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
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
and nurses and the tech and desks and books and supplies, and the gym and playgrounds — are all paid for by taxpayers whether those students come from low income households or high income households. /8
In contrast, Andrew Carnegie's foundation spent money nationwide on education and libraries because he believed education was good for the economy and wanted free public education to be ubiquitous.
Conservatives claim that child labor extends econ opportunity to low-income ppl, but it's really about restoring hierarchy & control. The white sugar elites I interviewed in Brazil made clear how little they thought of Black & Brown workers, and how much they despised ladders of mobility & equality.
"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
