There are significant factions who would prefer porn be eradicated in it's entirety and laws like this just use 'protecting children' as the more agreable face to their crusade. Ironically the same people who often crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
For all the talk about free speech and freedoms, a significant portion of the US doesn’t actually want free speech. They want free speech only for things they agree with.
Something that occurred to me a while back that I can’t stop seeing is that Americans fundamentally do not expect laws to actually be enforced and will get angry if they are, even when they voted for those laws. It’s something baked deeply enough into American society that we don’t consciously notice it, but no American actually expects to actually have to follow the laws they’re voting for.
I never thought of it like this before, but I think you are absolutely correct. 'Laws are for other people' might be the best descriptor of this phenomena. Its how American exceptionalism manifests at the level of the individual. Or maybe the other way around, this is core American ethic and exceptionalism at the national level is just the aggregate result.
An unfortunate aspect of the American system in today's political climate is that there are many veto points and it's even /typical/ for any new actions to be struck down by courts, so there is a sense in which it's rational to expect any new policies to never actually take effect.
I think from so many examples that many don't think the laws will be imposed on them. See so many latino republicans tearful interviews when their relatives get deported after supporting the Trump 2024 campaign. Or farmers who's business is selling their crops harvested by migrant laborers to overseas buyers. Factory owners or resellers dependent on imported goods. The list goes on and on, with the common theme of "I didn't think it would affect/happen to me!".
It's weirder than that. These people are all downloading porn, but they just want to rally against it to seem pious. Like the politicians voting against gay rights who are frequently discovered in restroom encounters.
2,000 years ago the accepted belief of nearly every culture we have records for was that rich people were morally superior to poor people because they were favored by whatever gods you believed in, and that slavery was justified because you must have done something to deserve it.
But then the books of the New Testament were written with themes like this:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Compare it to the rest of the world in the first century, and it’s extremely enlightened. Compared to most of the world today, even many self-professed “Christians”, the teachings on rich vs poor, pacifism, and forgiveness are downright radical.
In addition the New Testament doesn’t endorse slavery as something that people should do or something that is morally correct.
It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities. The principle is the same as when Jesus refuses to fight back against the Roman soldiers arresting him. Jesus isn’t endorsing the Roman soldiers’ behavior. He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
>It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities.
First, no one "happens to be" a slave.
Second, this is an implicit endorsement of slavery. Especially where slaves obeying their masters is made analagous to Christians obeying God. This is an argument made by the New Testament that slavery is a reflection of the natural hierarchy of God's design - that slaves are to their masters as all men are to God.
Or read Luke:
Luke 17:7-10
7 ‘Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, “Come here at once and take your place at the table”? 8 Would you not rather say to him, “Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink”? 9 Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? 10 So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”’
How deeply between the lines do we have to read to get to the part where slavery is seen as the problem, rather than slaves refusing to accept their lot? When you're using slaves as an object lesson for how Christians should view their relationship to God, you're endorsing slavery.
>He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
So if Christians aren't supposed to rebel against slavery, what should they rebel against? Were the abolitionist Christians who did rebel against slavery sinning against God in doing so?
Passive acceptance of the status quo in this regard is not what many would consider "extremely enlightened."
In a modern democracy slavery is detestible because non slaves are not the property of anyone and are (ostensibly) subject only to the rule of law. In such a system to take away someone's freedom, remove them from the rule of law, and place them under the rule of mere human is abhorrent.
But we're talking about a time period where everyone was a slave to someone else. Palestine was under Roman occupation and everyone owed absolute fealty to the Roman Emperor. Everyone was a slave to the emperor.
In this period there was no hope of creating a system that recognized the equality of all people through rebellion. If Jesus had urged rebellion against authority, the Roman Empire would have crushed the rebellion (as it did a few years later with the destruction of the Temple). If Jesus had urged slaves to rebel against their masters, all that would have happened was that slaves would have been killed.
The average Roman considered slaves and the people of Palestine in general to be morally beneath them. They didn't see them as equals. They had no problems slaughtering everyone in the entire province.
I think a major purpose of the Jesus' message was focused on spreading the message that we should "Love our neighbor as ourselves" which includes loving our enemies. Only once that message spread was it possible to begin to organize our societies in a more egalitarian fashion.
One way to spread that message is to demonstrate that love to everyone, even your cruel master. In that way it's not passive acceptance, but acknowledgment that long term change is your only option.
>Were the abolitionist Christians who did rebel against slavery sinning against God in doing so?
It's hard to answer that absolutely because we live in a very different world (as did the abolitionists of the 19th century). I don't think Jesus would have condoned political violence to overturn slavery. I don't know in what case Jesus would condoned political violence. But then again 19th century slavery was very different from 1st century Palestinian slavery, and it's hard to know how far pacifism extends. Jesus did chase the money lenders from the temple after all, but he also said turn the other cheek. And then yet again that isn't really "passive acceptance", it's deliberately provoking someone to unjustly hit you a second time, which is potentially a powerful weapon.
I do believe the abolitionists who advocated for change through political means and non-violence were doing God's work. And this was something completely impossible in first century Palestine. It was only made possible by centuries of advancement directly springing from the radical egalitarian teachings of the New Testament.
>In a modern democracy slavery is detestible because non slaves are not the property of anyone and are (ostensibly) subject only to the rule of law.
Slavery is detestable under any system and in any time. It being ubiquitous doesn't make it less so. It was ubiquitous in the 19th century as well.
>But we're talking about a time period where everyone was a slave to someone else. Palestine was under Roman occupation and everyone owed absolute fealty to the Roman Emperor. Everyone was a slave to the emperor.
One doesn't bother making a distinction between "slave" and "free" as the New Testament does in a society wherein everyone is a slave to someone else. Obviously not everyone was a slave in the context of the slavery being discussed here.
>In this period there was no hope of creating a system that recognized the equality of all people through rebellion.
As you mention, Jesus was willing to commit violence against the moneychangers in the temple just to send a message. He was willing to say the rich can never enter the kingdom of God. That it would be better that a millstone was hung around the neck of those who harmed children. That it would be better to gouge out one's eyes and cut off one's hands than give in to temptation. He invited persecution, and invited his followers to seek persecution, suffering and death. Jesus was obviously willing to be confrontational when he felt it.
But the morality of slavery never merited even criticism, not even in the abstract form of parable.
>One way to spread that message is to demonstrate that love to everyone, even your cruel master. In that way it's not passive acceptance, but acknowledgment that long term change is your only option.
That slaves should be expected to endure the cruelty of their masters indefinitely and, at least according to Luke, with pathetic scraping obsequience, in hopes that at some point in the future a change will come is grotesque. And there is still no condemnation of slavery here, because this is meant to be a metaphor of how Christians are supposed to treat everyone.
>It was only made possible by centuries of advancement directly springing from the radical egalitarian teachings of the New Testament.
The Bible was the moral basis for slavery.
The concept of innate human rights separate from any religious context is contrary to Biblical teaching - the Bible is clear that humans are entirely the property of God to dispose of as he will, with no inherent value beyond that will.
The concept that ownership of one person by another is fundamentally immoral contradicts Biblical teaching. The God of the Old Testament - also the God of the New Testament - the God Jesus worshiped and whose law Jesus claimed to embody - endorsed slavery. Verbatim. Full stop.
The concept of government by any means other than the absolute divine right is contrary to Biblical teaching. The Bible makes it clear that God creates the governments of the world and that they rule with his authority.
The concept of gender equality is contrary to Biblical teaching, because according to the Bible, women are created to be subservient to men and inherently unequal to and less than men, and inherently unclean, because Eve was the source of original sin.
The advancement of morality beyond this paradigm came as a consequence of diverging from the requirement that morality conform to Biblical doctrine. It would have been impossible otherwise, because Biblical morality itself cannot evolve beyond the canon. The Bible will never say that women are equal to men, it will never say that slavery is wrong, it will never endorse government of and by and for the people.
Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
The natural consequence of following this is to never keep slaves, to never take advantage of another person, to never harm another person in any way. Slavery is inherently incompatible with the greatest commandments.
The Old Testament law was a framework for governance of an imperfect people. Jesus didn't come to establish a new framework for governance. He came to teach people people how to live in a way that makes following the letter of Old Testament law unnecessary. If everyone loves their neighbor as themselves, and loves even their enemies, there is no need for government at all.
And yet new systems of government were established because of shifting views as more people began to embrace the radical egalitarian view that humans had inherent worth as we are all created in the image of our creator, and that we are all one in Christ.
>The Bible will never say that women are equal to men, it will never say that slavery is wrong
"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
> Compare it to the rest of the world in the first century, and it’s extremely enlightened
This reads like somebody who doesn't have a lot of knowledge/experience with other religious texts.
A core principle in Theravada Buddhism, one of the oldest schools of Buddhist philosophy, is the practice of ahimsa [1] - avoiding actions which cause undue suffering to any living being and that even includes animals. You can find this concept in Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.
Abrahamic religions don't crack the top 10 of most empathetic and compassionate world views IMHO.
>This reads like somebody who doesn't have a lot of knowledge/experience with other religious texts.
It's been a while, but I've taken a class on Dharmic religions, and another on Middle Eastern Religions (mostly Islam, Judaism, and Coptic Orthodox Church). I've also read a fair amount about most of the other largish world religions.
>ahimsa [1] - avoiding actions which cause undue suffering to any living being and that even includes animals.
Avoiding causing undue suffering is a huge step away from the commandment to actively love all people including your enemies.
The New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters, and says women should remain silent and obey their husbands, and not have power over their husbands because the glory of women is childbirth.
The morality of the New Testament - the entire Bible, actually - is pretty vile by modern standards. Which is not meant to be an insult, because it was written thousands of years ago and morality necessarily evolves as societies become more complex. Expecting a modern view of gender equality or innate human equality from the time of the Roman Empire or the Bronze Age would be absurd, that just didn't exist.
But because Christians believe the Bible is the inerrant and absolute word of God, they have to justify the cognitive dissonance between modern morality and Biblical morality by pretending that either modern morality is sinful (eg accepting gays goes against God's design or a hundred years ago accepting equality between black and white people goes against God's design,) or the Bible was actually super progressive all along.
But modern morality is mostly an invention of the Enlightenment creating an alternate, secular model that even Christians eventually appropriated.
This is not a man-made law. They didn't even have scripture back then. This predates that. Well, it was the stone age, so you would have to figure it was written in stone if anything, way before there was paper and pen.
If Gods' laws even exist, this is one of them.
So when it comes to modern man, basically this all reduces quite logically to a simple equation:
How long does it take a moron to figure out that you can't make childrens' privacy illegal without doing it to everybody else at the same time?
It's like duh, why is it people want to not only go against Gods' law, but Neanderthals too?
Even a cave man would recognize it when they see a Mississippi lawmaker who still needs to grow some brains in the 21st century to even begin to keep up with evolution or anything else written in stone.
This isn't even really it. If you read the section of Project2025 about porn and these sorts of age laws, then barely talk about porn at all. They lead with "transgender ideology" and such. The goal isn't to keep porn away from kids. The goal is to keep anything that offends their desired hierarchy away from kids.
This view is the antithesis of the entire, pluralistic, classical liberal project that this country was founded on. Everybody has a hierarchy, and people should, for the most part, be allowed to choose their own hierarchy. The problem isn't that someone dislikes porn or whatever, it's that they try and force it on the rest of us.
Of course. I think that theirs is horrible. I'm not saying that having a preferred way of ordering society is bad. I am saying that oppressing LGBT people is bad.
False equivalence... the "unjust" man is actually the one constantly keeping "the middle" right where it belongs... in the middle. There has to be a give AND a take if there's going to be a middle at all.
"I am actually the one constantly keeping the middle right where it belongs... in the middle. There has to be a give and a take if there's going to be a middle at all." says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him. He takes a step back.
"I am actually the one constantly keeping the middle right where it belongs... in the middle. There has to be a give and a take if there's going to be a middle at all." says the unjust man.
If you think they exist naturally, you're only looking at one of thousands of independent variables. If you average them out, we all tend towards mediocrity.
When someone appeals to hierarchies (e.g., "there's always a bigger fish"), they're just admitting to using a painfully one-dimensional worldview.
James Dobson made a career advocating for child abuse including physical abuse for “strong willed children”. Somehow it’s never Focus on the Family that these people want to ban.
The US fought a whole war with itself over whether people should be allowed to own other people. They shouldn't, we decided, except on certain circumstances.
Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.
Conflating parenting with slavery and ownership is not only a category error but an offensive one. Parental authority isn’t ownership; it’s a duty to safeguard children’s developing autonomy and vulnerability.
Pretending otherwise betrays an indifference to children’s actual welfare, and a disturbing form of motivated reasoning deeply concerning in its implications.
It might not be consistent with slavery, but children as chattel was a thing.
It wasn't until 1874 that child abuse was documented with Mary Ellen Wilson and then later that rights and protections were accorded children. Now it's true that foster care and congregate care existed before 1874. But it was Wilson who started the ball rolling.
I'm not sure they're saying it's wrong more that the change was imposed externally by the victorious union rather than actually being arrived at so the question was never really settled. Looking at the history it looks clear it was. After reconstruction was halted and southern states weren't forced to allow black politicians and voting you get the decades of segregation, Jim Crowe laws, etc that followed until the civil rights act forced equal treatment under the law. Civil rights were never willingly given by the southern states.
That’s idiotic; as the amount of control parents are allowed over their children has never been lower compared to historical norms. We’re at the point a minor can get an abortion without parents being informed; which would have been unheard of and unthinkable 50 years ago, let alone the idea that a government would even mandate leaving parents unaware of a sexually active child. That idea didn’t even occur to the most rabid of socialist dreams.
No, that's not true at all. There are ample examples from the past of children being both more and less controlled by parents. It's mainly upbto the parents and how they choose to parent.
You're correct that recently the most overbearing, authoritarian parenting styles have received a minor legal haircut, where the worst abuses must be done either in secret or not at all. The parents who feel victimized by this new norm would like things to go back to how they were when no one asked why their kids had so many bruises on their faces.
If it weren't so often about denying them medical care or a proper education or about their ability to abuse them in various ways I'd be more sympathetic. Kids have rights too their parent's don't own them to get to violate their rights just because they're their kids.
Children are human beings who need growing autonomy as they mature, not property of parents. I have several (adult, to be clear) friends who have suffered serious damage due to overly authoritarian parenting.
In legal terms, children aren't full humans. They literally don't have fully formed brains and there isn't an expectation that they can make decisions that consider the consequences of their actions.
In the sense that a phrase like "growing autonomy" doesn't really mean anything, sure they should get that. Practically, they shouldn't have a lot of autonomy. The concept of childhood education is largely predicated on the idea that children have no idea what is going on and someone else should be inculcating knowledge, values and beliefs in them while making long term decisions on their behalf. And there is a pretty good argument that those values and beliefs ought be aligned with their family.
No, but the law is not a thing of subtlety and nuance. It is a thing of bright lines. It would be infeasible to have a law that says "children can make adult decisions when their parents think they're ready", so we have to pick a cutoff point which tries to strike a balance between giving too many immature kids power over their lives, and restricting too many mature kids from making decisions with their lives. Some kids will be unfairly held back because they are very mature at 15, some will ruin their lives because they are completely immature at 18. It's imperfect but no perfect solution is available.
My point remains unchanged: Strict parenting has killed far less people than lax. Strict parenting can generally be recovered from; lax parenting, you’ll be dead before you even recognize it.
Evil little fuckers. Who even thinks that the US Federal Government isn’t totally qualified to be in complete control of their children’s education and lives, anyway? Probably some racist Ruby Ridge types (/s)
Except “corrupting” in this case often just means “LGBTQ”. In exactly the same way “corrupting influence” used to mean “music made by black people” or “anything pro-worker”.
Corrupting ideas don’t exist. There is truly no such thing as an infohazard. We, as humans, are capable of making up our own minds about things and we don’t need to give this power of censorship over to people who are not acting in good faith.
I've been convinced for a while that the religious angle against queer folk is just a front.
Instead of honest religious conviction, I think the pearl clutching is the manifestation of the collective paranoia of weak men who are terrified that other men are looking at them the same way they look at women.
> If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.
Well, they would be talking about maintaining control. Control requires constant vigilance to reinforce compliance coupled with making sure there is no disobedience. The latter speaks to "needing control."
I forgot the beaten path. I wondered where the porn was, like where is all the baseball( both insipidly boring), and then my boss did a web search for gramophone and there were only a few results, but banging rocks together? Millions. He looked for something related to goats and then I had to reload his machine from scratch. ( Dropper+payload) Like he blew a transmission.
It's certainly not "full of", though I'm sure it's there. I never see it, but then I don't follow people who post it.
I certainly see less random pornographically-tinged content showing up in my day-to-day usage than I did when I was on twitter. The default view being literally only stuff I've explicitly followed does rather change that experience.
I wouldn’t say “full of”, but like other mostly uncensored social media sites like Twitter, it’s definitely there if you’re looking for it (and sometimes even when you’re not).
My dad gave me my first porn magazine. It was a good thing, too, since by the time I could legally buy a picture of naked ladies I'd already spent a good deal of time in their company.
