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Universally Unique!
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For example, one book tasks three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “drag queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.
The Justices had read the books in question.
Both Gorsuch and our resident kinetic-action-advocators are claiming that Pride Puppy is exposing young children to leather fetishism. This would be outrageous if true. But, uh, did anyone posting in this thread bother to check if it is?
The wordlist has 300+ words on it, ranging from 'alligator' and 'apple' to 'zebra print' and 'zipper.' While I don't doubt that the depraved adult minds here are capable of imagining sexualized depictions of the 'carrot' or 'cucumber,' the book depicts a family making a salad.
Likewise, while it's easy to imagine situations where 'leather' or 'underwear' are shown inappropriately, it is also easy to imagine pretty innocuous situations. For example, leather sofas and jackets are common furniture and clothing, respectively. Kids universally learn about underwear in the nonsexual context of potty training and personal hygiene, and comic book heroes have been drawn as-if wearing briefs over their pants for longer than anyone in this thread has been alive. The Captain Underpants series is a 20 year old media empire with more than 50 million book sales in the US and major feature film adaptations.
I have no doubt that some vegans are offended by the former, and I can imagine some schoolmarm disapproving of Captain Underpants specifically or maybe even all comics generally. Nevertheless, the hyper-hyper-majority of parents, regardless of religion or sexual mores, have no problem with any of the above. So, is Pride Puppy's depiction of leather and underwear a bunch of puppy-players, leather daddies, and dudes in jocks, or is it people wearing leather and undies in ways that would be perfectly appropriate for a Halloween costume at an event with kids present?
In a shocking twist of events, a 40 year old children's book publishing house did not decide it was a good idea to teach 4 year olds about puppy play. Instead, the only depictions of 'leather' are a lesbian in a motorcycle jacket waving at a dog and people wearing leather shoes. The only depiction of 'underwear' is a gay guy wearing green briefs over his blue leggings, with all the sexual energy of Aquaman. If you'd like to evaluate for yourself: the content in question.
If one's actual objections are "don't normalize Pride marches," "don't normalize homosexuality," "don't normalize trans," etc. it's possible to have a discussion on the merits of those issues. But it's tremendously dishonest to cloak one's actual objection to the former with trumped-up talk of introducing 4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.
'Nutpicking' isn't exactly the peak of good rhetoric, but I hope we can hold ourselves to the standard of, at the very least, finding real nuts to pick. This is an internet forum, after all! We needn't act like Supreme Court Justices – we can do 2 minutes worth of basic fact checking.
Apologies, looking at this in context, I think I probably came off as cranky at you, but I actually think you did a fine job presenting the plaintiff's arguments & broader issues. Your top-level was fine and good. However, I am disappointed with the several subthreads where an expansive reading of the malicious implications and innuendo in the plaintiff's arguments are uncritically credited when they seemed, to me, both so obviously in-credible and, as it happens, trivially-verified to be untrue.
Sure, this statement is true. But for people not super into the anti-LGBT stuff, it's a lot less incendiary! To extremify a bit more, if Little Bobby Tables is being fitted for his harness and pup mask in kindergarten, essentially every parent would throw unlimited support behind whoever promises to make that stop. But if he's told that there are guys like his dad, except instead of having a wife, they have a husband, and some of his classmates might have two dads... yeah, some of regulars here think that's a justification for unlimited violence against civilization, but a large majority of the country disagrees.
Parts of the thread are fine (or at least aren't doing the thing I'm complaining about). Agreed.
Were I somehow put in charge of designing Pride Puppy's word search, I certainly would have avoided including 'leather' to try and prevent this sort of "Re: Re: Re: Re: FWD: Re: Biden forces schools to let furry kids use kitty litter!" urban legend from circulating on X. But at the same time, if I had to name 300 distinct objects / attributes in that story, yeah, 'leather' and 'underwear' probably make the list—there's really not that many things to choose.
Given the context, which really is about as anodyne and wholesome as possible, this sort of free-association guilt-by-implication argument is the same school of media criticism that spent the last twenty years detailing how each and every piece of media was racist, misogynistic, and otherwise problematic, just with different in- and out-groups. "Woke right" is an annoying snarl term, but at the same time, I can't help but think this really is just conservative Anita Sarkeesian.
This seems like the classic equivocation on the word 'sexuality.' A man mentioning his wife is just talking like a perfectly ordinary person, a man mentioning his husband is "making things about sexuality/sex/politics." Obviously Pride is related to 'sexuality' and what people wear to Pride is an expression of 'sexuality' but this meaning of the word has not all that much do with sex, per se, (though some stuff at Pride definitely is and of course no minimally-qualified parent is taking his child to Folsom) and is no more child inappropriate than a teacher wearing her engagement ring. Nor a man wearing a suit, even though that's a huge fetish. Or a teacher appearing pregnant in front of her students, even though it's very literally the fruits of her sex life.
The taboo around keeping kids and 'sex' separate serves a vital social role of establishing easily-adjudicated bright-lines to protect them from pedophiles. This is right and good. But teaching kids that Pride is a fun social event (while certainly a sort of political propaganda) doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket. The average 90's Animaniacs or 2010's Adventure Time episode had far more sexual content and real, intended innuendo than the examples on display. It was just (mostly) straight.
The broader complaint that this is indoctrinating kids into LGBT acceptance is... basically true! But like, when people like the indoctrination, they just call it 'socialization' (or "Niceness and Civilization," as the case may be) and pretending gay people don't exist, aren't a normal part of society, or are inherently 'adult content' that's not a normal part of kid-friendly public life is, from my vantage, a far less neutral option than teaching kids what most of society broadly accepts. Again, if folks want to debate that, I do think it's fair game. But the groomer narrative is, broadly speaking, transparent malicious lies, and we should aspire for better discourse.
As many on this forum would agree: inculcating western values and defending western culture against folks from other cultures is essential for the continuation of western civilization. The disagreement is about what those values are.
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