vote accordingly

October 25, 2022 1:46 PM

On October 18, Republican Rep. Mike Johnson introduced the "Stop the Sexualization of Children Act", apparently designed to "protect" children from "sexually explicit material". In practice, it is a federal anti-LGBTQ bill which threatens to defund any federally funded institution which provides LGBTQ-supportive material to children under 10. It defines "sexually-oriented material" as images, descriptions, and simulations of sexual acts, genitalia, or "any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects." This includes "any exposure to transgenderism", which may cover the very existence of trans people in those spaces.
posted by fight or flight (25 comments total)

Christ, what an (party of) asshole.
posted by Windopaene at 1:51 PM on October 25, 2022 [14 favorites]

So, the way you fight this is:

"Okay - so you're saying that sexually-oriented material includes images or descriptions of sexual acts or genitalia.

"First book to go: the dictionary. And I think we should also remove all the encyclopedias. Oh, and the Bible - unless you want to rip the Song of Solomon and the Book of Deuteronomy out, then maybe the rest can stay? Or, hang on, there's that bit with the adulteress in the New Testament, maybe we'd better remove the whole Bible.

"What else...oh, these potty training books have to go too. At least the ones geared towards boys, they specifically mention penises.

"...Hang on, before I go on - do you consider breasts and buttocks to be covered by this? Because that could keep us really busy trying to screen for that."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:02 PM on October 25, 2022 [13 favorites]

No. We need a politician in power standing up and calling this what it is: a naked attempt to ban any and all queer people. From everything. That’s the goal of the bill.

The nuanced discussions around “yes, but these books too…” are important, but people may not care as much. Per Erin Reed’s tweets, they are classifying being trans as “sexual”, with a broader end goal of saying trans people do not exist. And yeah, any LGBTQIA+ people could be swept up by this; the language is broad enough. Then it’s trivial to jump to “we have no gay people in [state].”

This is the next major step. It’s not “lol dumb GOP” or anything. It’s the strategy. Straight people only. No other way.

Who are the people in power shooting down this crap, actively and openly? It needs to be treated as the very real threat it is.
posted by hijinx at 2:18 PM on October 25, 2022 [35 favorites]

Oh, I absolutely agree electing an official is the better approach. I am proposing a second and more local malicious compliance front if this is ever up for public debate.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:25 PM on October 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Gott
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 2:28 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

So, the way you fight this is:

You need to stop thinking like this. You cannot beat these people by pointing out their logical inconsistencies, because they don't care. Actually, they do care: the logical inconsistencies are the point. They aren't concerned that, if applied neutrally, the laws would ban the Bible, because they are fucking fascists, and the whole very point is that they think laws should target out-groups and protect in-groups. You need to stop strategizing as if these people are acting in good faith.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:46 PM on October 25, 2022 [79 favorites]

I appreciate your enthusiasm, EmpressCallipygos, but with the exception of the Bible you're literally just describing my childhood brought up by fundamentalist Christians. No encyclopedias, no books about the body, nothing that ever showed breasts or buttocks. Hell, my mother took away any books in which girls kissed boys well into my teen years. And then wondered why I ended up not liking boys...

And then everything ArbitraryAndCapricious said.

Anyway, I'm exhausted and terrified. I sure hope my cis friends step up for this because I cannot fucking fight anymore.
posted by brook horse at 2:50 PM on October 25, 2022 [20 favorites]

“The Democrat Party and their cultural allies are on a misguided crusade to immerse young children in sexual imagery and radical gender ideology,” he said in a statement. “No federal tax dollars should go to any federal, state, or local government agencies, or private organizations that intentionally expose children under 10 years of age to sexually explicit material.”

I wish this stuff got old. It never gets old, I guess. Now, transphobes are leading the charge by recycling and redeploying this shit:

Section 28:

Enacted on 24 May 1988, the amendment stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

Save Our Children:

Mike Thompson discovered in a poll taken in March 1977 that women in Dade County opposed repealing the measure two to one; they saw their gay friends as relatively harmless. Save Our Children's strategy, therefore, worked to prove that homosexuals were amoral, promiscuous, and defiant of traditional gender roles, and that they were a specific danger to children. [Anita] Bryant took this strategy as a crusade, delivering speeches that intoned that Dade County's passing of the ordinance "guts the law on the side of the unrighteous. If homosexuals are allowed to change the law in their favor, why not prostitutes, thieves, or murderers?" She specifically connected homosexuals with child molesters, saying "Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach."

Time to prepare some more pies.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:51 PM on October 25, 2022 [11 favorites]

I am proposing a second and more local malicious compliance front if this is ever up for public debate.

This won't work, so we'd all better make sure the other things do.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:13 PM on October 25, 2022

I know these people don't give a shit about hypocrisy, logic ethics or morals, but I get really tired of them defining freedom as the ability to not think about racism, never be called out on their bigotry or hatred, and pretend to being white straight Christian males makes them uniquely special and worthwhile
posted by Jacen at 3:21 PM on October 25, 2022 [17 favorites]

power over others excites some people.. some become performers, some just get a little more animated and maybe we call them raconteurs in a type of setting. power is part of that, the ability to share something you have and elicit reactions in others. in that world, I suppose we could get into word games and push against this or that, but that's not the world we are talking about.

the power these people are tapping into is their social status and the awareness they can get away with things, they can control others and at the very least elicit a reaction they enjoy (anger, exasperation, outrage). they are holding the cards, so to speak.. in many cases the levers of authority come easily into grip. some of them want to hurt and kill you, don't ever forget it. we cannot play games with these people, you would not play games with an abuser or a person who cannot control their violent tendencies. You need to 'solve' this problem, surely, but how? in the most just world I can imagine, a percentage of the population might be so harmful to others, with no clear remedy, that we'd develop ways to put them away from harm to themselves, others. we have seen these attempts over time, some seem genuine given what we know at a given time. but mostly, there's enough monsters and people willing to throw in with them that the problem is either quite a bit bigger, or we are just doing our best to not be subsumed by the problem entirely: loss of health, friends and family, our own lives. that is where it's at, friends, from what I can see
posted by elkevelvet at 4:05 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects

"Any topic"? Well, this could be a way to rid schools of "conversion therapy" materials.
posted by gimonca at 5:51 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

You need to stop strategizing as if these people are acting in good faith.

I hear what you're saying....but then again, if there's a chance to put Baphomet on the courthouse lawn, I hope someone rises to the challenge.
posted by gimonca at 5:54 PM on October 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

"Any topic"? Well, this could be a way to rid schools of "conversion therapy" materials.

Consider the current Supreme Court and consider whether you think they will rule with any consistency on cases like this.

The gun case enshrining outcomes "consistent with the" [Constitution's] "text and historical understanding" previews the license this Court is taking to find whatever is ideologically preferred by arbitrarily defining the appropriate scope (intellectually and temporally) of the 'historical understanding' of any issue. (This is not all that different than Scalia's jurisprudence; which was always sophist and outcome-oriented, 'originalist' rhetoric non-withstanding.)

You can expect that the conservative majority will not find that anything involving teaching kids what it means to be queer or trans before the age of majority is consistent with the Constitution and its appropriately (conveniently) delimited 'historical understanding.'
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:00 PM on October 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

Or, at least, that they will decide that letting each State set its own policy on that matter is among the unreserved powers devolved to the states, and does not implicate the equal protection clause, under whatever rationale is salable.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:13 PM on October 25, 2022

I am so very tired of this shit.

It's an endless, well-funded wave of hatred.

And I'm also so incredibly angry. Incandescently angry. Burn it all down angry.

I want the media coverage of it to stop. treating. it. as. good-faith.

Stop treating it as based on morals, or 'protecting' anyone.

Start calling it out for what it is. Start calling out he sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fascist intrusions into personal lives. Start pointing out the utter hypocrisy of even beginning to frame it as 'protecting children' when what it ensures is psychological damage for any child who feels remotely out of place in a heterosexual, cis-gender, christian world. Start pointing out that framing these laws as 'protecting the rights of individuals to hold personal religious beliefs on sexual and gender identity' is utter and complete hogwash because those ideas of rights are couched in terms of the power to override the rights of others

Start connecting the dots of all the bills, court actions, smear campaigns, political lies rolling out across the country and ask:

Is this what an open society means? Is this what personal freedom means? Is this what tolerance and equality means?

And maybe we can have a real debate about how individual freedoms and social responsibility intersect. And maybe a clearer collective understanding could eventually get enshrined into law so that we stop hitting this bullsh** again and again.

But first and foremost, I want the hatred and lies in these bills called out in the mainstream. I want the intent and the likely outcome of their passage detailed for anyone who might not have caught it. I want the next moves in terms of lawsuits and follow-up bills that the people behind this have clearly signaled are ready to be highlighted in the discussion.

And I want the people proposing these bills to be publicly questioned by non-sympathetic interviewers and asked to justify them and to defend the intended outcomes. I want them to own who the f*** they are. I want them to own the fact they are eager for people like me to lose our jobs, our families, our lives. I want them to either own up to their hatred and hypocrisy or slink back under rocks and stop this shit for good.

It's not as if they've exactly hid their intentions or endgames. The language of these bills is the thinnest layer possible to enable those who tacitly agree with the outcomes to sign off and pretend they don't know better.

Call it what it is. Rip off the bandaid. Demand those behind this step forth and own what they want.

It may be a painful moment for the country to confront some entrenched prejudices, but it's not as if those prejudices are going to go away on their own.
posted by allium cepa at 6:50 PM on October 25, 2022 [30 favorites]

Think how long it took them to finally call it the Big Lie.
posted by gottabefunky at 7:26 PM on October 25, 2022

Something you can do TODAY (10/26)- last day to comment!
Virginia's leopard-in-a-puffy-vest has put forth anti-trans model rules for schools that would prevent schools from creating trans-affirming polies to prevent harassment. It is also all about "parental rights", but only if you are an anti-trans parent, because it forces schools to use a child's legal name and gender unless parents explicitly tell them otherwise, and even then, protects bigoted teachers who refuse to use the preferred name & pronoun, or harasses a student who just wants to use a bathroom.

Anyway, today is the last day to comment, and you can provide a comment anonymously, and apparently from any state. So support Virginia transgender children today!
Here is the ACLU's opposition letter if you need language for your comment. Right now, I think the comments are 2-1 in opposition, but I saw at least one TERF campaign with copied subject lines.
posted by Hermeowne Grangepurr at 9:31 PM on October 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

Is this what an open society means? Is this what personal freedom means? Is this what tolerance and equality means

Part of the problem, as we saw with the Yale Law protest a few months back, is that there are people who do argue that yes, we are obliged to allow bigotry a seat at the table in the name of "tolerance" and "freedom". My patience with these people is pretty much used up.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:24 PM on October 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

And specifically, the logical inconsistencies and absurd vagueness are *how the law functions as intended*. The goal is to make any affected institution so nervous about bounty-hunting lawsuits that they spontaneously self-censor and exclude LGBTQ people. Suddenly you have a perfect society where everyone follows your horrible bigotry without you having to take the ugly step of actually outlawing completely innocent books and people, which might provoke action against you. The fear and the knowledge of exactly which things will spark lawsuits and which won't do your work for you, and you can rest easy trusting that the courts will dismiss out of hand any lawsuits that try to remove something important, like the Bible, as obviously unintended.

As Ash the evil android once said, "You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility."
posted by Scattercat at 2:15 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]

I want the media coverage of it to stop. treating. it. as. good-faith.

This is the entire game, right now. We're expected to act as if there can be a reasonable debate about trans rights. That there can be a reasonable disagreement about whether kids should know that queerness exists. We're expected to take as a given that media containing non-cishet people or pairings is inherently sexual and, therefore, inappropriate for children.

And so we're expected to let bigots talk, expected to accept their poisonous ideas as if they deserve consideration. But of course, like you said, the arguments aren't made in good faith. They know that they're not self-consistent, they know that they're not designed to clarify, but rather to create confusion such that it sounds reasonable to support unreasonable things.

I had to say, "excuse me? what the fuck did you just say?" to a coworker last week when they included "the trans stuff" in a list of abusive things happening in schools. What was maybe most shocking was that the response wasn't contriteness or apology but, in fact, just calmly trying to explain to me all the bad-faith things they've heard on the news. No matter how many times I told them to fuck right off with that, I honestly don't think they understood that I was incandescently angry. And I swore. A lot. Which is not something I do at work. Ever.

I am a white-passing Latino man, and I have heard a loooooot of racist screeds in my life because bigots think everyone thinks like they do. This was exactly like that. I don't think I could have done anything to convince this person I was actually arguing with them because they have been convinced by this bad-faith bullshit that queerness as a concept is a threat to children.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:47 AM on October 26, 2022 [19 favorites]

https://at.tumblr.com/bundleofsouls/americans-vote-like-your-life-depends-on-it/sf69j25x7ms0

"The bill being discussed here is H.R.9197 and it goes farther than is being described.  This bill isn’t a prelude, it in and of itself tries to, effectively, ban “sexual material” from being viewed by someone under the age of 10.  “sexual material” which it defines as anything pertaining to ”Any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity, any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation or related subjects“.  This is an outright assault on all of us in the LGBT community and beyond that would ban us from existing in spaces where children would be expected to be present, or attempting to teach children that we exist so they don’t suffer like many of us did and don’t cause others to suffer."

It's so outrageously bigoted it's hard to believe even the Republicans would put their names on it, but they've been laying the groundwork with their online astroturfing hate campaigns since 2013.
posted by subdee at 7:20 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's so outrageously bigoted it's hard to believe even the Republicans would put their names on it, but they've been laying the groundwork with their online astroturfing hate campaigns since 2013.

And yet they still have to make their intentions sound palatable under the guise of "protecting children" from being "exposed to sexual material."
posted by Gelatin at 7:31 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Exactly what they've been saying in their online astroturfing hate campaigns for years yes.
posted by subdee at 7:35 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd love to visit a few American national parks one day, but considering what I read in the news, it won't be safe unless I've got a team of bodyguards surrounding me 24/7 and my country's embassy on speed dial. How else am I going to deal with all the racial profiling, gun abuse, religious extremism and conspiracy theories?

It's like a can of worms (the far right) was not only opened, but spilled everywhere (on social media), and the worms began to eat people's flesh to rejoice in their newfound freedom.
posted by wandering zinnia at 4:08 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]