Tag Archives: parental rights

Proof Of Insanity

As regular readers of this blog know, I read (or at least scan) reports from a lot of different media. In the process, I increasingly find myself muttering things like “these people are insane!”

Take a look at any rundown of the “news of the day,” and you will find conspiracy theories and behaviors bizarre enough to make Marjorie Taylor Greene look rational. (And that is saying something.)

I recently saw that the GOP in a Florida county passed a resolution “banning the. jab,.” They want to  ban the COVID-19 vaccine in the state of Florida. Lest we conclude that the insanity is limited to the Sunshine State, however,  U.S. News disabuses us of that comforting conclusion. Arkansas, Montana and South Carolina are the latest states to advance bills or enact laws that ban requirements based on vaccine status.

The war on vaccination joins the war on “wokeness”–and science, and health, and common sense.

The Indiana legislature is a never-never land where logic goes to die. Is the state having difficulty finding qualified teachers? Indiana’s Senate just passed a bill (patterned after Florida’s), that will allow teachers to be charged with a felony for allowing students to check out books some parents don’t want their kids to read.

Indiana sure isn’t recruiting teachers with that message…

The same lawmakers who defend that measure by chanting “parental rights” are busy passing bills divesting parents of trans kids of their right to determine their children’s medical care. (Indiana’s legislature hasn’t improved much since it passed a law changing the value of pi.)

And then–brace yourself for this one.The MAGA folks have discovered that there is no war in Ukraine. It’s all a “false flag” operation! Shades of Alex Jones!

As Josh Marshall recently reported

Since I spend time, for better or worse, swimming in the swill of right wing influencers and Trumpists, I’m often able to see things before they go fully mainstream — or rather before their existence gets picked up in mainstream media. Just over the last few days there’s been a burst of claims that something is not quite right about the Ukaine War, that the whole thing might be made up. Perhaps it’s a potemkin war. Maybe the Ukrainians are just crisis actors, as we sometimes hear claimed about the victims of mass shootings in the United States. The “questions” are characteristically vague and open-ended, designed to sow doubt without stipulating to any clearly disprovable claim.

The particular claim or question is, where are the pictures? Why isn’t there more war reporting as we’ve seen with every other war. How is it world leader after world leader is able to visit Kyiv in relative safety?

Marshall shared a post to Twitter from someone named Becker, who evidently started at Fox News and found it too mainstream. He decamped to The Blaze, TimCast, and the Rubin Report– “more explicitly white nationalist and fascist news organizations. Now he is the “Becker News CEO.” Here’s the post.

 I am sick and tired of the lack of footage of the Ukraine war. I worked in cable news. I am initiated. If it bleeds, it leads. Where is the war footage? Where are the Pulitzer Prize winning photos? This smacks of a scam and the American people are fed up.

Produce the documentary evidence or STFU already. We’re not sending our sons and daughters to die over a corrupt undemocratic country’s politics without documentary evidence. We don’t give a crap about your Russian bogeymen. This is not a matter of US national security. So, put up or shut up.

Pick your chin up off the floor! As Marshall notes, in the real world  where most of us live,  the war in Ukraine is more than well-documented. The pictures–even the sounds–are on television, on social media, on the front pages of America’s remaining newspapers. Everywhere.

Volume doesn’t equate to quality or insight. But quite apart from the nonsense we’re discussing here, there is an avalanche of video, photography and satellite record of this conflict that really has no equal in history. Like so much else, a lot stems from the existence of the smart phone: most of the civilians and the combatants have smart phones which allow them to create high quality records of events in real time. These circulate on social networks and encrypted distribution networks like Telegram. Drones also play a role. They’re all generating video coverage whether they are surveillance drones or simply recording the final moments before they crash or detonate themselves.

Every reader of this blog can add to these examples. We’re seeing the steady growth of what the Trump Administration dubbed “alternate facts,” and you can’t reason with inhabitants of alternate realities.

I guess I’ll go polish my space laser…..

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Parental Rights (But Just For The Right Parents..)

I still remember experiencing an epiphany of sorts when–some twenty years ago–a group of parents wanted the Indianpolis City-County Council to pass an ordinance  preventing children from accessing certain books from the public library. The library had responded by offering what I felt was a reasonable accommodation: parents who desired to control what their kids could check out could fill out a form at the library, and librarians would require parental approval for materials their children wished to read.

Nope–not good enough.

These advocates of “parental rights” insisted that no child should access whatever it was that had them up in arms. That’s when I realized that what these parents really wanted was the right to control the decisions made by other parents.

That mindset is all around us.

Elon Musk believes in free speech for racists, anti-Semites and homophobes–but not for critics of Elon Musk.

Anti-abortion fundamentalists want “religious liberty” defined as the imposition of their religious beliefs through the passage of laws that ignore the liberties of people whose religions differ.

That absolute disregard for the rights of people who disagree with them–and their utter un-self-awareness of that hypocrisy– is obvious in so many of the fights being waged by these culture warriors. The anti-mask, anti-vaccine “freedom fighters” are a great example–they don’t care if they endanger friends and neighbors; It’s their rights that matter.

E.J. Dionne recently made that point in an op-ed about the “parental rights” extremists who’ve been showing up at school board meetings and demanding that certain books be banned. He noted that this new round of censorship “has sturdy roots in a right-wing movement that uses slogans around “parental rights” to defend removing books from libraries in the name of “protecting” children.”

The scare quotes I put around parental rights and protecting kids will invite immediate denunciation and provide an opportunity to say that terrible liberals like me are against parents exercising their responsibilities and protecting children….

Opponents of censorship heartily agree that parents should have an important say in how schools work and how public libraries serve our children. What we’re against is a willful ideological minority imposing its views on everyone else, dictating which ideas should be forbidden in public institutions that instruct the young.

As Dionne noted, the same disregard for the rights of other parents permeates the movement’s dishonest “anti-CRT” assaults. (I think everyone who screams about our schools teaching Critical Race Theory should be challenged to define it. They have no clue. What they really want, of course, is whitewashed history…) Dionne cites several surveys that confirm the desire of a majority of American parents to teach accurate history, warts and all.

“We found that Americans of all political orientations want their children to learn a history that celebrates our strengths and also examines our failures. Americans overwhelmingly agree that the experiences of minority groups are an important part of that history. And they agree that if students are better informed about America’s past there’s a better chance of not repeating past failures.”

When it comes to book banning, a survey for the American Library Association in March asked: “Would you support or oppose efforts to remove books from local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them?” It found 71 percent were opposed.

There is an appeal to the idea that parents should have some control over what their children learn,” Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux, who has polled extensively on educational issues, told me. “But parents don’t want a situation where the most upset parent determines what other children learn or what books are in the school library.”

It’s instructive to look at the questions in surveys that the culture warriors claim support book banning: one Rasmussen survey found that 69 percent of voters “believe books containing explicit sexual depictions of sex acts, including homosexual sex, should not be present in public high school libraries.” Those stocking school library shelves would agree–and it’s the height of dishonesty to use language suggesting that such explicit materials are what is at issue.

As Dionne says,

The vast majority of parents want their kids’ schools to be open and welcoming settings for education, not battlefields in culture wars designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time.

Unfortunately, most of these sensible parents lack the time and resources to do battle at school board meetings.

The board members who must listen to the ravings of these fringe activists need to remember that people are loudest and most aggressive when they know they don’t represent a majority–and that the parents who disagree with the loudmouths have parental rights too.

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