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An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class
Reading the entire interview, the school board comes out looking only slightly more reasonable than was portrayed in the "mainstream media".
The chair of the school board, Barney Bishop III, insists that the David incident was only a small contributing factor, but when asked to elaborate why the board decided to pressure the principal to resign, he says:
To me, the overall tone of Bishop's statements suggests that the David incident was in fact a major reason, if not the sole reason, for the firing (sorry, "resignation under pressure"). Bishop says:
The interview doesn't say in what context the teacher told the students not to tell their parents or that the images were not pornographic. (Maybe the original article does? I haven't read it because it's paywalled.) Out of context, it does sound suspicious. I suppose the first could have been a joke. As for the second, I'm not sure why the teacher would need to tell the students in the classroom that the images were not pornographic. In any case, my priors are that it is extremely unlikely that the teacher was a "groomer" trying to sexualize the kids.
The year before, the school had notified the parents that their children, who are 11 and 12 years old, were going to be exposed to the horror of a statue depicting a human. This year, the teacher teaching the class told the principal (the one who was later fired) to send out a similar notice, but the principal apparently forgot. This is an "egregious mistake":
Michelangelo's sculpture of David is "controversial":
The interview ends with the reporter saying "I just don’t think this statue is controversial", to which Bishop responds:
An article in the BBC relates this to the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, AKA the "Don't Say Gay" Bill. Personally, I think it's just typical American prudishness. In other Western countries, it is perfectly normal and unremarkable for statues with exposed penises and breasts (non-pornographic, of course) to be displayed in public, where they are easily seen by children of all ages.
At one point, in describing the school, Bishop says:
Obviously the sentence is false if taken literally, as critics have pointed out. But does anyone know what he might have actually meant? They don't have pronoun badges? They don't put pronouns in their email signatures? They don't use trans people's preferred pronouns? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious as to what leads people to say nonsensical things like this, what they understand the word "pronoun" to mean.
So, I think there is a really interesting conversation to have here, because I am actually genuinely curious about the trad-con take on the issue of not-obviously-sexualized depictions of nudity displayed to children. While I differ from the tradcons on some important issues, I’m genuinely very favorably-inclined toward their approach to sexuality, and I can see a very compelling argument in favor of those parents’ complaints.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that instead of showing the class David, this teacher had Googled “nude man” and showed the top result to the class. Or, hell, in the interest of ensuring he doesn’t find porn, he Googles “nude man posed like Michelangelo David”. What, practically, in terms of its effect on the students, is the difference between that scenario and what the teacher actually did. Now, in terms of the teacher’s intent, or what the teacher is hoping to achieve, the distinction is clear: he wants to show the students a seminally-important work of Renaissance art, and the amazing skill demonstrated by the artist, and presumably isn’t doing so for any sexual reason. Still, in actuality, what he has shown them in either scenario is a very detailed (even graphic) depiction of a nude human male body. Presumably if there is any sexualized or prurient effect on the children that we would expect to result from showing them a naked man - particularly if they are young enough or sheltered enough to have never seen one before - that same effect would likely occur when showing them David.
(Perhaps that’s a key disagreement here - maybe people would argue that the statue is so obviously fake and non-sexual that there’s no way someone would be aroused or scandalized by looking at it. However, I’m not so sure this is true, and I’m frankly not even certain that Michelangelo himself did not have a conscious or subconscious prurient intent at least partially motivating his creation of the statue.)
So, if one takes it as a given that young kids shouldn’t be exposed to a graphic depiction of a dick and balls - or a pair of titties, or whatever - then does the fact that those genitals are made of marble instead of flesh make such an important difference that one ought not to object to the display of this statue where children can see it? I’m not so sure it’s such a simple question that we can just dismiss or gainsay these parents out of hand.
Could you elaborate on what specific harm showing an anatomically correct sculpture to sixth graders does to them?
The reasons we don't want to show actual pornography are varied. We don't want to encourage kids that young to have sex by showing it to them. We don't want them to conflate the exaggerated performance of sex in porn with normal sex and have them immitate it. And we don't want them to think adults showing them pornography is normal and prime them for future abuse.
I think a group presentation in the context of art history is distinct enough from some creepy dude showing you porn alone that it's not priming children for abuse. It's not a sexualized performance or a depiction of sex children are likely to immitate. It's possible 11 year old straight girls and gays boys will experience arousal at the sight of a naked male body for the first time and seek out other depictions of naked men, leading them to engage in sex too early.
I don't think David is so fake it's impossible to become aroused by looking at him, the healthy male body is normal site of arousal for women/gay men, but he's not designed to be highly arousing either. He also expresses the Renaissance ideal that the human body is a beautiful creation of God worthy of veneration and is undeniably important in art history. The school's policy of letting parents decide through permission slips whether the harm of potential arousal at the sight of a healthy male body outweighs the educational value seems wise and it's important to note that only 1 parent of the fifty kids actually objected to his inclusion, the controversy is that they didn't issue the permission slips like they did in years past.
It's a violation of property rights. If I'm paying six figures a head for 18 years (well, on paper; in practice it's closer to 25) of
latent ability to challenge meinnocence, you better damn well believe I'm going to go after anything that threatens that. While I understand that I can't dictate society impose my standards- would that I could- it disturbs me that my property might be made to grow in ways that run counter to my interests.I don't think it's more sophisticated than that. It's not maximizing the objective well-being of the kids we're worried about; they don't matter and are objectively worthless to society (a long-term net negative, if TFR is any indication) beyond the tasks their parents have for them.
The concept that society cannot violate parents' property rights over children are a socioeconomic wage in the calculus of having children- anytime someone says "but what if my kid grows up to be [undesirable thing]?" this is what they mean. If the wage is too low, society doesn't get kids, so society must defer to them or even the people arguing for these wages to be lower (for culture war reasons, or just rational ones) go extinct.
It isn't outlandish to consider children the property of their parents. Prominent libertarian Murray Rothbard endorsed that framing to some extent, with the caveat that the "ownership" is merely trusteeship until such time as the child asserts self-ownership.
Bible says (or at least heavily implies; it's been a while) "children are property of their parents", extends blessings to children who obey this and execution to those that refuse.
The employee benefit plan of Christianity is mostly rear-loaded; the retirement plan can be accurately described as "out of this world".
Seems pretty cut and dry to me. I'd want to maximize the chance my child takes advantage of it, and we can start by covering up everything that matches the naturally-emergent sin disgust heuristic, starting with a fig leaf on this nude statue over here. Why gouge out one's own eye (a popular and plain-ish, though not necessarily correct, reading of the passage) when you can see no evil by less traumatic means?
Do you mean Psalm 127?
It says that children are a gift from God (specifically, a reward) but that's not the same thing as saying that parents own their children. After all, a fully-grown child is supposed to be as much a gift from God as a child, but you presumably wouldn't say that fully-grown children are the property of their parents!
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