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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.
I never understand the hypocrisy angle, and it always seems to me to be used 100% in bad faith.
I'm a parent and have several vices that I'm not proud of. I don't want my children to have the same vices, so I teach them that those vices are wrong. No parent wants their kids to grow up hooked on anger, alcohol, drugs, or porn. For each of my vices, if I could go back in time and prevent myself from ever getting hooked in the first place, I would do it, even for the vices I "enjoy." It would have been better to never have known those corrupting pleasures. But I can't. Sometimes it feels like having a chronic disease. So I scratch the itch every so often and do my best to endure the temptation otherwise.
Even if the Zieglers don't feel guilty about having threesomes and don't intend to stop, I don't see how it undermines their organization. Perfect morality and zero hypocrisy is an intentionally impossible demand. I don't think the Zieglers believe that having threesomes is morally preferable to not having them. It's possible to realize that you have a broken moral compass and at the same time to work hard to ensure that the people you love most in the world, your children, don't end up like you. So this pearl clutching seems ridiculous to me. Let he who is with sin cast the first stone.
To more fairly apportion the blame though -- the reason these hit pieces are published is because there's an unfortunate section of the red tribe who "thank God that they were not made like other men" and will drop support for this group over this. Luckily I think this group is shrinking, but it must still be effective -- they're certainly not publishing these to convince blue tribers.
I am Catholic from a Catholic culture. Damn, I would be very surprised if the conservatives did not engaged in drinking games and threesomes!
I always found hilarious how, in Protestants and Anglo-saxon countries, you are expected to behave in private as you behave with your public persona. I understand that the accusation of hypocrisy are easy to do in these cases and are a fruit too sweet to not pick it, but still it does not registers in my brain.
Does the Catholic culture not teach that God sees all, even your private life, and that it is God's judgment that matters, not the public's?
Yes, but it also about one of the main differences between Protestants and Catholics, the division and opposition between Faith and Works.
In Catholic teachings, salvation come both by faith and work. It implies also that, if you are not a good Catholic (as everyone else, because we are all sinners) at least you can find salvation by work (helping your communities, joining the public rites etc).
That is why you encounter two peculiar phenomena here that I do not see in protestant countries;
That is why it is absolutely hilarious when someone try to import protestant behavior here, like intersectional feminists trying to persuade ours that we need to burn churches, or local politicians (often left-wing) yelling at the population that drinking or partying or whoring is immoral, and being systematically ignored.
...
You've still gotta go to confession and genuinely repent man, and that comes with making genuine attempts at not fornicating.
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