Anne Lutz Fernandez: How to make sense of these contradictions? High school seniors shouldn't read Toni Morrison without parental permission, but eighth graders can work in restaurant kitchens or meatpacking plants without it. /1

How to make sense of these contradictions? High school seniors shouldn't read Toni Morrison without parental permission, but eighth graders can work in restaurant kitchens or meatpacking plants without it. /1

America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor lawswww.washingtonpost.com States are leading the largest effort in years to change the patchwork of laws that regulate child labor, with major implications for the labor market.

Parents must be informed by the school if their child identifies as transgender, but parents cannot ask the school to identify their children as they wish. Kids can’t discuss periods until middle school, but if they get pregnant at any age, they must carry a baby to term or into mortal danger. /2

These and other contradictions of GOP rhetoric and policies around schools and children — and the so-called parents rights movement used to justify them — have had some reasonably asking which parents they are talking about. /3

Looking for consistency can be a fool’s errand given that the GOP does not demand it of itself. I’ve long been tapping this sign, a graphic from a 2016 Rand report on the type of Russian propaganda that the American right has since embraced: /4

Yet connections can sometimes be found and meaning made by pursuing questions like Piper’s. When the GOP calls for parents’ rights and for the protection of children, who and what are they protecting? /5

A Xitter thread last year from “National Review” writer Dan McLaughlin pointed toward answers. In the thread, he responds to a tweet comparing one state’s expansion of free lunch to all children and other states loosening their child labor laws. /6

Among other things, McLaughlin was making an argument against public education. Like the lunches he doesn’t think all kids should get for free, the school buildings students enter daily — and the roof over them and the heat in them, and the bathroom facilities, and the teachers and counselors... /7

"who pays for it" is such a goddamned red herring. School lunch is one of the cheapest things we can "pay for." Like, the arbitrary reduction to Trump's bond would go a long way towards covering that. Deeply unserious policy question

I roundly reject any declaration of “parent rights” (and any assertion of “states rights” for similar reasons). It’s about asserting ownership of kids, who are people. Kids have rights and entitlements. Parents have duties to secure those for their children. And what they try to label as “rights” 1/

is very clearly “powers” that they are delegated to fulfill those things. The parental rights movement turns this dynamic in its head and I will always push back on it (and the same for the states crowd) every time. 2/2

America isn't divided over this. A handful of Republicans hellbent on repealing the 20th century are advocating this. The majority of the public thinks they're crazy.

Yesterday's much shorter thread:

Today in Misleading Headlines: "America," as in the American people, are not divided on child labor laws. The political parties are divided on them, with GOP-controlled states and industry working toward unraveling child protections. No public opinion polls are provided in the piece.

America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor lawswww.washingtonpost.com States are leading the largest effort in years to change the patchwork of laws that regulate child labor, with major implications for the labor market.

Which I read, and again: this is being driven by a small group of hard-right Republicans, not the general public.

Yup. These "divided America" headlines keep obscuring that.

And the commitment to reporting on the "two sides" as though there are two, equally populous parties is part of what obscures this. Even within GOP there is not a commitment to this, and there are far fewer GOP voters. Land doesn't vote, except via gerrymandering and packed courts.

I don't think these are contradictions, to conservatives. They feel that other people's bodies and minds belong to them and they have the absolute right to police those bodies and minds as they see fit. It's horrific and primitive, but it's consistent.

In both instances the aim is to keep people ignorant.

It’s all control—turning kids into obedient robots who don’t think or feel outside of narrow parameters. I think it was Gellner who argued nationalism supported standardized education that meant you could move workers around the country as Industrial Rev’n needed—interchangeable worker-units.

It doesn't seem to me like America is divided if they couldn't find any non-politician to take the pro-loosen child labor laws position.

Yesterday's much shorter thread:

Today in Misleading Headlines: "America," as in the American people, are not divided on child labor laws. The political parties are divided on them, with GOP-controlled states and industry working toward unraveling child protections. No public opinion polls are provided in the piece.

America is divided over major efforts to rewrite child labor lawswww.washingtonpost.com States are leading the largest effort in years to change the patchwork of laws that regulate child labor, with major implications for the labor market.

Hot take: The child labor thing is because the talent market is tight and people are holding out for higher wages. Red State legislators are responding to business owners.

Meat packing plants don’t “make kids feel guilty for being white.”

The plants aren't hiring white kids. A ton of child labor exploitation is the kids of recent immigrants or unaccompanied minors.

Right! A: they need meat packed B: it’s “those people.” C: they don’t care about anything having to do with keeping children safe unless it involves children being exposed to something they deem unpatriotic.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” —Frank Wilhoit

It is not about the children, of course. It makes total sense in the context of small business owners keeping their employees in line: hiring kids keeps wages down for adults, and makes unionizing harder. Racism and sexism also keep wages down, so they like them, too.

When this doesn't fix "the problem" (the problem being "how can I turn other people's children into gold"), mandatory service requirements and forced marriage will be next.

Please see the three levels of Republican Child Value 1. White kids - for coddling and indoctrination 2. Brown kids - for hard labor and fear mongering 3. Black kids - for target practice

they're fascists, at their core, meaning they don't have to make sense of their beliefs or positions.

What contradiction? They think work is good for the soul and education isn't. Pretty simple

These headlines, I guess a wildly small percentage is still a division. 🙄

not contradictory if you understand the point is to make poor scared people who need to work to survive

The kids who are working g in meat packing plants are brown, the kids who must be protected from Toni Morrison are white

The end goal of conservatism is the reinstatement of slavery, fascism is a means to that end.

The children yearn for the mines

They're getting all this nonsense from the biBLe so it doesn't have to make any sense whatsoever!

These are only contradictions if you assume that the GOP actually cares about children.

Being able to read Toni Morrison doesn't exploit a high school seniors work.

You can't make sense. It's insane.

Utter nonsense, because none of these "rules" are made out if someone caring about anything. It's just l'art pour l'art : Needing an alibi work to show some "work" being done. For some clown, who keeps a position occupied.

Belief systems and ideologies don’t need to be logically consistent. For ones that are oppressive, rely on blind faith or cult like cultural norms, it is a feature to have contractions that only those inside “get”

Just another way to keep wages extremely low

Starting to think the answer is capitalism and the fix is simply to start a business that pays children to read Toni Morrison.

You only need to look at a map of the places that fought to keep slavery to understand the states where child labor laws are the weakest.

They want more workers who are cheaper and with less rights. I think they see the kids in Dicken's novels as a goal and not something we changed for the better.

There has never been a contradiction in ‘do as I say and not as I do’.

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