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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:
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:
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 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.
Thots and Q's:
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.
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.
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.
Regarding the listed contents, I do think it is inappropriate to be teaching four-year-olds about "leather" - in a sexual context - or even "drag queens", the attempted desexualization of which I find more than a little bemusing. I don't believe crossdressing itself is inherently sexualized, but drag as a subcultural tradition has always had a strong erotic element, and it's kind of bizarre to teach children about it when they quite possibly haven't even properly done the birds and the bees yet.
"Intersex flag" I would, however, strongly defend. Being intersex is an anatomical trait, not a sexual behavior. Four-year-olds can very well be intersex themselves. Teaching them to be at peace with it, and teaching their classmates that it would be wrong to bully people for being intersex, seems perfectly defensible. Indeed, viewed in this context, the intersex flag is just about the only pride flag which could apply to a four-year-old.
I disagree even on this point. There are literally NO subcultures in the western memeplex where crossdressing isn't involved in either a fetish or a sexualised lifestyle.
Welllll.... wearing the clothes of the opposite sex in a non-sexualised way was part of old Hallowe'en traditions (men dressing up as women in aprons etc, women wearing trousers and caps before it became common or usual for women to wear pants). it was all part of the theme of disguising yourself to protect against the malign spirits and the upheaval of the normal rules (this being the night the borders between the Other World and our world opened, and spirits and ghosts could cross over into the human realm and humans could cross over into the other world). Think of it as the spirit of Saturnalia. It's known as guising in Scotland.
The English pantomime tradition carried this on in a way, as well as the comedians who dressed up as women - Les Dawson was not portraying a drag queen, though the humour did depend heavily on double entendres.
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There have been plenty of edgy comedians who cross dressed in nonsexual but still not exactly child-friendly ways.
don't they do that as part of their bit BECAUSE it is inherently sexual? after all sexual humor is one of the more universal forms of comedy.
There is a sexual element involved, in that it used to be inherently ridiculous for a man to dress as a woman, the opposite sex. But not as in relating to sex - 'ordinary men doing ordinary things, but they're dressed as women' was enough to sell Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari's Bosom Buddies to ABC! However once they started developing romantic plot lines for the characters in the second season, people got uncomfortable with it.
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Sometimes it’s just edgy incongruity. Not granny approved, but not purely sexual and/or relating to other male/female differences.
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Pantomime dames in the UK/Australia, which leads into crossdressimg comedians/entertainers like Dame Edna Everage and Mrs Brown?
Do panto dames, Dame Edna and Mrs. Brown (might also innclude Mrs. Doubtfire) represent a subculture in the same way as Glitter & Titter Cabaret, where London's finest burlesque stars, drag queens, and comedians light up the stage? Their audiences I suspect are different. Is there much crossover amoungst the performers?
Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) was a pretty standard Drag Queen until they broke out to become a prime time TV star with what was essentially a panto dame performance. So some crossover at least. I'd say panto dames certainly used to be what I would call a sub culture, I don't think it is as big a thing as it used to be though.
Drag brunches tend to be PG (with some light innuendo) and remind me pretty heavily of panto dame performances, which is what made me think of it.
According to Wikipedia
Sometime later
Is there much Panto that would have to be after the watershed because it's inappropriate for children?
Also Paul O'Grady was a homosexual, neither Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) nor Brendan O'Carroll (Mrs. Brown) were members of this particular peculiar subculture.
But also did appear as Lily Savage on Breakfast programs and primetime television shows. Pantomime humor from Panto dames is built heavily on innuendo and adult jokes that go over children's heads, but can entertain their parents. Lily Savage was very close to this, just dialled up a notch. Seriously go on Youtube and pull up Blankety Blank which was a primetime show. They call it risque but it's just the same kind of innuendo you would find in panto. Now it is on a spectrum and Savage is more crude than a panto dame at his worst, but he settled into a fairly generic prime time career.
Lily Savage's prime time persona was fairly tame. Whether the actor playing the character is gay or not has no real impact on what the character said. Indeed O'Grady himself was much tamer than Savage in his TV persona once he switched out. He himself made the point he only dressed as a woman for money, just like Humphries et al.
We're Humphries or O'Carroll as risqué as O'Grady?
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This is a bad argument. What the parent poster was claiming was that crossdressing does not imply sexualized lifestyle. What you are claiming is that sexualized lifestyle implies cross-dressing (a claim I don't follow btw, I don't think that there is that much cross-dressing in the straight vanilla hookup culture).
It is as if someone claimed to argue that skin contact does not imply sexuality, and you tried to refute them by (correctly) observing that almost all sexuality involved skin contact.
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I mean what comes to mind are two things done in the West. First, acting. People wear costumes. To represent the character they are portraying. Second would be fraternitie using dresses as humiliation or just as a quirky costume for a party. Those things are rare, but I don’t think it’s true that no contexts in any culture have cross dressing must be sexualizing it.
Also, Milton Berle.
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You should go to the theater more often. The pantomime dame of traditional British panto, for example, is a perfect example of a performance style that's quite similar to gay drag, but intended to amuse a wide audience (including young children), not to arouse in any way. You would also be hard-pressed to argue that a hyper-traditonalist production of Hamlet where Ophelia is played by a young lad in period dress, as she would have been in Shakespeare's time, is shooting for "fetish content".
I think we were implicitly talking about men dressing as women rather than women dressing as men, but you'll find an even greater wealth of 'wholesome' examples of crossdressing if you start looking at crossdressing women and girls - the archetypal Eowyn/Mulan/etc. story is hardly a bodice-ripper.
And all that is without wading into the Trans Question in anyway, as that would be tedious and probably unproductive.
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I think @WandererintheWilderness is correct on this point. For example, I have a friend who wore a dress for Halloween one year. He doesn't have some weird fetish or lead a sexualized lifestyle, he just did it for a lark. Or for another example, Trey Parker and Matt Stone wore dresses to the Oscars the year they got nominated, because they thought it was funny as hell to throw people for a loop as they pointedly refused to answer questions about why they did it. So crossdressing isn't inherently sexualized. But it is certainly true (imo) that the typical example of crossdressing is sexual in some way.
There is an argument that a man wearing a dress for Halloween is doing something sexualised; he's just doing a sexualised thing as a joke rather than as an integral part of his identity.
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Well, no surviving ones, at any rate; the most famous one was the mass of women cross-dressing in the '60s and '70s. Of course, that movement was so overwhelmingly successful that it's just the room temperature now.
There's also tomboyism, though that's not really an organized subculture so much as an emergent phenomenon.
The main way to tell whether a particular crossdresser is doing it for fetish/sexualized reasons or not is to look at how well they fit into the surrounding environment. If they're in formal wear when everyone else is casual (which covers both your average drag queen and Sam Brinton) it's 100% fetish/sexual, but if it's not then it's reasonable to assume they have other goals (where, sexual or not, they're unlikely to try and make it your problem).
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