Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Some Bad News From Florida

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

34 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

In a mixed economy State run education system, should there be no standards or monitoring of what is being made available to students of any age?

The question is monitoring by whom? Children should be monitored. Certainly a parent should monitor, but someone else with "prevailing" agendas is threatening. When and how does this other source of monitoring get its authority ... legitimately/rightfully so?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

The question is monitoring by whom? Children should be monitored. Certainly a parent should monitor, but someone else with "prevailing" agendas is threatening. When and how does this other source of monitoring get its authority ... legitimately/rightfully so?

First, I would say that a public education system is ab initio invalid.  Any proper education is voluntary and hence not part of any State or Government system.  Like so many other things there should be separation of State and education.

 

Now in a mixed system we find ourselves in, IF one could truly opt out, i.e. get a 100% refund on any and all taxes/fees the public systems takes, one could enroll one's own children in a private school or otherwise educate one's child independent of any State intervention. In a private arrangement the parent has the right to remove the child from any school/tutor and schools/tutors offering services would have standards about what they would expose the child to, and there would have to be agreement.  Voluntary systems would have free reign politically and religiously and in every respect as long as they do not violate the individual rights of the child or parents.

SINCE most jurisdictions do not allow this, parents are chained... restricted to either use the public system or pay twice (once in taxes for the system and once again for actual education).  

IF a parent uses the system, in which they cannot (generally) voluntarily shop around for different teachers, or different schools (geography is limited), that parent MUST rely on the powers that be to ensure proper and appropriate education of the child.  A State body must be held accountable to the parents, and if individual agents of the State are abusing or misusing their position to indoctrinate or groom children, with Marxist or oversexualizing/inappropriate materials for a children of a certain age, then those parents are owed a duty to remove those materials and those teachers and ensure it does not happen again.

If you think "teachers" on average as individuals who have gone through teachers college would be best to provide whatever education they deem fit to your kids I would think again... and do some research about what is accepted at most teachers colleges and licensing bodies, politically, morally, and epistemologically...

In a State run system there are generally laws and regulations to ensure the system works as intended, and if the unions, licensing bodies, and colleges and individual teachers are getting out of hand... something has to be done.

 

EDIT:  Again, much of this comes down to whether the law purports to restrict the actions of private entities or whether it is enacted to apply to State Institutions i.e. Public Schools funded by taxpayer money.  Update: From what I can tell the law only applies to public schools. This is not bad news, but an attempt to hold government accountable and responsible. 

Edited by StrictlyLogical
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, necrovore said:

Sounds like you're trying to set up an ad hominem.

This isn't about me.

I agree.

 

If it were about you, you would be a parent with a child in school.

 

Individuals acting as agents of the state are not free agents able to do whatever their fancy tells them.. nor in the presence of naive impressionable children should they be allowed to.  Dereliction of their duty which causes harm violates your rights as a parent and your child's rights.

Edited by StrictlyLogical
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you want to protect kids, you want to protect them from the initiation of force, threats, and fraud, same as for an adult. (It also makes sense to protect kids from dangers they may not be able to understand; this is why you don't allow a baby to play with razor blades. In some cases, it makes sense to protect adults in this way, too, such as by requiring hard hats on a construction site, although adults can usually understand that, but I digress...)

All the Marxist indoctrination and the sexual grooming and so forth depends on force or fraud or both, and the reason it is infesting the schools is precisely because the schools provide the ability to do both to children (and, to some extent, parents).

A separation of state and education is the correct solution, and it would also entail separating education from the legal use of force.

However, the main reason we don't already have a separation of state and education is religion, because religious people have always believed that morality (and culture) cannot be reached by means of reason (or "reason alone"), but has to be imposed by initiating force -- especially upon children. "Spare the rod, spoil the child." So it is natural to them to impose education by force as well. The problem for them is, the Constitution doesn't allow it to be specified which religion(s) may be used, so the power of force that was given to public schools can be used for any religion, anything not based on reality, anything that has to be imposed by initiating force or fraud, such as Marxism, or sexual exploitation of the naïve. Religionists respond to this problem by attacking the First Amendment, rather than attacking force and fraud, which they know they need for themselves.

So their argument amounts to saying, "Instead of allowing schools to infringe rights, we should let parents do it!" I disagree. The solution is not to hand the instruments of force back to religionists, even if they happen to be in the majority. I don't think the solution is to say that religious parents, rather than schools, should have the power to initiate force -- which they will do, not only against their own children, but against anybody who might "influence" their children such as by providing a 15-year-old with access to a stack of books that includes The Fountainhead.

Nobody should have the power to initiate force like that.

Edited by necrovore
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I’ve recommended reading the novel, given copies of The Fountainhead the novel and lent out a VHS copy of the movie to several people over the years and I’m not a teacher.

The evils of public/state schools notwithstanding, the notion that the presentation of worthwhile ideas should or only does ‘happen’ at school is a cultural artifact that should be removed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

. . .

A State body must be held accountable to the parents, and if individual agents of the State are abusing or misusing their position to indoctrinate or groom children, with Marxist or oversexualizing/inappropriate materials for a children of a certain age, then those parents are owed a duty to remove those materials and those teachers and ensure it does not happen again.

. . . 

There is no monolithic "the parents". When I was in grade school and high school, overwhelmingly, parents of children at my public schools would not have wanted the students exposed to the theory of evolution in the classroom. My own parents included. Some parents would have disagreed with the majority. And there were wise educators who would favor teaching objective science to the students, rather than bolstering the dogma of religion (majority, power-wielding religion) in public schools.

My parents certainly would not have wanted students in public schools being exposed to the idea in class that there was something wrong with the position White Supremacy. When I was in high school, and a young practice-teacher selected the recent novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" for our literature class, that was a controversial selection. Tax payers in the Deep South wanted it banned from public school, and there were politicians ready to make hay by cozying up to those bigots. Today, there are some parents, taxpayers and voters, and some politicians who want it kept under wraps that the USA is populated with millions of bigots still committed to White Supremacy (with respect to Black Americans). I grew up in Oklahoma. It was maybe a dozen years ago, thanks to the internet, that I first learned of the White torching of a prospering Black district of commerce in Tulsa, now known as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. More recently, some of my white high school classmates learned of this atrocity, and some, the decent ones, were livid over never hearing of it in our Oklahoma State History class, which the State required for all public high schools. Many of we students were dedicated in the 1960's to the cause of racial equality under the law and to racial desegregation, notwithstanding the racism of our parents. From my neighborhood outside the city limits, you could go to the nearest city high school, which was being integrated, or you could apply for an exception to attend some unintegrated city high school on account of wanting to take something like German or swimming, which were not offered at the nearer school. Some of the students in our all-white neighborhood insisted, to our parents' chagrin, on going to the integrated school precisely because it was integrated.

One fortunate situation of students today is the internet for getting information. Even if the schools went back to the way it was in my childhood and youth, where gayness was never mentioned, the young folks could learn what they want to know about it from online information. I could only go to a dictionary or encyclopedia entry, which were really quite opaque. As far as sex and school goes nowadays, whether public or religious, I gather that things are more iron-fisted puritanical threatening due to the meddling from the adults in the society. It is now criminal (fines or imprisonment) for students in high school to have consensual sexual intercourse with each other. That is not at all how it was back in the day. Dating (heterosexual) and steadies were about sexual relations, and adults not your parents could just pound sand.

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

necrovore had written in response to a post by SL: 

Quote

 

Sounds like you're trying to set up an ad hominem.

This isn't about me.

 

To which SL responded: 

Quote

 

I agree.

If it were about you, you would be a parent with a child in school.

 

SL, that response indicates you are going with the informal fallacy of relevance that is known as the Circumstantial ad hominem, specifically: because your interlocutor is not a parent with a child in school, his position is false. That does not logically follow. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are about 16,800 school districts in the USA. Cases of "inappropriate" books in school no doubt get outsized political media attention in comparison to what is mainly underway each day at school in those districts. I doubt the incidence of "inappropriate" books in schools warrants the criminal statute adopted by the Florida county. Sounds more like using one's criminalization powers to make the problem look big enough for outraging voters and getting certain politicians elected on the basis of the hyped issue.

I came to a juncture in life at which I considered becoming a high school teacher, getting qualified for that in physics/chemistry/mathematics. But my life-partner dissuaded me, because of the hot issue at the time of legally barring gay people to be public school teachers. (Gov. Reagan's opposition to that initiative in CA in those years was one shining moment for him in my book.) Criminal penalties for selecting wrong books in teaching sounds like a pretty big discouragement for entering teaching.

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Boydstun said:

SL, that response indicates you are going with the informal fallacy of relevance that is known as the Circumstantial ad hominem, specifically: because your interlocutor is not a parent with a child in school, his position is false. That does not logically follow. 

Respectfully I disagree.

Necrove made an assertion that something was "bad" news. 

In all contexts the "good" must be carefully considered, and especially in the complexities of the context of a quasi-enforced State regime.

Where everyone involved is enslaved to an institution it's already bad, when changes are made to that system it can get better or worse (still bad).  To whom in the context is some change in a thing "good" or "bad"? 

I submit it depends on how one's individual rights are affected.

Properly:

No one has a right to education, or a proper education. 

No one has a right to anyone else and certainly not complete strangers, having an education, or a proper education.

No one has a right to teach a captive audience in a State run context whatever you want, in fact no one has a right to teach whatever you want in any privately run context (unless you own the institution yourself)... your boss (if it is not you) will quickly let you know that.

Parents and their children, however, have a right not to be harmed, not to be subjected to indoctrination, or sexualization (at an inappropriate age), not to be misled with extremely dangerous concepts beyond their ability to truly grasp, not to be turned into little Marxists, not to undergo permanent life altering surgery until they have the conceptual capacity and responsibility to make that decision which only comes in adulthood... etc.

 

Now, parents and children are effectively forced to play in a State regime of education, but they are the one's whose rights are potentially and in some cases actually violated.  Unfortunately, sometimes people who are not in the position to experience the violation of those rights do not fully understand the situation.  This you no doubt have experienced throughout your life as well.

 

My question "Are you a parent" is precisely on point.  Particularly given the complexity of the issue and the sheer under-reporting by mainstream media of just how bad schools and teachers colleges have become ... they are rife with Marxist and socialist ideology.  Parents experience these trends on their children first hand.

 

As for "Circumstantial ad hominem", in some contexts I can see how that would apply, I am certainly not saying that any non-parent's reasons are incorrect because they are non-parents, AND I am not stating non-parents could not form logical positions had they the full information parents do, I am of the belief that in many cases, non-parents do not have the information that many parents do.

The technicalities of the law may be awkward, and possibly could be disproportionate, but I think the current reports by progressive media are overstated, and/or some school boards are over-reacting. 

Overall, as a first step this is good news.  Children CANNOT be subject to the whim of every possible kind of teacher, who more and more might include radically Marxist or sexual-activist views... we can only hope in an invalid mixed enforced State system, semi-sane guidelines are provided within that system to educate (not indoctrinate) children appropriately.

 

 

Edited by StrictlyLogical
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Boydstun said:

There is no monolithic "the parents". When I was in grade school and high school, overwhelmingly, parents of children at my public schools would not have wanted the students exposed to the theory of evolution in the classroom. My own parents included. Some parents would have disagreed with the majority. And there were wise educators who would favor teaching objective science to the students, rather than bolstering the dogma of religion (majority, power-wielding religion) in public schools.

My parents certainly would not have wanted students in public schools being exposed to the idea in class that there was something wrong with the position White Supremacy. When I was in high school, and a young practice-teacher selected the recent novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" for our literature class, that was a controversial selection. Tax payers in the Deep South wanted it banned from public school, and there were politicians ready to make hay by cozying up to those bigots. Today, there are some parents, taxpayers and voters, and some politicians who want it kept under wraps that the USA is populated with millions of bigots still committed to White Supremacy (with respect to Black Americans). I grew up in Oklahoma. It was maybe a dozen years ago, thanks to the internet, that I first learned of the White torching of a prospering Black district of commerce in Tulsa, now known as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. More recently, some of my white high school classmates learned of this atrocity, and some, the decent ones, were livid over never hearing of it in our Oklahoma State History class, which the State required for all public high schools. Many of we students were dedicated in the 1960's to the cause of racial equality under the law and to racial desegregation, notwithstanding the racism of our parents. From my neighborhood outside the city limits, you could go to the nearest city high school, which was being integrated, or you could apply for an exception to attend some unintegrated city high school on account of wanting to take something like German or swimming, which were not offered at the nearer school. Some of the students in our all-white neighborhood insisted, to our parents' chagrin, on going to the integrated school precisely because it was integrated.

One fortunate situation of students today is the internet for getting information. Even if the schools went back to the way it was in my childhood and youth, where gayness was never mentioned, the young folks could learn what they want to know about it from online information. I could only go to a dictionary or encyclopedia entry, which were really quite opaque. As far as sex and school goes nowadays, whether public or religious, I gather that things are more iron-fisted puritanical threatening due to the meddling from the adults in the society. It is now criminal (fines or imprisonment) for students in high school to have consensual sexual intercourse with each other. That is not at all how it was back in the day. Dating (heterosexual) and steadies were about sexual relations, and adults not your parents could just pound sand.

Quasi-enforced State Education is wrong.  All who are trapped by the system have to deal with the fact of its existence.

 

The main problem with the Socialist Progressives, is that they cannot differentiate between cultural and societal injustice and the political violation of individual rights.  Lying is an injustice, prejudice is an injustice, racism, sexism, sexual orientationism, generally otherisms are injustices... and in a free society some people would not be able to shop in certain places or be able to buy any cake one wishes from every baker.

Whether or not force can lead to an acceleration of the correction of these cultural "inadequacies", violation of rights is never right, no matter how impatient the progressive activists are.  In a proper society, we pay for freedom with the realization such things may never wholly disappear.

Schools are progressively teaching socialist and progressively flawed ideas... churning out little leftists like never before across all western democracies.

 

So here, we have in Florida, like so many other places, a State run propaganda and indoctrination machine, with radical elements running about.  Not everyone agrees what should be taught because everyone has a different poison... like every religion is different.  The first step is to reduce indoctrination and concentrate on education... and if too much poison is found in any particular area... stick to teaching the unpoisoned ones.  The State should be giving up power not taking more power... and so parents might have to address some areas themselves as they see fit... but that is the ideal case anyway. The State has no role to play in raising children, or pushing culture "forward", no more than they would in a proper society without a State education system.

Edited by StrictlyLogical
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

I submit it depends on how one's individual rights are affected.

That's like saying you have no right to object to state-sanctioned murder, unless you're the one being murdered.

If rights are being infringed, the solution is not to infringe rights "in the other direction." It's to stop the infringement.

Giving the State the power to make lists of "approved" books -- and to enforce that list with the threat of felony charges -- is a very bad idea. (If the list is allowed to stand, the Left may themselves take control of it someday... and what then?)

Edited by necrovore
Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, necrovore said:

the Left may themselves take control of it someday... and what then?)

Hopefully this back and forth will become untenable after a while and the same thing will happen as what hopefully happens throughout  government, they get out of areas the left and right disagree on… and leave people alone.  The best anyone can hope for a State run system everyone participates in without choice, is that anything taught there consists of what both sides agree should be taught there.  If that breaks down hopefully sanity will prevail and the education system will be set free of any government involvement.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Hopefully this back and forth will become untenable after a while and the same thing will happen as what hopefully happens throughout  government, they get out of areas the left and right disagree on…

It looks like, over the past few decades, we have been moving in the opposite direction and polarizing more and more.

Also, the argument of "Do you have kids? Because if you don't, you aren't arguing from a love of your kids the way I am arguing from the love of mine" is ultimately an emotionalist argument, not just an ad hominem. Such arguments are favored by people of faith but are not acceptable as motivations for government policy.

Edited by necrovore
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, necrovore said:

It looks like, over the past few decades, we have been moving in the opposite direction and polarizing more and more.

Also, the argument of "Do you have kids? Because if you don't, you aren't arguing from a love of your kids the way I am arguing from the love of mine" is ultimately an emotionalist argument, not just an ad hominem. Such arguments are favored by people of faith but are not acceptable as motivations for government policy.

You missed, or are completely ignoring my comments above.  That is your choice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Invoking religious people repeatedly and exclusively as though this issue spontaneously arose from that corner's general desire to control what people get to read, as though there is no other relevant background, nothing that came before and that explains and lead to this, is also a fallacy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Boydstun said:

I doubt the incidence of "inappropriate" books in schools warrants the criminal statute adopted by the Florida county.

Having looked into it, lived it with my daughters in school and discussed it with many parents, I do not share your doubt.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Our Governor got elected to office running on keeping the Toni Morrison book Beloved away from the high schoolers. To win that many votes, you have to get a lot of votes from people who don't have children in public school. Lots of voters who were simply Republican anyway or who just wanted to vent their hatreds of this or that sort of person without the honesty to say it outright. I have not read Morrison's book, and I don't intend to. I heard it got a bump in sales once talk of its banning became the highlight of the campaign for Governor. We did not have economic issues at that time because the incumbent Democrat had the Commonwealth of Virginia in budget-surplus. Unsurprisingly, our present Governor has made statements to some segments of his supporters along this line: "I believe that life begins at conception." Talking his position on when abortion should be illegal. Talking that way and no doubt praying for the sake of his Party that no such bill arrives on his desk. Now the election is over and the Republicans got their man in on protecting the children from Morrison, we hear nothing on the topic. They won the election, and that was the point. They had had higher, deeper hopes, of course: to ban abortion and get rid of same-sex marriage. But their real God is getting power and keeping it and what with the view of the electorate in general elections and all, they'll have to tread lightly on those.

I don't know that what children are being taught in school concerning sexual orientation and gender identification is the most important source of influence on children today on those issues of life. The wider culture and exposure to it by children might be the more important source (Putin is protecting his country on that front). The other evening, on our anniversary, we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant where we had asked for the waiter who had served us when we first moved here and on the evening of the day of our wedding 7 years ago. He is a single parent with two sons. We hadn't seen him for a long time because he had sustained serious injury from falling down a stairs in their home. A few years ago, he had been telling us of his elder child's conflicts at school over his coming into a period of thinking he wanted to become the opposite sex. He wasn't getting support at school, but derision and hostility. Getting caught up with the father, our waiter, the other night, he mentioned that that son is now a junior in college, is happy, and has a girlfriend.

My husband had always been bisexual. He and his former wife raised the children and on through college. Both of their sons turned out to be straight. They got some pain in school back in their youth over vicious remarks being made concerning gay people. They knew it was baloney, but it hurt to hear such stuff because their father was gay. Fact is, we too, are the American family. I became part of that family 27 years ago, and the grandson, now age 22, has always known me as Grandpa Stephen. You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. We simply have won the wide culture war in which the enemy tried to keep who we are invisible or seen as evil or mentally defective. The power of economic boycott now overruns the decisions of the Resistance US Supreme Court, they being very far out of step with wide respect and love for gays and lesbians in this culture that we helped make more decent.

On literature being read by high schoolers, the poetry also bears watching for banning:

How beautiful are your sandaled feet, princess!

The curves of your thighs are like jewelry,

the handiwork of a master.

Your navel is a rounded bowl;

it never lacks mixed wine.

Your waist is a mound of wheat

surrounded by lilies.

Your breasts are like two fawns,

twins of a gazelle.

Your neck is like a tower of ivory,

your eyes like pools in Heshbon

by the gate of Bath-rabbim.

Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon

looking toward Damascus.

Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel,

the hair of your head like purple cloth—

a king could be held captive in your tresses.

How beautiful you are and how pleasant,

my love, with such delights!

Your stature is like a palm tree;

your breasts are clusters of fruit.

I said, “I will climb the palm tree

and take hold of its fruit.”

May your breasts be like clusters of grapes,

and the fragrance of your breath like apricots.

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

So much of culture, society, and its institutions, some of which are machinations of the State, are helplessly flawed, flawed and influenced with error, bias, irrationality, overzealousness, greed and negligence.  They pull in different directions, and strike at different populations of individuals, and yes in times of misintegration/activism they take vengeance in active discrimination of perceived so called groups formerly or presently holding power.  The infringements on individual rights is alarming and disheartening, whether perpetrated by the system on a wide level or by radicals within the system abusing power.  Less government, and proper government are what is needed.

The curriculum and the teachers, in this flawed imposed system, are not always guided by interest in the flourishing of every individual child.  Agendas, causes, regrets, revenge, rebellion, personal biases all... these tendencies and attitudes now too commonly override and cloud the appropriate needs of children..[so caught up with "imbalance" are the progressives, that they fully self-justify keeping some children down, or actively working to squish their spirit with guilt and self-doubt...].

What I see lacking most is an understanding of True Self-love (and individuality), what it really objectively means, and its nurturing and encouragement.  Superficial and political (radical) influence, group-think and categorization of this tribe against that tribe, amplified by social media is now hollowing out the spirit of so many innocent individuals, so that they do not know who they are, why they should make certain choices over others, or what life is.  So caught up with trying to fit in they fall apart.

 

This comes to that junior in college, now to all appearances happy.  There is no reason that anyone should go through the self-doubt, or lack of self-love, as they are, at such a young age.  I think some (not all) less than virtuous high level medical executives ... pharma or surgery - and insurance related... are pushing hard (top down) for wide spread acceptance ... i.e. adoption of the their products (and the attendant flow of money) with insufficient regard for the mental state and maturity of some potential customers, and the  impact that the permanent irreparable and irreversible effects can have on those so vulnerable and young, at an age where making stupid mistakes is notoriously commonplace. The religious and medical communities used to push a cure for being gay, they did not need big tech and institutional influence to push their flawed agenda.

Whether being A or B is a construct or not, I believe that anyone, any "I am that I am" feeling bad about themselves for what they intrinsicly are is utterly a construct, and a horribly tragic one.  One IS utterly unique, and true self-love dictates that whatever one looks like, one looks like what one feels because that is the one that one is, one is not beholden to what anyone else labels one, or what anyone else thinks how looking and feeling should be related.  We are not As and Bs or Cs, which should act or feel or do anything in particular, a person is not something that should not have been.  Self-love supercedes any and all groups and groupings.  Every person, although on a journey, is perfect, as a human being, as a self-soul, an end in themselves... just as they are.  That is what needs to be taught.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Invoking religious people repeatedly and exclusively as though this issue spontaneously arose from that corner's general desire to control what people get to read, as though there is no other relevant background, nothing that came before and that explains and lead to this, is also a fallacy.

Schools can have a great deal of power over young children who do not understand what is being done to them, and there are teachers who subject some of their students to horrible psychological abuse, without the knowledge or consent of the parents. I saw it firsthand when I was a kid in school, even back in the 1980s.

I can easily imagine teachers talking kids into gender identities that they don't really want, possibly getting other kids to bully targets into it. There have even been cases where teachers can allow (or perhaps require) kids to get hormone therapy without the knowledge of the parents -- and this gender-change stuff ends up sterilizing the kids. So, all this can be used as a forced sterilization program. It certainly has Nazi overtones.

It's entirely proper for the government to put a stop to that rather than allowing it to continue (or encouraging it).

However, there are a lot of people who take religion seriously, who believe in enacting "God's perfect Kingdom" into law. I have a lot of experience with family members who believe that kind of religion. It is not merely a bogeyman invented by the Left. It is very real. They don't want "democracy," they want an absolute monarchy or dictatorship, where all the laws are based on their religion. God, they say, takes precedence over the Constitution, so no matter what the Constitution says, there can never be a "right" to question or disobey God.

They also have a lot of superstition about how reading the wrong books or watching the wrong movies will give the Devil power over you and so forth, and they would be more than happy to ban The Fountainhead and The God Delusion and Catch-22 and 1984 and lots of other books that have ideas they don't like, and they will argue that all such books are the same as the ones that talk little kids into having sex, and should be banned on the same grounds: they are against God (even if not always directly).

Of course most of the reason kids are vulnerable in the first place is that Christianity, being a falsehood itself, cannot teach kids how to distinguish truth from falsehood, and therefore leaves them without any guidance in such matters except to accept the authorities they grew up with.

I oppose giving the government powers which will be used to enforce religion at the expense of reason and individual rights. These overreaches cannot be dismissed as innocent mistakes; they must be opposed.

Such opposition does not mean giving the Left whatever they want. It means depriving the government of the power to push any ideology on children by initiating force, whether it's Marxism or Christianity.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...