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Notes -
Fresh Moms For Liberty Scandal Just Dropped
From what I can gather from reading the newspaper on the topic, she appeared to be running the local Party House. Police reports state that they had been called to her house for underage drinking multiple times in prior weeks. She threw a birthday party for her daughter, perhaps larger than usual?, and things got a little out of hand. Schillinger and her boyfriend provided both liquor and beer. Schillinger drank with the teens, including playing beer pong and pouring shots. Schillinger and her boyfriend, separately, punched different teens while trying to restrain them from leaving the party. Schillinger supposedly yelled "THE ONLY THING I ASK IS THAT YOU DON'T LEAVE."
While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States, Schillinger appears to have been attempting to do so responsibly. She wanted her kids to drink at her house, under supervision, and to keep them there until the morning when they had sobered up to avoid drunk driving. Kids drinking under parental supervision are obviously safer than kids drinking in the woods or in an empty house. Kids who drink and don't drive home are safer than kids who drive. The altercations alleged seem more like (politically motivated?) throw ins than serious assaults, no allegations of serious injuries, more like horseplay than violence.
This comes after an earlier scandal involving an OG founder of the group and her husband, the president of the Florida GOP:
The Ziegler's confirmed in interviews that the pair had a prior history of group sex with the woman involved, but Mr. Ziegler (obviously) denied any wrongdoing. Ziegler was, however, at the woman's apartment at the time alleged. The prior history reduces, though obviously does not eliminate, the odds that this is a politically motivated hit-job. More likely to be a case of sex being a full contact sport, with some degree of hazy consent violation in there. The bigger story than the alleged sexual assault in the papers has been the confirmed threesomes.
Thoughts? Some of mine, disorganized:
-- Everyone, regardless of their politics and their opinions of alcohol or group sex, needs to recognize that this is why laws and social customs that pry into people's personal lives are bad. If Ziegler committed assault, prosecute him, but various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best. When we pass laws that allow people to be prosecuted for actions in their personal lives, we open political dissidents (of all stripes) to these kinds of criminal prosecution attacks. I don't really know any details of this particular case, but rape laws that make proving innocence essentially impossible open political avenues of criminal attack that are indefensibly broad. We've already seen this happen to Assange, where it is physically impossible for him to prove that he used a condom and it remained on throughout the sexual act, and that was leveraged to force him into hiding. Irrational underage drinking laws make criminals of normal, normatively moral American teenagers, and criminalizing "furnishing minors" makes felons out of parents who are trying to engage in harm reduction. Ordinary Americans should not have an adversarial relationship with the cops, where we find that ordinary Americans have an adversarial relationship with the cops it is the law that is wrong.
-- This does bring to mind my general joke about the Moms For Liberty and adjacent content police in public schools: if anybody wants to remove or ban a piece of media from the public school library, their own child first needs to come in for an interview. If it is found that their child knows what "bussy lmao" means or the lyrics to WAP, the book can't be banned. Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?
-- On the other hand, it strikes me that both women were engaging in libertine behavior in what is "generally" a responsible and rational way. Schillinger tried to protect the teens, who were probably going to drink anyway, by supervising them and making sure they didn't drive. Ziegler was engaging in non-monogamy, but in the context of a committed marriage. Maybe the MFL types really do believe that these things are a-ok for consenting adults, but not for minors. Maybe they really do want to teach kids about fraught topics in their own way, rather than by rote in school? Just this possibilty makes me infinitely more sympathetic and amenable to MFL.
-- Does the median Moms For Liberty donor care about this? Is this behavior seen as hypocritical by the people who support MFL, or merely by liberals who are confused about their actual values? Is MFL low-key a Vulgar Wave organization, advocating for tits-and-beer 90s liberalism once kids are of age? Or is this a hypocritical look behind the curtain? Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?
-- The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.
-- On an apolitical note, prominence in literally any field is once again proven to get you fresh trim. Someone commented to me after seeing the movie that it was weird to them that Oppenheimer, a probably-autistic physics professor, was able to have a wife and a mistress. I replied that he was brilliant and recognized as brilliant and prominent by those around him. That made him sexy. We see that over and over with people like Kissinger, Oppy, Falwell Jr. Even being prominent for advocating a return to moral conservatism will get women to engage in wild sex with you, despite the obvious factors.
My first thought is that there is absolute no tension or conflict between the Moms for Liberty position that parents should substantially control what schools teach and having leadership that is permissive with underage drinking and group sex. Contra the position that MfL is a group of lunatic right-wingers, I think they are actually sincere in their position that parents should be determining values rather than schools. Despite the snarky "family views indeed" from columnist Scott Maxwell, it is actually entirely possible to promote family values while having a personally kinky sex life or thinking it's fine for teens to play beer pong. If we weren't so deep into red-blue bullshit, pretty much everyone I know on the Blue Tribe side of things would think this is fine.
On your last point, I looked up the people involved, and... wow. Christian Ziegler is a rather dumpy fellow. Christian's wife, Bridget, is absolutely beautiful, particularly for a woman in her 40s. I don't know if this was supposed to be a hit piece, but the screencaps of her making faces at a board meeting sums it up. But now you tell me that not only does the portly fellow have a stunning wife, he was apparently regularly finding threesomes with her? I swear, if this whole thing was flipped around, the Blue Tribe would just be making fun of the Red Tribe for being jealous of Christian's life.
This feels like such a stretch.
The central innovation of the Florida school curriculum lockdown controversy was the right starting to call anyone on the left who tried to help trans teens or teach anyone that gay people are a thing that exists 'groomers'.
Furnishing minors with alcohol and/or drugs so that you can lure them to your house and have drunken parties with them is quintessential actual grooming behavior, like, it's literally what actual groomers do to actual minors to actually statutorily rape them.
Which, I'm not saying that full sequence of events necessarily happened here, but come on. If your side is going to make the entire argument center on who is or isn't a groomer, 'my boyfriend and I throw drunken parties every week for local minors where we get wasted with them and get in psychical scuffles with them' cannot possibly be spun as a good look.
It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin -- I do think that the confusion is related to a misapplication of the (artificial) Red/Blue team dichotomy. If it were "Moms for Jesus" or something I could buy some hypocrisy-based attack, but she seems to be living well within her moral framework here?
Well, what's true is, 'arguments as soldiers' is partially an inevitable result of our two-party system, and in some cases is actually a sadly effective and pragmatic tactic that you're sort of forced to play into if you don't want the other side to beat you with it.
To whit: You can say that the Red/Blue team dichotomy is artificial, but the Democrats/Republicans dichotomy is not. People trying to have political stances and agendas that don't fall along that dichotomy may be perfectly valid and reasonable and good, but they're also in a very real way irrelevant to teh exercise of power. The person appointing the next Supreme Court Justice is going to have either a (D) or an (R) next to his name, and that's what will determine how the game of politics cashes out in actually affecting people's lives for the next 50 years.
So: Sure, Moms for Liberty and the Ron Desantis (or whoever else you want to use as a stand-in for the 'teachers are groomers' movement) are different people with different personal politics, so to an extent it's not surprising or scandalous at all if their rhetoric disagrees with each other in fundamentally contradictory ways.
ON THE OTHER HAND: They are both republican-aligned movements that are trying to promote Republican policies and put more (R)s next to more names in government.
If the broader republican movement is trying to convince us they're right using two different arguments, and those two arguments directly contradict each other, doesn't that mean that there must be some flaw in their platform, the the broader ideology overall is inconsistent and misleading in some way, that something is rotten in Denmark, and anyone who is on the R side should be noticing that some of their soldiers are pointing their guns the wrong way and get confused and self-reflective about it?
Even if the two arguments are reasonable on their own and are aligned with the ideology of the individual person making them, the fact that both are then being taken up and spun into the larger Republican narrative alongside each other, indicates a flaw in that platform.
(and, I shouldn't even have to say this, but obviously this all applies ceteris parabis to Democrats and the left, this is a general problems with politics)
You misunderstand -- I'm saying that this is not an issue that cuts cleanly across party lines. There are many left-ish people who are not comfortable with the orthodoxy vis a vis trans issues, and there are Republicans (I'm thinking fiscally conservative urban types) who are probably fine with it.
For most of these people it is not important enough to impact their vote, so long as it stays off their lawn -- but putting it into schools plants it squarely on the lawn of every parent. So we shouldn't be at all surprised if the opposition does not fulfill the classic grumpy church-mom stereotype that is typically in the drivers' seat at socially conservative organizations. (say, anti abortion ones)
Well yeah, because these are liberal organizations in opposition, not traditionalist ones (who look like that) or progressive ones (who also look like that, except with an unnatural hair color).
In this case, the liberals have finally started to notice just how rotten the skin suit of sex-positivity progressives are currently wearing is. (30 years too late, but better late than never.) And while they're still kind of stupid- the ultimate way to defend their "we're banning these books from the library" is to argue from slave morality and insist that they actually be good enough to justify their content (1984 wouldn't be the same commentary it is without the depictions of sex therein; if you think they're either gratuitous or disrespectful to women, then you
are part of the problemdon't understand Orwell)- I'm not surprised that a faction that's been taking its victory a little too much for granted hasn't put on its best face yet (not that it can; liberals don't believe in best faces).More options
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And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula discussing LGBT, trans and civil rights issues:
...
So painting them as being about Liberty in any meaningful sense of the word, other than Liberty being a red-tribe codeword, seems patently dishonest. Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe. Some of the shit that was banned in Florida schools a few years ago was hilariously inoffensive.
As for the OP, whatever. I don't really care. But if people bothered to look at the context, I'd expect most to at least get a chuckle out of the fact that people clutching their pearls at the idea of their child being exposed to the idea that gay people exist then get schwasted with them on the weekend in between threesomes.
I agree that it's a bit ironic, but I wouldn't go so far as to say dishonest. In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' -- school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all. I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum -- although they seem a bit nutty and I'm sure that I wouldn't want to defend their specific choices of books that should not be taught in school. (much less whatever straw version of them that the D.B. has cooked up)
Indeed; mask mandates are also pro-liberty as they give people the freedom to not worry about getting COVID in the train. Censorship gives LGBT and minorities freedom from hate speech. Jailing Donald Trump will give us freedom from fascism and neo-nazism.
Censorship is inherently illiberal however you try and dress it up. That doesn't make it bad. There's such an aversion to censorship that when we actually decide we want to engage in it we have to lie to ourselves and dress it up as some freedom or another.
Better argument for the curriculum. Bad argument for book bans. Nobody is forcing your child to look at those books any more than anyone was forcing the other high school kids to go to that party.
Whew. Good luck with that one, man.
I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.
The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?
You don't seem to be engaging with Chrispratt's initial point about the dishonesty of the org name. If the 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' is liberty, then anything can be liberty. Can you name an example of a political issue that cannot be framed as liberty in this way? I agree with you that determining curriculum is not anti-liberty. I disagree that it is honest to call it pro-liberty.
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Hell, the books aren't even censored. If somebody wants to go buy their drawn child porn at Borders for their kid, they'll get the full experience.
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This in a way reminds me of Bastiat’s claim against statists. He said something to the effect if we object to the public funding of education the statist believes we object to education.
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But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. Being pro-liberty does not require them to support the woke reading list over the maga reading list.
I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .
I wouldn't claim it as apolitical, and I wish you wouldn't call it my side.
In some cases I'd agree with you, in others I would disagree. In still others we would get bogged down by semantics about 'making things political.' I could argue that children sitting at desks is a weapon of the white supremacist state to keep down PoC and that they need to go, and MFL would fervently oppose that. In this example I'd argue that the MFL position isn't political at all, it's just...keeping desks in school. The same way that for some of these books, I don't think it should be controversial at all that they're available in the library.
But all of that is somewhat beside the point. The comment I replied to was describing MFL as if they're some objective and principled group that supports liberty and freedom of choice. The reality is that they're anything but.
Jkf wasn't calling mfl objective and principled - hell like he said it says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin.
Moms for Liberty, not principled autists for liberty. The idea they are principled and objective is an expectation only blue tribers hold, red tribers don't have to lie to themselves about women to that extent. I mean, it's pretty bad for red tribe too don't get me wrong, but not at the level of expecting a group of Floridian moms to be principled and objective.
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Chris has me blocked so this is me mostly yelling at clouds, but:
Removing books from a school curriculum cannot in any reasonable way be considered "banning"
The linked article does not link to primary sources, where I can confirm MFL is portrayed accurately. The link to Galileo, MLK, and sea horses do not lead to where the claim was made, but to years old articles from the Daily Beast itself, about Galileo, MLK, and sea horses.
In addition, given how gay people (who I have effectively zero problems with) have been perpetually used as a wedge to justify the normalization and protection of the trans phenomenon, I would be terribly close-minded to not consider expelling them from course books if I thought it ultimately wasn't worth the tradeoff, at least under these conditions.
If Dems keep up the taunts of "So now what, you're gonna deny that gay people exist?", they may end up having a real Fucked-Around-Found-Out moment. There's a lot of things I might be tempted to sacrifice if they're going to be cynically propped up as shields against me.
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'Deplatforming is not censorship' is a stance I held and defended vociferously during the Cancel Culture debates, but I think the tide has sailed on that one, as they say.
For clarity, am I supposed to pretend you aren't who people say you are or not?
You do you fam.
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It seems to me there is a very big difference between a public institution endorsing controversial things for kids and calls to deplatform (eg remove from Twitter or prevent someone from speaking at a university).
I can be for the freedom to engage in consensual sex for money. I can at the same time believe that institutions can try to discourage prostitution. Similarly I can be against kids having sex and making that illegal without there being a contradiction.
Sure, there are principled reasons to treat the situations differently, of course.
I was just responding to a very specific form of semantic argument about how to define words like 'censorship' and 'banning' and so forth. Arguments that don't rely on those semantic distinctions and the emotional associations we have to them are not affected.
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Yeah, it was a wild ride to see the same people argue for cutting off access of willing adults to messages they want to hear, suddenly turn around to declare it's beyond the pale for parents to curate what their children get to see.
Sorry, which platforms that have zero children on them were people being deplatformed from?
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