I’m so sorry that happened to you.

I really tend to hate the parents’ rights crowds. Children deserve rights and knowledge and community.

I read most of that (think I missed the last few chapters, but he was out of Elan and had done some traveling)–it was horrifying. There’s also a 3 episode documentary on Netflix called “The Program” where the documentary maker revisits the now closed school where she went (The Academy at Ivy Ridge) and by episode 3, she’s followed the money to one family behind a lot of these institutions. But as she and former AaIR students actually see other facilities far from where they were locked up, they’re all carbon copies of each other, they’re all just the same punish-for-everything camps with no escape. Fucked up that there’s like a formal recipe for how to do this to families and not get caught. And that there are so few legal protections for children.

Not exactly fantasy, but Great Expectations by Dickens has a boy who grows up totally normal and then has his life transformed by a mysterious benefactor. It doesn’t go the way the kid expects.

Also, Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive & Tress and the Emerald Sea feature kinds of magic that can be accessible by anyone if they engage with it right. So perhaps give those a go. SA is a long series, but Tress is pretty approachable.

A lot of them are raised to be that way though. One of the big pushes in a lot of Christian circles, for example, is the push to raise kids believing in complementarianism instead of egalitarianism–simply put, that god created men and women to have different roles, and that men just so happen to be in the role of leadership. Combine that with extreme purity culture (at times involving courtship instead of dating, for example) and a fervor to push for big families, and you get a bunch of grown ups looking up after 5, 10 years in a marriage going, “wait, I was promised happiness, why am I so miserable?” Divorce is a huge tool to help. We need to give people, especially women and children, a safe exit from high control spaces.

My small city is getting a new Christan Nationalism school next year. The neighbors aren’t thrilled that the adults will all be in armed to the teeth at this school in the middle of a decent neighborhood. One of my kid’s friends is going there next year, and told the class that her dad is draining her bank account for the tuition. For an elementary school year education.

Another fun fact: private schools don’t have to take all applicants, so they regularly turn away students with disabilities or special learning needs.

I pointed that out to friends of a friend visiting from Ohio, after they told me how their state did a great thing, making vouchers available to all families in the state. I pointed out how the public schools need the ‘regular’ kids to help subsidize the special services needed by other kids. When the non-special needs kids aren’t there, funding for the specialists gets too expensive for public schools to be able to maintain. The lady clearly didn’t know what to say to that, and after a minute she just said how their children’s private school was too small to be able to have specialists like that. Not sure how that invalidates my point about accessibility of education for all students… It was too sensitive an event to voice that I don’t think public money should be going to institutions that are tax exempt churches. If churches don’t want to pay taxes, their organizations shouldn’t have their hands out for the public coffers. Simple.

Maybe that’s what pope Franky was talking about when he said surrogacy was a threat to human dignity.

Oh friend, what a ride you’ve been on. I grew up LCMS, and so lemme just say thanks for not doing that to your kids. I noticed what you said about immigrants trying to assimilate in LCMS as well. Particularly when I would visit family in the Midwest, there was a Chinese buffet that we would always visit, and my anti-immigrant (in general) family would proudly say how he went to their church, that the church wrote on his behalf to help get him citizenship, etc. I saw that less in my own community, but LCMS is not the biggest fish in that pond. Baptist is. I’m sorry you had that experience. Bad theology hurts people, and I’m glad you’re making it out on the other side.

Yeah, black kids don’t need the help of white kids to succeed. They need their schools funded as if rich white children went to them though.

Also, school isn’t just about success, it’s about learning to live in a society, one which isn’t just a monoculture. Hard to learn to live together (for all kinds of races & identities) spending entire childhoods separated.

Yup, accelerationists.

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Friendly reminder to everyone that the rest of the world has signed on the United Nation’s Connvention on the Rights of the Child; the US doesn’t like that it could prevent children from being spanked, because God wants us to spank our children (spare the rod, spoil the child).

Religion is often a basis for the suffering of children.

Probably something like this

Yeah, conveniently that’s about the time that it got real offensive to be openly racist. Closet racists hated abortions as the new code. Then kids grew up learning AbOrTiOn StOpS a BeAtInG hEaRt and that it’s always murder. And here we are.

Except, unlike Vietnam, the media wasn’t able to to show our dead when they were returned home. So, not fully televised.

There’s a Venn diagram somewhere of the states denying food aid for children and states rolling back child labor protections. From the linked article “State child labor law changes are part of a broader, troubling agenda to boost corporate profits and increase economic desperation of low-income families and children” and “While FGA lobbies for the erosion of child labor protections in states like Arkansas, Iowa, and Missouri, they are simultaneously working to limit access to anti-poverty programs like SNAP and Medicaid, block expansion of Medicaid eligibility, and promote the defunding of public education through expansion of school vouchers in the same states. Taken together, FGA’s priorities represent a radical, multilayered assault on the same low-income families whose economically desperate children are most vulnerable to recruitment by unscrupulous employers for jobs involving long hours, low wages, and hazardous conditions that harm their education, health, and well-being.”

So literally the plan is: Make em super hungry, exploit them for cheap labor while they’re young, tell em anyone who’s still hungry is a lazy leach who deserves to starve.

Mental health is a squishier standard. Let’s say I had depression and decided to talk to someone about it, get the help I needed to become mentally healthy again. Should that necessarily be penalized if I want to go buy a gun to go out to the range or hunting with my buddies? Should seeking help disqualify someone entirely? Does that prevent people from getting help they think they might need, stigmatizing an already stigmatized practice?

Meanwhile, if Dave down the hill has a record, he’s already shown he was willing to do an illegal thing, whether or not the record is fair. If he already has reports against him for domestic disturbances, that’s pretty cut and dry violent behavior that ought not be allowed to intensify.

I’m not saying mental checks aren’t a good idea or aren’t worth it. I’m saying that they’re a harder sell because a) they take more nuance to formulate well and b) the propaganda machine will have an easier time telling people how those checks are overreach.