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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30640 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.

If I were queen, my hard rule would be no sexuality in school for any kid under 12. At 13 or so, obviously you need to explain sex and how babies are made. But why teach that in preschool, or even grade school when kids are not mature enough to handle it? And what make this sort of thing so important that it cannot wait for that maturity to develop.?

To borrow words from feminist organiser, writer, mother and Marxist feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, “‘innocent’ is code for powerless – a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human”...
To conquer this fear, it may be necessary for leftists in the 21st century to first give up apologising for the production (and self-fashioning) of non-innocent young people, and practice vindicating it. Only then are we likely to move beyond the “defence” of trans childhoods, towards their celebration. In the final lines of her 2018 study Histories of the Transgender Child, scholar Jules Gill-Peterson writes: “If we adults really desire to learn to care for the many transgender children in our midst, we need to learn what it means to wish that there be trans children.” Let us, as a matter of urgency, set to training ourselves and each other in this wish.

Leftists like Sophie Lewis explain the "why" pretty explicitly, but as usual there's the ultimate defense of "that's only a crazy fringe that all the moderate liberals are only slowly being trained to support, so stop noticing it"

Source for that paragraph? I'm having trouble finding that in the links above, and there's clearly room for much more beyond what I've managed to deduce about these people already.

a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human

That isn't just slow-pitch, it's tee-ball.

It's darkly funny how people always insist "muh child sexualization" has to be from male child molesters and discount the obvious conclusions even without the iron-clad evidence: that there are female child molesters, that this is how they work, that they're trivially identifiable (and how to identify them), why they think the way they do, why they should be kept away from your children at all costs, and that most of the weird sex shit in the classrooms is not only their fault, but done with this intent.

but as usual there's the ultimate defense of "that's only a crazy fringe that all the moderate liberals are only slowly being trained to support, so stop noticing it"

I am reminded of the Catholic Church and its intentional failure to notice molester priests. But you know what? If you wanted to make a boy [or girl] feel dirty and in need of Christ's grace forever, institutionalized buck-breaking is such a fantastic way to accomplish that goal.

https://magazine.tank.tv/issue-94/features/sophie-lewis

Not just a random commie blog either. Their latest issue has the director of the Irish modern art museum

I keep stressing this, but leftist vanguardism works, and nobody seems interested in making it stop working.

I was hoping for more of that Marxist feminism source material directly. Other than that, I think that's the most incoherent thing I've read in a long time.

and nobody seems interested in making it stop working

Your standard excuses; the only people who understand sexuality clearly enough to correctly condemn it are too tired/busy, and that leaves the rest of the traditionalists who have zero desire [or ability] to actually understand the problem (per the "obviously this is all male pedophiles" comment around here somewhere) and therefore cannot solve it effectively. It's just low on our list of priorities these days, just like everything else.

Let me know if you manage to find a copy, all I could get is the Google books sample.

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