As a matter of fact, it seems over my 40 years here that most of the time it's religious extremists who want to ban speech and literature, I haven't seen much legal action taken against fundamentalist religious literature, no matter how hateful, though.
I would suggest you look into the content of the books being challenged and come to your own conclusion as to whether they are age appropiate or not. After all, the term "age appropiate" is subjective.
Here is an article about a woman who was gay and married to a woman and explains in her own words how she was ostracized and put down because of it, and then had to quit because even mentioning her marriage in the classroom could have gotten her fired.
Seems to me like things were not overblown, and Florida is turning into a Christian fascist stronghold
I just don’t understand this line and I see it so much. I’m not remotely “Christian”, some might even call me christophobic.
Yet I enthusiastically support these measures and would love to see them expanded. How do you cope with that? Not everyone who is against you is religious.
You keep saying everyone who disagrees with you is some religious fascist. You need to accept that there is a large, diverse community of people who are opposed to you.
None of this should be a surprise given the widespread use of regressive censorship tactics in the LGBTQBBQ community. You literally asked for this.
The some of which, quite frankly, has content that is shocking to provide in schools to children. And I personally think the blind outrage on the basis of "banning LGBTQ books" ironically hurts the greater cause of LGBT inclusivity.
I swear, you folks will reach as far as possible to make book bans seem reasonable.
And who do you think votes for these decisions? The parents. So presumably many parents think that some books in school liraries are not age appropiate.
I haven't even expressed my opinion on this topic yet you are assuming my stance because you lack nuance. That's why I suggest you read the actual books that are being challenged and come back with a more informed perspective.
Give me a list then.
> who do you think votes for these decisions? The parents
You think voting for something like this is reasonable? Why can those parents not police what their children do, so those of us who want our kids to be raised with knowledge of other people's struggles can let them read those books? I don't go looking to ban the bible, even if it has rape, murder, incest, and etc. in it.
- "Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe
- "All Boys Aren't Blue" by George M. Johnson
- "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison
- "Flamer" by Mike Curato
- "Looking for Alaska" by John Green
- "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky
- "Lawn Boy" by Jonathan Evison
- "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie
- "Out of Darkness" by Ashley Hope Pérez
- "A Court of Mist and Fury" by Sarah J. Maas
- "Crank" by Ellen Hopkins
- "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" by Jesse Andrews
- "This Book Is Gay" by Juno DawsonThen, once you answered that, tell me why I shouldn't ban Catholic churches from my community because of the perceived risk of pedophilia loving sexual pervert priests? (note: I don't believe we should ban churches, but at least I can show evidence of a threat)
My point here is that information is not dangerous and should not be banned or kept behind a locked door. That's how we end up with powerful interests controlling us.
There are a lot of non-parents with strong opinions about this.
[0] Absolutely no one who is developmentally prepared to have sex needs a book to tell them about the existence of oral sex, because they already know. We are not talking about books telling teens how to have sex safely, we are talking about books informing pre-pubescent children which parts A go into which parts B.
On what planet is a kid seeking out this information learning about it for the first time in the school library?
Huge difference between saying teachers shouldn't distribute the book and it should be removed from the school library. Libraries don't push books by virtue of having them on their shelves.
And again, when you look at the populations getting uppity about this, it's the ones with high rates of teenage pregnancy and STI transmission. Which makes sense. If Suzy only sees pictures and videos online, or has acts described to her by equally-clueless friends, she's less capable of making informed decisions than someone who also saw the terminology and context in a book. (She's also been informed the topic is taboo.)
Not particularly, but it's a moot question. It's not part of her sex ed. It's on a book shelf. We don't ask why The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is an important part of Suzy's anything when we concur with it being available. Same here.
Turning the question around, what's the harm in Suzy going into a library, picking up this book and learning Grindr exists? (Again, in a hypothetical universe where this sequence of actions occurs without her knowing of it already.)
> Reminder that Suzy is 11 years old, not a teenager
"The average age of first exposure" to online porn is 12 [1]. Even if Suzy's parents practice perfect digital hygiene, unless they're raising her as a houseplant, she's going to be exposed to this at a younger age than we were. The choice is whether she gets exposed within a context of information, understanding and comfort, or if she's thrown into the fray in a state of ignorance.
[1] https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/education/2023-05-14/sex-inter...
Note that my argument begins and ends with libraries. I don't really have an opinion on classroom instruction and materials.
Yes there was, and your conviction that this must be an exaggeration shows just how completely out of touch the mainstream media-following public is from the reality of the situation. Just as a single example, the children's illustrated sex instruction manual "This Book is Gay" has had its relevant contents republished all over the internet, so that one would practically have to have been specifically avoiding seeing it. It is using LGBTQ as a shield for pedophilia and as an LGBTQ person that makes me sick. The very title gleefully declares this intent: "This Book is Gay" and therefore if you object you must be a homophobe, and not, you know, someone who thinks that maybe children shouldn't be having sex unless and until they are old enough to work it out for themselves.
ETA: I almost forgot that even Snopes had to admit about the contents of this particular book: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tampa-school-sex-book/. In fact snopes reports it's even worse than what I said; it provides instructions on how to obtain access to hookup apps. To kids. Hookup apps. Kids. It's sick.
Well, I read the snopes article and the book seems edgy but reasonable. Why is it sick? Is it wrong to teach middle school kids about sex before they might have it in high school? Anyways, I said I wasn't going to respond here anymore, so I won't, but I guess your morals and mine aren't a matching pair. I don't see how sex ed harms middle school kids. If anything, it helps them not be a dufus and get preggo when they have sex the first time. Lots of movies that middle schoolers watch show people meeting each other in different situatiosn and then dating, which isn't any different from a "hookup app", which aren't used for as much sex hookups as you folks seem to think, it's where people today meet each other to date. Sex isn't sick, it's how humans make babies and become closer as couples and sometimes how they have fun.
Who the fuck brought pedo shit into this? Not me. I am for information dissemination. You're the one thinking every kid is going to be going on Grindr and meeting adults who want to have sex with them. If I tell my kid "this is weed, I smoke it to feel calmer" it doesn't mean I want my kid to go and use it until he's not developing any longer. I still want him to know what weed is, so he can make an informed choice when his friend asks him to try it in college or whatever.
You have an answer for everything, don't you? Funny how all of your answers are aimed toward promoting pedophilia.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
That's the same thing.
Defining a book as "age inappropriate" because it talkes about sexuality means that talking about sexuality is age inappropriate.
But taking about sexuality is critical for the healthy development of an LGBTQ+ child! How else can they understand, or even put into words, what they themselves are going through?
Teachers can show children Schindler's List, but can't talk to them about sex. That's the reality we are discussing here.
The words written for a law aren't how the law is actually implemented. Law isn't code. The group in power, in this case people who want to limit how LGBTQ people live, will write a perfectly reasonable law, and then only apply that law to cases that they personally believe in. In other cases, such as if you were to complain about the bible being lewd, they would state some exception for it and ignore your request. This "perfectly democratic" law is, in fact, used in a non-democratic way!
That’s banning a book purely for its message. Any student could access the message of it by watching tape of a presidential inauguration.
I used to buy the incrementalist argument that these books are inappropriate for grade schoolers. But then the law, predictably, was extended to high school and shows no sign of stopping.
Banning books has never been looked back on as a sign of a strong society. School is meant to be about resolving conflicting ideas. Pretending kids aren't getting 10x worse on the internet, or from their friends with an internet-connected device, just separates society into an imbecilic underclass and ones who can afford a more interrogative education.
This is the answer, and what you see in most elite private schools. (Adult supervision versus parents, granted, though parents are of course welcome.)
Huge chunks of western countries have banned books (with criminal penalties) for almost a hundred years now.
This clearly isn’t true in and of itself.
For example, you’d never write these kinds of comments in support of inclusion of certain Holocaust-adjacent material, which is actively banned in many western countries. Countries that, I might add, you would probably consider as doing well today?
You support book bans, you just don’t support banning these books. Please be honest and transparent about this, it’s much more respectable.
Fucking "Mein Kampf" is available, today, in several thousand libraries and bookstores around the USA and I wouldn't have it any other way. Some of us actually believe in the right for information to be free. I served in the military to fight (ostensibly) for freedom like this.
I’m not endorsing those viewpoints, merely showing how huge numbers of westerners actually are ok with book bans as long as it’s the right topic.
Both sides do this. Parents should have a direct say in the books teachers assign their students. One group of parents doesn't get to decide which books are and aren't allowed in a library.
Policy-wise, and even in respect of Americans' views, agree. In terms of politics, it's as real as it's contrived. The messaging, debate and legislation is done in a two-sided way, particularly in Florida, where national attention has paramagnetised even school boards.
> absolute, unfettered free speech for adults and that every parent has an absolute right to decide what their own children are exposed to
This is fair. There are logistical issues with letting parents go à la carte on public education. But that's solvable.
I don't see banning books from libraries statewide helping parents "decide what their own children are exposed to." The brush is too broad, and it's one group of parents making decisions for others' kids. (And to preëmpt accusations of hypocrisy, I think it's equally ridiculous when "progressive" elements strike classics for all because somebody might get offended.)
I don't want crazy religious idea being taught, I don't want people's opinions about how there are 57 genders being taught and I don't want a teacher or a school district trying to instill their chosen value system on my child. I want them to learn how to read. I want them to learn how to write. I want them to learn how to add and subtract. Frankly, considering how miserably school systems are failing to teach kids basic literacy, they should be embarrassed to even discuss their cultural, religious and/or political agenda (even when they insist that their agenda isn't cultural, religious and/or political).
When I was in school ~40 years ago, with 3 or 4 exceptions out of a class of ~100, every child could read, write and do math at or near grade level. I didn't know a single thing about the personal lives of any of my teachers, whether they were married, had kids, and certainly not what their sexual orientation was. It didn't matter - because they were there to teach academic subjects! Nor did any of my teachers know (or concern themselves with) my personal life, my sexual orientation or anything else aside from my academic performance in the subject they were teaching. There are a lot of reasonable, normal people who just want schools to become centers of academic learning again instead of another battleground in the cultural war.
I'm still trying to square your "every parent has an absolute right to decide what their own children are exposed to" with parents who feel the round Earth is a lie.
I'm arguing that the literacy rate in the average school is currently so low in the United States that many students are unable to read at all. I'm arguing that anyone who is more concerned with the number of gender diverse library books than the number of students who are unable to read and write is part of the problem.
At my ultra prestigious school 60 years ago all seven members of my class could read and write at college level by third grade. Schools are so terrible compared to yesterday.
I'm still waiting to hear about what to do when a parent says the round Earth is against their beliefs and they have the right for their child to never be exposed to such absurd, extreme, and unnatural ideology. It seems pretty core to your idea that "every parent has an absolute right to decide what their own children are exposed to."
In many of our largest cities, we are spending over $15,000 per student, every year. In many of these schools not a single student meets grade level standards in reading or math. That's right. Not one single student in the entire school. Let's take Baltimore, which spends over $17,000 per student, and has been one of the most outspoken cities about the need for a greater focus on "cultural education".
>Project Baltimore combed through the scores at all 150 City Schools where the state math test was given.
>Project Baltimore found, in 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math. Not a single student.
>Among the list of 23 schools, there are 10 high schools, eight elementary schools, three Middle/High schools and two Elementary/Middle schools.
>Exactly 2,000 students, in total, took the state math test at these schools. Not one could do math at grade level.
23 of 150 schools, 2000 students. Not a single student in any school proficient in math! Over $17,000 a student! A large number of the other districts had only 1 or 2 students proficient in the entire school. The highest grade-level proficiency in the entire city was 38%. If a city receives more than $17,000 per student, and turns out dozens of schools where not a single student is proficient, then that city has failed utterly in its educational mission. Suggesting that the problem is that they are "underfunded" (which is the en vogue political position of apologists for the educational system) is absolutely absurd. The failure of our public schools, and the widespread defense of that failure, is a microcosm of our societal failure at large.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r...
New York State is now officially lowered its "proficiency standards" for testing, conceding that kids just aren't as literate or educated as they were in the past, and that standards must be lowered so that it can appear that our failed educational system is functioning.
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-...
But you can be sure that going forward, New York State officials will be comparing the "proficiency rates" of next year (with the lowered standards) with the kids from previous years, and pretending that kids are just as educated as before (if not touting their 'improvements'!)
It is one thing to argue for lower standards, less literacy and a generally less-educated population in lieu of an agenda of social and cultural indoctrination. It is an entirely other thing to pretend that our failed educational system is actually teaching our children to read, write and perform arithmetic at the levels it has done historically for over a century. We are going to suffers severe consequences as a nation raising a generation of children who cannot read, write, do basic arithmetic or think critically.
>I'm still waiting to hear about what to do when a parent says the round Earth is against their beliefs and they have the right for their child to never be exposed to such absurd, extreme, and unnatural ideology.
They can send their kid to a private school run my lunatics just like the parents who think there are 57 genders. Public school should be for sane, reasonable people who just want their kids to learn how to read and write and not be indoctrinated with any fringe madness.
When you see massively falling test scores after school districts got massively interrupted for a couple of years from a pandemic, do you think it's the pandemic response that caused it or acknowledging gay people exist?
Note, I made a point to mention aptitude pre-pandemic for a reason. I imagine 40 years ago you could have also found tons of entire schools where every student was below grade level. I do agree we need to improve schools. I don't think pulling books from the library because they might touch on a topic like gay families exist is doing anything meaningful to address it.
> not be indoctrinated with any fringe madness.
Fringe madness like the round earth right? I guess you're the arbiter of what is and is not fringe madness? Whatever happened to the parents being able to choose, suddenly when it's something you believe in it's just basic fact?
For the record, I'm not a flat earther. But at the same time when I hear people saying any nutjob should have the absolute right to dictate what the curriculum or books are in the school, you'll have to deal with this. Some parent wants to not have their kids exposed to gay or trans ideas or concepts. Some parents don't want their kids exposed to the theory of gravity. Empowering one of these groups to ban the books is also empowering the other.
What if my child is in the class with a flat earther parent?
From what I understand some schools have pulled lots of books from libraries overall. There were tons of books I had access to that weren't directly a part of the curriculum, and in fact parts of the curriculum specifically gave my classmates and I the opportunity to explore different topics and books which weren't a pre-chosen part of the curriculum.
It's all about extremists, it's even all about "religion", even from the ones who call themselves anti-religion.
That said, don’t pretend the side you’re referencing is “peaceful”. It is extremely militant. They explicitly seek out moderator and other positions of power to enforce their world views via censorship.
I’ve seen the discord groups where they openly discuss doing this. They pride themselves on silencing others who they deem have violated their orthodoxy.
There isn’t a fridge gaming community on the internet that is safe from you and it is incredibly frustrating. Resistance is inevitable.
Frankly, the LGTBQ community are fighting for survival. If the far right gets what they want, these people will not be able to live in safety. So maybe being militant is reasonable when their lives are being threatened.
Well, the “ends” have consequences. I find it funny that the side so hellbent on calling everyone else “fascist” is the first to employ the definition of fascism (merger of state and corporate power) to enforce censorship on others.
If you’re (other) and just want to be left alone then you better start vocally separating yourself from the mainstream “community” and their jackboot tactics now, because the backlash is coming (due to said tactics) and it’s going to overspray unless mitigated now.
I simply argued that trans-activists argue in bad faith and regularly blur the lines on the definition of transphobic.
Rather frustrating to be banned site-wide simply for citing a fact.
The left will tell you (and demand that you accept) that that's somehow a healthy human being.
And to the extent that we accept it, it is a demand to reject fertility as an indicator for human health.
By all means eat yourself into a sphere, neuter yourself with sex hormones, mutilate your genitals - live your best life, but understand that if we all behaved that way the species would go extinct.
And I do not owe it to anyone to pretend otherwise.
Just for clarity on this point: If you meant Brían Nguyen, it was 'a' Miss America pageant and not 'the' Miss America pageant. The title wasn't "Miss America", it was "Miss Greater Derry"
For example, shouting the words, "Fuck God" in the middle of church would be considered an assault on the congregation.
Calling a non-binary person a "Man" would be considered an assault on that person.
Many of us secularists and atheists would very much like to leave the shadow of religious organizations. We can't do so without openly confronting the reality of those religious organizations and their power over our lives.
For that confrontation, we use words.
Maybe it was flagged because you started a slapfight about LGBTQ issues on a thread about encryption; then started implying anyone disagreeing with you was a fascist bending over backwards to ban books, instead of a human with potentially justified objections to said material?
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Assume good faith.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
Just to potshot at a few
Edit: I like your edit with HN rules. It's interesting that often fascists like to utilize the rule of law to supress speech and dissent in order to pervert and take over control of the rule of law.
I am done in this thread, anyways, everything that had to be said was said, and it's irrelevant to discuss further.
It's always religious extremists who want to ban speech and literature. This includes the secular religion of the DC Blob, the Spanish government and many other governments currently seeking to ban "hate speech", "disinformation" and (even more absurdly) "malinformation".
It's weird how short term people's memory is. It was only a few decades ago that certain mainstream political group wanted to make "violent video games" illegal. Their figurehead was a frontrunner for US president in 2016. You don't have to throw a stone very far to see that people on both sides want to ban free speech. Just look at how freaked out states like NY and California got over 3D printed gun files. Give them a few years and I guarantee they'll come after crypto next, if crypto stands in their way.
The only thing I've learned is that everyone wants to claim they support free speech but they just mean "their" speech, not the other guy.
...That all goes out the window once your judiciary becomes an extension of the political apparatus of course. Once that happens, your courts will just start creatively reinterpreting what things mean to most effectively and comfortably bring about what they deem to be the way to go.
Hence why Roe v. Wade, while being a great thing, was ultimately bad jurisprudence.
Also, if a state feels it's time to try it again, they might just go ahead and enforce this law to make this kind of a case happen again, hoping the SC comes to a different decision.
That's a mighty liberal interpretation about what those laws actually say. Try reading a more unbiased source.
It's time politicians spent time increasing accountability and preventing abuse before they even think about granting more power to law enforcement.
I think the next angle will be that it's needed to prevent hate speech. Any other ideas?