People dramatically exiting twitter is childish to me. Why do you need validation for using social media? Also people having fake outrage over twitter drama and smear merchant journalists who push terms of service boundaries on purpose is equally childish. Grow up.
Why are you omitting the entire sentence?
"Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in."
That sounds perfectly reasonable as long as the bill goes on to explicitly define in law exactly what is and is not age/developmentally appropriate. I'm going to guess that it does not and that the true point of the law is to criminalize something poorly defined so that it can be used to selectively attack anyone who covers those subjects no matter how they do it.
If you can't see the obvious difference between covering the district approved sex ed curriculum and trying to push the legal limits of what you are allowed to say to children before you go to prison, you should not be allowed around children.
> Laws like this are intentionally vague so we can put such a person under the prison where they belong without having to worry about them weaseling out of it.
I cut the second half for brevity: it seems that the bill does in fact prevent the use of the word under at least some circumstances, so I condensed the exceptions since they’re not relevant to addressing the claim that it doesn’t do so at all.
It prevents talking about sexuality with children (up to 3rd grade), whether it's gay, straight, trans, furries, whatever. To say it's about one specific thing when it's about the entire subject is misrepresenting the bill.
Why should it be more acceptable, exactly? This is not even about sexual education, it is literally illegal to explain to those kids that sometimes a man and a woman love each other, and sometimes two men or two women do the same. Of course, the first part will never be enforced, but the second and third clearly will.
There is no age at which it is inappropriate to listen about these extremely basic facts of the world.
When I was in kindergarten I didn't even know my teachers had first names, much less spouses. A kindergartener is not your friend to share your life with. People have terrible boundaries. This is why public schooling must be destroyed.
When I was in kindergarten I knew people you saw in other contexts like school were people like your family who had names and families like your family. I have no idea how one could possibly reach that age and not know that. Extending that with the idea that people's families come in all sizes and combination with some having 2 men or two women seems entirely age appropriate.
In the broader context this topic would be dull as dishwater and boring as toilet training if a certain type didn't make it interesting if only as a measure of their obsession with sex and other people's mere existence transgressing on useless norms that they somehow assume are vital to our society.
Outside of your fantasies teachers aren't violating your kids boundaries by having a same sex partner or a last name nor yet by telling them some households have two mommies or two daddies. What you are actually concerned about is constant exposure to reality may lead your kid to believe that its normal and acceptable for a man to love another man or a woman another woman which is ok because a substantial minority are gay and it is indeed ok for them to love whom they love.
Instead you'd rather in your words "destroy public schooling" one of the most obvious wins of the modern era to avoid... your kid learning about... adam and steve.
Your approval is of no value and your disdain is of no concern. If it helps you to create a fantasy in your mind of what my concerns might be, you are free to do so.
Please do explain how at present kids are being wronged with specific examples and feel free to follow up with what you think public schooling ought to be replaced with for the tens of millions of kids whose parents cannot afford private school.
Government schools are literal prisons for children and the only place many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lifetimes. They should be replaced with nothing.
For practical purposes for a lot of kids this would mean no education, no socialization, less food, and running wild while any and all adults in the house have to work to pay rent. As someone who had a really shitty public school experience I still think this is absolutely an awful idea.
All you have going for you is momentum and that is changing rapidly. States are passing real school choice all the time. Real school choice means the money goes with the student no matter where the student goes. Home schooling is spreading like wildfire. Your schools are failing and they will die once enough people have escaped them. Your approval or disapproval is irrelevant, you've already lost.
Most people are ill equipped by intelligence, education, demeanor,and available time and to substitute for an entire building full of teachers. Schooling doesn't have to take place in the home but most parents are unsuited to the task by themselves.
The number of people home schooling went up during the pandemic but it is a single digit percentage not spreading like "wildfire". I expect home schooling to be sufficient for only a minority while a larger portion might well benefit from a partially or wholly online experience.
We are not allies. We do not share a common culture or morality. Your arguments are irrelevant. The schools are being destroyed right before your eyes and you are powerless to stop it.
I didn't say anything about the kindergarten teacher's spouse - the simple fact I was mentioning is something kids can obviously see on their own around them, and may well ask their teachers about.
Well, when I was in kindergarten, I very much knew my teacher had a spouse, had twins, and she was pregnant at the time.
Would it have been inappropriate if she said her and her husband was having a baby? In todays society would it have been in appropriate if she said her and her wife? How do you think these same conservatives would have felt if little Johnny came home and mentioned to their parents that their teacher spoke about her wife?
Teachers are service providers. They should have no deeper emotional bond with their students than the cashier at McDonald's has with their regular customers. Students are not friends. While the isolated story of your teacher sharing her wedding pictures is not a big ordeal, it shows an underlying problem of poor boundaries. We have a pervasive problem, at least in the US, of teacher with poor mental health and poor boundaries trying to be friends and pseudo-parents to their students.
I find this approach so sad. We've let the corporatization of everything build such huge walls between us as humans. Seeing every interaction as transactional and emotionless just feels like death to me.
Exactly - and teachers specifically have always been exactly formative figures in your youth.
At least in my country, what the GP is saying is almost the precise opposite of how the pupil-teacher relationship is conceptualized. Indeed, people often bemoan teachers who just think they're providing a service, instead of taking their responsibility as mentors seriously.
Demoralizing public school teachers and making them feel like death sounds like a win to me. The best possible outcome is they all quit and the public schools shut down. Until then, squeeze them, deny them any concept of free speech, let them know they are not to be trusted. These are government agents who have laws compelling parents to put their children in their presence. Public schools are literal prisons for children.
Just to be clear - an informed electorate is sort of key for American Democracy so openly arguing against any form of education is a pretty clear argument against some really basic tenants of America.
There are multiple problems with this, the biggest being defining 'appropriate.'
and by their definition that somehow topics around queer people & gender can be inappropriate; this is not sex education and no, nurses are not handing out hormones to pre-teens.
Many of these laws specifically enable people to sue teachers, governments, officials, women who had an abortion, etc.
That enables conservative & religious fanatics to have the last say and impose their moral worldviews onto the rest of us.
The fact that gay people exist is not 'appropriate' in many of their minds. Which is gross and sad. And therefore these laws give the vocal minority the power to force the rest of us back into the closet.
Yes they can as long as it's age appropriate. "A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students."....next
Which is the gigantic loophole - the bill isn't limited to primary grade levels. A parent suing U of F about their child being exposed to information about "sexual orientation" is perfectly allowed within the letter of that law. It says "primary grade levels" and then throws in a completely unlimited "age-appropriate" clause that allows it to apply to any person at any school receiving state funding.
Whenever these bills use squishy language like "age-appropriate" it's to provide an easy out for politicians at the time while causing a chilling effect over all discussion.
"not age appropriate" is defined nowhere, intentionally. It's meant to be enforced against non-straights, or scare them into not being able to say anything at all.
A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about [sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels] OR [in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students] .
So no discussion about gender identity or sexual orientation (so don't discuss about families with two mommies) at all in primary grade levels. Then, for all (other) grade levels, no such discussion that is not age-appropriate.
Ah yes the ol' "Let's just cut the military budget" position.
Teachers salaries are 100% a local issue. If you want to raise their salary then vote to increase taxes in your county. Teachers are state employees. The states governments are more than capable enough to solve these issues since they are local issues.
To be fair, state and local governments would have to increase the total tax burden on their populace to increase education funding, or makes cuts to other things in their domain. The federal government could certainly cut the military budget and grant those funds to state or local education programs, without increasing anyone's tax burden.
That said, my understanding is that the military budget mostly goes to salaries, so any drastic cuts would leave us with massive unemployment. You'd have to take things really slow to make that big a change in the labor force without pretty ugly side effects.
And don't forget, military needs teachers as much as anybody. When there's no war soldiers are on stand-by. What do they do? They train, which is really a form of education. They could learn many things besides how to use weapons. They could learn how to be teachers when they are ready to leave the military. :-)
