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.
Not at all, the Russian ban was an outright speech restriction (I'm originally from Russia). This only applies to schools taking federal money. This is much more similar to pressuring institutions taking federal money to do things, by both parties, like adding or removing diversity programs, mandating wage levels, curtailing due process for sexual assault investigations, investigating alleged fraud, etc. There are actually colleges that are very careful about not taking federal money where it would affect them.
The approach that most people in the US seem to favor is "this is totally fine that the right-thinking government can do this, the problem is that the other guys occasionally get to rule".
The real solution is to remove the levers, or the federal spending, so that neither side can do it.
I wonder about the downvotes? Do you really think people being personally muzzled by a dictatorship without due process and with draconian punishment is remotely comparable to having some strings attached when a large bureaucracy gets taxpayer money, in a manner that both parties have demonstrably, factually used for decades?
in that case, as much as I hate the current admin, a thin silver lining is that progressives, the most contemptible, even though less harmful, faction in American politics is even more upset :D
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.
You’re gonna want to look at today’s news out of the Boy Scouts.
Short version: the US military provides some funding to the scouts. Hegseth threatened that funding to push the scouts to roll back LGBT-friendly policies, and they’ve caved. Along with that, other changes include waiving fees for children of members of the military, dropping a citizenship merit badge, and adding a military merit badge.
They don’t appear to be planning a new organization, they’ll just co-opt the BSA.
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.
Just as a side note, there is no Orthodox Pope since Eastern Orthodoxy is kind of a federation of national churches. Other Orthodox patriarchs disagree with Patriarch Kirill to varying degrees, even to the point where the Russian Orthodox Church is currently out of communion with Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the "mother church" and seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moscow–Constantinople_sch...
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.
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."
There are truancy laws. Private schools can have speech rules, but parents are free to choose such schools, and so free speech rights are not an issue.
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.
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.
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.
They're all fines. The person receiving something while paying nothing isn't the one being fined. They're doing the thing you have to do in order to not be fined. Indeed, that's where the financial penalties being paid by everyone else are going.
Go ahead and try to distinguish this from de jure financial penalties. If you get cited for speeding, that's definitely a fine, right? But the money then goes into the same general fund as other tax revenue. We're not even consistent in what we call this. The "tax" on cigarettes is clearly a penalty intended to deter usage, the proponents openly admit to it. The federal tax code is absolutely riddled with rules that cause you to pay a different amount based on whether you do or don't do something. The debates about which forms of taxation to use are fundamentally about which activities we want or don't want to be disincentivizing -- witness the people who openly express the intention to tax the rich specifically as a penalty for having too much money. Meanwhile the Georgists think we should use Land Value Tax instead of penalizing people for working.
The penalties for doing something look like you paying them when you do it. The penalties for not doing something look like them paying you when you do it. But because they don't actually have any of their own money, it's never actually them who is paying you, which means that everyone who "gets paid" (i.e. isn't penalized) is extracting that money from the penalties paid by everyone else. Who wouldn't have had to pay that both in the case where they did the thing required to avoid the penalty and where the government offered no such disincentive for not doing it by not collecting the money in taxes and other fines.
You're trying to make an exception out of the person who is actually paying $0 in all taxes, but to begin with that is extremely uncommon, e.g. good luck directly and indirectly avoiding property tax if you live indoors, or avoiding indirectly paying federal income tax if you eat food or consume any other goods or services. It's pretty plausible that such people don't really exist, and even if some did, the penalty still applies to everyone else.
And even for the hypothetical person who somehow directly and indirectly paid actual zero in all taxes, if they stop doing the thing, their personal finances still see the same disincentive as everyone else -- they still get penalized for not doing it. If we had a UBI and then someone got cited for speeding but the speeding fine was less than the UBI, would you say that they aren't being penalized for speeding? No, because if they hadn't gotten the citation they would have gotten more. And so it is with not doing something.
The reason this is important is that there are things the government isn't supposed to punish you for doing, meaning they're not to give you any disincentive of any kind. Offering you money -- which for substantially everyone in real life is actually their own money -- and then taking it away if you do the thing they're not allowed to punish you for doing, is punishing you for doing it.
A lot of your argument presupposes a distinct lack of parental authority in the education of a child.
The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime. They called their legislators to make the changes and, in a rare event, the legislators listened and are acting upon it.
The system, for once, seems to be working. Both sides should see the objective value in at least that.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
This variation of the origin story gets a lot of play. However it doesn't address the outside book-ban groups who provide titles to parents - or who just appear at school board meetings themselves.
Eleven "super requesters" — those who raised concerns about or challenged
15 or more titles at a time — accounted for 73% of the targeted books.
They often referred to lists of books originating in other districts
or from online forums. Some had no children in the district.
In nearly 60 cases, the school district didn’t own the book
the requester sought to remove.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
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.
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.
Where "classic literature" is specifically defined as:
“(B) CLASSIC WORKS OF LITERATURE.—The term ‘classic works of literature’ means the works of literature (including translations of such works)—
“(i) included in the Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 1990), published by Encyclopaedia Britannica;
“(ii) referenced in the article ‘Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read’ by Thomas Purifoy, Jr. and published by Compass Classroom (as such article appeared on the date of enactment of this subsection); and
“(iii) referenced in the article ‘Classics Every High Schooler Should Read’ by Mary Pierson Purifoy and published by Compass Classroom (as such article appeared on the date of enactment of this subsection).
Of the first, "The selection of authors has come under attack, with some dismissing the project as a celebration of European men, ignoring contributions of women and non-European authors" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
Of the latter two, Thomas Purifoy, Jr. is a Young Earth Creationist. Mary Pierson Purifoy is, I believe, his 26 year old homeschooled daughter, who then went to Liberty University, a conservative, private evangelical Christian.
Compass Classroom develops materials for Christian Homeschooling.
That sounds like a deliberate bias towards a white, male, English, Christian subset of classic literature. Not only doesn't they include something like "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", it doesn't look like they even include Les Misérables, which we read in school.
While the first list includes Freud's "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children"???
Yeah, go ahead and explain why students should read that but not have an explicit allowance for Les Misérables.
> 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
Elementary if you mean k-6 sure, but the ban applies to secondary school students too which is where the real problem is because, you know, sex ed and puberty start to become relevant. Also elementary can mean grades 7 and 8 where this topic is actually relevant because again sex ed and puberty and pretending like sex ed isn’t important for the government to fund/restricting it to abstinence is proven to result in exploding STD rates, teen pregnancy, higher abortion rates and other medical and psychological issues longer term. It’s almost like sex is an activity people will engage in regardless and all education does is make it safer and less traumatic. Who would have thunk. No one “on the other side” is arguing to make this material easily accessible to first graders, but that it should remain accessible to those going through puberty can start as early as grade 5 which is why there’s a common practice to start in grade 7 to capture it when it’s become broadly relevant and puberty has started maturing more towards sexuality.
Also the text you cited is meaningless because “art” is subjective - one man’s art is another’s profanity. For example Olympia by Manet was called obscene and is now considered foundational to the modernism movement. The last judgement by Michelangelo was also considered profane at times despite being important in the Renaissance and censored at times. The author of the book in question would certainly call her book an artistic expression so now you’re into characterizing on your opinion (or rather the opinion of some group that gets power) what counts as acceptable art and what counts as profane.
And finally schools should be a place for the opportunity for self directed learning so limiting it to instruction is silly. And what if a teacher of English wanted to instruct the students about censorship by examining the contents of banned books to grade 11 and grade 12?
Also, if you can’t see how the same group is also washing a cultural war on higher education, particularly when it comes to sexual and gender topics, I don’t know how you don’t see this fight extends there eventually as well. Again - this is fight is largely driven by the Christian nationalist movement and religious fundamentalist zealots on a crusade against education, even if they maybe have legitimate concerns in narrow cases, is going to really cause a lot more collateral damage.
If you really can’t see the problems with all of this, I don’t know how to help you. It’s a story we’ve seen on repeat throughout history, whether the Iranian revolution and similar shifts to fundamentalism in other Arabic countries, witch hunts, ISIS, Spanish Inquisition, etc etc. it’s always the dumbest people you know persecuting the people they don’t like for saying uncomfortable things.
I guess goodbye to the Enlightenment principles this country was founded on because there’s a claimed issue that can’t be demonstrated to have had any scientific evidence for harm? And science it’s important to use here because it is under attack - the same people have repeatedly tried to ban and fight teaching the theory of evolution and tried to push teaching “intelligent design” into the science room.
> So totally cool if an atheist government came to power and
From public libraries? Not many christians are borrowing the bible from the public library, I don't think they'd care. It's also telling that you assume I'm christian myself. This is why the Democrats lose elections, you know. You think that the only ones voting against you are biblethumpers. You count those up, and there's no way team red can win.
>Why do I feel like the people doing this for gay and trans materials would
You mean the people who don't want pornography being distributed to their children in the public schools that they are forced to fund? Those people?
>And here’s something uncomfortable. Unlike religious texts, which are forced onto children, no one was forcing kids to read this book.
The drug dealer defense? "I didn't put a gun to his head and force him to inject fentanyl-laced street heroin!"
>I feel like among the books gender queer is an exception in terms of explicitness
But I didn't complain about those other books, did I? When you look up the lists of "top banned books", do those other books show up at the top of the list? Are they on the list at all? You failed to police your own, and now the rest of us are being forced to police them. That book wasn't banned though never being purchased by school libraries. It had to first show up on the shelf. And you didn't do anything to stop it. Now responsible people have to step in and do it for you.
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.
So your argument is school libraries should have Playboy and Penthouse on the library magazine rack because you had access to a Hustler? Softcore porn is "incredibly tame" compared to hardcore porn, therefore softcore porn belongs in schools?
That's an insane argument. The pornographic-ness of "the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to" has no relevance to decisions about what to put in a school library.
You sound like you aren't really reasoning, rather you're just coming up with justifications only in the context of achieving a particular result, and not considering other implications.
Sex education and access to educational material around sexuality is inversely correlated with teen pregnancy. The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant? While it makes sense that the current administration would take this step, considering the President's numerous attempts at teen pregnancy have been a contentious issue, what's your motive?
You sound like you aren't really reasoning, rather you're just coming up with justifications only in the context of achieving a particular result, and not considering other implications.
> The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
That's a different argument than the one you made.
But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
And the encyclopedia isn't "banned," you can still get it yourself somewhere else, the school or whatever just made a choice about what to carry or what not to carry which they do all the time and will always do.
> So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant?
No, obviously not. And that you went there shows pretty flawed reasoning. You didn't seem to understand my comment, and you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
My argument was what you said didn't make sense: I already summed it up: "the pornographic-ness of 'the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to' has no relevance to decisions about what to put in a school library."
> But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
I would have absolutely no problem with this existing in a middle or high school.
> you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
> I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
No, it's option 4: you didn't really understand the narrowness of my point (which I was really explicit about), and kinda aped bits of the structure without really getting it. The proof is how you want on about teen pregnancy in response to me, like that had anything to do with what I was saying or where I was coming from.
>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.
Great, you've identified how people who want books for children to include porn can include that porn without getting in trouble for it. Just need 167 pages of filler.
>Cool. So if those mythical people actually exist and do so, we can address it if it ever happens.
My original comment that you and others replied to gives the name of the book, the author, the name of the site you can view the book for free, and tells you which page to turn to. It's not mythical, I all but deep-linked to it.
There is no baby in the swampwater you peddle. You probably don't have a baby and never had a baby... I have children. This is actually important to me.
The book you linked to is not pornography hidden behind 167 pages of filler. It is appropriate content for teenagers and I have zero issue with it existing in a public school.
I do have kids, and I don't appreciate the harm you are trying to do to the environment they are growing up in.
> 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 ?
> 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 ?
I didn't know it was a First Amendment violation for the government to not give me money to buy porn. Not giving me money is ban on what I'd have spent it on! When will this injustice be righted! When will I get my money!?
This issue just goes to show that liberals aren't immune to propaganda and misinformation, and they have their own problems with it.
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.
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.
Visual depictions of hardcore sex acts where penetration is clearly visible = "sexuality". One wonders if anything at all can be pornography with your definitions.
Again, not all sexuality is pornography, and an inability to recognize that does not serve as evidence toward the contrary.
According to Oxford,
sex is "sexual activity, including specifically sexual intercourse.",
and pornography is "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings".
If you are erotically stimulated by even the sight of sexual organs or sexual activity, that is a problem you need to deal with, but please do not project your perspective onto others. Many other people are able to look at such things and understand the message being conveyed. Nuance between words is not something we can just hand-wave away when it doesn't suit our argument. Sex and pornography are categorically different things.
It's shameful and sexually repressive to teach people that any form of sexual activity is pornographic. Or that children should wait until they are out of the house, away from parental supervision, to learn even the most basic things about sexuality. It's incredible to me sometimes to think about how much things have shifted back and forth in the last 100 years. In the 80's, you'd often find PG-rated movies containing nudity or sexual references. What happened, why have we slid back?
You would've had a hard time in my high school Sex Ed class, which I personally thought was still too censored and Puritan-influenced.
>and pornography is "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity
The example I originally provided, that you and everyone else responded to contains the explicit display of both sexual organs and fellatio. It is indisputable, I gave detailed explanation how to see it for yourself in the book in question.
The depiction of fellatio, a type of sexual activity, is not inherently pornographic.
I would direct you toward my previous two comments and reiterate that your inability to understand the difference does not mean there is not a difference.
>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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I'm saying the list above carefully includes a bunch of more or less universally recognized good things, with the subject added on top, implying that the "left" views on sexuality are also good things. But that form of argument is lying to you because this list omits bad things and other things in grey area.
To be fair, that depends on what the poster meant by "to be targeted". The list looks like it implies banning or criminalizing, but again, no one is being banned or criminalized under the legislation we are discussing.
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.
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...
Not at all, the Russian ban was an outright speech restriction (I'm originally from Russia). This only applies to schools taking federal money. This is much more similar to pressuring institutions taking federal money to do things, by both parties, like adding or removing diversity programs, mandating wage levels, curtailing due process for sexual assault investigations, investigating alleged fraud, etc. There are actually colleges that are very careful about not taking federal money where it would affect them.
The approach that most people in the US seem to favor is "this is totally fine that the right-thinking government can do this, the problem is that the other guys occasionally get to rule".
The real solution is to remove the levers, or the federal spending, so that neither side can do it.
I wonder about the downvotes? Do you really think people being personally muzzled by a dictatorship without due process and with draconian punishment is remotely comparable to having some strings attached when a large bureaucracy gets taxpayer money, in a manner that both parties have demonstrably, factually used for decades?
in that case, as much as I hate the current admin, a thin silver lining is that progressives, the most contemptible, even though less harmful, faction in American politics is even more upset :D
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.
---
[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.
Didnt Kirks org already do this, to an extent?
You’re gonna want to look at today’s news out of the Boy Scouts.
Short version: the US military provides some funding to the scouts. Hegseth threatened that funding to push the scouts to roll back LGBT-friendly policies, and they’ve caved. Along with that, other changes include waiving fees for children of members of the military, dropping a citizenship merit badge, and adding a military merit badge.
They don’t appear to be planning a new organization, they’ll just co-opt the BSA.
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?
Almost anti-Christ like, wouldn't you say?
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.
Just as a side note, there is no Orthodox Pope since Eastern Orthodoxy is kind of a federation of national churches. Other Orthodox patriarchs disagree with Patriarch Kirill to varying degrees, even to the point where the Russian Orthodox Church is currently out of communion with Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the "mother church" and seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moscow–Constantinople_sch...
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.
Good. Hopefully we can get a government contract with Boston Dynamics robot dogs wielding flamethrowers to enforce it too.
Not a book ban, but not using public funds to push a hotly contested culture war point.
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."
> No need to emphasize "government"
There are truancy laws. Private schools can have speech rules, but parents are free to choose such schools, and so free speech rights are not an issue.
I still don't see how qualifying it as "government" schools is at all relevant to the topic.
This bill would also apply to private schools receiving money under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
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.
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.
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.
They're all fines. The person receiving something while paying nothing isn't the one being fined. They're doing the thing you have to do in order to not be fined. Indeed, that's where the financial penalties being paid by everyone else are going.
Go ahead and try to distinguish this from de jure financial penalties. If you get cited for speeding, that's definitely a fine, right? But the money then goes into the same general fund as other tax revenue. We're not even consistent in what we call this. The "tax" on cigarettes is clearly a penalty intended to deter usage, the proponents openly admit to it. The federal tax code is absolutely riddled with rules that cause you to pay a different amount based on whether you do or don't do something. The debates about which forms of taxation to use are fundamentally about which activities we want or don't want to be disincentivizing -- witness the people who openly express the intention to tax the rich specifically as a penalty for having too much money. Meanwhile the Georgists think we should use Land Value Tax instead of penalizing people for working.
The penalties for doing something look like you paying them when you do it. The penalties for not doing something look like them paying you when you do it. But because they don't actually have any of their own money, it's never actually them who is paying you, which means that everyone who "gets paid" (i.e. isn't penalized) is extracting that money from the penalties paid by everyone else. Who wouldn't have had to pay that both in the case where they did the thing required to avoid the penalty and where the government offered no such disincentive for not doing it by not collecting the money in taxes and other fines.
You're trying to make an exception out of the person who is actually paying $0 in all taxes, but to begin with that is extremely uncommon, e.g. good luck directly and indirectly avoiding property tax if you live indoors, or avoiding indirectly paying federal income tax if you eat food or consume any other goods or services. It's pretty plausible that such people don't really exist, and even if some did, the penalty still applies to everyone else.
And even for the hypothetical person who somehow directly and indirectly paid actual zero in all taxes, if they stop doing the thing, their personal finances still see the same disincentive as everyone else -- they still get penalized for not doing it. If we had a UBI and then someone got cited for speeding but the speeding fine was less than the UBI, would you say that they aren't being penalized for speeding? No, because if they hadn't gotten the citation they would have gotten more. And so it is with not doing something.
The reason this is important is that there are things the government isn't supposed to punish you for doing, meaning they're not to give you any disincentive of any kind. Offering you money -- which for substantially everyone in real life is actually their own money -- and then taking it away if you do the thing they're not allowed to punish you for doing, is punishing you for doing it.
A lot of your argument presupposes a distinct lack of parental authority in the education of a child.
The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime. They called their legislators to make the changes and, in a rare event, the legislators listened and are acting upon it.
The system, for once, seems to be working. Both sides should see the objective value in at least that.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
This variation of the origin story gets a lot of play. However it doesn't address the outside book-ban groups who provide titles to parents - or who just appear at school board meetings themselves.
ref: https://wisconsinwatch.org/2024/07/wisconsin-book-ban-school...it’s a manufactured and coordinated from the top down moral panic that you have fallen for, or are content to cynically exploit.
>The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught ...
Can you elaborate?
>The system, for once, seems to be working.
Interesting worldview.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
That’s definitely not how this is playing out.
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.
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.
Where "classic literature" is specifically defined as:
“(B) CLASSIC WORKS OF LITERATURE.—The term ‘classic works of literature’ means the works of literature (including translations of such works)—
“(i) included in the Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 1990), published by Encyclopaedia Britannica;
“(ii) referenced in the article ‘Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read’ by Thomas Purifoy, Jr. and published by Compass Classroom (as such article appeared on the date of enactment of this subsection); and
“(iii) referenced in the article ‘Classics Every High Schooler Should Read’ by Mary Pierson Purifoy and published by Compass Classroom (as such article appeared on the date of enactment of this subsection).
Of the first, "The selection of authors has come under attack, with some dismissing the project as a celebration of European men, ignoring contributions of women and non-European authors" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
Of the latter two, Thomas Purifoy, Jr. is a Young Earth Creationist. Mary Pierson Purifoy is, I believe, his 26 year old homeschooled daughter, who then went to Liberty University, a conservative, private evangelical Christian.
Compass Classroom develops materials for Christian Homeschooling.
That sounds like a deliberate bias towards a white, male, English, Christian subset of classic literature. Not only doesn't they include something like "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", it doesn't look like they even include Les Misérables, which we read in school.
While the first list includes Freud's "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children"???
Yeah, go ahead and explain why students should read that but not have an explicit allowance for Les Misérables.
> 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
Elementary if you mean k-6 sure, but the ban applies to secondary school students too which is where the real problem is because, you know, sex ed and puberty start to become relevant. Also elementary can mean grades 7 and 8 where this topic is actually relevant because again sex ed and puberty and pretending like sex ed isn’t important for the government to fund/restricting it to abstinence is proven to result in exploding STD rates, teen pregnancy, higher abortion rates and other medical and psychological issues longer term. It’s almost like sex is an activity people will engage in regardless and all education does is make it safer and less traumatic. Who would have thunk. No one “on the other side” is arguing to make this material easily accessible to first graders, but that it should remain accessible to those going through puberty can start as early as grade 5 which is why there’s a common practice to start in grade 7 to capture it when it’s become broadly relevant and puberty has started maturing more towards sexuality.
Also the text you cited is meaningless because “art” is subjective - one man’s art is another’s profanity. For example Olympia by Manet was called obscene and is now considered foundational to the modernism movement. The last judgement by Michelangelo was also considered profane at times despite being important in the Renaissance and censored at times. The author of the book in question would certainly call her book an artistic expression so now you’re into characterizing on your opinion (or rather the opinion of some group that gets power) what counts as acceptable art and what counts as profane.
And finally schools should be a place for the opportunity for self directed learning so limiting it to instruction is silly. And what if a teacher of English wanted to instruct the students about censorship by examining the contents of banned books to grade 11 and grade 12?
Also, if you can’t see how the same group is also washing a cultural war on higher education, particularly when it comes to sexual and gender topics, I don’t know how you don’t see this fight extends there eventually as well. Again - this is fight is largely driven by the Christian nationalist movement and religious fundamentalist zealots on a crusade against education, even if they maybe have legitimate concerns in narrow cases, is going to really cause a lot more collateral damage.
If you really can’t see the problems with all of this, I don’t know how to help you. It’s a story we’ve seen on repeat throughout history, whether the Iranian revolution and similar shifts to fundamentalism in other Arabic countries, witch hunts, ISIS, Spanish Inquisition, etc etc. it’s always the dumbest people you know persecuting the people they don’t like for saying uncomfortable things.
I guess goodbye to the Enlightenment principles this country was founded on because there’s a claimed issue that can’t be demonstrated to have had any scientific evidence for harm? And science it’s important to use here because it is under attack - the same people have repeatedly tried to ban and fight teaching the theory of evolution and tried to push teaching “intelligent design” into the science room.
> So totally cool if an atheist government came to power and
From public libraries? Not many christians are borrowing the bible from the public library, I don't think they'd care. It's also telling that you assume I'm christian myself. This is why the Democrats lose elections, you know. You think that the only ones voting against you are biblethumpers. You count those up, and there's no way team red can win.
>Why do I feel like the people doing this for gay and trans materials would
You mean the people who don't want pornography being distributed to their children in the public schools that they are forced to fund? Those people?
>And here’s something uncomfortable. Unlike religious texts, which are forced onto children, no one was forcing kids to read this book.
The drug dealer defense? "I didn't put a gun to his head and force him to inject fentanyl-laced street heroin!"
>I feel like among the books gender queer is an exception in terms of explicitness
But I didn't complain about those other books, did I? When you look up the lists of "top banned books", do those other books show up at the top of the list? Are they on the list at all? You failed to police your own, and now the rest of us are being forced to police them. That book wasn't banned though never being purchased by school libraries. It had to first show up on the shelf. And you didn't do anything to stop it. Now responsible people have to step in and do it for you.
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.
So your argument is school libraries should have Playboy and Penthouse on the library magazine rack because you had access to a Hustler? Softcore porn is "incredibly tame" compared to hardcore porn, therefore softcore porn belongs in schools?
That's an insane argument. The pornographic-ness of "the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to" has no relevance to decisions about what to put in a school library.
You sound like you aren't really reasoning, rather you're just coming up with justifications only in the context of achieving a particular result, and not considering other implications.
Sex education and access to educational material around sexuality is inversely correlated with teen pregnancy. The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant? While it makes sense that the current administration would take this step, considering the President's numerous attempts at teen pregnancy have been a contentious issue, what's your motive?
You sound like you aren't really reasoning, rather you're just coming up with justifications only in the context of achieving a particular result, and not considering other implications.
> The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
That's a different argument than the one you made.
But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
And the encyclopedia isn't "banned," you can still get it yourself somewhere else, the school or whatever just made a choice about what to carry or what not to carry which they do all the time and will always do.
> So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant?
No, obviously not. And that you went there shows pretty flawed reasoning. You didn't seem to understand my comment, and you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
My argument was what you said didn't make sense: I already summed it up: "the pornographic-ness of 'the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to' has no relevance to decisions about what to put in a school library."
> But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
I would have absolutely no problem with this existing in a middle or high school.
> you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
> I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
No, it's option 4: you didn't really understand the narrowness of my point (which I was really explicit about), and kinda aped bits of the structure without really getting it. The proof is how you want on about teen pregnancy in response to me, like that had anything to do with what I was saying or where I was coming from.
>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.
This has been litigated a million times. Actual pornographic material is already not allowed in schools.
Books that include characters having a sexual encounter on page 168 is not that.
Great, you've identified how people who want books for children to include porn can include that porn without getting in trouble for it. Just need 167 pages of filler.
Cool. So if those mythical people actually exist and do so, we can address it if it ever happens.
Until then we should not pre-emptively throw the baby out with the bathwater.
>Cool. So if those mythical people actually exist and do so, we can address it if it ever happens.
My original comment that you and others replied to gives the name of the book, the author, the name of the site you can view the book for free, and tells you which page to turn to. It's not mythical, I all but deep-linked to it.
There is no baby in the swampwater you peddle. You probably don't have a baby and never had a baby... I have children. This is actually important to me.
The book you linked to is not pornography hidden behind 167 pages of filler. It is appropriate content for teenagers and I have zero issue with it existing in a public school.
I do have kids, and I don't appreciate the harm you are trying to do to the environment they are growing up in.
> 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 ?
> 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 ?
I didn't know it was a First Amendment violation for the government to not give me money to buy porn. Not giving me money is ban on what I'd have spent it on! When will this injustice be righted! When will I get my money!?
This issue just goes to show that liberals aren't immune to propaganda and misinformation, and they have their own problems with it.
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.
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.
>The conflation of sexuality and pornography is
Visual depictions of hardcore sex acts where penetration is clearly visible = "sexuality". One wonders if anything at all can be pornography with your definitions.
Again, not all sexuality is pornography, and an inability to recognize that does not serve as evidence toward the contrary.
According to Oxford,
sex is "sexual activity, including specifically sexual intercourse.",
and pornography is "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings".
If you are erotically stimulated by even the sight of sexual organs or sexual activity, that is a problem you need to deal with, but please do not project your perspective onto others. Many other people are able to look at such things and understand the message being conveyed. Nuance between words is not something we can just hand-wave away when it doesn't suit our argument. Sex and pornography are categorically different things.
It's shameful and sexually repressive to teach people that any form of sexual activity is pornographic. Or that children should wait until they are out of the house, away from parental supervision, to learn even the most basic things about sexuality. It's incredible to me sometimes to think about how much things have shifted back and forth in the last 100 years. In the 80's, you'd often find PG-rated movies containing nudity or sexual references. What happened, why have we slid back?
You would've had a hard time in my high school Sex Ed class, which I personally thought was still too censored and Puritan-influenced.
>and pornography is "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity
The example I originally provided, that you and everyone else responded to contains the explicit display of both sexual organs and fellatio. It is indisputable, I gave detailed explanation how to see it for yourself in the book in question.
The depiction of fellatio, a type of sexual activity, is not inherently pornographic.
I would direct you toward my previous two comments and reiterate that your inability to understand the difference does not mean there is not a difference.
>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.
> 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
huh? Could you link me to some news stories, and perhaps some recent analyses of these files? Maybe list any prominent Americans who are involved?
> 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
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?
Control. Virtue signalling. Because they can... [0]
[0] Why does a dog lick his balls?
Sorry, the toothpaste doesn't go back into the tube with social issues. Interracial marriage isn't going away either lol.
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?
I'm saying the list above carefully includes a bunch of more or less universally recognized good things, with the subject added on top, implying that the "left" views on sexuality are also good things. But that form of argument is lying to you because this list omits bad things and other things in grey area.
To be fair, that depends on what the poster meant by "to be targeted". The list looks like it implies banning or criminalizing, but again, no one is being banned or criminalized under the legislation we are discussing.
Nazis can fuck off.
PS. Damn son, you put your LinkedIn out there for everyone to see too? https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-msu
re: LinkedIn: well yeah. I strongly believe nobody should have "одни слова для кухонь, другие — для улиц".
I'll give you credit for at least putting a name and face to completely retarded beliefs. Here's hoping you get a clue, cheers.
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.
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.
They revoked driver's licenses of transgender individuals in Kansas giving only 3 days notice.
> 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.
This is a naive take. The clock can be rewound far back.
We should make Mein Kampf available, too? Anarchist Cookbook?
Why is there a federal department of education, anyway? Shouldn't the states be fully responsible for educating their population?
Finally, some politicians had some sense.
Unfortunately, some of them is going to abuse that.
But that what politics is - only trade-offs, no perfect decisions. Only brain ded radicals of all sides think there are simple solutions.