Ulta Beauty – Photo: jetcityimage via iStockphoto, Jonathan Van Ness – Photo: JVN Hair via Facebook
The Family Research Council is blasting Ulta Beauty for selling hair products from nonbinary reality star and hairstylist Jonathan Van Ness, best known for Netflix’s Queer Eye, and for posting an Instagram video showing Van Ness in a multi-colored dress and white heels, “jumping and shrieking” with excitement as store employees unveil a display featuring a large poster of him.
The famously anti-LGBTQ group claims Van Ness’ behavior mocks women and “what he perceives to be female behavior.” It also notes that Ulta previously hosted a now-deleted podcast episode featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which it cites as further evidence the company promotes a caricatured view of femininity.
In 2023, Mulvaney sparked controversy with a promotional video for Bud Light, leading to a widespread boycott that cost the parent company Anheuser-Busch billions and ended Bud Light’s reign as the nation’s top-selling beer.
FRC notes Ulta faced backlash in 2022 for partnering with Mulvaney — a year before the Bud Light controversy. The group claims many women reject the stereotypical behavior and dress of transgender and nonbinary influencers, and objected to Mulvaney’s since-deleted podcast interview with “gender-fluid” host and makeup artist David Lopez, where they discussed “girlhood.”
“Ulta didn’t back down then, and they won’t back down now,” wrote FRC intern Caily Shriver in the organization’s news outlet, The Washington Stand. “Despite the vast exodus of Pride Month branding, Ulta still stuck to their transgender-sympathizing guns.”
FRC accuses makeup giant Sephora of following Ulta in “abandoning women” and criticizes both companies for financially supporting The Trevor Project, the nation’s largest LGBTQ suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization.
FRC also claims The Trevor Project is “grooming” children who contact their suicide prevention hotline and objects to the nonprofit’s resource guides for educators on creating LGBTQ-inclusive classrooms. According to FRC, these guides encourage teachers to “hide information from parents” about their children’s LGBTQ identities, often outing them against their will.
“Companies like Ulta and Sephora happily endorse and give copious amounts of money to groups like The Trevor Project to promote the transing of minors, while keeping it all hidden from their parents,” Shriver writes, referring to all forms of gender-affirming care as “child mutilation.”
“Christians don’t need to compromise their morals by funding perverted companies like Ulta and Sephora that give men a platform to discredit women and the female experience,” Shriver continues. “A single cent towards these companies helps fund the mental and physical destruction of minors.”
FRC has a history of vehemently opposing same-sex relations and marriage, opposing LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws, supporting conversion therapy, and directing pastors to Bible verses calling for the death of those who engage in same-sex acts. It also rejects transgender identity as valid, citing the Biblical belief that God “created [humans] male and female.”
Pop star gushes over romance with Big Brother co-star Chris Hughes while saying she felt pressured to identify as a lesbian — fueling right-wing backlash.
Last weekend, queer pop star JoJo Siwa abruptly canceled her upcoming performance at a Chicago Pride event scheduled for Sunday, June 29.
Back Lot Bash Chicago, host of the two-day outdoor event, announced on Instagram that Siwa would no longer be performing, citing a "scheduling conflict," according to the Daily Mail.
No further explanation was given for the cancellation.
Siwa, 22, recently released her latest single, "Bulletproof," independently after parting ways with Columbia Records, which had issued her 2022 EP Guilty Pleasure. Neither she nor the label commented on the split.
Austin police are investigating whether an assault on a transgender woman and a male bystander at Barton Springs, a popular Austin swimming spot, was a hate crime. The incident occurred on July 26, when three men began flirting with the woman’s friends and then allegedly harassed her after she approached them.
"They said something along the lines of 'I don't support that lifestyle,' while pointing at me, which upset all three of us," said the transgender woman, whose name is being withheld for safety and privacy reasons, in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.
Luke Ash, a Baptist pastor who worked at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, says he was fired after refusing to use a trans co-worker's preferred pronouns.
Luke Ash, lead pastor of Stevendale Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, says he was fired from his job as a library technician at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library after refusing to use a co-worker's preferred pronouns. He was reportedly dismissed after referring to the colleague by female pronouns during a July 7 conversation with another library employee.
"That co-worker corrected me, said that the person she was training preferred to be called 'he,' and I refused to use those preferred pronouns," Ash told anti-LGBTQ activist and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins during an interview on the conservative Christian political show Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.
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