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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.
This is a situation where it’s illustrative to look at the alternative behavioral choice. A 17 year old whose parents do not allow her to host a party with drinking will instead attend parties where no responsible adults are present. These parties will probably include drugs and sexual harassment by strangers.
The “don’t leave” was made to sound like they were trapping the kids but it was certainly more about preventing them from driving drunk. Which, again, some percentage of teen drinkers will do after attending a party without adult supervision.
That's what I find so interesting about the situation: that argument of "harm reduction" is exactly the argument that Moms for Liberty's opponents are typically making. MFL (and its allies) largely argue against early/LGBT/overly-explicit sex-ed on the basis that kids shouldn't do that so they shouldn't know about it. Liberal arguments are that kids will do it anyway so they should be educated about it so they do it safely. We've precisely flipped our valences.
On parental control: did each child (30-40 by police report) show up with a signed permission slip? Was each parent aware of where their child was going and what they were doing? Or were the teens mostly there without their parents' permission?
You see where this all gets slippery, I hope. I see the harm reduction argument she would make, but teen drinking is also not an inevitability for all kids, and making it less convenient makes it less common. Marginal kids are drinking/not-drinking based on how easy it is to get alcohol and get a place to drink it, even if some kids are going to find a way regardless. Much like it's obvious to me that doing too much PRIDE bullshit in the classroom will probably increase the amount of homosexuals coming out of that school marginally, even if there will still be gay kids if you don't do any PRIDE education; holding regular ragers at your house probably causes some marginal kids to drink who would not have otherwise been drinking, because now they're invited to a party where otherwise they might not have been or because they feel comfortable going there or because their parents are ok with them going to a party with Mrs. Schillinger, even if it is true that some kids would still drink regardless. I was drunk less than five times in high school, based on my later behavior in college I've not doubt I would have been more likely to drink had there been a convenient Party House in our school system.
I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory. Attending some wine mom's parties are not. Likewise, introducing kindergarteners to the gender/sexuality spectrum is way off the fucking mark of when that lesson would be age appropriate, if you agreed it was appropriate at all for compulsory K-12 education. Having teenagers drink at roughly the same age teenagers have always drank as long as humans had alcohol gets a big fat meh from me.
Source for the above claim about gender spectrum bullshit in kindergarten
No, it isn't. If you don't want your kids going to public school, you don't have to send them.
You are required to do something that you call education, and public schools are the lowest friction way to do that. But the unschoolers get away with it, you can too.
You are required to do X. X costs a lot of money. The government will provide free X and will generally make it the easy default.
What percentage of people choose not government X?
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