Guess the pun part of it escaped our intrepid reader here.
That’s not the point: the point is that the shirt actually unambiguously states its claim from its imagery to its slogan. The vagina shirt is ambiguous at best.
I get your point, but you seem to see no difference. I understand your point is that random pictures of vaginas with unrelated phrases is equal to the shirt in question.
Well, the difference between your position and mine is that one of them comports with the law. The other is yours.
Hence why it has pictures. Fetus, older fetus, no fetus. Hrm. What’s going on?
Ok. Then we’re left with, what? Abstinence is the only way to be sure . . . to get a well-used vagina? When it comes to vaginas, you’re right, I don’t get it, and I don’t want it. =P But that still doesn’t make the phrase on the shirt related to the picture. How about if I just make up some wild ass analogy too?
Would it be okay to have a picture a nicely cooked chicken with the caption: Veganism is the only way to be sure? Or would a kid look at it and say, cool, chicken? The analogy you used is just as ambiguous as mine: to be sure of what? To get a nicely cooked chicken dinner?
I understand your point; I just wish that you’d use analogies which are roughly, well, analogous.
Clearly your first statement here doesn’t coincide with your second since you accept that my characterization of the porn showing is actually illegal.
But now your argument is that, in the context of a school: is it okay to mention a topic of serious societal importance, which can be somewhat abridged because school children are young and certain things can be sanitized to the position that if this is true, then showing them completely age-inappropriate material is okay too?
Unfortunately for you, you have either 2 choices: lock him away, or accept that he’s going to find out about things whether you want him to or not.
Pictures of festuses were shown. Not mangled, aborted fetuses which seem to equate with regular, non-aborted, unmangled ones for the sake of (not)proving your point by taking it out of the context in which it must kept.
And he will unless you lock him away. Even if it’s not on your timescale.
Yes, because I’m the one here who doesn’t understand the scale of it because I think that equating discussing a topic is the same as showing to children gratuitous pictures which would make many adults squeamish. I suppose when discussing not hitting people with a child, you’ll equate telling them it’s wrong to do with being exactly equal to breaking out photos of people who’ve been severely beaten and whose injuries make it difficult to identify that they’re barely human, let alone who they are.
I say this because your argument about what you’d take issue with didn’t happen in this case. Indeed, in the shot for the picture of the aborted, mangled fetus, there’s merely a shaded in block. It’s almost like it was sanitized by the religious right to make it okay to use in schools to advocate a position within the confines of the law. Because, you know, aborted fetus pictures wouldn’t be allowed because they’re objectively inappropriate.
I am not on about what actually happened at the school in the OP. I am on about your response to Dangerosa saying it is ethically and morally wrong to introduce these topics outside of the family.
I responded to your take on that post by saying I am partly with you and partly not with you.
I agree completely kids will gather information on their own and not always in accordance with what a parent would deem an appropriate time or manner. Such is life.
I disagree that it is therefore “ok” for people to take it upon themselves to educate my child about any thing they like regardless of the age of the child without my ok. It is not for you to decide, it is for the parent to decide.
The porn was not the best example, the mangled fetus is a better example (i.e. legal) of this notion. It was merely to illustrate the point.
Nowhere did I suggest locking away kids because they might find out something on their own. That said I think I should be able to reasonably expect the school I send my child to to keep things reasonably within the realm of age appropriate learning (play ground who knows what they will learn).
Well, I’m shocked that so many of the people here are not in favor of the broadest possible protection for student free speech. And some are or have been teachers. (you know, the “government” also tries to restrict teacher’s speech, even outside of the school.) Freedom is a funny thing, and fragile too. Let the girl wear the shirt, and other kids can’t handle it, punish them, not her.
Like others have said, it’s a teachable moment about tolerance, diversity of ideas, and the Constitution. All good topics for the classroom.
As I said I think the sex education debate is analogous to the abortion debate from the context of what we should and should not allow children to willfully expose other children to in the setting of an educational environment. There is no place for abortion or sex education sloganeering in a K-8 public school.
Go on… exercise your right. (looking for good example… oh well, this one will do) Walk to a police officer stand 1 foot away from him/her without saying anything and smile. If they step back, move a step closer. If he(or she) says anything, and that includes a direct order, just ignore them and quote your “silly” line.
Kids at school have a right to “learn”… They MUST obide by rules. The same way as YOU have to obide rules. If a cop tells you to move… you move.
If a school bans inapropriate clothing, the kid’s choice is to either remove that clothing, OR to leave the school - in the latter it will probably end up being the parent’s choice rather than the kid’s.
You are free to exercise rights in the context of set rules. Thats life.
It’s unavoidable, unless you lock said child away. You know the remedy to the problem. That you choose not to use it implies that you’re okay with them hearing it from other people.
Of course, the less obvious remedy is to beat some random person to the punch by actually preparing your child for big wide world out there. After all, we have rights in this country. And our rights to express our views don’t stop because someone wants his child to remain ignorant until some predetermined* age.
*Usually an age beyond what the child is at the moment, ya know, because the parent was going to get around to it sometime in the future.
Here’s a suggestion for an example: pick one of many, many types of examples which are:
*not about illegal conduct
*not gratuitous
*are actually protected speech
*that you don’t like and want to see curtailed.
What you’ve chosen so far as analogies:
*illegal conduct (which is never protected)
*gratuitous pictures, which are expressly not protected in schools
*speech that isn’t protected for students by the First Amendment
*that you don’t like and want curtailed.
Sad for you then that our country has inconvenient laws which don’t give you the ability to make the other 300 million of us prance around your notion of what schools should be.
The conduct in question is protected speech. It addresses this child’s perspective. It was done quietly. It was done peacefully. It was done in a non-gratuitous fashion. The school went awry of well-established law by abridging this child’s free speech. Shame on them.
But there are many, many ways in which the law treats kids and adults differently. If what you were saying is such a truism, then why can’t an 8 year old buy booze, vote, serve in the military, and drive a car?
Seems to me you are saying it is a big, mean world out there and kids are likely to be exposed to all sorts of things whether I like it or not.
I agree that is true.
I disagree that it makes it ok for you to then go ahead and expose my kid to whatever you see fit. Hey, free speech, big mean nasty world, why not?
The point was about ethics/morals in this case. Not what you can legally do. Nitpick the examples all you like to cloak your bankrupt argument.
Sometimes a thing may be completely legal to do. That does not make it ok to do. I wish you understood that but I’m giving up trying to explain it to you.
Because neither buying booze, serving in the military, nor driving a car is a right guaranteed in the Constitution. Voting is, and the Constitution very explicitly says that an 8 year old cannot vote.
A law which said an 8 year old could vote would be invalid, because the Constitution is the highest law of the land. Similarly, a policy which says that 13 year olds may not exercise a right to non-disruptive free speech is also invalid, for the same reason.
[nitpick]
The 26th Amendment reads to me as you cannot deny voting rights to those 18 and older. Does not read to me that you can’t grant voting rights to an 8 year-old…just that an 8-year-old cannot claim a constitutional right to do so.
[/nitpick]
This is it. Most of these types of questions are so loaded that no one should have try to simplify it down to the children who might question it. Parents on all sides of these issues should take concern with who might be influencing their children, especially those in elementary school.
I can remember clearly, nearly twenty years after the fact, conversations or commentary from teachers that made a big impression on the way I understood or interpreted viewpoints for years (or permanently).
First, I can remember my sixth grade teacher, a great guy, using casual -although very discreetly- “pot” slang and jokes at various times, nothing most kids would ever catch onto. I remember about halfway through the year I watched “Half-Baked” (not at school- friend’s house) and I suddenly ‘got it’. My parents had been strictly Just Say No supporters and after I thought about it all it substantially changed my viewpoint on drugs, ect. I knew better than to try to challenge my parents, but over the years it has had a deep impact on my personality, ect.
Later, in high school I remember being pulled aside after a class in which I had given a report (something historical if I recall) and being the class clown I had said something was “gay” in a derogatory way. At the time I didn’t quite understand what the problem was, since my Christian father sometimes called things he disliked “gay”. I didn’t get in any formal trouble, but I was asked to stop using ‘gay’ in a derogatory way. I asked what the big deal was and the teacher explained to me how there may be gay students in the class who would be offended by that sort of usage. Just that explanation made me question what my parents had always told me about homosexuality.
For whatever reasons these two encounters stick out in my mind clearly, and I always wonder what different type of person I would have been had these teachers not been there or said anything that changed my beliefs in some certain way. I remember quite clearly through junior and high school the ways that some teachers on all sides of certain issues colored the discussions in class. How are you supposed to make sure the teacher is going to give the students a viewpoint that you agree with? What if the teacher that gets asked about this t-shirt is pro-choice? Surely she would have the first amendment right to discuss the issue in her terms, and isn’t that going to put the authority figure in this case as singling out a certain students and saying “she’s wrong”? What are the other kids in the class supposed to take from this?
Like it or not, kids spend hundreds of hours each year with their teachers and even teenagers can be very impressionable. Coming from any teacher’s viewpoint, this is going to put you in a catch-22 with someone’s parents coming in angry that you are proselytizing your moral viewpoints on their child. Better to avoid the liability, leave the morals to the parents and encourage discussions to gradually increase into core moral concepts.
In high school we had very interesting class discussions on all sorts of hot button topics like race, gun control and roles of government; but we had built up to that by learning how to have less explosive discussions on less moral topics- land sharing between different groups, nations trading resources, ect. We didn’t start in 7th grade with “Abortion: Killing Babies or Not” witch is obviously the debate this shirt was made to answer.
In which seventh grade subject would a discussion of this be appropriate- Health? Science?
Your takeaway from this Bildungspost is that speech rights of teachers and fellow peers should be more limited rather than extended? I think your story highlights precisely what I am getting at: the non-parentally-controlled interactions that school provides is essential to the socialization of children in our culture and serves as an important counterbalance to the potential dangers of a childhood filled with unopposed exposure to a parent’s anti-social belief system. As HRC might put it, it takes a village…