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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.
It's a curious problem I think. I am against most of that stuff being taught in school but the whole "teach the controversy" thing must have some limits. What would my enemies do with this veto? I'm not so sure the opt out is the correct thing to demand, the battlefield should surely be the curriculum itself.
Yes, an opt-out liter just cedes the territory to the attackers, and you know they won't honour it the second they get the power. That's why my response was ignoring the sophistry at court and asking "how did we get to this point, and how do we stop it happening again?"
All the viable solutions are outside of the law and politics.
Edit: Awesome, I make a neutral post in line with the choices I've lived and personally spoken of repeatedly. But someone fedposts near it after the fact, so now I look sus and eat a ban. This place is a fucking joke. "Well, he didn't say it, but next to this thing someone else said later, maybe he's thinking it."
Oh, great.
I just gave Capital a slap on the wrist for his near-identical response. For consistency’s sake, you can have one, too.
Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?
Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.
And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.
This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.
This seems exaggerated. You had a literal civil war and it wasn’t this bad AFAIK. Obviously quite a lot of people died but ‘the end of all good things and a life of permanent misery and terror’ doesn’t seem like a good way of describing post-civil-war America.
I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.
If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.
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