When a clothing store opened in Cedar Glen, Calif., in the summer of 2021, the owner hung a Pride flag at the entrance, her friends recalled. Whenever someone would tear down the flag, owner Laura Carleton would raise another one.
But after someone complained about the flag on Friday, the encounter turned deadly.
A man arrived at the store, Mag.pi, around 5 p.m. and criticized Carleton’s Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Carleton, 66, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following “a lethal force encounter” with deputies after the shooting, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
Community members have since rallied around Carleton’s store, placing Pride flags, flowers, candles and photos of Carleton in front of it. Matthew Clevenger of Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ said Carleton was a strong ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
“She was a fierce protector of everybody being who they wanted to be,” Clevenger told The Washington Post.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her family’s business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.pi’s website. After graduating from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Carleton worked at a retail store before joining Kenneth Cole in the 1980s. Carleton worked for the fashion company for more than 15 years as an executive.
In 2013, Carleton founded her clothing store, Mag.pi, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Calif. She added a second store in Cedar Glen in 2021. While she built her career, Carleton married her husband and took pride in their blended family of nine children, her store’s website says.
Carleton was one of the largest donors to Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ and attended the organization’s Pride boat parade in June, Clevenger said. A section of Mag.pi was dedicated to rainbow-colored products, and she displayed rainbow candles by the cash register, he said.
Carleton helped create a culture in which the LGBTQ+ community felt accepted, Clevenger said. But some community members were still resistant, he added, and took down Mag.pi’s Pride flag multiple times.
After making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriff’s department. He was holding a handgun when deputies found him on a nearby road, where he later died, officials said.
The Republican party needs to be forcibly dissolved, or this will keep happening.
Unfortunately, liberals would rather shove their heads in the sand and keep trying to play nice with these fascists.
I believe people have the right to be who they are as long as it isn't hurting others, but Intolerance should be met with intolerance, nothing less will do.
I have been screaming this for a long time now. As a memeber of the LGBTQ Community, we cannot tolerate the intolerant, even if we are called islamophobic, religiousphobic or whatever. We cannot let these assholes take away our rights. It already started in Italy and it will keep spreading if we keep tolerating these assholes.
What are we supposed to do? Seriously.
Congress is a logjam in both chambers.
The military would split if you tried to force red states to stop being shitty.
Most of our top weapons are in those red states.
So what’s the solution that doesn’t lead to half the country dead?
Plus, on the world stage, a “United” United States protects countries like Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, etc. What happens when we’re gone? China becomes dominant and just starts enslaving people in the lands it takes? The Saudis take over parts of the world and bring their shittiness with them? Russia fucks up more of Eastern Europe?
So what’s the answer here to some really complex questions?
The answer is not to lose the 2024 elections and even exceed what we did before. That starts at the local leveling and volunteering with voters rights groups and getting the youth registered to vote. And we must do this the next election. And the next. Until we can close loop holes to prevent further coups by Republicans.
I am as anti-republican as I can possibly be, but even so I realized that the current MO of the democratic party is not to overthrow the Republicans or stop them from doing horrible shit because they're profiting immensely from it.
They get so much grassroots support because they are not the bad guys that they don't even have to try to be the good guys anymore.
With that being said, they have actually done some good and I'm not against the democrats. I'm just not satisfied with their commitment to the cause and I really wish they would step it up, and any Democratic candidate that is closer to my ideal will get my vote over any establishment candidate.
Unfortunately it's going to take time now to get more desirable candidates. Trump did so much damage to the country that we'll be undoing it a while.
We need to be the change we want to see. Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez weren't recruited by the Democratic Party. They ran and won as Democrats often much to the chagrin of the National Party. They won't make it easy. And they will absolutely try to recruit people to run against candidates that don't play ball with them. But they can still lose no matter how hard they try.
This is your answer. The change we want isn't going to happen at the federal level only. The DNC has had a really terrible leader up until recently, but even so, they don't have a good pulse on the left-electorate. They can't seem to figure out that the country isn't center anymore.
The reason we didn't have a "red tsunami" at the midterms, which going on historical trends should have happened, is because of the extremely hard work of grassroots orgs that mobilized the voters on the left (typically low-turnout voting bloc) in local, state, and federal races. And they did all that on a shoestring budget, with little to no help from the DNC.
The change is going to have to be from the local level up. That's how the GOP got to their "minority rule" status, and it's how we'll win back true democracy.
Contrary to what people believe, the US military has a fairly good cross sectional representation of the American populace. It is most certainly not right wing. I've known more than a few active duty military members and actually most were moderate to liberal on the political spectrum. And fairly intelligent.
Yeah, it’s a good cross section, but that still means there are a LOT of neo-Confederates in the military. A new civil war would be devastating.
So like, what happens when one side gets a hold of nukes?
That’s what I’m worried about and why I reject these calls from super-leftists for a new civil war. Do you want NYC, LA, SF, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Portland nuked? Because that’s what happens when the hillbillies in Iowa and the Dakotas get their hands on the nukes that are stored there.
We’ve built the most powerful military the world has ever seen, along with the most powerful single weapon, and guys like the one I initially responded to just want to go ahead and shatter that with a civil war where the neo-Confederates WILL use that against Blue cities.
Why are you only rejecting the "super-leftists" and not the right wing who are carrying out evil acts and actually openly calling for civil war, and have been declaring we've been in a civil war for years?
Don't you dare use my words to try to serve some political agenda.
Man, reading comprehension is NOT your strong suit, is it?
I’m this thread, I was responding to another leftist calling for, as he put it, “R E V O L U T I O N”.
Of course I’m also against shitty neo-Confederates ALSO calling for a civil war, but you already knew that, didn’t you, you condescending little sealioning fuckhead? Instead, you need to turn this into yet more whatabiutism.
I don’t want a new civil war. It’s that easy. If one starts, I simply don’t see a way that it doesn’t turn devastating and nuclear. Calling for a revolution is dumb: our military will likely split, and then two sides of the same super powerful weaponry are fighting in my homeland. No thanks!
Heh. One of my favourite pasttimes is TTRPGing, and one of the settings I made to explore my disdain for the hard-right was a setting that featured the destruction of San Francisco by nuclear weapons by Conservatives. I could totally see a 'Christian States of America' nuking a liberal city...
Honestly, vote. They think they can act like this because of Trump giving them the go ahead. Move the Overton window.
I’d guarantee you and bet that the military is overwhelmingly in favor of supporting the left should it come to it.
Otherwise, they’d have to admit that they stand against the entire purpose and cause of the military.
I just don’t see that happening. Either I have too much faith in the intelligence of our armed forces, or I’m wrong, but this is how I see it going down.
I agree that most of the military would favor the Union again, but there’s a significant enough amount of neo-Confederates that it would cause BIG problems.
Your country does just as much damage on a global scale as those you’ve mentioned as the bad guys. Please don’t forget that.
Yeah, but I’d generally take our shittiness over Saudi or Russian shittiness. As a note, my family escaped Russia when the Bolsheviks took over, so I’m HIGHLY biased there.
China… I’m not sure about. I studied Chinese history in college, but that was 20 years ago so I kind of stopped paying deep attention around the time of Hu Jintao. Xi seems much more forceful and willing to expand China’s power via dominance and enslavement.
There are no GOOD superpowers, but I think the US is the least bad.
I do kind of agree, but let's not forget to all our shittiness in Latin America. Here's a top 10.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/10-of-the-Most-Lethal-CIA-Interventions-in-Latin-America-20160608-0031.html
Yeah, we screwed up Latin America terribly and are dealing with the consequences now.
Still: I’d take it over the other superpowers.
We have to stop playing within the system
I honestly thought I was on lemmy.ml. I didn't realize I was amidst liberal redditors, but I'll spell it out for you.
R E V O L U T I O N
We can't fix the current system.
And again, what do you do about the consequences of those actions?
Revolution? Do you know where B-2 bombers are based? How about B-52s? Where are most of our young troops sent to train? All three: The South.
You want revolution, but have no plan for it.
Eventually a Thermidorian Reaction will crush the neofascists. Hopefully soon.
Liberals are spineless cowards, we have to fight back. The fascists gave us permission to use deadly force and self-defense the moment they use deadly force against us
So what? You become a one party nation? How about maybe, now this will sound crazy, but fixing the validity of 3rd party parties might help.
First Past the Post voting is an issue that could help make 3rd parties valid.(edit: if we got rid of it)
Until then, a 3rd party is literally fantasy.
Just go to proportional representation, FPTP is crap in otherways. Actually everyone would be chuffed if the electoral collage just went away, the bar is not that high.
Yeah, I meant that we need to get rid of FPTP.
And I agree, nuke the fucking electoral college.
I did not think what you had could be called FPTP though? Other countries have more then 2 parties and FPTP but between the collage and borked rules in the US basically make them impossible.
What the US has is FPTP. We need ranked choice or something else that permits 3rd parties to be viable.
As well as eradicating the electoral college.
It was news to me, we where always taught the US had the electoral collage system.
So First Past the Post and the electoral college aren't mutually exclusive.
The electoral college is voting logistics, a relic of a time when sending paper ballots in a sealed box from Vermont or Georgia to Washington was a months long horseback ride through dangerous territories. It was a clever solution to solve the logistics of running a democracy on the technology they had at the time.
First Past the Post is a simple voting system where each persong gets one vote with one name on it. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. The problem with it is it tends toward 2 parties through the spoiler effect. If there are 2 parties that run similar enough platforms, that splits the voting base, because either party will satisfy those issue needs, but the opposition to those issues would be one big voting bloc. Thus the 2 losing parties will siphon off voters from the other losing party until eventually one party remains.
It's why the Dems in this country range from vaguely progressive corporate neoliberals (think Biden or Pelosi) or to highly progressive further left wing* people (think Bernie or AOC. And Republicans range from conservative corporate neolibs (think Romney or McCain) to reactionaries and outright fascists (think Boebert and Marjorie Green).
*compared to the rest of our representatives in America
Well yes, but way back many years ago in school the two systems where treated as not the same type. My country has FPTP but we don't consider the US to use it (at least years ago in school). This could be because of how like many countries with FPTP ours does have more then 2 parties win seats in every election where in the US it is though legal means almost impossible (I know they exist but I don't think any have won a seat). This also could have been some weird pride thing as well, as learning world political systems in public education always seemed to have a bit of the propaganda to it.
In any case it is interesting and neat to learn you guys use FPTP also.
The Electoral College is just to elect our President. It has no other purpose than that.
As an American, you vote for four people who represent you directly in the government: your Representative in our House of Representatives, two Senators in our Senate, and the President. The Senators are a relatively recent addition as for a long time, Senators were appointed rather than directly elected, and some people are talking about going back to that system. But for now, that's 4 people you vote for.
Representatives are voted for by their voters in their individual districts. This is like a MP. In some districts, such as those in Maine, we use Ranked Choice Voting. In others, we have a sort of runoff election if nobody wins a majority. However, in most, we vote FPTP, and the guy with the largest share of the votes wins.
Senators are state-wide votes. We'll only vote for one at a time, and over 6 years, we'll have one election for one seat, another election for the other seat, and a 'bye-year' where we don't vote for Senators at all. Like the House, this is rarely RCV or Runoff, but is frequently FPTP.
POTUS votes are run nation-wide, but they really are state-wide in all states except Maine and Nebraska, where they are hybrid Congressional District-wide and State-Wide. This is where the Electoral College comes in, and trying to RCV this could well challenge constitutional crises because if no one candidate gets more than half of the EVs, the race is thrown to the House, which is an anti-democratic thing.
We also have that.
And how is that accomplished without extreme violence?
Who said without?
Two things, basic morals and the rules.