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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31681 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.

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.

  • -10

Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?

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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War (sigh) has changed.

Motorization. Improvised explosives. Handheld automatic weapons. Radio. A small number of motivated individuals can deal a lot more damage today than they could during the March to the Sea.

Personally, I think a hypothetical U.S. balkanization would look more like the Troubles than the American Civil War. It’d be high-variance: some regions would see a bombing every week, and others would be left untouched up until the point a militia rolled into town. Even the best-off, though, would suffer compared to the globalist, interconnected society we have today.

Not everyone would see the outcomes FC described. But enough of them would, and then they’d take up arms and gouge back. And your children would never expect to have it as good as we did.

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We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.

The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.

What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.

For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.

Rdrama mocks us for words, words, words, but it do be like that though, and it's a good thing.

Explain why a political solution won't work, explain what might work instead, try to keep a relatively morally neutral tone. It's not that hard, you can literally boogaloopost if you put enough effort.

You belive that had @Capital_Room explained his literal bullet solution or @WhiningCoil his outside the law and politics solution in a morally neutral tone they'd be grand?

Maybe one of them will edit their posts with your suggestions.

Yes, I've seen it done, and I've seen prominent posters (who used to be mods) clutching their pearls over it, and leaving in a huff about it, and no disciplinary action being taken.

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What a joke

You've been asked to not do this in the most clear way possible.

Not any other critics of modding have been asked to stop. Just you, and just these kinds of dumb comments.

I am tempted to take your advice and give you a permaban:

Letting obvious trolling go on this long is a bad look, but the mods are such easy marks for it.

After all these sorts of comments you make are obvious trolling.

Community sentiment is generally against perma-bans these days. 30-days for you

This is a terrible ban and using his comment about the obvious troll poster troll posting and getting away with it because charity is endless to new posters who pretend not to know anything is ridiculous.

But the reason this is a terrible ban is because WhiningCoil's ban was a joke on several levels of both being bad and lazy and sets an assuming the worst kind of rule to the forum as a whole that I'm sure will go well.

But the bad moderating here seems to be here to stay if you can't just admit that you made a mistake and should actually be as charitable to the people you mod as they are supposed to be to you.

We've extended a great deal of charity to Steve. We've asked him to stop making these sorts of comments. He chose not to.

He has also been warned many times for antagonistic behavior, both on this account and the previous account. He was very close to earning a permanent ban with his previous account's behavior. We made a note to ourselves to not completely ignore his previous account's bad behavior, but we mostly did and proceeded to be lenient with him as if he was a newish user.

Other people's bad behavior, even if it is a mod's bad behavior, is not an excuse for bad behavior.

If we specifically ask any user not to do a specific thing. We mean it and we will take note of it. If Netstack had broken every rule we have and gotten de-modded for his comment I still would have banned Steve for his comment. This is a 'fuck around and find out" moment. We literally only have two punishments in our toolbox, the first is asking people to stop doing a thing, and the second is bans.

I clearly said in my comment that no one else has been asked to not provide feedback. Only Steve, and only those types of comments.

I personally think netstack's ban of @WhiningCoil was fine. Its only that he should have been harsher with @Capital_Room. 5 days at least for capital room for clear fedposting. And just one day for whining coil cuz it sorta looked like fedposting.

As far as I am concerned fedposting is one of the few existential threats that this board faces. The other two are zorba kicking the bucket and a democrat party crackdown on free speech on the web.

One day bans are minor and basically nothing. That is us saying "yes really, this is a rule we will enforce, don't do it". For anything resembling fed posting I'm also willing to hand out bans like candy. Don't fucking do it. We can choose to be lenient when it is just the rules we care about enforcing. But this is a rule that the world will enforce upon us if we don't self police. Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it. We still might ban you, because again we aren't really the ones making the rule on this. Sorry it sucks, I don't like it anymore than you do.

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After all these sorts of comments you make are obvious trolling.

Um, no they're not. Trolling is deceptive posting in order to bait a response; Steve clearly does think that netstack's action was "a joke". I do not get "troll" vibes from him in general; he appears to be a sincere, very angry, very radical rightist.

Steve is a frequent flamer (i.e. someone who insults others). That is itself against the rules, but it's not the same thing as trolling.

Isn’t “baiting a response” the important bit? It’s the main reason I was ignoring Steve.

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To join the choir, initially I read the comment as being about culture, not violence. Entirely undeserved, in my opinion. It's not a quality comment as it doesn't speak plainly, but you inferred the worst possible meaning from it.

It's not a quality comment as it doesn't speak plainly, but you inferred the worst possible meaning from it.

There is a soft rule to speak plainly, for this reason...

What Montgomery County did was pretty classically tyranny (remove the safety valve from a policy when it exposed the unpopularity of the policy) it shouldn't be a surprise that some people respond with the correct response to tyranny. Sic semper...

FWIW I got this comment to rate and marked it as "neutral". You can read the suggestion of violence into it if you want but I think you have to bring that in yourself; there are other things that could just as well be referred to (culture, exit, self-segregation, etc)

how do we stop it happening again?"

The only answers to that question, at this point, involve literal bullets.

Well, now that I'm off ban, to clarify: I mean less "2nd amendment solutions," more Suharto.

How we stop it happening again is we get a Caesar Augustus or a Bonaparte, with the loyalty of the warriors, and the willingness to use them to purge the enemy. It's "tanks in Harvard yard" as part of going Henry VIII (or Qin Shi Huangdi) on academia.

  • -11

Do you remember the last time you were warned for toeing this particular line?

Yeah, you’re crossing it.

Unlike your extensive history of high-effort, high-quality comments on political polarization, there’s nothing here. Nothing to engage with, nothing to discuss. It’s snarling at best and a call to action at worst.

I’m going to go with a one-day ban pending discussion with the team.

Calls for violence can be engaged with. There's the violence is never a solution, view. There's the sometimes violence is the only solution, view and now it's timely or untimely. There's violence as a political tool.

Violence is never the solution for the weak, which is what the right is. If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him and you will see far worse kinds of censorship than 2021 but for decades.

Moldbug was right when he called violence a false path to power.

Violence is never the solution for the weak

This is true, if one arbitrarily declares that anyone who achieves solutions through violence must therefore have not actually been weak.

which is what the right is

Are we?

It seems to me that we've gotten to the position we're in by attempting to cooperate with defectors. That position seems to be changing rapidly now that common knowledge of the defectors is spreading.

If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him and you will see far worse kinds of censorship than 2021 but for decades.

One of the things that I don't think most moderates have cottoned to is that enforcement of this sort of thing might not be a viable option any more. For the last several years, we've seen a consistent pattern of long-standing, load-bearing social norms abruptly dissolve, and the way this has repeatedly gone is that Red Tribers achieve common knowledge that the "norm" could not be applied to their advantage, and so simply stopped applying it to Blue Tribe's advantage. We saw this with sexual misconduct accusations, with character accusations, with appeals to rule of law, and many others. I think we've seen the beginnings of this pattern applied to political violence with the riots, Rittenhouse, the j6 pardons and now Luigi and Karmelo. You'll know for sure when notable Red Tribe violence occurs, and Red Tribers simply reject the appeal to "norms" en-masse.

Do you think, in the current environment, Red Tribers won't celebrate if a Blue Tribe politician has his strings cut, after years of watching their friends and neighbors openly wish for and celebrate lawless murder of Red Tribers? If so, I'd say you're quite the optimist.

Come on man, you can't even get the average conservative normie boomer to be upset about his own son being murdered. When we stop hearing "I wish that my son was killed by a 60-year-old white man (instead of a black illegal)", I'll agree that the right has decided to stop crippling itself with one-sided social norms. Until then they're just punching bags for the left to torture for fun and profit.

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If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him

Does that include Trump sending in the Marines? Or a future President Vance rolling tanks into Harvard yard a la Yarvin?

It mostly relates to acquistion of power, so if you can send tanks to harvard, you have likely already won, therefore any violence now is not gonna get you screwed over. Simialr to protests, protests are a way of showing your power, not acquiring it.

That's not actually a solution either. Putting bullets in people is downstream from doing politics. The left understands that better than the right, which is why the left keeps getting away with boiling the frog while the right polishes their gun collection muttering "one of these days, for sure..."

I mean, obviously any real solution to this involves eliminating a lot of evildoers, but that's literally the last step of the solution, not the first. The conservative frog in the pot uselessly fantasizing about killing the cook is just as doomed as the liberal one croaking "fact-checkers deboonk claims without evidence that the pot is starting to boil!"

while the right polishes their gun collection muttering "one of these days, for sure..."

Yes, which is why I'm not calling for rebellion, but a Caesar sending soldiers as "right-wing death squads" to purge the domestic enemy.

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 don't believe crossdressing itself is inherently sexualized,

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.

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

O'Grady obtained his breakthrough into television when he played the character of a transvestite prostitute informant, Roxanne, in three episodes of ITV's police drama The Bill between 1988 and 1990.

Sometime later

He turned down ITV's subsequent offer of a weekly show because it would air before the watershed and thus force him to drastically alter his act into a form of light entertainment.

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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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.

Sometimes it’s just edgy incongruity. Not granny approved, but not purely sexual and/or relating to other male/female differences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Yeah. I remember there was a big thing a few years back about whether or not leather should be welcome at pride, because pride has become a family thing for some people and there are kids there now. But that's a matter of "should leather be pushed out of a space because kids are entering the space".

But bringing leather into a space that is specifically for young kids is beyond the pale. Enough so that I would expect that even the majority of the queer-and-proud population would be against it.

WTF was the school board even thinking here?

Edit: or am I just being gullible, and the books the school board pushed didn't have leather except in the literal sense that one of the characters in one of the books wore a leather jacket?

As to why the "introducing little children to drags" thing exists, see my thoughts here — my best guess is that it's a bizarrely misjudged attempt to counteract the anti-trans argument that goes "trans women are functionally drag queens, drag is a sexual practice that shouldn't be allowed in public, therefore trans women shouldn't be allowed in public" by denying the 'drag is inherently sexual' step of the reasoning, instead of the 'drag queens and trans women are the same thing' step.

Regarding this particular school board, though, I don't think they looked too closely at the material in the first place. They saw a generally-pro-LGBT book and rubber-stamped it without even trying to judge its specific merits.

Sure, I buy that the school board just rubber-stamped this book without much thought. That part is not surprising to me. The bit that's surprising to me is that they decided to double down, and then double down again, and continue until they're now showing up in front of the supreme court. This case (edit apr 24: as described in the top-level comment) is a giant gift to social conservatives, at a minimum in the court of public opinion and I expect also in the court of law. So I wonder if the school board just doesn't realize that, of if they do realize that and just don't care - I just have a burning curiosity as to what their thought process was when they decided to escalate to this level.

So I wonder if the school board just doesn't realize that, of if they do realize that and just don't care

Your brain does weird things to you once you're in the realm of true belief, I saw the same kind of thing around trans stuff. My conclusion is that they know and care, but consider the actions that got them into trouble axiomatically good. Getting pushback is no argument for backing down. Getting pushback so huge it could set back the whole movement might be an argument for a tactical retreat, but not for conceding that any wrongdoing took place. Then there are more trivial matters like overestimating their own competence, or how much support they have from either the public or the elites.

"good trouble." The phrase was a mantra in 2020.

Because they’re public school teachers. ‘The experts being wrong’ is to them like ‘a triangular circle’ or ‘a purpley sort of orange’- not so much wrong as making so little sense that nobody could believe it.

They just don’t realize not everyone thinks this way.

Definitely do not care. Schools and libraries near me have basically taken the position that nothing short of the 101st Airborne will get them to stop showing pornography to children. They don't care about elections, court cases, funding, irate parents at school board meetings, nothing. Showing sexually explicit material to children is their terminal goal, and nothing can possibly stop them from doing their favorite thing.

They saw a generally-pro-LGBT book and rubber-stamped it without even trying to judge its specific merits.

The topic is integrated into the teaching materials and suggested answers for addressing student questions, and it's difficult to get around the board's bigoted animus.

The school board wasn’t thinking. They’re teachers and they were going with the flow. It is literally incomprehensible to teachers that ‘the experts’, however defined, can be wrong. Like if you suggest it they’ll stare at you blankly, literally not understanding the words you just said. And the experts suggested kids should be taught this stuff, so teachers concluded ‘parents who want to shield their toddlers from learning about BDSM should lose custody of their kids’ instead of ‘the experts should be shot’.

Being intersex is a disease state. It’s too complex a topic for a 4 year old to grasp adequately

I mean, it's pretty straightforward. You can argue it's rare and not worth bringing up unless you have an intersex kid actually there in the classroom at risk of being bullied for it. But "too complex"? "Normally girls' bodies look one way and boys' bodies look another way. Very rarely, people are born a little different, with a mix and match. This is fine." Pretty straightforward. Hell, bearded women used to be sideshow attractions and remain one of the Stock Circus Characters that children might very well be exposed to in a comic book or cartoon. They'll mostly just think it's funny. They certainly won't think it's complex.

I am not sure if you mean to imply more depth than you give explicitly, but the version you wrote is not the same as Magusoflight’s. I think it’s misleading to say, “This is fine,” without qualification, at least where kids are involved.

Consider teaching children about paraplegia. You want children to respect its victims and to be aware of what they really are and are not capable of. You want them to understand that disability is not a moral failing. But you don’t want them to think that being wheelchair-bound is just as good as being able to walk, that it’s no affliction at all, and that given a choice between being healthy or paraplegic there is no reason to prefer one over the other.

I think that the folks adding intersex conditions to the preschool and grade school curricula are trying to say that there is no reason to prefer not to be intersex; they are looking to deconstruct sex and gender in the minds of children as young as they can get them. To teach that this is an affliction, to add that little bit of complexity, would undermine their goals.

If we want to play it that way, I don't think changing "This is fine" to "This is unfortunate and you should feel sorry for them" would add too much complexity. "Sometimes people are disabled, and you should give the sympathy rather than mockery" is also something children are perfectly able to grasp. (Of course, I disagree with the premise. Many intersex conditions are perfectly harmless, in which case I see no reason why they should be taught as "afflictions" any more than, say, being left-handed.)

I see no reason why they should be taught as "afflictions" any more than, say, being left-handed.

I dunno, being left-handed sounds kind of sinister to me.

Boooo!

(I upvoted. But boooo!)

I will admit to overusing that pun, but I shall never apologise for it.

I too am bemused at kids being exposed to drag, it puts me in the same weird headspace as Las Vegas. (Caveat: I'm aware actual people with families live and work in Las Vegas, but I'm talking about the touristy stuff). It always struck me as quite odd that Las Vegas at least in its marketing, had tried to clean up their act and put on a family friendly sort of facade. You can search for family friendly attractions and find official Vegas tourism guides that just pitch Vegas as a fun spot for the whole family. I am still astonished at how many corporations think Vegas is an excellent place to hold their trade shows - and then are somehow caught off guard when the HR reports of inappropriate behavior start piling up.

The thing is, when you are actually there on the Strip, the "family friendly" facade is paper thin. The smell of weed is everywhere. Aside from the many scantily clad costumed characters you'll see roaming around in broad daylight, the many leaflets for various erotic shows, it's common to see tourists themselves cutting loose because, hey, it's Vegas baby!

I went for work events three or four years in a row, and my boss always looked for some attraction or some show we could see for a night out. And no matter how family friendly it was billed (of course the explicit stuff would have been way off limits because work function) I left afterwards wondering if I needed to make a report to HR. There was one occasion where we ventured off the Strip - that was a big mistake. I don't know the name of where we ended up but it was highly awkward to be there with my coworkers, let me tell you.

Drag shows hit me in a similar way. Like it's so clearly designed with particular content for an adult audience. The fact that this one person wants to tone down their act this one time and read little kids a book does not to me, take away from the fact that this is fundamentally an adult-oriented performance art, made for adult consumption. I am absolutely baffled why people want to sanitize it and pretend it's something other than what it is.

I think, if you want to be more charitable than "activists doggedly and automatically want to normalize anything which scandalizes prudes without stopping to think if maybe, sometimes, the prudes have a point", it's a response to anti-trans attempts to equate trans women presenting female in public with drag. The right-wing firebrands say "so-called trans women are doing drag, a sex thing, in *public", and the activists maladaptively decide to respond with "uh, actually, drag isn't inherently sexual" instead of sticking with "yeah, well trans women aren't the same thing drag queens".

Didn’t drag queen story hour predate trans as a culture war battlefield?

I don't think so? It wasn't until several years after the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner, and the general topic of bathroom drama, that I even heard of drag queen story hour. Maybe in some deep-blue strongholds?

I'd speculate that what actually happened here wasn't "deep-blue strongholds", but the opposite - an increasingly noteworthy phenomenon of deep-red strongholds who somehow managed to ostrich-with-head-in-the-sand their way through the entire LGBT activist phenomenon until recently. They can wind up thinking of things like drag queen story hour as opening blows in the conflict because they weren't paying attention before that.

Per Google, DQSH first started in 2015 in San Francisco. The first big national-news-grabbing fight over trans bathroom access was in 2016 (North Carolina), but there had been several state- and local-level squabbles over trans issues in the years before.

it's a response to anti-trans attempts to equate trans women presenting female in public with drag.

Drag Queen Story Hour co-occurring with the rise of trans as a prominent... subculture? ideology? post-Obergefell claim-staking? surely plays a role in that conflation. Not sure if it can be meaningfully disambiguated.

"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.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the likelihood of any individual child being intersex or knowing an intersex child is vanishingly small (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome only affects 223 out of every 100,000 male babies, and often isn't even obvious until the subject starts puberty). This isn't like myopia, which affects nearly a quarter of the population. Even if I received credible assurance that the four-year-olds in question would only be taught about intersex conditions in a strictly medical context and would not receive any education about queer theory, gender ideology or pseudoscientific nonsense about "sex assigned at birth" - I would still question the utility of teaching four-year-olds about extremely rare medical conditions which affect such a tiny proportion of the population. Of course no hypothetical child suffering from motor neurone disease should be ashamed of themselves or face bullying because of their condition, but teach a class of four-year-olds about motor neurone disease, and no matter how many caveats you include about how rare it is (never mind statistics, these children don't understand addition yet), we both know what would happen: the dumber half of the class wouldn't know what you were talking about, while the smarter half would go home in floods of tears and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about being paralysed and dying young.

I suspect know that the only reason that children are being taught about intersex conditions at all is the same reason these conditions have been brought up 99% of the time they've been raised by anyone since the turn of the century: as a means of smuggling in gender ideology by the back door.

The situation where a lesson on a medical condition is appropriate is when there's a child with that condition in or about to join the class. That's a known way of preventing shame and bullying.

So yeah, if there's a kid with CAH in the class, teach the class about CAH. Or if there's a wheelchair user, teach about wheelchairs, etc.

But that (ISTM) is why many standard blues support teaching trans stuff--the idea is "We can't know in advance if such a child will be in the class! So we should just assume one might be, and teach everyone!" It makes sense (is also why people put random wheelchair users into stories, for example). The problem is the side effects swamp the benefits. Well, IMO. But you gave a good description of some of the kind of side effects you'd see from any plan to "Just teach every 4-year-old about [some rare condition]!"

(Then when it comes to trans specifically, an additional problem is we don't actually know the truth of the assumptions underlying this plan, that "It's just like a medical condition that is 100% physical! It has a fixed rate of occurrence and you never know who will get it and you can only treat it one way!" And there's even some evidence that those assumptions are false. People often really want those assumptions to be true, I think because it'd make life / "doing the right thing" simpler for them. I sympathize...but I'm inclined to believe they aren't true. So they end up being harmful. And we shouldn't impose curricula based on them.)

Or if there's a wheelchair user, teach about wheelchairs, etc... It makes sense (is also why people put random wheelchair users into stories, for example).

Such a large proportion of people will require the use of a wheelchair for some period of time at some point during their life that it makes sense for schools to proactively teach children about wheelchairs, even if none of the pupils in the school are wheelchair-bound. This is also what I was getting at with the myopia example. Mass-release children's books in which the characters are a Five-Token Band wherein one child is shortsighted, one is wheelchair-bound, one is autistic etc.? Given the statistical frequency of these conditions, completely unobjectionable and even commendable. Now, mass-release children's books in which one character is trans, one character has CAH, one character has Huntington's etc.? That I find a lot more difficult to get onboard with.

And there's even some evidence that those assumptions are false. People often really want those assumptions to be true, I think because it'd make life / "doing the right thing" simpler for them.

There's also an obvious celebration parallax effect, in which activists will deny up and down that social contagion plays any role in trans identification, and yet are fully aware that teaching children about the concept of transgenderism (particularly when it's defined using an extremely broad constellation of "symptoms" which just about everyone might experience from time to time) is a surefire way to guarantee that at least some of them come out as trans. But of course they'll rationalise this away by claiming (unfalsifiably) that the children in question were already trans, but simply lacked the language to describe their experiences until they were educated about it.

The double standard/isolated demand for rigour is also on full display: any adult who's interacted with a child for more than five minutes knows perfectly well how impressionable how children are. If you teach a class full of children about X (where X is a medical condition, mental illness etc.), by the end of the class half of them will be convinced they suffer from it. (Never mind small children - how many first-year psychology undergrads have become convinced they suffer from schizophrenia after a single introductory lecture thereon?) But these same adults will turn around and insist that transgender identification is governed by a completely different set of psychological dynamics, wherein false positives simply do not exist under any circumstances.

wherein false positives simply do not exist under any circumstances.

Not quite. False positives exist when you start regretting cutting off your breasts or dick-n-balls, at which point it turns out you were never trans, and it's your fault for asking for those surgeries in the first place.

As a last resort, perhaps. They're much more comfortable just implying that detransitioners don't exist and trying their best to keep them out of the conversation entirely.

We shield kids from a lot of complicated real-world things that could affect them. 4-year-olds can have degenerative diseases. Or be sexually abused. Both are much more common than being "intersex" (unless you allow for the much more expansive definitions touted by activists for activist reasons). So I guess schools should have mandatory picture books showing a little kid dying in agony, while their sister gets played with by their uncle, right? So that these kids can be "at peace" with it?

...Of course not. Indoctrination is the only reason people are pushing for teaching kids about intersex medical conditions. Kids inherently know that biological sex is real, and can tell the difference between men and women. Undoing that knowledge requires concerted effort, and the younger you start, the better.

The comparison strikes me as a strawman. Degenerative diseases and sexual abuse are inherently upsetting topics. Being intersex is a minor, harmless anatomical deviation from the norm. I cannot imagine a child of any age being upset at being told it exists. They might, at most, giggle a bit.

Being intersex is a minor, harmless anatomical deviation from the norm.

A large proportion of intersex people are congenitally infertile. As noted by @vorpa-glavo, "people with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)". People with Klinefelter syndrome tend to have issues with reduced strength, cognitive impairment and mood disorders. People with Trisomy X tend to have IQs a standard deviation or more below average, among other cognitive impairments. And so on and so forth.

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"

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:

It is harder for most people to sympathize with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.

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':

It is not necessary to figure parent-child incest as a unilateral impingement on the child by the parent, since whatever impingement takes place will also be registered within the sphere of fantasy. In fact, to understand the violation that incest can be—and also to distinguish between those occasions of incest that are violation and those that are not—it is unnecessary to figure the body of the child exclusively as a surface imposed upon from the outside. The fear, of course, is that if it emerges that the child’s desire has been exploited or incited by incest, this will somehow detract from our understanding of parent-child incest as a violation. The reification of the child’s body as passive surface would thus constitute, at a theoretical level, a further deprivation of the child: the deprivation of psychic life.

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 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.

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?

They involve teenage girls as well.

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).

Was the pushback against pedo acceptance even driven by leftist normies, or was it a result of conservatives being stronger and better organized?

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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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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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.

I don't think any words will convince you that normies actually can't be convinced of anything anyone wants at any moment regardless of current belief if you're determined to believe that they can.

This is just playing defense and trying to ignore all the evidence. What's the purpose of kids' night at a sex toy shop? What's the meaning of "little girls are kinky too"? Why is all "kink" pushed relentlessly at the same time as actual sex is demonized (especially normal heterosexual sex)?

You're doing that typical thing where you tell people to ignore the academics and activists over there, because a majority of leftists don't agree with them (yet). Until recently normie leftists didn't agree that "the idea that there are two distinct opposite sexes is a 19th century colonialist invention," and yet they got on board with it instantly, ignoring any cognitive dissonance that they'd previously spent years spouting "umm actually sex is distinct from gender."

And already in every case where "kink with kids" comes up, leftists have wound up on the pro-kink side with those activists. Why do normie leftists take more issue with a 25yo dating a 22yo than with schools telling 3rd graders to Google leather daddies? Because one is "queer, kinky, and disrupts heteronormativity," while the other is yucky and straight.

Supporting "queer kink with kids" is just the other side of the coin of "problematizing" heterosexual relationships out of existence. The more normal sexuality can be suppressed, the easier all that energy can be sublimated into party-approved "queer culture."

Because one undermines the parent-child relationship and the other one doesn’t. When these people make gaffes and tell us what they really think it’s almost always family abolitionist thought- the same reason they’re inherently skeptical of heterosexual sex.

The point of that original comment was to provide a historical throughline throughout history in leftist thought, which I think it does pretty conclusive for a relatively short post. Later in that original thread I provide an example of a contemporary article.

Futurity and Childhood Innocence: Beyond the Injury of Development by Hannah Dyer (2016)

Other people in this current threat have provided other examples. It's not hard to find articles/academic publications on this stuff if you go looking.

My point was to look at leftist academic thought, which is always upstream of what (leftist) normies think. It may or may not make its way downstream in the future. Probably not as the tide is turning against leftism, and that pedophilia is so intrinsically evil and disordered that normies can't abstract it way like other things.

I actually think the argument anout adulthood 'shifiting to mid-twenties' is actually in favour of the deconstruction of child and adult, not against it, as it makes the boundaries between child and adults, fuzzier, not clearer. Young adults are being infantalized, extended adolescence. The concept of 'adulting' is classic deconstructionism - adult is now something your perform, rather than something you are.

Well, if we're just lazily copy-pasting, might as well. I figure I'm entitled to do that, since your argument has indeed been copy-pasted by every other traditionalist when complaining about the Left for the last 40 years and as such it's been 30 years removed from any relevancy.

If the Left is trying to advance pedophilia, they're clearly doing an absolutely terrible job of it, considering the average age of virginity loss and general age of consent has done nothing but rise (making these ages gender-neutral is not really a liberalization of the law) and the newer generations are more sensitive to this, perhaps as a reaction to constantly having gross sex stuff they hate forced into them every waking hour. Considering the cultural power they have to change these things, this failure is out of character.

They aren't following the gay rights playbook of "fix the perception that X is a complete and utter rejection of social norms so that the average Joe thinks you're sufficiently like him that he no longer sees fit to stop you"; instead preferring only to ride the wave of gunboat diplomacy that is the trans rights movement (which, in fairness, doesn't exactly follow that playbook either).

It should be extremely telling that there's basically zero "groomer literature" that features a relationship the average boy or man would ever be interested in (given all the pairings are gay men, gay boys, or gay men with gay boys; if a woman is ever featured it's lesbians- my evidence is that the spiciest stuff the Right can dig up only includes [young-ish] boys, because if it were [young] girls they'd trumpet that instead). One would assume that if the movement was purposefully pro-sex-with-kids thing their literature would feature a lot more girls or straight women for what should be obvious reasons, but since that's not the case that claim is obviously false.

Now sure, that's still damning with faint praise given that we already know the Left is perfectly fine portraying boys like that (and will not hesitate to call them bigots for complaining about/resisting the same kind of unwanted sexual attention from men that women have been trying to banish for decades now), but I think the trads doth complain too much; their brand of Junior Anti-Sex League has the same end result, they just doesn't like the concessions the progressives leave for man-on-man (or the bullying potential progressives leverage from the narcissism of this small difference, as viewed from a liberal perspective).

The thing about [what you call the modern Left, and what I simply call 'progressives'] is that it's all about destroying sex altogether, 1984-style. It makes complete sense why they fail to see a difference between pedophilia and non-pedophilia because their end goal is that nobody has sex ever; indeed, that's why progressives seek to push the age at which women are considered children ever higher and higher (outside of man-on-boy, but since boys are just men, and they hate men, they don't care about what happens to them plus it's free Oppression Points/owning the Trads).

Marxism intends to overthrow capitalism. America is still capitalist. Therefore, Marxism has had no impact on American society.

Feminism intended to make women happy. Women are less happy. Therefore, feminism did not achieve anything or cause any changes on society.

How is your comment not anything other than a post hoc fallacy?

You're not actually refuting the central claim that there is a strong current in contemporary leftist thought (critical theory, post-modernism, queer theory) that is okay with exposing children to sexual material or activities, or at the very least actively want to demolish barriers that prevent that from happening - the distinction between child and adult, the concept of childhood innocence.

The New Atheists thought that by demolishing religion, they would usher in an age of rational utopia. Instead they got new pseudo-religions. The sex/gender abolitionists thought they would usher in a sex (in both means of the term) utopia. Instead we have sexual chaos. The claim of the leftists is quite literally 'free love', to put it in a simple term, not sexlessness you claim the only way you get sexlessness is if you go so deep down the rabbithole where you deconstruct every the very concept of sex doesn't exist - but then sexlessness also doesn't exist.

I would suggest the reason pedophilia hasn't taken off despite it's presence in leftwing thought is that it is so intrinsically and self-evidently evil and disordered that most people can't and won't accept it even when they might accept other elements of the ideology in the abstract.

That being said, it's progressive - literally. Twenty years ago open political support for gay 'marriage' was unthinkable. Ten years ago, transgenderism was still a fringe concept. As disgusting as it is, and as much as people try to discredit the "slippery slope", it's not out of the realm of possibility to assume what the next step might be (if the leftists manage to retain unchecked power indefinitely)

You're not actually refuting the central claim that there is a strong current in contemporary leftist thought (critical theory, post-modernism, queer theory) that is okay with exposing children to sexual material or activities

I don't need to, because:

the only way you get sexlessness is if you go so deep down the rabbithole where you deconstruct every the very concept of sex doesn't exist

Yes, this is what progressive actually believe (what did you think "all sex is rape" meant?). They don't want sex to exist and act accordingly; that's why all of their "pedo literature" is oppression porn and why all of their efforts to educate children about sex center around portraying sex as ugly and terrible.

That's not consistent with traditional/your understanding of how pedophilia "works", but my assertion is that that/your understanding of the situation is completely wrong, and you haven't engaged with that at all.

the concept of childhood innocence.

Again, if you actually bother to read, this is what progressives fetishize. So do the traditionalists, for that matter (almost like it's the same impulse driving both); that's why all of their purity pomp and circumstances (especially surrounding their daughters) looks and acts so incredibly pedophilic.

To an overwhelming degree, it's a possession/preservation fetish.
If you're wondering what the opposite of that is, well, I wrote about what that looks like here.

I would suggest the reason pedophilia hasn't taken off despite it's presence in leftwing thought is that it is so intrinsically and self-evidently evil and disordered that most people can't and won't accept it even when they might accept other elements of the ideology in the abstract.

Again, you're unwilling or unable to engage with the actual argument. Progressive thought fetishizes innocence, so what we would expect from that is a bunch of so-called "pedo literature" that fails to actually contain any pedophilia [in the "straight man on little girl" sense], and what you actually should be looking for is, again, the fetishization of what they consider innocence.

And because a progressive defines innocence as "everything outside men having sex with women", It is not a coincidence that they advance all sexual causes that are non-straight because, by that definition, they are more innocent and deserve the privileges (when a progressive says "drag queens are innocent fun", this is the meaning of "innocence" in that statement). And the fact that the LGBT stuff dunks on the Trads is a nice bonus, but again, not the primary objective either.

Yes, this is what progressive actually believe (what did you think "all sex is rape" meant?). They don't want sex to exist and act accordingly; that's why all of their "pedo literature" is oppression porn and why all of their efforts to educate children about sex center around portraying sex as ugly and terrible.

I notice you ignored the second part of what I said from quoting me. Leftist are sexual utopians at their core, they just believe they have to radically deconstruct and destroy all existing sexual relationships (because they're oppressive) before the sexual utopia will somehow appear. This is the core concept of critical theory, as applied to sex.

To an overwhelming degree, it's a possession/preservation fetish...

...Progressive thought fetishizes innocence, so what we would expect from that is a bunch of so-called "pedo literature" that fails to actually contain any pedophilia [in the "straight man on little girl" sense], and what you actually should be looking for is, again, the fetishization of what they consider innocence.

They fetishizes insofar as they want to get rid of the concept of innocence. It's not preservation fetish, they want to destroy it. That's not my assertion, it's quite literally what they say, as has been already cited by me and others. Your shota reference example in your linked comment is a terrible example, both by the fact it's not a central example of leftism (if it's related to leftism at all), and by the fact that corruption is a central theme. It's about the loss of innocence - so I don't see how it supports your point.

I actually don't think we're really disagreeing her. The reason the leftist hates innocence is because they think it's a concept created by the oppressor class (cis-hetero-capitalist patriarchy or whatever variation you want to use) to control everyone and prevent them from enjoying the fruits of 'sexual liberation' (in both the physical and metaphysical sense).

Marxism intends to overthrow capitalism. America is still capitalist. Therefore, Marxism has had no impact on American society.

Feminism intended to make women happy. Women are less happy. Therefore, feminism did not achieve anything or cause any changes on society.

Marxism explicitly says it wants to overthrow capitalism. Few feminists seem to think in terms of "happiness" but they explicitly say they want to improve things for women. The people you think are pro-pedo, meanwhile, explicitly say pedos should be put through wood chippers. There's no parallel at all there. The rest is mere sophistry.

I oversimplified for the sake of brevity. I could say something like feminism's goal was to deconstruct the cis-hetero-patriarchy or whatever, the patriarchy still exists (by feminism's own admission), therefore feminism hasn't affected anything. Obviously this is sarcastic.

Did you not read my post? I explicitly reference and quote influential leftist intellectuals and academics who are pro-pedophilia, or as I said, are at least comfortable destroying any distinction that would allow pedophilia to exist. Do you think the quotes I have included are fake?

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.

Regardless of what you think follows from other things they believe, find me a pro-pedophilia social media post from anyone visibly on the left. I'll wait. I predict I'll be waiting a very long time. Not "well if you squint just right and also read these tea leaves over here...", but anything at all that is unambiguously supportive of boinking kids. You'll find a hundred, probably a thousand, wood-chipper memes before you find anything even close. It just doesn't exist, no matter how badly certain elements of the right want it to.

Most of these people have never heard of figures like Firestone, and even if they had, look at what happened to Germaine Greer. They feel deep loyalty to their movement but not a single shred of loyalty to any of the individuals that make it up, no matter how paradoxical that sounds to people like me or what debts of gratitude it might seem that they owe. And even Firestone never seems to have gone as far as openly supporting sexualizing kids, in any sense of the word.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230425233814/https://twitter.com/ZeebDemon/status/1650784866680832004

From "The transfeminine genderfluid Demon-Divine⛧

Luciferian⛧BLM⛧ACAB⛧YouthLib⛧Proudly Paraphiliac ☂ Radically Queer⛧Fandom Outcast⛧36⛧Your own personal Anti-Christ Washington, USA"

Boyfriend of this guy, "Black queer Zebra. Musician, Artist, Producer, Sound Engineer. He/Him". They both run a bunch of "kid friendly, queer centered" fandom discords for kids shows. That used to be my little pony, but all the kids are into hazbin hotel now, so that's where the "they/them kink friendly" discord mods are.

I can link you a ton of MAP stuff if you like. I collect this stuff as a hobby. Some of them work for Johns Hopkins doing destigmatization through intersectional praxis. It's all thoroughly leftist in theory and practice, hence all the pride flags.

"Just ignore it it's fringe" stops reassuring people after the 50th time the fringe took over the normielib collective consciousness. The same people are often involved in "systems" (multiple personality roleplay), and that's been rapidly normalized in leftist spaces.

I don't use social media that much and don't intend to go dumpster diving just to fulfil your demand. That being said, I know there's at least a handful of "Breadtube" type 'influencers' who have made various comments about age of consent and the like. Any 'serious' leftist intellectual is not going to put their thoughts on social media, where they will and can be eviscerated by normies, they're going to put it in academic text hidden behind jargon which I have already shown.

20 years ago, open public support for gay 'marriage' was unthinkable. 10 years ago, transgenderism was a tiny, tiny fringe and mostly a joke.

Vaush says hello.

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.

I had sex education in fourth grade, around ten or eleven. I think my parents had told me about the basic process before that.

I would argue that a child deserves to know how puberty works (which entails the biological end-game, which is sex and pregnancy) before that child enters puberty herself or himself.

Today, the other thing to keep in mind is that at least some children will have unfettered smartphone access. Now, kids sharing random porn videos in the school yard is going to be damaging no matter what, but kids first encountering the very concept of sex when their classmate shows them a gross video is likely much worse.

I think it's the name that is to blame. "Sex education" sounds like teaching children about sex, with lab work and home projects.

I agree that children should be taught about puberty so they don't come into the classroom reeking like billy goats, for example.

But why piss off parents by calling this "sex ed for primary school"? Call it "human body education", segregate it from "sex ed", shift the latter to the age when it's not as controversial.

This is just the euphemism treadmill. IMO the way you make it mostly uncontroversial is by:

  • making the curriculum absolutely transparent
  • making every individual lesson opt-in

Why not make every individual school lesson opt-in, then?

Depends on exactly what you mean by "no sexuality". Age-appropriate sex ed is important for children to know how to report sexual abuse (and to know that they should). Here's one organization's "Sexuality Concepts for Children (Ages 4-8)" (just what I found on a quick web search, the group's Wikipedia page doesn't even have a "controversies" section; exactly what should be on that list is not something I'm an expert on).

Age-appropriate sex ed is important for children to know how to report sexual abuse (and to know that they should)

A good point. It's probably not necessary for schools to educate kids on the existence intersex genitals to do the sexual abuse bit. Proofs: My Body is Nobody's Body but Mine!

At 13 or so, obviously you need to explain sex and how babies are made.

Thirteen strikes me as kind of silly, having grown up in the country. Anyone over six will have seen some pair of animals doing something, believe me.

(This doesn't mean children will know, or need to know, the ins and outs of sex. I can't remember a time when I didn't know that pregnancy happens when the male puts its thingie in the female's thingie; but it took me until puberty to realize that thrusting is a necessary part of the process. The basics of "where babies come from", though - come on. In no pre-19th century society were children ever spared the basic knowledge that it has something to do with touching naughty bits together.)

I don't think conservative city and suburbian parents care about little Timmy learning that the sheep and the cats are getting it on. They care about the sort of mind poison like, ** here are my preferred pronouns, here are some handout sheets with the top 40k genders you can catch em all, your home assignment is to tell nothing about this to your parents. **

There are lots of parents who explain the birds and the bees at conventional elementary school ages, because a not-insubstantial percentage of girls are showing the first signs of puberty at nine or ten. And public school's real goal is to undermine the parent-child relationship by rendering it as unnecessary as can be portrayed, so they have to beat parents to the punch.

I have to say that I've been reading your posts with the voice of Maiq the Liar and the feminine pronoun has destroyed the very foundation of my reality.

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

Bit late, isn't it? By that time, most of the girls will be menstruating and a few of them might be sexually active already.

And sure, you can argue that the parents should have prepared them for all of that, but realistically, some haven't. I'd prefer it if the schools make sure they have some idea what's going on, at the very least the biological reality of their situation.

I know that the county conceded that they would allow an opt-out for a Muslim student to not look at an image of Muhammad, but is that constitutionally required? I can imagine a hypothetical school district (backed by state law) deciding to use a picture book to teach kids about the Arab conquests. If Muslim parents complain? Tough shit. This is the kind of thing that makes school administration a nightmare.

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 don’t think this is because they are trying to hide who is suing here. News editing just sucks. I think the idea is that nobody wants to read a news article with a bunch of legal citations, so we end up with headlines like “Elon Musk’s DOGE Delt Legal Blow by Federal Judge”, when the substantive legal issue is that their motion to change venue was denied.

Well, "no pictures of Muhammad" is a sincerely held belief of a world religion. It is both fairly narrow in scope, too. So anyone who made a book about Muhammad and decided to include a picture of him would be trying to specifically piss of Muslims.

If someone decided to base their sex education around the theme "how Mary and Joseph had sex and Jesus was conceived", then we would also reasonably suspect that someones was trying to piss of Christians by violating a fairly narrow taboo. (By contrast, "how sex and pregnancy works" is an infinitely broader taboo which is much less rooted in faith.)

Well sure, and this makes me suspect that the plaintiffs are a significant steelman of their case. It has to be a religious belief to opt out and I suspect most parents who don't want their four year olds taught about bondage are not religious- it is possible, even common, to be secular and normal at the same time.

secular and normal at the same time

Isn't 'normal' as you've used it here just the remnants of cultural Christianity? If education were better this 'normal' may be perceived as more religious and less secular.

Exposure of unwanted children was 'normal' amongst many pagans before they were converted.

I think that misses the point. Historically, Christianity may have helped suggest we stop grooming and fucking kids, but the state requiring you to cite a religious reason for not wanting to do so now seems like an anti-pattern. I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.

I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.

Why else would you want that? If there's no absolute standard, anything goes. Guess you could make some argument that it's bad for them, but then you'd need to demonstrate that such a thing as 'bad' exists (i.e. an 'ought' rather than an 'is') and also that things wouldn't just work out if we all stopped worrying so much about sexualizing children.

Or, for that matter, owning slaves or murdering infants, or selling unwanted daughters into prostitution. Going to the next tribe over and killing, raping, and plundering. You know, standard human behavior sans Christ.

People are going to do what they're going to do. It's impossible to call it wrong without reference to a higher authority. One can point to cultural norms but, as we see here, that's ultimately a losing game. You can (physically) attempt to stop them, but not under any kind of rubric of right or wrong. And then the universe burns out (or blows apart) anyway.

It's impossible to call it wrong without reference to a higher authority.

No, I don't agree with this in the slightest. Cooperation is useful. Having a happy wife who helps maintain my life is objectively superior to a sex slave chained in my basement.

Cooperation is useful.

Thet is a function of hyperconnected modern societies with resource extraction capability no longer being the determinant of biological survival. The extent of cooperation historically was limited to how far the reach of your competitors were, and how much work was needed to get something useful out of the ground. We see that in societies with much more reliance on local resource extraction that the incentive for cooperation is much lower, since the pie is shared with more mouths.

I actually agree that open communication and cooperation is the most effective way to function as a society, with defectors being punished heavily to prevent tragedy of the commons. Unfortunately with disparate impact it is. now unbecoming to punish troublemakers, so we live in societies where the effort to create discord is so minimal and the rewards for the disruptor so great. Johnny Somali actively seeks to cause disruption for personal benefit, and he was never punished for his antics until he went to Korea and discovered Asian Racism.

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I think the higher-level point is getting lost here. "Useful" for what? Your preferences, which are just as (in)valid as someone else's? If someone else finds a chainéd sex-slave more 'useful' for their purposes, does that mean they get to call you wrong?

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I don't think you should need to go to church to keep the school from grooming your kids. (We homeschool)

I think the underlying cause for you wanting your kids not to be groomed is because you live in a society running on the fumes of cultural Christianity.

So… you think Chinese parents would all be fine with trans books for 8 year olds?

Their pushback comes from Confucian values emphasizing traditional family roles, collectivism prioritizing social stability over individual expression, and skepticism of Western ideologies seen as culturally disruptive.

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I think this board's religious makeup is coming out a bit here. I'll give christianity partial credit, because, of course, I'm very sure it wasn't paganism or Islam.

But I utterly refuse to concede that my parental instinct is 100% ascribable to a system of belief I've never been part of, or to a god that doesn't exist.

I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.

Or, perhaps, we were the ones missing the point, and no matter how much we believe we shouldn't, we do need to?

Maybe, sure. But parents in 0 AD mostly weren’t encouraging their wanted prepubescent children to experiment sexually either. So whatever. The point was that there are plenty of not-religious people who object strongly to this.

Actually parents in 0 AD weren't doing anything because there was no year 0 AD.

And since I'm bored and we're being pedantic anyway, it'd be AD 0, not 0 AD.

Sexual norms in antiquity are a pretty complicated topic (and inconsistent over time too): I guess that I can't speak to the presence of children, but Roman parades with lots of phallic imagery are documented to have occured. I believe it was Augustus who tried to steer the Roman upper classes toward chastity and fidelity in ways that would probably look "Christian" today but largely predate that Jesus character's major set pieces. Not to mention ancient practices of homosexuality and acceptable age gaps there.

Honestly, I know just enough that I'd be interested to read a longer, more coherent take on the subject.

If someone decided to base their sex education around the theme "how Mary and Joseph had sex and Jesus was conceived"

And here I was thinking it was a Roman auxiliary marching from the coast to Syria to put down a riot that stopped over and popped a baby in her.

Well, "no pictures of Muhammad" is a sincerely held belief of a world religion. It is both fairly narrow in scope, too. So anyone who made a book about Muhammad and decided to include a picture of him would be trying to specifically piss of Muslims.

What about the Wikipedia page "Depictions of Muhammad," which includes many visual samples? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad Do you think Wikipedia editors are "trying to specifically piss of Muslims?"

News editing just sucks. I think the idea is that nobody wants to read a news article with a bunch of legal citations, so we end up with headlines like “Elon Musk’s DOGE Delt Legal Blow by Federal Judge”, when the substantive legal issue is that their motion to change venue was denied.

There is an alternative, more cynical explanation, which is that news sites do not link to their sources out of fear that they'd then be competing for their readers with those sources.

Is it necessary to introduce concepts that include queer and gender ideology to children in public school?

Necessary to accomplish what?

There are thousands children's books that preach these things without drag queens or bondage.

There was this whole discussion about systems, and what they do, and what their purpose is. I think this is as clear of an example of The Purpose Of A System Is To Do What It Does. No, these books are not necessary to teach tolerance. Yes, these books are necessary to provide examples of sexual behavior that the school board want emulated, accepted, and normalized. Therein lies the disagreement and desire to opt out.

The defense by the school is classic motte and bailey. The well-defended motte is teaching tolerance. The productive bailey is exposing kindergarteners to drag queens and leather bondage fetishes. When challenged on the bailey, they retreat to the motte.

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.

Another win for TPOASITDWID. This looks like it is intentional for the purpose of denying the ability to opt out.

Ideally the Supreme Court should affirm the right to opt out that was already longstanding policy, and the fact that so many people opt out as to be a burden means the school is teaching the wrong things in the first place, not that people shouldn't be able to opt out at all.

Necessary to cultivate a society with pro-social norms that promote things like being polite enough to weirdos by discouraging things like bashing fags for fun. A reasonable idea for policymakers might be to check the trends. Allegedly even the per capita rate of "queer hate crimes" has increased despite a massive increase in queer identifying people. Lots of problems with hate crimes and expanding definitions. Nor does the rate of hate crimes account for positive increase in feel goods for queer people or advocates.

One thing about the leather-bondage drag queen exposure is, as far as I know, it's still uncontroversial to refer to these things as fetishes. Fetishes are differentiated from sexual orientation for reasons which include twin studies support that differentiation. I guess that's another pernicious thing smuggled placed on top of the load bearing pillar of "identity" and acceptance of all identified identities.

This looks like it is intentional for the purpose of denying the ability to opt out.

From how the school board meetings were relayed to Kavanaugh above, yeah, seems pretty bad. Charitably, these people were just bad at their job when designing curriculum. They didn't anticipate the resistance. Although when they encountered the resistance, rather than reverse course, they fought it all the way to SCOTUS.

I think like anti-racist trainings done by HR for adults, these things might well be counterproductive. It firstly associates this group of people with essentially “struggle sessions” often humiliating, but definitely something that they are forced to do and don’t want. Secondly it creates these divisions where a class of people are essentially otherized in an attempt at inclusion. You might not have thought about gay people as different from other people, but then the teacher hangs up flags and spends hours talking about how gays are different from other people, and to the shock of absolutely no one, the kids now see the gay or trans kid as a weird alien species of human not like them. Or in the case of HR programs, you don’t start our thinking of minority coworkers as weird, you don’t say “there’s a black person in accounting” or something. Then you are forced to Notice, Affirm, and Celebrate the diversity of your workplace and told how different these black people are, and then you can’t help but see them differently.

I haven't looked deeply into it, but my impression of research is that the anti-racist HR trainings are neutral to slightly counterproductive if you're judging by race relations. The real need for HR training comes from discrimination lawsuits. In that way they are productive so long they cover an employer's ass.

Or in the case of HR programs, you don’t start our thinking of minority coworkers as weird, you don’t say “there’s a black person in accounting” or something.

I think you may be typical minding here and it's driving you towards Democrats are the real racist.

You don't think of minority coworkers as weird, but you do notice minority coworkers. HR is correct that people are hard wired to notice the minority black lady in HR. That noticing leaves space for meaning and association. Mundane HR training attempts to provide a mild positive association via 'diversity'. Anti-racist programming goes further in the celebration of diversity, then adds a less benign negative association for white people, objectivity, being on time, etc.

A liberal I will learn her name, meet her, then judge how annoying of an HR lady she is is a common mode of operation. It's how most middle-class Americans I interact with engage. I prefer it, I want to keep it, but it's not natural.

As we've I've seen, the programming works. You really can cram coding into minds and get NYT editorials printed. You can really make Ford, Goldman Sachs, and POTUS bend the knee to deploy the new program. Force demands resistance so, yeah, there's resistance and counter-culture among the contrarians, vagabonds, individualists, and independent minded. Caveat is that the kids seem to be rejecting it now, because the kids think Dad is lame. Round and round.

I don’t know for sure how typically im skewing this, but it used to be the norm that you’d be taught to get to know tge person as an individual without regard to race. That was the color blind 1990s and 2000s. And I’d say that seems to have featured much better race relations in most cases. Certainly there were still problems, but you didn’t have any real animus between groups en mass. Now you don’t have to go very deep to find open racism, sexism, or homophobia that would not have been said aloud in the 1970s. You wouldn’t have talked openly about Jews manipulating American government, or immigrants eating pets, or black men being criminals in the Frank manner people do today. If you got in a delorean and went back to 1975 and casually mentioned that during the VP debate, JD Vance talked about immigrants eating cats, it would seem weird.

You wouldn’t have talked openly about Jews manipulating American government,

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/12/nyregion/500-rally-to-support-controversial-cuny-professor.html

The past is a different place that even people who used to live there forget about.
And of course there's a loooooot about the gays. Half the rap we listened to as kids was about curbstomping faggots, in retrospect presumably by guys who were still a little sore from Diddy's parties

Caveat is that the kids seem to be rejecting it now, because the kids think Dad is lame.

In an unusual win for equality, it's more that the kids think Mom is lame.

the kids now see the gay or trans kid as a weird alien species of human not like them.

Seems logical but not how it played out IRL. LGBT identification has risen in younger generations.

LGBT identification has risen among younger people, but so has social conservatism. This is seen in stats for young voters but there’s also no shortage of anecdotes floating around the internet of teachers complaining about their students seeming more openly right-wing in recent years (in fairness this also coincides neatly with the sharp rise in ideological progressivism among teachers).

I think the aggressive LGBT promotion toward children has a radicalizing effect, in both directions. Without such programs most kids, especially below a certain age, would simply not think about gay people (much less trans people) at all, unless they had personal experience, i.e. a gay relative or family friend. With the programs, they are forced to think about the issue, and some are attracted while others are repelled.

society with pro-social norms that promote things like being polite enough to weirdos

Wouldn't a society with actual pro-social norms apply pressure to dissuade the weirdos from their weirdo behavior, because the pro-social outcome is for them to be healthy and not a weirdo?

The uptick in weirdos and their weirdo behavior seems to coincide with a reduction in the historically applied pressure to reduce and contain weirdos.

Begging a lot of questions here....

Not sure about a lot, maybe three or four, is that alot?

Pressure applied to weirdos or near-weirdos can disist weirdoism.

Disisted weirdos are healthier than active weirdos.

There are more weirdos now, than in the past.

There were fewer weirdos in the past due to pro-social pressure to encourage weirdos to disist.

Wouldn't a society with actual pro-social norms apply pressure to dissuade the weirdos from their weirdo behavior

Yes. I think it is pro-social to quietly accept and tolerate hard weirdos, while pushing soft or potential weirdos towards normality. I like hard weirdos inasmuch as they don't proselytize weirdoism. They do all sorts of interesting stuff.

Now, most my life we have only progressively accepted, encouraged, or celebrated weirdoism. A reported increase in queer attraction (no longer identification) would be less concerning if it did not coincide with declining birth rates, the dissolution of family, and so on. Weirdo-normie stasis is clearly difficult for society to manage in a liberal way and that's a bummer. Perhaps we could use weirdo accreditation or a weirdo quota system. If we figure out the brain we might be able to better define the weirdo population through brain scans. Make sure no normies are stealing weirdo valor.

TPOASITDWID

This was really confusing at first. I figured it out eventually but it's a really bad idea to use a uncommon acronym without defining it the first time.

Even Google was no help because the two extra letters you added in the middle were just enough to make this thread literally the ONLY Google hit for this as it was typed, as opposed to as it was intended.

Would you like to share your note with the class?

The Purpose Of A System Is To Do What It Does

Except this is literally the first time I've heard anyone include the "to do", and the extra two letters were just enough to make it look weird and unfamiliar even though I thoroughly lurked the recent discussions of it.

So is POASIWID the correct version?

To be fair to myself, I did capitalize the whole phrase that I later shortened.

"POSIWID" is the canonical acronym.

I think he didn't bother defining because it has been the subject of a recent Scott post, and featured in a post on the Motte 2 weeks ago.

Without the typo it was. The extra two letters were just enough to throw me off.

So what you’re saying is that the purpose of the acronym was to be ungoogleable?

The better known acronym is POSIWID.

The belief can't be "philosophical" or "political" it has to a sincere religious belief.

What is the difference between a sincere belief derived from a religious framework vs a sincere belief derived from a philosophical one and why is religion given more weight in this regard? If i said that I believe in the supremacy of the biological imperative, and that queer doctrine is blasphemous in this regard, is this considered to be philosophical and therefore unreasonable? What if I said I sincerely believe that the imperative is a facet of God's will? Has my belief now become acceptable in the court's eyes now that I've rhetorically laundered it?

What is the difference between a sincere belief derived from a religious framework vs a sincere belief derived from a philosophical one and why is religion given more weight in this regard?

Because when the foundation of the relevant rules were written (ie, the Constitution), there was less of a distinction drawn between those categories and approximately everyone was religious. I'll even count Jefferson despite him being (probably? there's better historians than I around here to correct me) the least religious Founder.

There are times that they're given roughly equal weight, like conscientious objection, but even then having a religious framework makes your argument easier because it provides evidence beyond your own biases and desires.

Am I the only one that wants to go back in time with a tablet, and show the American founders a few videos?

I want to do the opposite; go back to the Philadelphia Convention, offer to take a handful of delegates to the future, let them stay for one year, then send them back to tell their fellows about how their ideas play out.

I'm frankly quite unsure what the effect of "we will create the most powerful empire in the history of man and it will engender sin on scales previously unheard of" would wreak on the XVIIIth century colonial psyche.

They were all romaboos so maybe they'd understand it in that way? But then again it plays into Christian eschatology to an almost frightening degree, and being the progenitors of the Whore of Babylon as hardcore protestants is unsettling to say the least.

I want to do the opposite; go back to the Philadelphia Convention, offer to take a handful of delegates to the future, let them stay for one year, then send them back to tell their fellows about how their ideas play out.

Which year? Do you think they would interpret Nixon's resignation as checks and balances succeeding or failing?

I'd tag along on the trip, would be quite Enlightening I'm sure.

They are making a legal argument, not a political or moral one; the first amendment to the U.S. constitution calls out religion specifically. This is the flip side of a related issue, that the Constitution (or at least constitutional jurisprudence) does not sufficiently limit the imposition of irreligious totalizing ideologies because they are not an “establishment of religion.” In the same way, violating a philosophical commitment is not “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Applying the religion clauses of the first amendment is already complicated in a country as socially and religiously diverse as America has become. Consider Masterpiece Cakeshop, whose proprietor’s sincere religious beliefs are not in doubt: He won at the Supreme Court on the grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was motivated by demonstrable animus against his religion, and even then the decision was 7–2.

he won only insofar as he was immediately targeted for other lawsuits on similar grounds. Yay.

Yeah, Colorado was so openly hateful they got to dodge the substantive ruling. Maybe they'll get there someday.

This is the flip side of a related issue, that the Constitution (or at least constitutional jurisprudence) does not sufficiently limit the imposition of irreligious totalizing ideologies because they are not an “establishment of religion.”

I'm glad that you brought this up because I thought of this as well while writing my post but didn't know how to word it. It has been rightly observed that the woke package of beliefs and its adherents could be interpreted as religious in nature and have utterly bypassed government safeguards w/r/t church and state.

I'd wager that the difference is largely practical.

If there's a large group of people that believe in a source of objective truth and mortality deeper than any human logic, no propaganda will sway them from its commandments. And if you try, you get martyrs and religious warfare. So, the government lets them swing their fists until they hit someone else's nose.

For non-thesists, however, while their beliefs can be self-consistent within an axiomatic system by definition there's no source of irrational/beyond-rational (depending on your viewpoint) certainty in the axioms they use. Therefore, the government can reasonably bet on trying to shift their axioms-- especially since they're not in any sort of community that might organize retaliation.

(If atheists get together to decide on objective moral principles they're going to set in stone and propagate forever... then congratulations, they've re-invented religion and become entitled to the same protections. See: the "Church of Satan" people.)

It was clearly practical historically. I can see why a polity of a certain age would have specifically enshrined religious protections during its founding.

I'm not sure how practical it is now given the decline of religion and the rise of religions that are totally servile to CURRENT_YEAR mores and the existence of secular ideologies like Marxism and nationalism that are clearly capable of motivating stubborn behavior.

And this system works much better at making religious people productive members of society(which they by and large want to do) than Laicite or totalizing state ideology.

Philosophy is “because I said so”.

Religion is “because my God said so”.

Rightly or wrongly, more weight has historically been accorded to the latter.

Rightly or wrongly, more weight has historically been accorded to the latter.

I suppose it's more difficult to game the system with an avowed commitment to the facially irrational than with a claim of independent thought above the law.

Because evangelism by the sword is still quite immediate and present in the modern world and it is a simple pragmatic acceptance of the fact that these beliefs are strong enough for people to die for. (How would a postmodern martyr even look like?)

How would a postmodern martyr even look like?

Sacrificing everyone and everything they hold control over for fleeting pleasures seems the go-to.

Punkish rebellion for its own sake with no actual goals a close second.

What is the difference between a sincere belief derived from a religious framework vs a sincere belief derived from a philosophical one and why is religion given more weight in this regard? If i said that I believe in the supremacy of the biological imperative, and that queer doctrine is blasphemous in this regard, is this considered to be philosophical and therefore unreasonable?

My understanding is that, legally speaking, religious belief and expression is a uniquely protected category in the US. Political or philosophical beliefs are not. If you oppose queer doctrine on political grounds, then you can't expect SCOTUS to grant you their time. Religious beliefs grant you special protections from the government.

What if I said I sincerely believe that the imperative is a facet of God's will? Has my belief now become acceptable in the court's eyes now that I've rhetorically laundered it?

I think a metaphysical grounding helps your case. Unless I'm mistaken, this is one of the ways to differentiate a religious and philosophical belief. But I know someone will have a more complete answer for you. This seems like it should be one of the more thoroughly investigated ideas in US law.

What is the difference between a sincere belief derived from a religious framework vs a sincere belief derived from a philosophical one and why is religion given more weight in this regard?

Legal scholar and philosopher Brian Leiter has a whole book on just that topic, by the somewhat trollish title of Why Tolerate Religion?. His conclusion is the opposite of what people often assume it's going to be based on the title - that all such "claims of conscience" should be treated with equal (and fairly high) respect in this regard, rather than religion having its own special claim to "tolerance" that isn't accorded to anything else.

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.

The Justices had read the books in question.

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:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: That's the one where they are supposed to look for the leather and things—and bondage, things like that, right?

MR. SCHOENFELD: It's not bondage.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: A sex worker?

MR. SCHOENFELD: It's a woman in a leather—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Sex worker, right?

MR. SCHOENFELD: No.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: No?

MR. SCHOENFELD: That's not correct. No.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: I thought—I—gosh, I—I read it.

JUSTICE BARRETT: It's a drag queen in drag.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Drag—drag queen in—a drag queen.

MR. SCHOENFELD: So—correct. The leather that they're pointing to is a woman in a leather jacket, and one of the words is "drag queen" in this—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: And they're supposed to look for those?

MR. SCHOENFELD: It is an option at the end of the book, correct.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Okay. And you've included these in the English language curriculum rather than the human sexuality curriculum to influence students, is that fair? That's what the district court found. Do you agree with that?

MR. SCHOENFELD: I think, to the extent the district court found that it was to influence, it was to influence them towards civility—the natural consequence of being exposed to—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Whatever, but to influence them.

MR. SCHOENFELD: In the manner that I just mentioned, yes.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. And responding to parents who are concerned—you agree that this—there was some intemperate language used?

MR. SCHOENFELD: I—I don't know that those were responding to parents who were concerned. This was after the fact for most of these comments. And this was in a very public setting which obviously got heated, and some intemperate comments were used, certainly. [Referencing the board meeting racist xenophobic white supremacist remarks]

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. And—and I wanted to understand your—your—your—your context that you were giving about the statement that some Muslim families—it's unfortunate that this—that this issue puts some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots. I think, in response to Justice Sotomayor, you were trying to give some context to that.

MR. SCHOENFELD: I don't think I was speaking directly about that comment. I think that comment was given—or was made—in June, which was several months after the decision to withdraw the opt-outs was made. I don't have context for that statement, no.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. And then the legal question. Why isn't discrimination against religion a burden on religion? If—if—if—if a state—now this is hypothetical, not—moving away from the record. If—if state actors intentionally discriminate against religion, what secular purpose, valid secular purpose could that serve? And how—how wouldn't that be a burden?

MR. SCHOENFELD: So I—I don't know—I mean, it depends on the hypothetical, what the state is doing and whether there is a secular purpose. That's hard to imagine one. But if the state is discriminating—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Against Muslims or Catholics or Protestants or whatever.

MR. SCHOENFELD: I think this Court has recognized that when an enactment that discriminates on its face—or has recognized with respect to an enactment that discriminates on its face—it is intrinsically coercive. That's how the Court has performed the burden inquiry. If you are privileging one religion over another, you are coercing people to subscribe to that particular set of beliefs in order to—

JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's a burden.

MR. SCHOENFELD: Yeah. Absolutely.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Thank you

4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.

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-)

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.

We are having those conversations right here in this thread! Most comments that do not claim there is pornography in Pride Puppy.

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?

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.

4 year olds to BDSM, when – at least in the examples provided – that's simply not happening.

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.

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.

We are having those conversations right here in this thread!

Parts of the thread are fine (or at least aren't doing the thing I'm complaining about). Agreed.

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.

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.

To suggest these are isolated concepts unrelated to sexuality stretches my credulity.

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.

These are children's stories. Most have fairly normal lessons in some way, but nearly all are in the setting of LGBTQ+ acceptance.

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.

some of regulars here think that's a justification for unlimited violence against civilization, but a large majority of the country disagrees.

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?

Charitably, the groomer accusation is downstream of the idea that programs such are are choosing to make kids more gay, because that is their preference. Literal pedophile accusations are real, and some people below defend it, but is less common. (Most common is mean shitposting.)

This seems like the classic equivocation on the word 'sexuality'...

I don't have a rigorous understanding of how people relate to sexuality and what the consequences of exposure are at age 4 versus 9. That might make me unqualified to argue about it here, but it doesn't make me, or the average parent, unqualified to say "Hey, wait a second, 'lace' and 'underwear' have sexual associations I'm aware of in this context. Why is that here?" Associations that a pregnant woman does not. Lace in a wedding book word search hits different.

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.

And I think this is a major disagreement. Pride is many things. Pride is civil rites. Pride is trans, and pride is transgressive. Pride is family friendly. Pride is debauchery, nudity, and a chance to get laid. Pride is identity. Even with the continued whitewash, to the distaste of some gays, Pride can be reasonably understood to be lots of things that 4th of July celebrations and Macy's Thanksgiving parade are not understood as.

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.

I wouldn't ask schools to pretend gay people don't exist, but the memeplex that advocates for celebration is fuel and also not very normal. Milder forms of indoctrination look a lot like the golden rule. A page in a book that mentions a man has a husband, that's normalizing something. Instead, Montgomery County said, 'damn the torpedoes!'

The children's book industry needs to churn out an fleet of content the in class curriculum to replace other curriculum. Identity, orientation, inclusivity is too important. Mandate a book a year? Nay, a dozen books. They each should be read 1 time-- 3 times, no, 5 times a year. A single child that leaves Pre-K without an understanding of pride parades, drag queens, and how lace and leather fit might be associated is an unacceptable outcome. The culture war of it all.

I have most of a post written that is one half an unlimited amount of questions on the present state of trans medicine/research with the other half a fantasy counter-factual for what a more mild culture war could have looked. I already push enough belongs on my non-existent blog. But, they can't normalize stuff like this. They need to man the wheel of the zeitgeist. They need to crush opposition and old-fashioned bigotry along with it. Hopefully it's part of a normalization process.

Anyway you should post more often.

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

Pride is a motte and bailey of events that was originally specifically to transgress. It is completely disingenuous to act like throwing Pride and sex acts together is some absurdity; that's what pride was for its first 40+ years, and that's still what it is in many areas.

Surely, surely some fraction of the LGBT community can act like normal gosh-darn people and admit that a line can be drawn between And Tango Makes Three or whatever the equivalent with human characters is versus Pride Puppy or Grandpa's Pride (Noticing a theme here). AND YET! This absurd books that are practically beyond parody keep getting pulled up in schools.

Gay people are normal, yeah. While it's been toned down since Raytheon started sponsoring, a significant fraction of Pride is not.

I should know better than to ask "what fresh hell is this?" because something new always pops up.

The only rationale I can see for having a wordsearch option at the end of Pride Puppy (with ordinary words like apple, baseball, coffee cup) is to pretend that this is educational rather than indoctrination. The kids are learning to spell and to identify words, so this is learning English!

I'm inclined to agree with Gorsuch here, a phrase I never thought I'd use: why is this in the English language curriculum rather than the human sexuality curriculum if they need to have it be a Pride parade with lesbians in leather jackets and drag queens and rainbow flags? If they just wanted a spelling book, why have it be a Pride parade? It is about teaching the kids that it's all normal, there are no divergent opinions on this, all that you see there is right and good, and heavens no there would never be anything for adults only in such a parade!

It's only "indoctrination" when you don't agree with the outcome. When I was in elementary school in the '90s. There was plenty of material in reading class that would have been considered indoctrination in a prior era among those of a certain persuasion. A biography of Dr. King comes to mind; why is this being discussed in reading class and not social studies? What about all the other stuff we read that subtly or not so subtly tried to convey the message that it wasn't okay to judge people based on race? What about the story about the girl whose parents met while her father was stationed in Japan? Is this nothing more than indoctrination about interracial relationships and multiculturalism (the story itself was about dating where the dad learned to use chopsticks and the mother learned to eat with a fork, and why they switch between both at home)? For that matter, we also read other stuff about American history in reading class; is the story about a Revolutionary soldier not indoctrination? Shouldn't this be part of social studies class?

The crux of the matter is that the normalization of same-sex relationships is a culture war battle that the right fought and lost, and some of the losers are clinging to the last viable paths of opposition in a desperate attempt to reverse the tide. The problem with these books isn't that they're age-inappropriate due to sexual content, it's that they're presenting same-sex relationships in a manner that isn't sufficiently condemnatory. That the plaintiffs have to resort to bad faith references to leather is proof of this—it's presented in a way to make one think that the book is referring to bondage or gay leather boy culture, when in reality it's a picture of a woman in a leather jacket, which picture would be unobjectionable in a book about anything else.

The crux of the matter is that the normalization of same-sex relationships is a culture war battle that the right fought and lost

Yes. And this is why my very tepid and grudging "okay sure civil marriage is already a hot steaming mess, why not let the gays get in on the trauma?" acceptance has cooled even more over the years.

"This will never affect you". "Don't like gay marriage? Then don't get gay married!" "This makes no difference to your life at all, it just means we can marry the people we love".

Well that was a heap of horse manure, even worse - at least you can use manure on your roses. This, on the other hand, has indeed led to "we will fight and die on the hill of having, in the school library for 12 year olds up, a book that mentions in passing 'hey kids, if you can't pay for your cross-sex hormones, peddling your ass is one way of getting money for it'."

Someone invent a time machine so we can go back, because clearly we weren't nearly repressive enough!

it's a picture of a woman in a leather jacket, which picture would be unobjectionable in a book about anything else.

A picture not just of a woman, but of a lesbian. At a Pride Parade. Where wearing leather has particular connotations. Seems like there is a lesbian leather subculture out there, and it's not just about "wearing a leather jacket and cheering on the parade". Context is important; a woman in a bikini at the beach is one thing, a woman in a bikini on the beach posing for her glamour shot is quite different in intent and how it is supposed to be read.

I think eventually there may come a split, the 'family-friendly' type of Pride parades will become the norm as the public face of the LGBT+ movement, where there are marchers from everyone including the cops, and floats, and corporate sponsorship, and it is just "waving the pretty coloured flags and cheering". The kinky elements, the overtly sexual ones, the remains of the original Pride, will go their own way or have their own separate areas where it's understood you don't bring the baby stroller or the four year olds or the normies.

Ultimately all that is for the movement to sort out for itself. Am I saying "no leather at Pride"? No. Am I saying there shouldn't be kink and it should all be family-friendly? No, because it's none of my business. If parents want to bring their kids to the parade, with the attendant risk of them seeing something they maybe shouldn't, that's on the parents because it's their job to raise their kids.

Which means that there are also parents who don't and won't bring their kids to the parade, even the family-friendly version, and that is their right too, because it is their job as to how they raise their kids. So why the necessity to have books like Pride Puppy in schools? That's going beyond tolerance and into "we're making all this normal, including the bits that go over the heads of the kids but which adults recognise, and you can't stop us or do anything about it".

You want to teach four year olds not to be bullies and not to pick on other kids or adults just for being different? Knock yourself out. You want to slip in the idea of leather dykes to four year olds and a different kind of Pride puppy? Yeah, no. They can wait till they're fourteen. Or sixteen. Or never, to find out about that.

I know I harp on this, but it's yet another one of those cases where everyone explicitly promised we wouldn't end up here. Or rather, relentlessly mocked anyone who suggested this would happen. Like, "leather fetish stuff in kindergarten" was the literal parody of "conservative hysteria" the left made fun of for years.

Forget the legal arguments, because this never should have been allowed to get this far in the first place. What could have been done differently? What can be done differently against the next batch of "nobody's trying to take your X/do X with your kids" tactics? Because all the tactics that everyone tried the last ten times failed miserably.

The left has won for a century pushing things that nobody wanted (even themselves in the beginning!), because they've discovered an entire strategy based around an ideological vanguard pushing insane things on the masses. A strategy which has taken on a life of its own and now exists only to replicate itself like cancer, with no regard to the plans or interests of its creators. Because ultimately, those creators are just a malleable as the proles their "strategies of intervention" were designed to control.

The left has won for a century pushing things that nobody wanted, because they've discovered an entire strategy based around an ideological vanguard pushing insane things on the masses.

Like an end to segregation? The pro-segregationists oft spoke of outside agitators.

Rootless cosmopolitan globalist outside agitators?

How are things in South Africa since they ended segregation?

How are things in South Africa since they ended segregation?

Better than the counterfactual scenerio for the black residents, worse than the counterfactual scenerio for the white residents?

I'm not even sure the former is true. Being a second class citizen is awful. But it's up in the air if dying of bandit inflicted wounds because your hospital has no electricity is better or worse.

Live free or die I suppose.

At least in Zimbabwe, black Zimbabweans now have fewer political rights and less economic prosperity than they did when it was Rhodesia. A real win for decolonization!

I'm sure black South Africans will soon enough experience these benefits of decolonization too.

I can think of at least one significant difference between segregation and, for example, the chemical castration of minors. The historical analogy I'd go with instead would be the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

It is kind of wild what the modern progressive will believe if you frame it as a civil rights issue. The response is almost Pavlovian.

This is a very mid-wit argument that is as specious as it is ever present.

"Without the Left women and minorities wouldn't be able to vote!"

Nonsense. This is a view of history as inherently progressive; you have good guys and bad guys and all of the bad guys will eventually lose if we just Resist hard enough. It's the fever dream of sophomore PoliSci students and ACLU lawyers alike.

Segregation and black enfranchisement itself were very non-linear and more a product of reform and reactionary ebbs and flows. People often forget that we had a black senator from Mississippi in the 1970s for instance. And that link shows the plethora of other black elected official holders before 1900.

The failure of Reconstruction was that it was, in fact, so radical as to provoke a counter-reaction that may have been stronger than what would normally occur. You then get Jim Crow and the Solid South for another few generations.

But that doesn't fit into the neat narrative of "Slavery Awful --> Lincoln --> Emancipation --> Oh no, KKK! ---> Rosa Parks, MLK ---> 1964 --> We're equal now! --> Oh wait, George Floyd, let's pretend it's 1964 again"

Do a deep dive into the better conservative (small c) thinkers; James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall. You'll see that one of the tenants of conservative thought is that it's totally fine for people to think whatever they want so long as the political system cannot be co-opted by the Small But Loud to coerce the Many But Disinterested to abandon their beliefs - as "ugly" as they might be. Democracy is a process and a system - never an "outcome" generator.

From, The Conservative Affirmation by Kendall:

Is there anything in the Constitution or in the American political tradition that prevents American government or American society from announcing: We intend to proscribe such and such ‘political’ opinions; to that end we intend to persecute those opinions, that is, to place the price of holding them—not expressing them, but holding them—so high that people will be forced to avoid them or, if they have already adopted them, to abandon them?

I know that, of course, all of us enlightened folk, if we were living in Alabama in 1955, would've definitely been on the "right side of history" and bravely advocated for desegregation. I mean, like, how could you not?

Because you (in Alabama in 1955) didn't really have a passionate attachment to the issue. It was simply the way things are. You're mostly interested in paying your mortgage and raising your kids. But, all of a sudden, your kids' teachers start telling them about their inherited culpability for slavery and you go, "Hey, what the fuck?" and now ... you're involved.

These people are sick. Teaching kindergarteners about sexual fetishes will never be ok, whether it’s gay or straight. Unfortunately there are a lot of very intelligent pedophile/groomer men, who’ve successfully convinced suburban white women that it’s a moral imperative to ram this down children’s throats, and steamroll the wishes of parents.

Need to look into sending the kids to catholic (or other reasonable religious) school, especially in these hyper-woke areas.

Need to look into sending the kids to catholic (or other reasonable religious) school, especially in these hyper-woke areas.

If you are worried about "pedophile/groomer men", you might want to think twice about a system which is run by men who voluntarily opted out of the church-sanctioned way to have sex.

There are no priests involved in the median Catholic school these days, except watching over at great remove and theoretically being responsible but more in a ‘has the automatic right to interview new principles in one of the rounds’ way than a ‘actually running the place’ way. Most Catholic schools are basically public schools with more competent teaching, some pro-life stuff shoehorned in, and a requirement that prospective parents be tithing at the local church.

Lmao that’s a great point

Hard to escape from this sort of thing these days, I guess? Shame to see very divisive topics being taught in public schools nonetheless. There needs to be a way to opt out of public school via some sort of school choice/voucher system. Competition is a good thing!

Please review our rules. See also the top of this thread:

Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

This is not a place to rant about how much you hate some group. It’s not a place for framing them in the worst possible light and stoking up outrage. Be polite. Be clinical. Describe people in ways they might reasonably describe themselves.

you don't need to affirm with them, but you do need to treat them with respect.

Not that he can say it out loud, but AFAICT there no acceptable way to do both of these, and up until quite recently trying to do so would get a teacher fired or a student suspended.

Could you elucidate? I'm lost.

Yeah, not my best writing. I mean that being respectful without affirming has been a losing strategy- teachers that try alternative naming schemes or avoid pronouns get fired (one example, though he did get a settlement), and it made the rounds recently that in 2022-2023 there was a toddler suspended from a UK daycare for an undisclosed "abuse against gender identity".

Personally I can't imagine a 3 year old being meaningfully bigoted to the point of suspension, though they are often rude. Out of the mouths of babes and all that. Got a kick out of my spawn of similar age asking her grandmother "why are you old?" last weekend.

AFAICT, from the progressive side, there is no such thing as respectful without affirmation. I understand why he as an advocate wants to present the possibility rather than declaring it impossible, but he is suggesting something that tends to result in negative consequences and long legal battles.

Ah, now I understand better.

Schoenfeld, arguing for Montgomery County, says 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.

Alito should have been more skeptical that "civility" and (especially) "inclusivity" are uncontroversial. Any teaching of "civility" is teaching not just that people should act in ways which are civil and not in ways which are uncivil, but teaching WHICH ways are civil and WHICH ways are uncivil, and those things vary sharply across the population. "Inclusivity" is worse, in that it's basically a positive label for progressive values rather than a label for anything uncontroversial at all.

We are at risk, because I am paraphrasing after reading most of the transcript yesterday, making some notes, and editing them into a post today while referencing some stuff. Here is that exchange:

JUSTICE ALITO: But, Mr. Baxter -- before we move away from the book that Justice Sotomayor was referring to, Uncle Bobby's Wedding, I've read that book as well as a lot of these other books. Do you think it's fair to say that all that is done in Uncle Bobby's Wedding is to expose children to the fact that there are men who marry other men?

MR. BAXTER: No, Your Honor...

JUSTICE ALITO: Yeah, the book has -- the book has a clear message, and a lot of people think it's a good message, and maybe it is a good message, but it's a message that a lot of people who hold on to traditional religious beliefs don't agree with. I don't think anybody can read that and say, well, this is just telling children that there are occasions when men marry other men, that Uncle Bobby gets married to his boyfriend, Jamie, and everybody's happy and everything is -- you know, it portrays this -- everyone accepts this except for the little girl, Chloe, who has reservations about it. But her mother corrects her: No, you shouldn't have any reservations about this.

SOTOMAYOR ...

It's more accurate to say Alito doesn't worry too much about determining the goodness of the book. Maybe it is good, maybe it is not not good. The concern is whether someone can make a religious objection to it. He thinks that is a pretty obvious, yes. This is a moral formation rather than information.

I agree "inclusivity" in the context of education has a clear progressive meaning. "Civility" I think we should hang on to or fight for. It is possible to be civil while maintaining moral disagreements. Happens all the time here and that's good. The well is poisoned enough that it's reasonable to want to* detach all the goodness terminology from progressive mantras.

  • Though probably not possible

"Civility" I think we should hang on to or fight for. It is possible to be civil while maintaining moral disagreements. Happens all the time here and that's good.

The discussions that fly here civilly wouldn't be seen as such in many spaces, certainly school. Even that term carries baggage.

I'm also not sure it matters. "Diversity" may not have had the progressive meaning until it allowed one to discriminate on diversity grounds and now the term has been used as a license so often that invoking it in certain context just screams progressive thing. "Safety" was also ruined when it became useful.

The liberal thesis was that there was some objective grounding to these concepts that people would naturally gravitate towards.

I think we can safely say at this point that the liberal thesis was wrong. "Consensus" is not a fixed, naturally-occuring attractor fit for anchoring a society. Values can drift without apparent limit, and mutually-incompatible value sets are not only possible but are routinely observed in the real world. Attempting to share power between mutually-exclusive value-sets is a fool's errand. The solution is borders; I pursue my values here, you pursue yours over there, and we do our best to leave each other alone. No level of language games is going to provide a sustainable workaround to this simple reality.

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.

The problem with this kind of rhetoric is that it has become transparently false. I have social circles I move in that range from boomer shitlib to woker than woke, and they all agree and affirm that the only way to treat someone with respect is to agree with them and to affirm them. Anything less makes you a monster.

Some white evangelical 14 year old politely saying they disagree that there is such a thing as trans people is not going to be treated with respect.

the absence is notable. Were this an evangelical push we could expect some evangelical bashing.

Shopping for sympathetic plaintiffs is just part of the process.


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