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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.
Both Gorsuch and our resident kinetic-action-advocators are claiming that Pride Puppy is exposing young children to leather fetishism. This would be outrageous if true. But, uh, did anyone posting in this thread bother to check if it is?
The wordlist has 300+ words on it, ranging from 'alligator' and 'apple' to 'zebra print' and 'zipper.' While I don't doubt that the depraved adult minds here are capable of imagining sexualized depictions of the 'carrot' or 'cucumber,' the book depicts a family making a salad.
Likewise, while it's easy to imagine situations where 'leather' or 'underwear' are shown inappropriately, it is also easy to imagine pretty innocuous situations. For example, leather sofas and jackets are common furniture and clothing, respectively. Kids universally learn about underwear in the nonsexual context of potty training and personal hygiene, and comic book heroes have been drawn as-if wearing briefs over their pants for longer than anyone in this thread has been alive. The Captain Underpants series is a 20 year old media empire with more than 50 million book sales in the US and major feature film adaptations.
I have no doubt that some vegans are offended by the former, and I can imagine some schoolmarm disapproving of Captain Underpants specifically or maybe even all comics generally. Nevertheless, the hyper-hyper-majority of parents, regardless of religion or sexual mores, have no problem with any of the above. So, is Pride Puppy's depiction of leather and underwear a bunch of puppy-players, leather daddies, and dudes in jocks, or is it people wearing leather and undies in ways that would be perfectly appropriate for a Halloween costume at an event with kids present?
In a shocking twist of events, a 40 year old children's book publishing house did not decide it was a good idea to teach 4 year olds about puppy play. Instead, the only depictions of 'leather' are a lesbian in a motorcycle jacket waving at a dog and people wearing leather shoes. The only depiction of 'underwear' is a gay guy wearing green briefs over his blue leggings, with all the sexual energy of Aquaman. If you'd like to evaluate for yourself: the content in question.
If one's actual objections are "don't normalize Pride marches," "don't normalize homosexuality," "don't normalize trans," etc. it's possible to have a discussion on the merits of those issues. But it's tremendously dishonest to cloak one's actual objection to the former with trumped-up talk of introducing 4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.
'Nutpicking' isn't exactly the peak of good rhetoric, but I hope we can hold ourselves to the standard of, at the very least, finding real nuts to pick. This is an internet forum, after all! We needn't act like Supreme Court Justices – we can do 2 minutes worth of basic fact checking.
He fumbled through a rolodex. That's funny! I don't think it's implausible for one of the characters in Pride Puppy to be a sex positive, sex worker. We can make that canon. People latching onto the exchange are not being fair to Gorsuch with the out-of-context snippet. For the purpose of maximizing honesty here is that exchange:
There is no 'BDSM bondage' that I could find in Pride Puppy, but there is a "drag queen" in a word search exercise at the end of the book and clearly a couple illustrated in the pages. They also arbitrarily slot (drag) queen under 'Q' instead of 'D', because they didn't have enough Q's.
Not all of the books from curriculum are in the dropbox link:
Pride Puppy (Pre-K), Uncle Bobby's Wedding (K-5), Intersection Allies: We Make Room for All (K-5), My Rainbow (K-5), Prince & Knight (K-5), Love, Violet (K-5), Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope (K-5), Cattywampus (Grade 6-), The Best at It (Grade 6-), Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World (Grade 7-), Hurricane Child (7-), The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets (8-), Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Rusin (8-)
We are having those conversations right here in this thread! Most comments that do not claim there is pornography in Pride Puppy.
There is a reasonable association from the introduction of "lace", "leather", and drag queens -- concepts that we adults are familiar with and associate with sex -- to queer identity and ideology. Then either from or to sexual identity and sexual orientation. To suggest these are isolated concepts unrelated to sexuality stretches my credulity. Sanitizing something for children doesn't make it about something else. These are children's stories. Most have fairly normal lessons in some way, but nearly all are in the setting of LGBTQ+ acceptance. In the case of Born Ready: The Trust Story of a Boy Named Penelope trans ID.
Bobby Goes To The Single's Resort in Cancun could be a story sanitized for the consumption of 5 year olds. It can avoid nudity, be made wholesome, and even have a standard children's moral to the story. After, Bobby Hangs Out With El Farrio the Pick-up Artist. The last in the series: Bobby Goes to Leningrad. Bobby gets cold in Leningrad. When he feels better, he learns how to spell, sews his own jacket, and when he gets hungry he eats his evil neighbor.
Apologies, looking at this in context, I think I probably came off as cranky at you, but I actually think you did a fine job presenting the plaintiff's arguments & broader issues. Your top-level was fine and good. However, I am disappointed with the several subthreads where an expansive reading of the malicious implications and innuendo in the plaintiff's arguments are uncritically credited when they seemed, to me, both so obviously in-credible and, as it happens, trivially-verified to be untrue.
Sure, this statement is true. But for people not super into the anti-LGBT stuff, it's a lot less incendiary! To extremify a bit more, if Little Bobby Tables is being fitted for his harness and pup mask in kindergarten, essentially every parent would throw unlimited support behind whoever promises to make that stop. But if he's told that there are guys like his dad, except instead of having a wife, they have a husband, and some of his classmates might have two dads... yeah, some of regulars here think that's a justification for unlimited violence against civilization, but a large majority of the country disagrees.
Parts of the thread are fine (or at least aren't doing the thing I'm complaining about). Agreed.
Were I somehow put in charge of designing Pride Puppy's word search, I certainly would have avoided including 'leather' to try and prevent this sort of "Re: Re: Re: Re: FWD: Re: Biden forces schools to let furry kids use kitty litter!" urban legend from circulating on X. But at the same time, if I had to name 300 distinct objects / attributes in that story, yeah, 'leather' and 'underwear' probably make the list—there's really not that many things to choose.
Given the context, which really is about as anodyne and wholesome as possible, this sort of free-association guilt-by-implication argument is the same school of media criticism that spent the last twenty years detailing how each and every piece of media was racist, misogynistic, and otherwise problematic, just with different in- and out-groups. "Woke right" is an annoying snarl term, but at the same time, I can't help but think this really is just conservative Anita Sarkeesian.
This seems like the classic equivocation on the word 'sexuality.' A man mentioning his wife is just talking like a perfectly ordinary person, a man mentioning his husband is "making things about sexuality/sex/politics." Obviously Pride is related to 'sexuality' and what people wear to Pride is an expression of 'sexuality' but this meaning of the word has not all that much do with sex, per se, (though some stuff at Pride definitely is and of course no minimally-qualified parent is taking his child to Folsom) and is no more child inappropriate than a teacher wearing her engagement ring. Nor a man wearing a suit, even though that's a huge fetish. Or a teacher appearing pregnant in front of her students, even though it's very literally the fruits of her sex life.
The taboo around keeping kids and 'sex' separate serves a vital social role of establishing easily-adjudicated bright-lines to protect them from pedophiles. This is right and good. But teaching kids that Pride is a fun social event (while certainly a sort of political propaganda) doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket. The average 90's Animaniacs or 2010's Adventure Time episode had far more sexual content and real, intended innuendo than the examples on display. It was just (mostly) straight.
The broader complaint that this is indoctrinating kids into LGBT acceptance is... basically true! But like, when people like the indoctrination, they just call it 'socialization' (or "Niceness and Civilization," as the case may be) and pretending gay people don't exist, aren't a normal part of society, or are inherently 'adult content' that's not a normal part of kid-friendly public life is, from my vantage, a far less neutral option than teaching kids what most of society broadly accepts. Again, if folks want to debate that, I do think it's fair game. But the groomer narrative is, broadly speaking, transparent malicious lies, and we should aspire for better discourse.
As many on this forum would agree: inculcating western values and defending western culture against folks from other cultures is essential for the continuation of western civilization. The disagreement is about what those values are.
See, the thing is, I'd be more convinced about "it's just a few crazy kids on campus" - sorry, I meant "it's just a book about being nice and having fun!", "it's just teaching tolerance and civility!", "it's just treating people the way they want to be treated" were it not that every. single. time. it's been - what was that phrase again? oh yeah - "motte and bailey".
"We're only teaching kids that some kids have two moms or two dads, what is wrong with that?" is the fig leaf for "and trans. that they might be trans. and they can trust us. we'll help them out and keep it secret from their parents. because their parents are bigots and would be mean to them. but we'll keep it a big secret just between the two of us, yeah?"
Now we're getting "it's just a woman wearing a leather jacket, what is so strange about that?" in the context of a Pride parade. Yeah, what is so particular about leather at a gay parade that could ruffle some feathers?
I have always hated the notion of dog whistles because I think a lot of the time it's motivated reasoning and people getting het-up over nothing. But damn it, sometimes a "lesbian wearing leather" is a leather dyke. Unless we are to assume the author of Pride Puppy is an innocent pure soul who thinks Pride parades/Pride Day/Pride Month are only about rainbow flags and everyone parading, with no deeper knowledge of the LGBT culture and its history, I don't see how things like that can be anything but deliberate. And it turns out Ms. Stephenson is an activist of sorts herself, so yeah I think it's deliberate. No matter what the illustrator says (so the leather jacket had to be studded? and a motorbike type jacket? because that's what women wear to the grocery store as a matter of course? with nothing underneath except a rainbow bra? and a choker?)
Okay sure, maybe, I imagine some women wear that kind. But looking online the closest I can find to the jacket in the illustration is "bomber" or "moto" jackets, and none of these have spikes on the shoulders. But then again, I've never worn a leather jacket in my life, so what do I know about fashion?
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