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Quite the opposite. I don't find their actions suspicious because they're committed by scientologists, I find scientologists suspicious because of their actions.
It might work if you stayed within the parameters of the original hypothetical. Not immediately telling the parents might be defensible in certain situations, but we were talking about "6 months or a year or three years".
Do you think the teacher should tell the LDS parents their kid is an atheist after 6 months if it is still the case that they would excommunicate and disown them?
If so, why?
It was absolutely my intention that this analogy applied for the full timeframe. The teacher should never override the student's judgement and tell the parents in that situation.
I think you should have said so explicitly, because "not immediately" sounds a lot more reasonable. Especially since the full time frame includes "potentially never".
I completely disagree with that, especially in the current political climate, there's a lot of unsubstantiated memes going around about how your parents are going to kick you out if they find out you're trans. And even outside of the current culture war, taking someone seriously, but not uncritically is a much better approach than what you suggest.
This just seem straightforwardly not true? 3 years of money saved up for an emergency is 5x as much as 6 months of money saved p for an emergency, more time might get students over the age limit for working a job or being declared an emancipated minor or all other types of opportunities, finding allies and building support networks is a social action that can take a long time and a lot of luck to pull off, etc.
People have a right to free speech, but you can't use speech to hire a hitman and be ok. Minors also have a right to safety and care, and different people's rights interfere with each other all the time. Figuring out how to adjudicate conflicts between different rights is a major part of public policy (and ethics).
I disagree empirically, but even if that's true, the teacher still has the option of deciding to tell the parents anyway, or trying to convince the student to do so. (again, I'm just talking about opposing a law to force teachers to disclose regardless of their judgement, not anything else)
And again I point to the uneven consequences of this situation; even if the student were wrong 75% of the time, the consequences in the 25% are dire enough to justify caution.
If you re-read your own sentence outside of this context, does it feel like a massive overreach? Saying 'it's not nice to call people infidels and say they should be subjugated and reeducated' is surely undermining some set of extremely zealous parents somewhere in the world, I don't think that needs to be documented and I definitely don't think it should open anyone to legal liability.
If you actually defend the blanket case you're making there, I strenuously disagree. If you want to specify a more nuanced policy, I'll consider it, but frankly I think parents need to suck it up and get involved in their kids lives themselves if they are about this stuff. Respecting parents interest in their kids is a good default position, but I still consider it a privilege they need to earn with their actions, not a divine right granted to them by a higher power or something.
I completely disagree with that, especially in the current political climate, there's a lot of unsubstantiated memes going around about how your parents are going to kick you out if they find out you're trans.
I was referring there specifically to my example of the LDS church and an atheist student.
Going back to the original case in point, I instead would say that the state shouldn't overrule the judgement of the teacher/school about whether or not to tell the parents, in particular with a blanket rule for everyone rather than an actual investigation of the case at hand.
Huh? I wasn't talking about the student saving up the money, I thought there would be resources available for a minor kicked out of home.
Yeah, but we're not talking about whether or not parents should hire a hitman to take out their child, or whether or not they should deny them safety and care, we are talking about whether or not they have a right to know what's going on with their kid at school. I already said there might be cases where withholding the information from the might be justified, but this must be temporary, must leave a paper trail justifying the decision, and the parents must be allowed to sue if it turns out to have been wrong.
Yes, and they also have the option of hiding it indefinitely because they believe anything other than affirmation is bigotry. The point is to take that option away from them.
It's not uneven. Medical transition is just as, if not more, dire.
But you haven't just changed the context, you also massively changed the severity of the transgression. I already gave an analogous example - imagine a Muslim or a Jewish kid converts to Christianity. The teachers deliberately hide it from the parents, and possibly take steps to help facilitate the conversion. That should definitely also be suable.
Sure. Homeschooling for the win. But there are many parents who can't afford to do that, and they should not be forced to send their children to schools, where they will be taught beliefs about their core identity, which they consider hostile.
I hangout with some parents of trans kids, and that does, in fact seem to be a common unsubstantiated belief.
I disagree. First of all, the state overruling teachers is the status quo. There's tons of regulations about who can be a teacher, how a school must be run, etc. One more hardly makes a difference. But more importantly there is no evidence teachers are any more likely to work in the child's best interest than parents. If the teacher can overrule the parents, the state sure as hell can overrule the teacher.
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