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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.
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.?
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"
Copying an old comment of mine from the old place.
I think a very strong case can be made that the New Left, and its subsequent and related movements in the academic left particularly queer theory, is pro-pedophilia (eventually filtering down to the 'woke' public in watered down form). To be more charitable, it's not that they are pro-pedophile per se, but rather that they have adopted a world view that doesn't make a distinction between pedophilia and non-pedophilia. The aim to is "deconstruct" sex, gender, sexuality, race and so on. Why would one expect them to stop there and not deconstruct adult and child? In many cases, this is what they explicitly want to do. Some might say this is a 'slippery slope' fallacy, but I think Newton's First Law is an appropriate analogy. One might argue it is the logical conclusion of left academic theory (that is, the critical theories prominent in academia).
It's probably best to use some examples.
John Money, a psychologist and sexologist, with a background in pediatrics, active in the 50s and 60s. John Money is notable for being one of, if not the first person to theorize a distinction between sex and gender, and was the academic who introduced the term 'gender identity' and has been highly influential in the development of sex and gender theory. What is less well know about Money is some of his extremely unethical practices, including the infamous case of David Reimer. When Reimer was born, he was subjected to a botched circumcision that destroyed his penis. On the advice of Money, Reimer's parents subjected Reimer to sex change (as a baby) and raised him as a girl. As part of the therapy, he would make Reimer and his twin brother engage in mock sexual activity, including making them strip for 'inspections' and taking photos. Money claimed that these activities were essential for the development of a healthy adult gender and sexual identity. The case of Reimer was long held up as evidence in support of Money's and later ideas of gender identity and the distinction of sex and gender. David Reimer would "de-transition" later in his teens. Both David and his twin brother Brian would commit suicide in their thirties.
In the 1960s to 1990s, influential German psychologist, sexologist and sex educator Hemlut Kentler ran an experiment with government support where he would put young children as foster children with known pedophiles and encourage sexual activity. Kentler had strong tied to left-wing intellectual circles and believed that 'sexual repression' was the key driver of fascist ideology.
Shulamith Firestone, radical feminist and author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. In the book, she makes four demands for an authentic feminist revolution. Number three is for 'the total integration of women and children into all aspects of larger society' (by this she means the removal of any cultural distinction between men/women and adult/child). Number four is for 'the freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually'.
In 1977, a group of French left or left associated intellectuals signed a petition to the French government asking them abolish the age of consent in France. The signatories include some extremely significant and influential names, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-François Lyotard. I should point out that there is strong evidence is that Michel Foucault was a pedophile, and regularly made trips to Tunisia to abuse young boys there. One has to wonder how this relates to his work in postmodernism.
There's Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay Thinking Sex, considered a foundational text for gay and lesbian studies, gender studies and queer theory. In Thinking Sex, Rubin defends pedophilia (and incest as it happens). It's hard to get a direct quote (you can read the essay yourself) as the language is expectedly obtuse, but it is the logical conclusion of what she is arguing. For example:
Rubin, and many academic leftists like and since her, want to deconstruct the concept of childhood innocence, seeing it yet another part of the oppressive system we find ourself in. I should point out, the Motte and Bailey is particularly strong here.
There's of course, Judith Butler, the queer theorist who needs no introduction. What Judith Butler means can be hard to actually decern, but here's a choice quote from her 2004 book 'Undoing Gender':
Which fits into my initial description - it's not that the 'academic left' (or critical left or whatever term you want to use) are pro-pedophile per se, but rather they believe in deconstructing sexual norms in such a way that pedophile becomes a meaningless concept (and one might say, intentionally or unintentionally giving pedophiles free license to operate). These are just examples, but you can find many other academics arguing the same or similar. A large part of it goes back to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, which basically argues through a Freudian-Marxist synthesis that our natural desires and impulses are suppressed by the capitalist system in order to funnel them into productive work (which no one actually wants to do), and therefore liberation from capitalism but necessarily include the liberation and expression of these desires, with of course, an emphasis on sexual desire.
But surely these are just kooky academics with insane theories that would never actually have any real-world consequences (regardless of how crazy influential they are), right? That normal people (that is, leftists) would never actually implement these kinds of things in a practical manner, right? Well these theories do seem to have effect, least of all in (critical) pedagogy. In particular, sex education does seem to have been affected by these theories, at least in the US. One example is the book 'Gender Queer: A Memoir', the subject of recent controversy, becoming standard in curriculum and libraries for many schools, and is aimed at pre-teens. The book contains extremely graphic (drawn) images, including a blowjob and sex scenes. You can search for the images yourself.
I recall seeing this post the first time it was published (or something close to it), and just like back then, I fail to see how this observation about the leftists of 1980s squares with the present day. I see normal people (that is, leftists, ranging from basic reddit just be a decent person-ists to transhumanist plural Marxists) quite a lot (admittedly mostly on the internet). In no spaces is any hint of any indulgent relationship between an adult and a child seen as more abhorrent than those normal people (leftist) spaces. The border between adult and child is far from being erased, it is shifted to mid-twenties. And I know how people act when there is something they really think but can't say (I've been on the Motte when it was on reddit), so I do not believe all of them are merely pretending to dislike any crossing of the 18-/18+ barrier.
The worldview of an average left-leaning normie is "no viewing anyone under the age of 18 as a sexual being at all". A minimal detached clinical acknowledgement is allowed, so as to be able to know teens could have unsafe sex, for the purposes of thwarting said unsafe sex. The attitude of the queer community towards educating children on sexuality is, at the worst of it, myopic and selfish, caring more about bolstering their political alliance than the livelihood of those children, but I don't see calling it pedophilic as anything but mental gymnastics.
In how many normal people (leftist) spaces was it not abhorrent to schedule a 14 year old girl for a double mastectomy, because she wants to be a boy, 20 years ago? I was still hearing "no one is doing gender surgeries on minors" as an argument until 2-3 years ago, and it was only dropped when you could start linking people to peer reviewed studies, where clinics were bragging about how many minors they performed mastectomies on.
I don't doubt that they're currently not in favor of it, but give me a reason to believe that when their vanguard decides it's time to push that particular door open, they'll refuse.
Because the vanguard did try to push that particular door open, and they did refuse. Paedophile acceptance was part of the counterculture, but was kicked out of the coalition when SJ nucleated. This is an unusual fact pattern suggesting unusual forces at work; the about-face on nerds/aspies is the only other one I can point to. If I had to point to a suspect for the unusual force, it'd be innate "ick" responses of teenage girls.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm actually on the pro-paedo side of this fight, albeit not actually in favour of AoC abolition due to logistical concerns (in particular HIV necessitating sex ed).
So how do you explain the normie core happily going along with the mastectomies? They involve teenage girls as well. Was the pushback against pedo acceptance even driven by leftist normies, or was it a result of conservatives being stronger and better organized?
Trans activists successfully convinced a sufficient number of leftist normies that some kids are inherently trans, those who are know it at a young age, and that those kids will suffer terribly and kill themselves if forced to become physically normal adults of their birth sex, therefore the mastectomies and such are actually necessary medical care.
A lot of normies are still uncomfortable when confronted with the details, though, hence the euphemism of "gender-affirming care".
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Remember that I'm talking about an "ick" from teenage girls, not an "ick" on behalf of teenage girls. It's not like mastectomies are being forced on unwilling teenage girls, after all, just given to willing teenage girls who are plausibly making bad decisions (and who do not themselves believe they are making bad decisions).
From my memories of SJ spaces, and from the way SJ works*, I feel extremely confident in saying it's the former.
*One of the most poisonous parts of SJ is that it considers those outside the movement to be hopelessly mired in false consciousness and thus incapable of having anything to contribute; this is exactly why it's so intransigent in the face of external opposition. As such, you don't see conservative ideas getting adopted by SJ; it kinda has to be independently rediscovered within the walled garden in order to be accepted there.
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