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Comment by bayareateg | Hacker News Reader

This is a stupid bill, but how is this an anti-LGBTQ issue?

Anything that even slightly has to do with LGBTQ people will likely end up getting blocked from children’s eyes, while anything to do with non-LGBTQ people won’t.

I find it interesting this criticism assumes age-appropriate LGBTQ content isn’t a thing.

Because the people who will use the law as a club to enforce their morality will assert that there is no such thing.

I'm currently reading Foucault's history of sexuality, and the reason you might want this is because population!

Obviously we are facing a population crisis, and we will need more bodies for the factories and retirement homes. Or at least this was the idea in the 1800s. We might have morally coated it with religion, but biopower is a real thing.

The current hypothesis is that the ever evolving LGBTQ+ is a way to sell niche products to these groups. You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.

I don't really believe this, I'm an anti-realist and I think continental philosophy is BS... but this is a classic. Also, there are sooo many ways our sexual taboos are all about economics. Once you see it, you cant unsee.

I'm wary of reasoning that boils down to using utilitarian arguments to back up moralistic fundamentalism - especially when there are so many other things that would achieve similar results but continue to go unaddressed. We could start with making sure every child has abundant access to food and healthcare so they grow up as healthy as possible. We could address the economic treadmill wherein two incomes have become de facto mandatory, causing many straight women who want kids to put it off indefinitely. And if increasing our population is a desirable goal, we could even use public money to outright subsidize the cost of caring for kids. Never mind America-first policies like immigration to increase our own population at the expense of other countries.

> You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.

This is veering off into conspiratorial thinking land. Of course there is an element of truth to it. But that same element of truth applies to basically every other meme as well.

@srslyTrying2hlp

FWIW I didn't say "no". I said it was dubious to place emphasis on that specific approach when there are other approaches that could help the same goal and are more in line with our Western values, but they aren't being followed (in fact they're closer to being actively rejected!)

In general it's extremely important to exercise one's judgement/heuristics of which arguments are worthy of focus, lest one end up being taken in by superficial criticisms and actually end up harming the thing you're claiming to want to fix. Like in this instance the proponents of religious fundamentalism are also responsible for pushing a lot of backwards policy that actively harms children once they've been born - their own heuristics are just wildly out of touch with the modern world.

@srslyTrying2hlp

I'd say you're using this idea of "fallibility" as a license to make unsubstantiated assertions and then avoid responsibility for the implications. Or maybe you just need to put down the bong, detox, and touch grass. Nobody is "denying reality and science" here.

Age appropriate books intended for that still get banned, so the assumption is just that the decisions about it won't be made in good faith. "X has two dads" kind of books aren't really adult, and yet...

Then sue, at that point, and win.

Ah yes, I have a lot of faith that the stacked Supreme Court will return a fair result in this issue.

SCOTUS says no.

unless they're gonna bribe Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Bush appointees with more $$$ and goods that their current backers that approach is going to fail

the Tea Party's main goal was to get their people into local / state / federal circuit / SOCTUS positions, and they have succeeded.

Have you paid attention to the discourse of the would be censors? They've been conspicuously trying to turn crossdressing from a longstanding tradition (albeit mostly comedic) to obscenity. Hell, even calling trans people inherently obscene. Talk about giving away the game.

discussion of sex ed / lgbtq topics often falls under obscenity laws or age filtering, so queer youth might not be able to read it anymore, is the general worry.

Project 2025 includes a multi-prong plan specifically targeting LGBTQ and generally enforcing "christian values".

One of the prongs is requiring ID to go online. Another is to use a combination of media mergers with 'voluntary' government-controlled self-censorship to clamp down on unregulated speech.

So, its blast radius will be centered on LGBTQ issues, but it's designed to cover your comment too.

It isn’t, the author of the criticism is desperately trying to attach another issue to get people to pay attention.

It also doesn’t make sense a Democrat from New Jersey writing the bill saw it that way at all.

This. That crowd is constantly shoehorning themselves into non-pertinent issues as part of their pathological attention seeking behavior.

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