This is creepily similar to Russia circa 10+ years ago with its "gay propaganda" and "child protection" laws, and strong government support for the church.
MAGA is just United Russia with a different supreme leader. The end-game is the same - a vaguely lipservice-Christian[1] autocracy.
When they tell you of all the insane shit they want, believe them. They are an existential threat to the republic, because they don't place any value any of the immutable principles of the republic, and will sell all of them up the river to see their guy win.
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[1] Their actual behavior is incredibly un-Christ-like.
It has similarity in that there is a form of alliance between predominantly white fundamentalist catholics and evangelical christians and Trump which is embodied by Vance which could be seen as mimicking Putin proximity with the Orthodox church. They both use their churches to justify a civilizational agenda and frame autocracy as protection.
Still, there are several major differences one bieng the patriarch supporting Putin while the Catholic church mostly opposes Trump.
The interesting part has more to do with the ideological fundation than with the electoral reality. It's not about winning a few percentage points, it's about the ground work for their political vision.
Like the Great Rus and Kirill give a cultural justification for Putin war and anchors them in an historical framework where they make sense, Trump (I mean Vance really) is using the evangelists and the threat of a perceived shift in what makes America America has a justification for his policies.
It’s honestly terrifying that efforts to ban books and restrict what teachers can teach have made such a big comeback in the US. When I was in school, we always discussed banned books from the perspective of “we used to ban things that made people uncomfortable in the bad old days, but that could never happen in the 21st century”. Obviously that glossed over a lot of nuance, but it still shocks me as an adult seeing repression we discussed only from a historical perspective make its way back into the legislature.
Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.
I deeply oppose MAGA but the idea of winning through the take over of the cultural institution - school, universities, the media - has been theorized by Gramsci followers like Marcuse and Horkheimer.
In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.
Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.
So, following your logic, I assume you violently oppose restricting access to Social Media? After all, young people are, according to you, supposed to be exposed to frightening ideas. So, bring the beheadings on!!!
I struggle with the federal government's power over all this. Let the states and local jurisdictions decide. Put in guardrails so that those local jurisdictions don't become corrupted, but at the same time we should empower people to place their children in education systems that don't ultimately falter to who's empowered in the fed.
You may be okay with your children reading some books. That's great, and you should be able to find the right school districts for them, and I should be able to do the same to ensure my children don't read through explicit material without any form of parental oversight.
> I struggle with the federal government's power over all this.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
"Federal funding" is a misnomer. All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers. So when the federal government takes your money and then says "you can only have it back if you do X" they are not actually funding something, they are imposing a fine for not doing it.
If you want to paint an abstraction layer on top of it then all you have to do is make it symmetrical. The federal government is extracting money from the state's tax base that would otherwise be available to the state and conditioning its return on doing something, which is a financial penalty against the state for not doing it.
It's a fairly simple equation: What's the thing you'd have to do (or stop doing) in order to receive (or not pay) the money?
You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.
My point was your initial premise is wrong: “All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers”. There’s plenty of instances where the federal government takes and redistributes tax dollars, from person to person, or state to state. Calling this particular instance a fine, but not every other instance, is wrong.
Could you claim any book with boys being different to girls breaches the sex talk rules? I'm just wondering how you could use this law to show how ridiculous it is.
Age verification (porn bans), VPN bans, restrictions on 3D printing - all of these are other policies, both proposed and already in law, that make additional violations of individual rights easier to pass, because these things have been normalized. It’s why the slippery slope isn’t always a logical fallacy.
There are always going to be fights about what gets taught in schools, and what isn't. It's an inevitable consequence of government run schools. I don't agree that it is a free speech issue.
Children do not have the full set of adult rights.
No need to emphasize "government" -- It's an inevitable consequence of schools.
Private secular schools have fights about what gets taught.
Private religious schools have fights about what gets taught.
Children have more rights in public schools than they have in private schools. Tinker v. Des Moines: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
These policies are symptoms of the authoritarian zeitgeist, not its causes. We will keep getting more and more of them until people start believing in democracy again. In that sense, I don't think it's a slippery slope, since one policy doesn't automatically lead to another.
1. Ban exposing minors to "sexual material." Who would be against that? Surely only weirdos would push to expose kids to sex and pornography. Make sure this gets challenged in court and that it's found constitutional under 1A.
2. Define things we don't like as sexual material. Obviously being gay is entirely about sex, just like being trans is about genitals. You don't even have to speculate that this is the motive—it's defined explicitly in the bill.
3. Boom, you found a legal way to ban what would otherwise be a pretty obvious 1A violation.
This is the public institutions half, it's harder to swing a bill like this for private institutions which is why that's handled with age verification bills. That way it's not technically a ban.
Anyone who wants can look on archive.org to see a copy of Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer book, often cited as one of the "most banned" books out there. It is apparently intended for minors.
And it is pornographic, check page 168. Just far enough into the book so that any adult checking it first might not notice and permit it.
Finally, if I check the House bill, will I discover that instead of "banning books" it just insists that such books are restricted to adults at public libraries and only insofar as that public library receives grants from the feds?
So totally cool if an atheist government came to power and started banning the Bible because of all the violence and rape depicted that’s in there (hey - it’s only if you take federal funding)? Or you’ll say it’s totally different because the stories about the Bible are how to be morale thus providing context? Context you conveniently omit from your example which covers all kinds of sexuality and how to navigate that with all the other romantic feelings. Children in my class btw regularly drew and wrote more obscene things.
Why do I feel like the people doing this for gay and trans materials would be the first to object people trying to apply it to religious texts?
Look, I asked when I was like 10 for a book and the library warned my dad it was intended for adults. I think the most he asked me was if I was sure / why I wanted to read the book but ultimately left it to me. Children picking their reading materials is critically important both as a skill of learning how to pick and how to deal and digest the content you encounter.
And here’s something uncomfortable. Unlike religious texts, which are forced onto children, no one was forcing kids to read this book. Kids were searching it out because they were curious about sexuality and trying to understand their feelings which means the age of those “kids” was probably 10+ when they were probably perfectly capable of processing these issues with the support of mature and rational adults. The problem as always are the adults in this situation who demand the rest of society “protect” their children from the ideas out there in world instead of raising resilient kids, which is an insane position honestly.
Finally, what about all the other books that aren’t like the one you pointed out? I feel like among the books gender queer is an exception in terms of explicitness and the real thread that connects the banned books is what they talk about, not how.
Even though you’ve widely missed the point, ironically complaining that others can barely read, let’s engage with your argument to show how it’s not so easy.
Libraries today carry the Bible. Libraries, as non profits, also get grants from various entities including local, state, and federal governments. So then is the argument we should we then ban all government funding for libraries? I’m going to assume your response is to say “no, just don’t use federal dollars for this stuff” although it’s not wild of someone of your presumed political persuasion to also be in favor of this option. Is that easy though? It’s not like there’s a magical fairy that attributes “book A was purchased from this funding stream and book B from this other”. “No no” I can hear you saying. You do this with block grants - that solves the mixing problem. Except it doesn’t - I have pool A of money from the federal government and pool B from some other source. I normally might use A and B equally to buy some books but now I just buy the banned books from B and A to by the rest. So now I’m not using federal dollars but I’m still buying all the same books with the same input stream of money. If you’re literate you understand this is the exact same problem we have with “this tax or penalty or whatever will be used to fund schools” which is meaningless because they just then decrease the school funding by that new revenue amount, thus effectively funneling it into the general fund.
> There’s no need to be reading the bible, a comic book, a book about being gender queer, etc; when students can barely read to begin with.
If you're talking about “can barely” read it’s important to be precise about what you mean because excluding the pandemic, scores have been pretty constant over the past 20 years. And by the way, reading different texts with different subject matters with different ways of understanding and interpreting the subject matter is precisely important for developing reading skills.
But you’re right - for those in this thread who are struggling with basic reading and critical thinking skills to understand the points people make in the comments, maybe we should recommend them some starting materials.
You’re overcomplicating a simple issue of budgetary standards to avoid the actual point. Calling a federal funding restriction a "ban" is a massive reach. If I refuse to pay for my kid to buy a certain video game, I haven’t "banned" the game from existence; I’ve just exercised my right to decide how my money is spent.
Your "Pool A and Pool B" shell game theory is exactly why these federal restrictions are being introduced. If schools are just shuffling money around to bypass community standards, then the federal government has every right to put a hard "no" on its portion of the tab. It’s called fiscal accountability.
Also, the argument that "reading anything helps literacy" is a weak excuse for including sexually oriented or gender-theory materials in a taxpayer-funded elementary curriculum. If the goal is literacy, we should be funding proven phonics programs and the classics, not social experiments. People aren't "missing the point" just because they don't want to subsidize your specific social preferences with their tax dollars.
The bill specifically carves out text for "preserving instruction in science, classic literature, art, and world religionS.
That page (and the rest of the book) is far less pornographic than the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to, and regularly shared between ourselves, and is incredibly tame.
I also find it very telling that you'd consider what is on page 168 pornographic in the first place, sexually explicit maybe, but it is not intended to arouse or cause sexual excitement, it's meant to portray a lived experience.
The sexual repression in the United States is part of the reason why so many people grow up with the wrong ideas around sex and why teen pregnancy is such a big thing. Open discussion about these things (including gender and gender identity in that) is the best way to allow kids to grow up to be functional adults that are well informed and able to have critical thought about how and what they do and are far less likely to fall prey to predators and people who want to do them harm due to their lack of experience.
>That page (and the rest of the book) is far less pornographic than the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to, and regularly shared between ourselves, and is incredibly tame.
And you'd be ok with federal funds to be used to purchase "actual porn" and place it in schools?
The bill is about not using federal funds for this material.
> And it is pornographic, check page 168. Just far enough into the book so that any adult checking it first might not notice and permit it.
Is your position that a proportionate response is a national book ban - to violate the 1A with a law that permanently, negatively impacts millions of Americans ?
you know, every time i see this book cited as the worst example of what the book banners want to ban, i check it out. Skimming to the "pornographic parts", i'm reminded just how repressed we are to find this repulsive. You should be uncomfortable when learning new things. Sexuality is not pornography. It's certainly more extreme than anything I was ever exposed to in my youth, but i'm sure this could have been massively helpful to a few kids in my high school, and probably de-stigmatizing for a few others. Certainly worth pissing off a few parents.
>I'm sure this could have been massively helpful to a few kids in my high school, and probably de-stigmatizing for a few others. Certainly worth pissing off a few parents.
That's great, then they can go to the public library and read it. Hopefully a teacher or guidance counsler can recommend it. It doesn't mean the federal government needs to pay for it to be in a K-5 school.
>Hopefully a teacher or guidance counsler can recommend it.
Not according to this bill.
>...prohibiting use of funds under the act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials...
The conflation of sexuality and pornography is one of the most harmful Puritan ideologies to persist into modern American culture. Speaking as a recovering Catholic who grew up in an extremely sexually repressive household.
As far as gender and sexuality specifically, nearly every aspect of what I did and said was analyzed and judged as "gay" or "not gay" by my guardians, gay also serving as a proxy for non-masculinity... and thus I could not for example have long hair (as apparently only gay men have long hair, and routinely pointing out that Jesus himself had long hair frequently led to punishment or physical abuse). From music taste to choice in friends to choice in language or books, to how I dressed.
In fact, I was told that men are never supposed to cry or show weakness, and my grandfather would quite literally beat the living shit out of me on a very frequent basis from the age of five, savagely beating me with metal objects and whips and belts, anything he could get his hands on, proclaiming that I would continue to get beaten until I stopped crying and took it "like a man". This was a routine part of my cult training as a child, getting beaten until my insides were dried out from crying and I physically could not cry anymore; until my diaphragm was convulsing from the pain. If I'd been found with a book like Kobabe's Gender Queer, I probably would have been put in the hospital.
I wouldn't wish my experience on the most evil of men. I absolutely understand why many who experienced gender violence in their youth simply decide to leave the entire concept of gender behind. Personally however, my path has been to unapologetically be myself and help other young men understand that they can embrace and define masculinity in whichever way they choose. To take back the reigns of masculinity from violent, sexually represeed psychopaths. The number of pissed off parents racked up along the way is just a measure of my success in this endeavor.
I realize I'm coming into a back-and-forth that grew organically, but... how does this intent tie back to a What Justifies Censorship argument? It sounds like:
1. If I think what they say is bad for youths
2. And it seems the original author thought it would influence youths in the way I don't like
3. Then it can be censored
Is that it? Because if so... well, I've got some bad news about the Bible, and that's not even getting into the trustworthiness of the agency making determination 1 and 2.
It's good to remind Americans that like 20-30% of us blindly support trump and not much will change that(sunk cost). Another 10-20% support him cuz he might hurt the correct people and that's worth it. Another few percent support him cuz he's a rich guy and to a lot of Americans $$$=good person.
> prohibiting use of funds under the act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.
"For other purposes" is going to be doing a Herculean effort of carrying for the next few years if this passes. for example:
>This bill includes “lewd” and “lascivious” dancing as prohibited topics or themes.
I guess we learned nothing from Footloose.
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And yes, for a TLDR on the article and the general situation of this the last decease or so: such book bans tends to be a roundabout way to associate "sexually oriented" topics with the trans community. Sometimes the entire LGBT umbrella is hit.
Pre-epstien, I'd be surprised that such people care much more about what goes on with a person's state of being than the person themselves. But it really seems like every accusation is a confession.
Didn't a bunch of kids in NYC get STIs cuz of this like a decade or two ago? A bunch of rabbis were biting baby dicks, oh sorry I mean performing a religious ceremony, and giving kids STIs.
The rep who introduced the bill quoted Hitler in a speech 2 days into her term. And then she spent the next 5 years advocating for horrible, repressive legislation. Disgusting.
"Stop the Sexualization of Children Act" yeah right, because the biggest sexual threats to children are identity affirming books and not the paedophile sex trafficking networks run by the elites which have seen zero prosecutions in the US. At this point the US government is a total joke and laughing stock for the rest of the world.
Trying to parse this comparison. Are you comparing the withholding of federal funds for certain classes of books to a revolution that installed an Islamic theocracy in Iran?
Can you elaborate on how you think these two things are comparable?
The former is "tax dollars can't be spent on books that depict certain content". The latter is "a revolution lead by Islamic theocrats installs a brutally repressive islamist regime that transformed an otherwise western country into a hellscape". You think these things are the same?
But more generally, all those little book bans in various forms, explicit anti-diversity and xenophobic rules, undermining the right to vote for the specific groups of citizens, etc. add up and point in a specific direction. There are quite a few popular people who would be up for a theocracy, and a lot of openly fascist people down with the brutally repressive part. Consider how the sexual content in the Bible doesn't normally get included in those laws - like it's not the sexual content that's actually the target here...
Nothing happens out of nowhere. We're at "concentration camps are accepted by many people" level at the moment. The direction of government is obvious, the speed and possible success are still up for debate.
Okay but this isn't a book ban. I'm not understanding what you're saying. This bill doesn't prohibit these books from being printed or sold or possessed. Did you even read it? Seems like you're pivoting to "prison camps for people in the country illegally means we'll have a theocracy soon". I'm not sure you've actually thought this through.
I know it doesn't prohibit printing and selling them... yet. It doesn't really matter, because this proposal for ban in schools doesn't exist in vacuum. This specific change in itself is not that important. But on the background of what's happening in general, what's not happening in terms of kids sexual safety, and which group is mostly involved in the whole issue - that's important.
And you somehow changed the "concentration camps" to "prison camps for people in the country illegally". I meant exactly what I wrote.
You are either completely uneducated on world history or willfully ignorant.
There is no limit on how far back the clock is allowed to turn.
Things that will be targeted:
* homosexuals (often the first)
* non whites
* interracial marriage
* voting rights
* voting right for women
* women’s suffrage
* education for girls
* no fault divorce
* freedom of speech
* freedom of mobility (like to leave the country)
* trade unions / labor unions
* Freemasons (Oddfellows, etc)
* practicing a religion other than Christianity
* environmental regulations
* public lands, federal parks
* etc etc etc
Look not to China or North Korea for the operating model but East Germany during the Cold War. There was a massive surveillance operation in place then and technology has only improved.
Freedom is not guaranteed and for most of human history was not a goal.
Your list is missing Nazi parties somewhere between the non whites and voting rights. And for most of the countries in the world - gun owners at the top of the list. Just speaking from historical perspective.
Weimar Germany was very socially liberal, homosexuality was socially accepted, legal rights for women were the same as for men, and all of that definitely went away quite quickly.
> Sorry, the toothpaste doesn't go back into the tube with social issues. Interracial marriage isn't going away either lol.
Sorry, that's just naive, overconfident liberalism. There is no mandatory "direction" to social change. Given enough time, every bit of that toothpaste will go back in that tube, and enough more time it will come out again, only to go back in after a spell. And it won't be an oscillation. It'll be some weird path none of us can predict.
This is creepily similar to Russia circa 10+ years ago with its "gay propaganda" and "child protection" laws, and strong government support for the church.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/11/russia-law-ban...
MAGA is just United Russia with a different supreme leader. The end-game is the same - a vaguely lipservice-Christian[1] autocracy.
When they tell you of all the insane shit they want, believe them. They are an existential threat to the republic, because they don't place any value any of the immutable principles of the republic, and will sell all of them up the river to see their guy win.
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[1] Their actual behavior is incredibly un-Christ-like.
They're fast tracking.
I hope they don't start a youth movement like the scouts and name it after their leader.
Doesn't have the same ring to it in English.
ICE Scouts? :)
Where is a safe place to go for this
Safety is an illusion.
Build up yourself
The Trumpets?
It has similarity in that there is a form of alliance between predominantly white fundamentalist catholics and evangelical christians and Trump which is embodied by Vance which could be seen as mimicking Putin proximity with the Orthodox church. They both use their churches to justify a civilizational agenda and frame autocracy as protection.
Still, there are several major differences one bieng the patriarch supporting Putin while the Catholic church mostly opposes Trump.
Catholics are a minority denomination in America, and an especially small minority in the relevant states.
Russian Orthodoxy, on the other hand, encompasses ~95% of Russian Christians, and there is no organized alternative to it.
... Also, Trump 2024 won Catholics by 12 points (While 2020 and 2016 was a 50/50 split.)
Whatever the church's views are, unlike the evangelicals, it's not dictating to its members how they should vote.
The interesting part has more to do with the ideological fundation than with the electoral reality. It's not about winning a few percentage points, it's about the ground work for their political vision.
Like the Great Rus and Kirill give a cultural justification for Putin war and anchors them in an historical framework where they make sense, Trump (I mean Vance really) is using the evangelists and the threat of a perceived shift in what makes America America has a justification for his policies.
It's pervasive throughout Project 2025.
It’s honestly terrifying that efforts to ban books and restrict what teachers can teach have made such a big comeback in the US. When I was in school, we always discussed banned books from the perspective of “we used to ban things that made people uncomfortable in the bad old days, but that could never happen in the 21st century”. Obviously that glossed over a lot of nuance, but it still shocks me as an adult seeing repression we discussed only from a historical perspective make its way back into the legislature.
Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.
My recollection is discussing banned books from the perspective of "people have done and still do this elsewhere in the US, but we don't do it here".
I deeply oppose MAGA but the idea of winning through the take over of the cultural institution - school, universities, the media - has been theorized by Gramsci followers like Marcuse and Horkheimer.
In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.
Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.
In the real world each and every one of us has to function at a workplace with people from every race and religion.
So, following your logic, I assume you violently oppose restricting access to Social Media? After all, young people are, according to you, supposed to be exposed to frightening ideas. So, bring the beheadings on!!!
I struggle with the federal government's power over all this. Let the states and local jurisdictions decide. Put in guardrails so that those local jurisdictions don't become corrupted, but at the same time we should empower people to place their children in education systems that don't ultimately falter to who's empowered in the fed.
You may be okay with your children reading some books. That's great, and you should be able to find the right school districts for them, and I should be able to do the same to ensure my children don't read through explicit material without any form of parental oversight.
> I struggle with the federal government's power over all this.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
I mean, it's an act of power to restrict funding (which is why I didn't call it a ban)
> act of power to restrict funding
Federal funding. States and districts are free to fund whatever they want.
"Federal funding" is a misnomer. All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers. So when the federal government takes your money and then says "you can only have it back if you do X" they are not actually funding something, they are imposing a fine for not doing it.
This only works if you pretend fiscal transfers aren't a thing.
If you want to paint an abstraction layer on top of it then all you have to do is make it symmetrical. The federal government is extracting money from the state's tax base that would otherwise be available to the state and conditioning its return on doing something, which is a financial penalty against the state for not doing it.
Ok, and when they take money from my paycheck and give it to a strung-out, unemployed junkie who paid 0 federal taxes, what are they fining me for?
It's a fairly simple equation: What's the thing you'd have to do (or stop doing) in order to receive (or not pay) the money?
You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.
My point was your initial premise is wrong: “All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers”. There’s plenty of instances where the federal government takes and redistributes tax dollars, from person to person, or state to state. Calling this particular instance a fine, but not every other instance, is wrong.
Could you claim any book with boys being different to girls breaches the sex talk rules? I'm just wondering how you could use this law to show how ridiculous it is.
Age verification (porn bans), VPN bans, restrictions on 3D printing - all of these are other policies, both proposed and already in law, that make additional violations of individual rights easier to pass, because these things have been normalized. It’s why the slippery slope isn’t always a logical fallacy.
There are always going to be fights about what gets taught in schools, and what isn't. It's an inevitable consequence of government run schools. I don't agree that it is a free speech issue.
Children do not have the full set of adult rights.
No need to emphasize "government" -- It's an inevitable consequence of schools.
Private secular schools have fights about what gets taught.
Private religious schools have fights about what gets taught.
Children have more rights in public schools than they have in private schools. Tinker v. Des Moines: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
These policies are symptoms of the authoritarian zeitgeist, not its causes. We will keep getting more and more of them until people start believing in democracy again. In that sense, I don't think it's a slippery slope, since one policy doesn't automatically lead to another.
And we're finally here on the national stage.
1. Ban exposing minors to "sexual material." Who would be against that? Surely only weirdos would push to expose kids to sex and pornography. Make sure this gets challenged in court and that it's found constitutional under 1A.
2. Define things we don't like as sexual material. Obviously being gay is entirely about sex, just like being trans is about genitals. You don't even have to speculate that this is the motive—it's defined explicitly in the bill.
3. Boom, you found a legal way to ban what would otherwise be a pretty obvious 1A violation.
This is the public institutions half, it's harder to swing a bill like this for private institutions which is why that's handled with age verification bills. That way it's not technically a ban.
Anyone who wants can look on archive.org to see a copy of Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer book, often cited as one of the "most banned" books out there. It is apparently intended for minors.
And it is pornographic, check page 168. Just far enough into the book so that any adult checking it first might not notice and permit it.
Finally, if I check the House bill, will I discover that instead of "banning books" it just insists that such books are restricted to adults at public libraries and only insofar as that public library receives grants from the feds?
So totally cool if an atheist government came to power and started banning the Bible because of all the violence and rape depicted that’s in there (hey - it’s only if you take federal funding)? Or you’ll say it’s totally different because the stories about the Bible are how to be morale thus providing context? Context you conveniently omit from your example which covers all kinds of sexuality and how to navigate that with all the other romantic feelings. Children in my class btw regularly drew and wrote more obscene things.
Why do I feel like the people doing this for gay and trans materials would be the first to object people trying to apply it to religious texts?
Look, I asked when I was like 10 for a book and the library warned my dad it was intended for adults. I think the most he asked me was if I was sure / why I wanted to read the book but ultimately left it to me. Children picking their reading materials is critically important both as a skill of learning how to pick and how to deal and digest the content you encounter.
And here’s something uncomfortable. Unlike religious texts, which are forced onto children, no one was forcing kids to read this book. Kids were searching it out because they were curious about sexuality and trying to understand their feelings which means the age of those “kids” was probably 10+ when they were probably perfectly capable of processing these issues with the support of mature and rational adults. The problem as always are the adults in this situation who demand the rest of society “protect” their children from the ideas out there in world instead of raising resilient kids, which is an insane position honestly.
Finally, what about all the other books that aren’t like the one you pointed out? I feel like among the books gender queer is an exception in terms of explicitness and the real thread that connects the banned books is what they talk about, not how.
Easy: federal tax dollars should not be buying the bible, whatever book is on this ban list, or anything of the sort.
There’s no need to be reading the bible, a comic book, a book about being gender queer, etc; when students can barely read to begin with.
Even though you’ve widely missed the point, ironically complaining that others can barely read, let’s engage with your argument to show how it’s not so easy.
Libraries today carry the Bible. Libraries, as non profits, also get grants from various entities including local, state, and federal governments. So then is the argument we should we then ban all government funding for libraries? I’m going to assume your response is to say “no, just don’t use federal dollars for this stuff” although it’s not wild of someone of your presumed political persuasion to also be in favor of this option. Is that easy though? It’s not like there’s a magical fairy that attributes “book A was purchased from this funding stream and book B from this other”. “No no” I can hear you saying. You do this with block grants - that solves the mixing problem. Except it doesn’t - I have pool A of money from the federal government and pool B from some other source. I normally might use A and B equally to buy some books but now I just buy the banned books from B and A to by the rest. So now I’m not using federal dollars but I’m still buying all the same books with the same input stream of money. If you’re literate you understand this is the exact same problem we have with “this tax or penalty or whatever will be used to fund schools” which is meaningless because they just then decrease the school funding by that new revenue amount, thus effectively funneling it into the general fund.
> There’s no need to be reading the bible, a comic book, a book about being gender queer, etc; when students can barely read to begin with.
If you're talking about “can barely” read it’s important to be precise about what you mean because excluding the pandemic, scores have been pretty constant over the past 20 years. And by the way, reading different texts with different subject matters with different ways of understanding and interpreting the subject matter is precisely important for developing reading skills.
But you’re right - for those in this thread who are struggling with basic reading and critical thinking skills to understand the points people make in the comments, maybe we should recommend them some starting materials.
You’re overcomplicating a simple issue of budgetary standards to avoid the actual point. Calling a federal funding restriction a "ban" is a massive reach. If I refuse to pay for my kid to buy a certain video game, I haven’t "banned" the game from existence; I’ve just exercised my right to decide how my money is spent.
Your "Pool A and Pool B" shell game theory is exactly why these federal restrictions are being introduced. If schools are just shuffling money around to bypass community standards, then the federal government has every right to put a hard "no" on its portion of the tab. It’s called fiscal accountability.
Also, the argument that "reading anything helps literacy" is a weak excuse for including sexually oriented or gender-theory materials in a taxpayer-funded elementary curriculum. If the goal is literacy, we should be funding proven phonics programs and the classics, not social experiments. People aren't "missing the point" just because they don't want to subsidize your specific social preferences with their tax dollars.
The bill specifically carves out text for "preserving instruction in science, classic literature, art, and world religionS.
That page (and the rest of the book) is far less pornographic than the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to, and regularly shared between ourselves, and is incredibly tame.
I also find it very telling that you'd consider what is on page 168 pornographic in the first place, sexually explicit maybe, but it is not intended to arouse or cause sexual excitement, it's meant to portray a lived experience.
The sexual repression in the United States is part of the reason why so many people grow up with the wrong ideas around sex and why teen pregnancy is such a big thing. Open discussion about these things (including gender and gender identity in that) is the best way to allow kids to grow up to be functional adults that are well informed and able to have critical thought about how and what they do and are far less likely to fall prey to predators and people who want to do them harm due to their lack of experience.
>That page (and the rest of the book) is far less pornographic than the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to, and regularly shared between ourselves, and is incredibly tame.
And you'd be ok with federal funds to be used to purchase "actual porn" and place it in schools?
The bill is about not using federal funds for this material.
> And it is pornographic, check page 168. Just far enough into the book so that any adult checking it first might not notice and permit it.
Is your position that a proportionate response is a national book ban - to violate the 1A with a law that permanently, negatively impacts millions of Americans ?
you know, every time i see this book cited as the worst example of what the book banners want to ban, i check it out. Skimming to the "pornographic parts", i'm reminded just how repressed we are to find this repulsive. You should be uncomfortable when learning new things. Sexuality is not pornography. It's certainly more extreme than anything I was ever exposed to in my youth, but i'm sure this could have been massively helpful to a few kids in my high school, and probably de-stigmatizing for a few others. Certainly worth pissing off a few parents.
>I'm sure this could have been massively helpful to a few kids in my high school, and probably de-stigmatizing for a few others. Certainly worth pissing off a few parents.
That's great, then they can go to the public library and read it. Hopefully a teacher or guidance counsler can recommend it. It doesn't mean the federal government needs to pay for it to be in a K-5 school.
>Hopefully a teacher or guidance counsler can recommend it.
Not according to this bill.
>...prohibiting use of funds under the act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials...
This isn't about funding.
The conflation of sexuality and pornography is one of the most harmful Puritan ideologies to persist into modern American culture. Speaking as a recovering Catholic who grew up in an extremely sexually repressive household.
As far as gender and sexuality specifically, nearly every aspect of what I did and said was analyzed and judged as "gay" or "not gay" by my guardians, gay also serving as a proxy for non-masculinity... and thus I could not for example have long hair (as apparently only gay men have long hair, and routinely pointing out that Jesus himself had long hair frequently led to punishment or physical abuse). From music taste to choice in friends to choice in language or books, to how I dressed.
In fact, I was told that men are never supposed to cry or show weakness, and my grandfather would quite literally beat the living shit out of me on a very frequent basis from the age of five, savagely beating me with metal objects and whips and belts, anything he could get his hands on, proclaiming that I would continue to get beaten until I stopped crying and took it "like a man". This was a routine part of my cult training as a child, getting beaten until my insides were dried out from crying and I physically could not cry anymore; until my diaphragm was convulsing from the pain. If I'd been found with a book like Kobabe's Gender Queer, I probably would have been put in the hospital.
I wouldn't wish my experience on the most evil of men. I absolutely understand why many who experienced gender violence in their youth simply decide to leave the entire concept of gender behind. Personally however, my path has been to unapologetically be myself and help other young men understand that they can embrace and define masculinity in whichever way they choose. To take back the reigns of masculinity from violent, sexually represeed psychopaths. The number of pissed off parents racked up along the way is just a measure of my success in this endeavor.
> It is apparently intended for minors.
You made that part up, and it is the operative part of your argument.
The author themselves disagree with you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/29/schools-a...
So does the National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/teaching-maia-kobabe/
Just because can't believe that people would promote a comic with explicit texting and sexual imagery to children doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I realize I'm coming into a back-and-forth that grew organically, but... how does this intent tie back to a What Justifies Censorship argument? It sounds like:
1. If I think what they say is bad for youths
2. And it seems the original author thought it would influence youths in the way I don't like
3. Then it can be censored
Is that it? Because if so... well, I've got some bad news about the Bible, and that's not even getting into the trustworthiness of the agency making determination 1 and 2.
Man, anything to distract people from the files.
What files?
The pedo ones
Republicans keep telling everyone who they are. But a good chunk of folks keep denying it.
No, a good chunk of folks like this and knowingly support this.
It's good to remind Americans that like 20-30% of us blindly support trump and not much will change that(sunk cost). Another 10-20% support him cuz he might hurt the correct people and that's worth it. Another few percent support him cuz he's a rich guy and to a lot of Americans $$$=good person.
You're both right.
If you can buy the book on Amazon or find it at your local library is the book really "banned"?
If it can't really be banned, then why waste all the time and energy passing this law?
> prohibiting use of funds under the act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.
"For other purposes" is going to be doing a Herculean effort of carrying for the next few years if this passes. for example:
>This bill includes “lewd” and “lascivious” dancing as prohibited topics or themes.
I guess we learned nothing from Footloose.
----
And yes, for a TLDR on the article and the general situation of this the last decease or so: such book bans tends to be a roundabout way to associate "sexually oriented" topics with the trans community. Sometimes the entire LGBT umbrella is hit.
Pre-epstien, I'd be surprised that such people care much more about what goes on with a person's state of being than the person themselves. But it really seems like every accusation is a confession.
> such book bans tends to be a roundabout way to associate "sexually oriented" topics with the trans community
Yup. When books get banned for containing actual sexual content, that gets reverted https://www.newsweek.com/bible-banned-texas-schools-over-sex...
And in other news, the Trump appointed ambassador in Belgium, Bill White, is fine with adult men sucking the blood from a baby penis.
And if you think I'm kidding, no I'm not.
Some of those boys end up with herpes, but it's all fine in MAGA land.
Source, straight from the horses mouth: https://youtu.be/KolvU5m0CZI?si=KMnq_y8KfGuhXkDY&t=410
Didn't a bunch of kids in NYC get STIs cuz of this like a decade or two ago? A bunch of rabbis were biting baby dicks, oh sorry I mean performing a religious ceremony, and giving kids STIs.
That is likely indeed, because in the interview, she explicitly mentions that New York is also questioning that practice.
The rep who introduced the bill quoted Hitler in a speech 2 days into her term. And then she spent the next 5 years advocating for horrible, repressive legislation. Disgusting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Miller_(politician)#:~:te...
Doesn't look like a ban, a mere withholding of federal funds.
I can't tell if this is just trolling or a genuine take. I'm any case, it's too simplistic.
... by any other name
"Stop the Sexualization of Children Act" yeah right, because the biggest sexual threats to children are identity affirming books and not the paedophile sex trafficking networks run by the elites which have seen zero prosecutions in the US. At this point the US government is a total joke and laughing stock for the rest of the world.
Are you saying that's impossible? Can you give relative estimates?
Why is there a federal department of education, anyway? Shouldn't the states be fully responsible for educating their population?
Sorry, the toothpaste doesn't go back into the tube with social issues. Interracial marriage isn't going away either lol.
Have your seen the 60s/70s photos from Iran? https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/iran-before-revolution-phot...
It just depends how much the government wants to go fundamental and how much people allow it.
Trying to parse this comparison. Are you comparing the withholding of federal funds for certain classes of books to a revolution that installed an Islamic theocracy in Iran?
Can you elaborate on how you think these two things are comparable?
The former is "tax dollars can't be spent on books that depict certain content". The latter is "a revolution lead by Islamic theocrats installs a brutally repressive islamist regime that transformed an otherwise western country into a hellscape". You think these things are the same?
I was addressing:
> Interracial marriage isn't going away either
But more generally, all those little book bans in various forms, explicit anti-diversity and xenophobic rules, undermining the right to vote for the specific groups of citizens, etc. add up and point in a specific direction. There are quite a few popular people who would be up for a theocracy, and a lot of openly fascist people down with the brutally repressive part. Consider how the sexual content in the Bible doesn't normally get included in those laws - like it's not the sexual content that's actually the target here...
Nothing happens out of nowhere. We're at "concentration camps are accepted by many people" level at the moment. The direction of government is obvious, the speed and possible success are still up for debate.
Okay but this isn't a book ban. I'm not understanding what you're saying. This bill doesn't prohibit these books from being printed or sold or possessed. Did you even read it? Seems like you're pivoting to "prison camps for people in the country illegally means we'll have a theocracy soon". I'm not sure you've actually thought this through.
I know it doesn't prohibit printing and selling them... yet. It doesn't really matter, because this proposal for ban in schools doesn't exist in vacuum. This specific change in itself is not that important. But on the background of what's happening in general, what's not happening in terms of kids sexual safety, and which group is mostly involved in the whole issue - that's important.
And you somehow changed the "concentration camps" to "prison camps for people in the country illegally". I meant exactly what I wrote.
Or Kabul in the 60's vs today, even more extreme change, with no hope to going back in the near future.
You are either completely uneducated on world history or willfully ignorant.
There is no limit on how far back the clock is allowed to turn.
Things that will be targeted:
* homosexuals (often the first)
* non whites
* interracial marriage
* voting rights
* voting right for women
* women’s suffrage
* education for girls
* no fault divorce
* freedom of speech
* freedom of mobility (like to leave the country)
* trade unions / labor unions
* Freemasons (Oddfellows, etc)
* practicing a religion other than Christianity
* environmental regulations
* public lands, federal parks
* etc etc etc
Look not to China or North Korea for the operating model but East Germany during the Cold War. There was a massive surveillance operation in place then and technology has only improved.
Freedom is not guaranteed and for most of human history was not a goal.
Your list is missing Nazi parties somewhere between the non whites and voting rights. And for most of the countries in the world - gun owners at the top of the list. Just speaking from historical perspective.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you saying that banning Nazi Parties and gun regulation are the first steps toward fascism and autocracy?
[delayed]
Weimar Germany was very socially liberal, homosexuality was socially accepted, legal rights for women were the same as for men, and all of that definitely went away quite quickly.
> Sorry, the toothpaste doesn't go back into the tube with social issues. Interracial marriage isn't going away either lol.
Sorry, that's just naive, overconfident liberalism. There is no mandatory "direction" to social change. Given enough time, every bit of that toothpaste will go back in that tube, and enough more time it will come out again, only to go back in after a spell. And it won't be an oscillation. It'll be some weird path none of us can predict.
Given enough tyranny, the toothpaste absolutely can be made to go back into the tube. And it better enjoy every second of it or else.
They revoked driver's licenses of transgender individuals in Kansas giving only 3 days notice.
This is a naive take. The clock can be rewound far back.
We should make Mein Kampf available, too? Anarchist Cookbook?