The whole issue of “these teachers just want the kids who have two dads or two moms to not feel left out” sort of deflates when you see some of the LoTT Tik Toks of the more clout-chasey Tik Tokkers.
It absolutely does not deflate it, because activists lumping the two together means that they are interested in using the worse TikTokkers to tar the innocuous ones, often merely for the infraction of being LGBT. We see the same pattern with the vague way the Don't Say Gay law was constructed, and the caginess its authors exhibited about whether they thought kids with two mommies or two daddies should feel uncomfortable in class.
That conflation, especially when welded to the "groomer" smear, actually is far right bigotry, and if you want to just laugh at the libs for getting owned by far right bigots, well, knock yourself out, I guess. But if you aren't just interested in doing that, maybe the fact that you aren't giving "parents across the political spectrum" a limiting principle that protects LGBT students, parents, and teachers is deeply destructive to building trust and consensus around these issues.
How do they not? How are they not being treated as valid?
I just read a several-thousand word piece about the subject that did not so much as acknowledge their concerns, or even their existence, except to argue by implication that it's unfair for them to be angry about being smeared as groomers because people have mean to conservatives in the past.
That's what I was responding to.
As for broader political acknowledgement, it's fine, but it cuts both ways, or perhaps it cuts in no way at all. It validates any policy outcome whatsoever as long as it meets basic Constitutional requirements.
I don't think I agree with MattY, because his brand is to focused on #HotTakes to be reliably agreeable, but I think he makes a lot of good points, and he's one of the people where I'm constantly thinking, "Here is a dude who is purportedly trying to persuade people to his left, especially on cultural and social issues, and doesn't know how to talk to them at all."
Yeah. FWIW, the messaging Ls we get from people being extremist idiots on Twitter are kind of annoying, but don't really bother me that much. If they weren't there, the Right would invent them, and has done so many times in the past.
What bugs me is that the clout chasing and audience capture prevents people from the broad Left from even talking to each other, and I'm starting to think this is actually damaging Team Blue's ability to come to any sort of policy consensus, or even reliably acknowledge that the various factions have much more in common than they don't, and have generally compatible values.
Also, it's easier to see among the more radical sorts, but the more moderate folk tend to be just as bad at communicating with the further left, and for reasons that really seem to boil down to in-group signaling and norms that, in practice, aren't a whole lot less counterproductive than the ones you see in the DSA or whatever.
Whenever I start one of Dr deBeor's articles, I think, "Hey, this is pretty good," and then spend the rest of the time anticipating the moment where it goes 110% off the rails.
That one stayed on the rails the whole way through.
I actually think at least some of the problem is Twitter, in that so much intra-party debate takes place there, and a lot of the protagonists tend to be writing/Tweeting for audiences other than the ones they need to convince to win the intra-party debates. This means that more radically minded, Leftward folk tend to deliver more radically minded, Leftward messages intended to convince moderates, and vice versa, leaving no one convinced.
But I think what’s triggered this is a lot of the next crop of anti-LGBT legislation (and I believe the FL law if I read it right ) give the teacher an affirmative duty to report to the parents if a student comes out to them.
Lying to parents is not appropriate. Encouraging kids to talk to their parents is appropriate.
Short-circuiting and jumping right to telling the parents doesn’t sit right with me. Not so much because the parent is an enemy, but because, while I obviously don’t fully trust the judgement of minors, I think I trust it more than state legislators and governors who have no specific knowledge of the situation
Should a teacher be required to out an eighth grader to his parents if he sees that eighth grader holding hands with another boy as they walk to school?
Because the answer to that one seems to be a pretty obvious no, the place where we draw the line between that and the behavior you describe may exist, but is not at all obvious to me personally, and I'm not sure there's a way around this that avoids relying on the discretion of teachers and/or administrators without treating the two cases identically.
Setting it aside: the problem may be real, but real problems can be cited as reasons to implement terrible policies, and if advocates concerned about those problems reliably propose terrible policy solutions, we may start to suspect there’s something else going on.
Part of the problem at the root of everything is the whole “there *IS* grooming going on” problem.
I'm old enough to remember when there was a "terrorism going on problem"[1] that was much more unambiguous than the "grooming" problem here, and to remember policy responses that were implemented in order to deal with that terrorism problem.
Axiomatically, I'm old enough to remember how many of those policy responses played out.
I'm pretty sure you are too.
[1] This started as a rhetorical flourish, but kids born on 9/11 will be celebrating with the customary first legal alcoholic drinks come September.
Because your definition of “bigotry” is expansive enough to include a majority of people.
This is not remotely obvious.
Indeed, if it were obvious, DeSantis et al wouldn't constantly be trying to hide the ball when it comes to whether it's OK for kids to be taught that some of their classmates have two mommies or two daddies.
If that’s true, then I’d say that that is something that ought to be overcome before the “we have the right to raise your children like this” argument takes place.
Is there a limiting principle here?
Because as stated, this means that you can be accused of "grooming" for teaching anything that may not want their kids learning in school.
And like, that includes a lot of stuff that virtually everyone believes that they should learn in school.
Because it means that mentioning gay people in front of third graders is still verboten, effectively forcing teachers into the closet and barring children of LGBT parents from mentioning their families.
“Teachers shouldn’t teach stuff that will get them fired” seems a trivially easy thing to agree on. Nobody would argue that the teacher who taught inappropriate stuff to 1st Graders shouldn’t have been fired.
And so the worry becomes about preventing the stuff that everybody agrees shouldn’t be taught.
Yeah, and one of the themes I've noticed play out repeatedly is that the policymakers and activists leading the charge on this stuff do pretty much the opposite of what you'd do if you wanted to reassure people who are concerned about the impact this might have on LGBT folk.
Indeed, to address Oscar's point about the linear term of our metaphorical Taylor expansion, I noticed when the first round of this fight played out, for CRT, early legislative responses tended to be more or less fine, with a clear focus on not teaching stuff that shouldn't be taught.
But as they spread and evolved over time, they kept getting worse, and more expansive, until, in some cases, it's not even clear you can teach why the Confederates started the Civil War, or why we needed a massive protest movement to end segregation.
Some argue that there needs to be a thicker hedge around the system.
Some do, but most of the time they build hedges nowhere near the problems like this.
And while doing it, they often run up to other lines--or barrel right on past them--yet the comfort of people, including parents, who take comfort in those lines is rarely addressed
I don’t think that “you shouldn’t talk about this sort of thing with five year olds” means “we hate gay people”.
Oh, I don't think it means that they necessarily hate gay people.
But it does mean that they think that gay people are weird and kind of gross and should conceal aspects of their identities and lives around five year-olds that are entirely uncontroversial when straight people mention them.
So now that I've had some more time, let's actually engage with the big picture here, not as you see it, but as liberals see it. Because that perspective is not accurately reflected in your piece, and the closest you come to it, in this paragraph, doesn't capture the underlying narrative at all:
There is this overwhelming attitude put forth by the left, dare I say a narrative, even, that parents are out here plotting and scheming, just itching to stir up trouble and cause problems for teachers.
We don't see this as a conflict between parents and teachers. We have variety of reasons for not seeing it this way, which I'll get into, but that's not the fundamental conflict we are witnessing.
What we're seeing is a resurrection of a conflict that sorta kinda went into remission for about five years, and is then flaring up again:
Republicans vs. LGBT people.
Are they building their case on top of an argument about protecting the children?
Well, yes, they are. They always do that. In calculus that's the zeroth order term, the constant in your series expansion.
They've always done that. It's been their go to move for decades, that one way or another, the public existence of LGBT people threatens their children. Very frequently they've built this on top of a very ugly and false smear: that gay people have a particular propensity for molesting children.
When we're outraged at the use of the term "groomer", it's not because Republicans aren't playing by some sort of rhetorical Marquess of Queensbury rules, but because they are using partisan grievances of exactly the sort you indulge in--that the Left did it first-- as an excuse to attack not liberals, but LGBT people, especially LGBT kids, LGBT parents, and LGBT parents.
It's not that Republicans are trying to prevent kids [1] from learning that gay people exist, they want to prevent kids from learning that gay people are not morally defective perverts, but human beings deserving of no fewer rights, or less respect, than other people.
What about the worried parents, you ask?
Well, what of them? Are we counting every sort of worry a parent might have about how their kids are treated in school, or are we only worried about them being brainwashed by evil transgender extremists?
Because what about the kids who are barred from mentioning their gay parents during show-and-tell, or the gay students who required to stay closeted, lest they raise questions that cannot be answered for fear of violating deliberately vague and overbroad laws.
Or the trans kids whose parents do support them, and find themselves subjected to being investigated (and worse) for child abuse for doing so?
Don't those parents count? Aren't their concerns valid?
Or do they have to agree with you on trans issues before they count?
[1] Not just their kids; many of them don't have kids, or don't have kids in public schools
It doesn't make the original claim that it's a lie to call it the "Don't Say Gay" true!
At all!
And just to be clear, the activists and officials who pushed that piece of shit over the finish line were very, very intent on keeping that aspect of the bill in place.
The response was politically ineffective in the VA Governor's race, but that does not, imply that it was false.
I'm not saying that there's no reason to discuss the political angle here; I am saying that it's very important to be clear about which you're talking about, lest we go around in a spiral of confusion for the umpteenth time.
On “Here Comes the Groom(ing)”
It absolutely does not deflate it, because activists lumping the two together means that they are interested in using the worse TikTokkers to tar the innocuous ones, often merely for the infraction of being LGBT. We see the same pattern with the vague way the Don't Say Gay law was constructed, and the caginess its authors exhibited about whether they thought kids with two mommies or two daddies should feel uncomfortable in class.
That conflation, especially when welded to the "groomer" smear, actually is far right bigotry, and if you want to just laugh at the libs for getting owned by far right bigots, well, knock yourself out, I guess. But if you aren't just interested in doing that, maybe the fact that you aren't giving "parents across the political spectrum" a limiting principle that protects LGBT students, parents, and teachers is deeply destructive to building trust and consensus around these issues.
"
How do they not? How are they not being treated as valid?
I just read a several-thousand word piece about the subject that did not so much as acknowledge their concerns, or even their existence, except to argue by implication that it's unfair for them to be angry about being smeared as groomers because people have mean to conservatives in the past.
That's what I was responding to.
As for broader political acknowledgement, it's fine, but it cuts both ways, or perhaps it cuts in no way at all. It validates any policy outcome whatsoever as long as it meets basic Constitutional requirements.
"
I don't think I agree with MattY, because his brand is to focused on #HotTakes to be reliably agreeable, but I think he makes a lot of good points, and he's one of the people where I'm constantly thinking, "Here is a dude who is purportedly trying to persuade people to his left, especially on cultural and social issues, and doesn't know how to talk to them at all."
"
Yeah. FWIW, the messaging Ls we get from people being extremist idiots on Twitter are kind of annoying, but don't really bother me that much. If they weren't there, the Right would invent them, and has done so many times in the past.
What bugs me is that the clout chasing and audience capture prevents people from the broad Left from even talking to each other, and I'm starting to think this is actually damaging Team Blue's ability to come to any sort of policy consensus, or even reliably acknowledge that the various factions have much more in common than they don't, and have generally compatible values.
Also, it's easier to see among the more radical sorts, but the more moderate folk tend to be just as bad at communicating with the further left, and for reasons that really seem to boil down to in-group signaling and norms that, in practice, aren't a whole lot less counterproductive than the ones you see in the DSA or whatever.
"
Whenever I start one of Dr deBeor's articles, I think, "Hey, this is pretty good," and then spend the rest of the time anticipating the moment where it goes 110% off the rails.
That one stayed on the rails the whole way through.
I actually think at least some of the problem is Twitter, in that so much intra-party debate takes place there, and a lot of the protagonists tend to be writing/Tweeting for audiences other than the ones they need to convince to win the intra-party debates. This means that more radically minded, Leftward folk tend to deliver more radically minded, Leftward messages intended to convince moderates, and vice versa, leaving no one convinced.
"
I don’t think they are the same.
But I think what’s triggered this is a lot of the next crop of anti-LGBT legislation (and I believe the FL law if I read it right ) give the teacher an affirmative duty to report to the parents if a student comes out to them.
Lying to parents is not appropriate. Encouraging kids to talk to their parents is appropriate.
Short-circuiting and jumping right to telling the parents doesn’t sit right with me. Not so much because the parent is an enemy, but because, while I obviously don’t fully trust the judgement of minors, I think I trust it more than state legislators and governors who have no specific knowledge of the situation
"
Should a teacher be required to out an eighth grader to his parents if he sees that eighth grader holding hands with another boy as they walk to school?
Because the answer to that one seems to be a pretty obvious no, the place where we draw the line between that and the behavior you describe may exist, but is not at all obvious to me personally, and I'm not sure there's a way around this that avoids relying on the discretion of teachers and/or administrators without treating the two cases identically.
"
Ok my analogy sucked.
Setting it aside: the problem may be real, but real problems can be cited as reasons to implement terrible policies, and if advocates concerned about those problems reliably propose terrible policy solutions, we may start to suspect there’s something else going on.
"
I'm old enough to remember when there was a "terrorism going on problem"[1] that was much more unambiguous than the "grooming" problem here, and to remember policy responses that were implemented in order to deal with that terrorism problem.
Axiomatically, I'm old enough to remember how many of those policy responses played out.
I'm pretty sure you are too.
[1] This started as a rhetorical flourish, but kids born on 9/11 will be celebrating with the customary first legal alcoholic drinks come September.
"
This is not remotely obvious.
Indeed, if it were obvious, DeSantis et al wouldn't constantly be trying to hide the ball when it comes to whether it's OK for kids to be taught that some of their classmates have two mommies or two daddies.
"
Is there a limiting principle here?
Because as stated, this means that you can be accused of "grooming" for teaching anything that may not want their kids learning in school.
And like, that includes a lot of stuff that virtually everyone believes that they should learn in school.
"
No it isn't.
Because it means that mentioning gay people in front of third graders is still verboten, effectively forcing teachers into the closet and barring children of LGBT parents from mentioning their families.
"
Yeah, and one of the themes I've noticed play out repeatedly is that the policymakers and activists leading the charge on this stuff do pretty much the opposite of what you'd do if you wanted to reassure people who are concerned about the impact this might have on LGBT folk.
Indeed, to address Oscar's point about the linear term of our metaphorical Taylor expansion, I noticed when the first round of this fight played out, for CRT, early legislative responses tended to be more or less fine, with a clear focus on not teaching stuff that shouldn't be taught.
But as they spread and evolved over time, they kept getting worse, and more expansive, until, in some cases, it's not even clear you can teach why the Confederates started the Civil War, or why we needed a massive protest movement to end segregation.
"
Like yeah that was in my first comment in this thread, which InMD replied to...?
"
I actually had a whole thing sketched out where I looked at higher order terms but my comment was already too long
"
Some do, but most of the time they build hedges nowhere near the problems like this.
And while doing it, they often run up to other lines--or barrel right on past them--yet the comfort of people, including parents, who take comfort in those lines is rarely addressed
"
Oh, I don't think it means that they necessarily hate gay people.
But it does mean that they think that gay people are weird and kind of gross and should conceal aspects of their identities and lives around five year-olds that are entirely uncontroversial when straight people mention them.
"
Yeah especially since it was a private school, and the legislative push is all about what happens in public schools.
"
So now that I've had some more time, let's actually engage with the big picture here, not as you see it, but as liberals see it. Because that perspective is not accurately reflected in your piece, and the closest you come to it, in this paragraph, doesn't capture the underlying narrative at all:
We don't see this as a conflict between parents and teachers. We have variety of reasons for not seeing it this way, which I'll get into, but that's not the fundamental conflict we are witnessing.
What we're seeing is a resurrection of a conflict that sorta kinda went into remission for about five years, and is then flaring up again:
Republicans vs. LGBT people.
Are they building their case on top of an argument about protecting the children?
Well, yes, they are. They always do that. In calculus that's the zeroth order term, the constant in your series expansion.
They've always done that. It's been their go to move for decades, that one way or another, the public existence of LGBT people threatens their children. Very frequently they've built this on top of a very ugly and false smear: that gay people have a particular propensity for molesting children.
When we're outraged at the use of the term "groomer", it's not because Republicans aren't playing by some sort of rhetorical Marquess of Queensbury rules, but because they are using partisan grievances of exactly the sort you indulge in--that the Left did it first-- as an excuse to attack not liberals, but LGBT people, especially LGBT kids, LGBT parents, and LGBT parents.
It's not that Republicans are trying to prevent kids [1] from learning that gay people exist, they want to prevent kids from learning that gay people are not morally defective perverts, but human beings deserving of no fewer rights, or less respect, than other people.
What about the worried parents, you ask?
Well, what of them? Are we counting every sort of worry a parent might have about how their kids are treated in school, or are we only worried about them being brainwashed by evil transgender extremists?
Because what about the kids who are barred from mentioning their gay parents during show-and-tell, or the gay students who required to stay closeted, lest they raise questions that cannot be answered for fear of violating deliberately vague and overbroad laws.
Or the trans kids whose parents do support them, and find themselves subjected to being investigated (and worse) for child abuse for doing so?
Don't those parents count? Aren't their concerns valid?
Or do they have to agree with you on trans issues before they count?
[1] Not just their kids; many of them don't have kids, or don't have kids in public schools
"
So the bill is lying about itself?
OK then.
Maybe the problem isn't just what liberals are saying about it.
"
I have read the entire sentence.
It doesn't make the original claim that it's a lie to call it the "Don't Say Gay" true!
At all!
And just to be clear, the activists and officials who pushed that piece of shit over the finish line were very, very intent on keeping that aspect of the bill in place.
"
Your analogy is too stupid to engage with usefully.
"
The response was politically ineffective in the VA Governor's race, but that does not, imply that it was false.
I'm not saying that there's no reason to discuss the political angle here; I am saying that it's very important to be clear about which you're talking about, lest we go around in a spiral of confusion for the umpteenth time.
"
Speaking of outliers, would you describe the Governor and AG of Texas as "outliers"?
"
So your concern is the deranged homophobic conceit that when a gay person mentions they're gay, they're talking about fucking?
Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought.
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