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 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.