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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Don’t get me hard, the annihilattion of America AND a few degrees off off global warming? I like this.
Honestly, vote. They think they can act like this because of Trump giving them the go ahead. Move the Overton window.
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.