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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30639 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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In lieu of the normal SCOTUS Mottezins... wake up, honey, the Culture War went to court again. Arguments for Mahmoud v. Taylor just dropped (PDF). A less oppressive SCOTUSblog write up here.

Obligatory disclaimer that I do not know anything. The gist of the case:

  • In 2022 Montgomery County, a suburb of DC, approved a number of LGBTQ books for the curriculum. They include these books and other materials from ages as early as 3-4 and up.
  • A bunch of parents cite religious reasons to opt-out of this part of the curriculum. This is in line with Montgomery's historical policy and the policy of neighboring counties. Opt-outs for religious reasons are normal for things like sex education and health classes that include it around the country.
  • Depending who you believe, so many parents chose to opt-out that the district had no choice but to change policy, or the district was so ideologically wedded to the material that they changed the policy. Either way, the county says no more opt-outs. Lawsuit commences. It goes up the chain and here we are.

I know we have some skeptics of "woke" curriculum, so for a probably not unbiased overview of the material, BECKET, the religious freedom legal advocacy non-profit backing the plaintiffs, provides examples in an X thread. They also provide a dropbox link to some of the material in question. In one tweet they claim:

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.

Another book advocates a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, telling students that a decision to transition doesn’t have to “make sense.”

Teachers are instructed to say doctors only “guess” when identifying a newborn’s sex anyway

The Justices had read the books in question. Kavanaugh acknowledged Schoenfeld, representing Montgomery County, had "a tough case to argue".

The county asserted that mandatory exposure to material, like a teacher reading a book out loud, is not coercion (or a burden?) that violates a free exercise of religion. Sotomayor seemed to support this position. Schoenfeld, arguing for Montgomery County, said these books that are part of a curriculum that preach uncontroversial values like civility and inclusivity. Alito, skeptical, said Uncle Bobby's Wedding had a clear moral message beyond civility or inclusivity.

The liberal justices were interested in clarification on what Baxter, arguing for the parents, thought the limits were to. What limits are placed on parents with regards to religious opt-outs? Kagan was worried about the opening of the floodgates. Sotomayor drew a line to parental objection to 'biographical material about women who have been recognized for achievements outside of their home' and asked if the opt-out should extend to material on stuff like inter-faith marriage. Baxter didn't give well-defined lines, but said nah, we figured this out.

Sincerity of belief is one requirement for compelled opt-outs. The belief can't be "philosophical" or "political" it has to a sincere religious belief. Age was discussed as another consideration. Material that may offend religious belief to (the parents of?) a 16 year old does not apply the same sort of burden as it does to a 5 year old, because a 16 year old is more capable of being "merely exposed" rather than "indoctrinated". A word Eric Baxter, arguing for the parents, used several times and Justice Barrett used twice.

Eric Baxter also stabbed at the district's position that there was ever an administrative issue at all. Chief Justice Roberts agreed and seemed to question whether the school's actions were pretext. Baxter had one exchange (pg. 40-42 pdf) with Kavanaugh who, "mystified as a life-long resident of the county [as to] how it came to this", asked for background.

Baxter: That's right. Hundreds of parents complained. These were mostly according to news articles mostly families from Muslim faith and Ethiopian Orthodox who were objecting.

B: When they-- when they spoke to the Board, the Board accused them of using their religious beliefs as another reason to hate, accused a young Muslim girl of parroting her parents' dogma, and then accused the parents of aligning with racist xenophobes and white supremacists.

B: And so, again, there's no question in this case that there is a burden, that it was imposed with animosity, and that it's discriminating against our clients because of their religious beliefs.

Baxter also pointed at ongoing opt-out polices in neighboring counties and different ones in Montgomery itself. He clarified the relevance of Wisconsin v. Yoder where it was found strict scrutiny should be applied to protect religious freedom. One example of an ongoing opt-out policy in Montgomery allowed parents to opt their children out of material that showed the prophet Mohammed.

ACB: .....What is your take on that and how we think about this, whether this really is just about exposure and civility and learning to function in a multi-cultural and diverse society and how much of it is about influence or as Petitioners would say indoctrination?

Schoenfeld: .....The school the express directive from the school is you don't need to understand your peers, you don't need to agree with them, you don't need to affirm with them, but you do need to treat them with respect.

Thots and Q's:

  • Is it necessary to introduce concepts that include queer and gender ideology to children in public school? Why, why not? At what age would the introduction be appropriate or inappropriate?

The eternal fight over what the state uses to fill children's minds in a land of compulsory attendance is main conflict, even if this legal question is one of what a compromise should look given religious freedoms.

  • A competent school district should account for the addition of new, potentially controversial or sensitive material.

It can do so in a few different ways and avoid a trip to SCOTUS. I support preaching civility and inclusivity to children. There are thousands children's books that preach these things without drag queens or bondage. In an ideal world, knowledge of and tolerance for queer people can also be taught without, what I would call, the excess. Schools can also program curriculum to account for opt-outs when it comes to touchy subjects.

Sex education can be crammed into 1 hour classes for a week of the year. This allows parents to opt-out without placing an unmanageable burden on the administration. A curriculum that requires teachers to read a number of controversial book at least 5 times each a year is a curriculum designed to, intentionally or not, make opt-outs onerous. In this case it was so onerous and so controversial that Montgomery was compelled to change the policy. Which is an administrative failure even if one doesn't believe it to be ideologically motivated.

  • It may be worth pointing out that coverage from outlets like NPR didn't include the name of the case or a description of the plaintiffs that brought it.

I've seen it argued both ways. That outlets notoriously don't link cases or share case names, but in this case the plaintiffs -- a mixture of Muslim, Christian, Jewish parents -- the absence is notable. Were this an evangelical push we could expect some evangelical bashing.

I know that the county conceded that they would allow an opt-out for a Muslim student to not look at an image of Muhammad, but is that constitutionally required? I can imagine a hypothetical school district (backed by state law) deciding to use a picture book to teach kids about the Arab conquests. If Muslim parents complain? Tough shit. This is the kind of thing that makes school administration a nightmare.

It may be worth pointing out that coverage from outlets like NPR didn't include the name of the case or a description of the plaintiffs that brought it.

I don’t think this is because they are trying to hide who is suing here. News editing just sucks. I think the idea is that nobody wants to read a news article with a bunch of legal citations, so we end up with headlines like “Elon Musk’s DOGE Delt Legal Blow by Federal Judge”, when the substantive legal issue is that their motion to change venue was denied.

News editing just sucks. I think the idea is that nobody wants to read a news article with a bunch of legal citations, so we end up with headlines like “Elon Musk’s DOGE Delt Legal Blow by Federal Judge”, when the substantive legal issue is that their motion to change venue was denied.

There is an alternative, more cynical explanation, which is that news sites do not link to their sources out of fear that they'd then be competing for their readers with those sources.

Well, "no pictures of Muhammad" is a sincerely held belief of a world religion. It is both fairly narrow in scope, too. So anyone who made a book about Muhammad and decided to include a picture of him would be trying to specifically piss of Muslims.

If someone decided to base their sex education around the theme "how Mary and Joseph had sex and Jesus was conceived", then we would also reasonably suspect that someones was trying to piss of Christians by violating a fairly narrow taboo. (By contrast, "how sex and pregnancy works" is an infinitely broader taboo which is much less rooted in faith.)

Well, "no pictures of Muhammad" is a sincerely held belief of a world religion. It is both fairly narrow in scope, too. So anyone who made a book about Muhammad and decided to include a picture of him would be trying to specifically piss of Muslims.

What about the Wikipedia page "Depictions of Muhammad," which includes many visual samples? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad Do you think Wikipedia editors are "trying to specifically piss of Muslims?"

If someone decided to base their sex education around the theme "how Mary and Joseph had sex and Jesus was conceived"

And here I was thinking it was a Roman auxiliary marching from the coast to Syria to put down a riot that stopped over and popped a baby in her.

Well sure, and this makes me suspect that the plaintiffs are a significant steelman of their case. It has to be a religious belief to opt out and I suspect most parents who don't want their four year olds taught about bondage are not religious- it is possible, even common, to be secular and normal at the same time.

secular and normal at the same time

Isn't 'normal' as you've used it here just the remnants of cultural Christianity? If education were better this 'normal' may be perceived as more religious and less secular.

Exposure of unwanted children was 'normal' amongst many pagans before they were converted.

Maybe, sure. But parents in 0 AD mostly weren’t encouraging their wanted prepubescent children to experiment sexually either. So whatever. The point was that there are plenty of not-religious people who object strongly to this.

Actually parents in 0 AD weren't doing anything because there was no year 0 AD.

And since I'm bored and we're being pedantic anyway, it'd be AD 0, not 0 AD.

Sexual norms in antiquity are a pretty complicated topic (and inconsistent over time too): I guess that I can't speak to the presence of children, but Roman parades with lots of phallic imagery are documented to have occured. I believe it was Augustus who tried to steer the Roman upper classes toward chastity and fidelity in ways that would probably look "Christian" today but largely predate that Jesus character's major set pieces. Not to mention ancient practices of homosexuality and acceptable age gaps there.

Honestly, I know just enough that I'd be interested to read a longer, more coherent take on the subject.

I think that misses the point. Historically, Christianity may have helped suggest we stop grooming and fucking kids, but the state requiring you to cite a religious reason for not wanting to do so now seems like an anti-pattern. I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.

I don't think you should need to go to church to keep the school from grooming your kids. (We homeschool)

I think the underlying cause for you wanting your kids not to be groomed is because you live in a society running on the fumes of cultural Christianity.

So… you think Chinese parents would all be fine with trans books for 8 year olds?

Their pushback comes from Confucian values emphasizing traditional family roles, collectivism prioritizing social stability over individual expression, and skepticism of Western ideologies seen as culturally disruptive.

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I think this board's religious makeup is coming out a bit here. I'll give christianity partial credit, because, of course, I'm very sure it wasn't paganism or Islam.

But I utterly refuse to concede that my parental instinct is 100% ascribable to a system of belief I've never been part of, or to a god that doesn't exist.

I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.

Why else would you want that? If there's no absolute standard, anything goes. Guess you could make some argument that it's bad for them, but then you'd need to demonstrate that such a thing as 'bad' exists (i.e. an 'ought' rather than an 'is') and also that things wouldn't just work out if we all stopped worrying so much about sexualizing children.

Or, for that matter, owning slaves or murdering infants, or selling unwanted daughters into prostitution. Going to the next tribe over and killing, raping, and plundering. You know, standard human behavior sans Christ.

People are going to do what they're going to do. It's impossible to call it wrong without reference to a higher authority. One can point to cultural norms but, as we see here, that's ultimately a losing game. You can (physically) attempt to stop them, but not under any kind of rubric of right or wrong. And then the universe burns out (or blows apart) anyway.

It's impossible to call it wrong without reference to a higher authority.

No, I don't agree with this in the slightest. Cooperation is useful. Having a happy wife who helps maintain my life is objectively superior to a sex slave chained in my basement.

I think the higher-level point is getting lost here. "Useful" for what? Your preferences, which are just as (in)valid as someone else's? If someone else finds a chainéd sex-slave more 'useful' for their purposes, does that mean they get to call you wrong?

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Cooperation is useful.

Thet is a function of hyperconnected modern societies with resource extraction capability no longer being the determinant of biological survival. The extent of cooperation historically was limited to how far the reach of your competitors were, and how much work was needed to get something useful out of the ground. We see that in societies with much more reliance on local resource extraction that the incentive for cooperation is much lower, since the pie is shared with more mouths.

I actually agree that open communication and cooperation is the most effective way to function as a society, with defectors being punished heavily to prevent tragedy of the commons. Unfortunately with disparate impact it is. now unbecoming to punish troublemakers, so we live in societies where the effort to create discord is so minimal and the rewards for the disruptor so great. Johnny Somali actively seeks to cause disruption for personal benefit, and he was never punished for his antics until he went to Korea and discovered Asian Racism.

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I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.

Or, perhaps, we were the ones missing the point, and no matter how much we believe we shouldn't, we do need to?

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