Legislation Proposed to Clarify the Rights of Parents of Gender Dysphoric Children Attending Public Schools

Attorney Luke Berg is asking state legislatures to clarify the rights of parents, especially in cases where public schools are secretly affirming a child's transition while at school. Here is some background and the key points Berg is proposing:

In the past few years, school districts nationwide have quietly adopted policies requiring staff to facilitate and “affirm” gender identity transitions at school without parental notice or consent—and even in secret from parents. Certain groups are telling school boards and administrators that excluding parents from the decision about whether staff will treat their child as the opposite sex is not only best practice but required by law. Neither is true. Such policies fly in the face of how schools treat every other decision of similar significance.

From a legal perspective, these policies violate parents’ constitutional rights to raise their children. They also conflict with science. Many professionals in the field believe that transitioning at a young age can become self-reinforcing and do long-term harm. And these policies divide children against parents, communicating to kids that their parents’ decisions should not be respected.

Key Points

• Schools have a long-standing tradition and legal obligation to inform parents of their children’s medical and behavioral issues and to honor their decisions about what’s best for their kids. Yet, prompted by a well-organized lobby, many school districts have decided that minor students can change gender identity at school without any parental involvement.

• A gender identity transition is a major event in a child’s life. It can have long-term effects on a child’s psyche and sense of identity, and, as a result, many mental health professionals recommend a more cautious approach, first helping children process what they are feeling and why.

• The increasingly common practice of rushing to “affirm”and facilitate a transition at school without informing parents, and even refusing to follow their wishes, runs directly against a strong body of case law recognizing parents’ constitutional right to raise their children.

• State lawmakers can and should clarify that school districts must defer to parents when children struggle with gender identity issues.

. . .

Even if political pressure fails, these policies are vulnerable to lawsuits. As discussed briefly above, a long line of cases from the United States Supreme Court holds that parents have a fundamental right, under the 14th Amendment, to “direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” This is “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by” the Court.

. . .

To be clear, such a bill would not, as some will likely argue, require teachers to immediately “out” to parents any student who has questions about these issues and confides in a teacher (though teachers must be permitted to communicate openly with parents about this, because this can be a serious mental health issue). But if a student wants to take the major step to transition, asking all teach- ers and staff to treat him or her as the opposite sex while at school, that should require parental per- mission, just as taking medication at school does, because—as noted above—social affirmation is a medical intervention. Teachers can still be a safe space for students to process these issues while gently explaining to students who want to transition that this is a big decision and that they need to involve their parents if they want to do so at school with the support of staff.

No parents should go through what Jay Keck58 went through, suddenly discovering one day that his daughter had changed gender identity at school, with the school’s active participation and affirmation but without any notice to him. No parents should go through what the Kettle Moraine parents went through, being forced to withdraw their daughter from public school just to protect her and preserve their parental role.

A bill to prevent this should find broad support among parents and constituents. Most parents are outraged when they learn that school districts are excluding parents from this major decision. Even parents who ultimately would allow an immediate transition should want and expect to be involved. Those who support these policies should be forced to defend them publicly and explain why they believe it’s ever appropriate to hide such a serious issue from parents or to subvert the parents’ decision about what’s best for their child. These poli- cies have been implemented quietly for a reason. A public debate that brings them to light may be all that’s needed to start eliminating them.

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Dark Triad Personality Characteristics Tied to Weaponized Victimhood

From PsyPost:

New research provides evidence that narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism — maladaptive personality traits known as the “Dark Triad” — are associated with overt displays of virtue and victimhood. The study suggests that people with dark personalities use these signals of “virtuous victimhood” to deceptively extract resources from others. The findings have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Fortune and human imperfection assure that at some point in life everyone will experience suffering, disadvantage, or mistreatment,” wrote the authors of the new study. “When this happens, there will be some who face their burdens in silence, treating it as a private matter they must work out for themselves, and there will others who make a public spectacle of their sufferings, label themselves as victims, and demand compensation for their pain. This latter response is what interests us.”

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Jon Stewart Loudly Declares his Full-Woke Tribal Membership in Alleged Conversation with Andrew Sullivan

I have enjoyed watching Jon Stewart over the years and looked forward to this conversation involving Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan. It was not what I expected. It was not a conversation at all. On these issues of race, Stewarts exhibits absolutely no sense of nuance, no curiosity regarding the statistical evidence pertaining to the issues and no interest in tamping down the shrill racist declarations of a second guest, a woman named Lisa Bond. I'd recommend that you watch two videos before reading further. The first is Stewart's introductory "comedy skit" regarding racism.  The second involves the "conversation" with Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan was rightfully appalled by this "discussion" and dissected it piece by piece in his article, titled "The Problem With Jon Stewart: How painfully, cringingly super-woke must a comedian get to stay relevant?" Here's an excerpt:

Jon Stewart’s insistence that Americans had never robustly debated race before 2020 is also, well, deranged. Americans have been loudly debating it for centuries. There was something called a Civil War over it. His claim that white America has never done anything in defense of black Americans (until BLM showed up, of course) requires him to ignore more than 300,000 white men who gave their lives to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy. It requires Stewart to ignore the countless whites (often Jewish) who risked and gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement. It requires him to erase the greatest president in American history. This glib dismissal of all white Americans throughout history, even those who risked everything to expand equality, is, when you come to think about it, obscene.

Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans. As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.” To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.

Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry. He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”

I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening. His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist. Those fucking white men, Lincoln and LBJ, never gave a shit.

What is stunningly obvious about Stewart's rant (and all Woke rants) is the lack of ideas for how to fix the problems they point to (and many of them are legitimate concerns). It's all theatrical virtue-signaling that refuses look at actually problems and solutions. For instance, what are some real-life changes we could implement that would actually result in inner-city minorities getting better math and reading skills? There is also a consistent refusal by these Woke performers to look at relevant data. Look what happened to Roland Fryer when he looked at real numbers and urged real solutions. Look at what happened to Steven Pinker.

For excellent analysis of Stewart's rant, see the [upcoming for non-subscribers] episode of The Fifth Column podcast "The Problem with Jon Stewart." Analysis begins about minute 23 and runs for an entire hour.

[Added April 3, 2022]

There are many Woke-inspired "conversations" like this and most of them are deficient and misleading in the same way.  They talk a lot about average, as though every "black"* person is the average person, when that is wildly false.  The "average" encompasses a wide distribution of people, many of whom are quite successful along with those who are struggling.  In fact, 60% of "black" people are middle class or above.  Why don't they discuss the many successful "black" people?  And why don't they ask what the successful "black" people are doing that unsuccessful "black" people are not doing? And why don't they discuss what unsuccessful "black people are doing that unsuccessful "white" people are also doing?  Such discussions simply don't help their narrative, which is that every "black" person in modern American is constantly victimized by racism perpetuated by every "white" person.

*I am no longer going to use the terms "white" and "black" to refer to groups of people. The willingness to categorize people by "color" is the first step onto the slippery slope of racism.  There is definitely racism in the U.S., but there is no such thing as "race." We can tamp down the former if we stop categorizing people (of any "color") in this crude, baseless and dangerous way.  For more on my refusal to categorize people as colors, see this article on Dr. Sheena Mason and see this article holding that "race" has no more validity than astrology.  When people ask for my astrological sign, I tell them that the are engaged in a nonsensical thinking.  Same thing whenever people categorize each other by color or "race."  Mason adheres to a theory of gracelessness, which she backs up with her own theory of gracelessness, which is a methodological and pedagogical interpretive and teaching framework for "how to analyze race and racism across time and place."  She discusses her threory at length in the video below, starting at Min 14:

Continue ReadingJon Stewart Loudly Declares his Full-Woke Tribal Membership in Alleged Conversation with Andrew Sullivan

Youtube Disappears Six Years of Work by Chris Hedges

Youtube's Mission Statement:

Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.

Bullshit.

Six years of work by Chris Hedges. Youtube doesn't like it, so now it is gone.

Excerpt from the website of Chris Hedges:

The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of the money-drenched electoral system, neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, predatory capitalism, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in the U.S. Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.

What were my sins? I did not, like my former employer, The New York Times, sell you the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, peddle conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset, put out a ten-part podcast called the Caliphate that was a hoax, or tell you that the contents on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “disinformation.” I did not prophesize that Joe Biden was the next FDR or that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.

"The deplatforming of voices like mine, already blocked by commercial media and marginalized with algorithms, is coupled with the pernicious campaign to funnel people back into the arms of the establishment media such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In the US, as Dorothy Parker once said about Katharine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. Step outside those lines and you are an outcast. This is the reason Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and I are on Substack.

It is perhaps telling that our greatest investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib, has trouble publishing in the United States. I would direct you to the interview I did with Sy about the decayed state of the American media, but it no longer exists on YouTube.

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Definition of Cancel Culture

Greg Lukianoff defines "cancel culture," documents its existence and urges that we not give in to its perpetrators who claims that it does not exist:

A culture of censorship—of shaming, shunning, and attempting to destroy people’s lives for ideological reasons—exists in America, and Americans have a name for it: cancel culture.

Let’s not abandon that name in a vain attempt to please the people most responsible for perpetuating the problem.

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