</p>
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Alex Jones mocks his own fans -- and boasts that he can get them to 'buy anything': Filmmaker
March 02, 2021
A filmmaker who had previously worked with Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist Alex Jones tells the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog that Jones openly mocks his own audience for being gullible rubes.
Filmmaker Caolan Robertson, who was hired by Jones to make a propaganda film called "You Can't Watch This," claims that Jones is motivated by a desire to financially exploit Trump supporters and further build his media empire.
<p>In fact, Robertson says Jones once told him off camera that he could get his fans to "buy anything" including "dick pills."</p><p>"Alex Jones doesn't care about most of the stuff he professes to," Robertson told Hatewatch. "It just shows he doesn't care about anything he talks about. He doesn't like Trump but then goes on camera talking about how Trump is the savior."</p><p>Robertson, who has worked with a number of far-right media personalities, now says he has disavowed their movement and will try to "undo the damage he did" by producing their propaganda, Hatewatch writes.</p>
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WATCH: Dem senator reads FBI Director Wray the riot act for withholding info and ducking questions
March 02, 2021
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) went on a tirade aimed at FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday morning, saying he is tired of the department's stonewalling of information and accusing the director of hiding information from Democrats that Republicans can see.
During his time addressing the director during a Senate hearing on the Jan. 6th. riot at the Capitol, Whitehouse went at Wray with a litany of complaints.
Whitehouse, in particular, focused on the FBI's intransigence when it came to the sharing of information into Donald Trump's connections to the Russian government.
"It seems that when the FBI wanted to get information to this committee, particularly when it wanted to get information to Republican members of this committee, so they could investigate your investigation of the Trump/Russia connection, that information got right through to our Republican colleagues," he accused, "It didn't go -- didn't seem to go through any interagency process, it wasn't delayed. What we seem to have is, for most of us, this is bipartisan, by the way when I say we got zero questions for the record answered from those hearings, I mean zero questions of any member of this committee, not zero Democratic members answered."
He added, "Your people do good work, Director Wray, I don't think you want that to be our tool. But you can't be in a situation in which you don't answer our questions, you create rigmarole log jams and when there is a political interest in getting information out to the committee, suddenly none of that rigmarole pertained, suddenly everybody gets their hands on all of the information they need just as soon as they need it. And, by the way, I believe on a partisan basis; not shared with both sides of the committee."
"So, before we get to clearing up whatever else we need to get cleared up, all of the stuff that is backed up behind our questions, we got to get through the problem of why you're not answering our questions, and we have to clear that up," he charged. "And I don't know how we clear that up. I think we clear it up, Mr. Chairman in a bipartisan fashion because I think both sides should get this. But this business of years going by of hearings in which zero QFR's [ Question for the Record] get answered and letters that get thrown off into the 'don't care to answer that one' pile.'"
"Woodrow Wilson once said that the oversight function, the investigative function of Congress is to be preferred even to its legislative function -- we have to get that back," he continued. "And I'm going to find a way with this committee and with you to clear the backlog -- if I've asked them and they deserve answers, they should be answered."
Watch below:
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