Originally published at: A school board continues to ban Pride flags by calling them "political" | Boing Boing
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When did the idea of equal rights for all become a negative idea?
Fuck’s sake… 
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Right?
For some people losing their “special privileges” feels like oppression, I guess. Assholes.
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It has always been a negative idea for those that see equality as as threat to themselves. Even many of the absurdly deified US “founding fathers” weren’t too keen on equal rights for all.
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Well, yeah, kind of a rhetorical question, really.
Assholes gonna asshole.
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The US plan started with “equal rights for white men who happen to own land”
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So if the school board has a problem with “political” flags, perhaps a group of students should travel around school prior to the start of classes removing other political flags (respectfully), starting with the flag with 50 stars and 13 stripes hanging on the pole in front of the school buildings. If the school board objects, argue that you’re helping the school conform to board policies.
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Millions of Free Speeches, Free Speeches For Me
Millions of Free Speeches, Free Speeches For Free
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The American flag seems awfully political to me. Better ban that one too, eh?
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The concepts, like many concepts, may not be political, but certainly the flag is partisan.
And what if some other students show up with their own non-political straight pride flag? Such a thing exists.If the school allows one it must allow the other. Or are some kinds of “pride” political, and other kinds non-political, and how does a school come up with a policy it might need to defend in court that can distinguish the two?
There’s a lot to be said for schools banning expression of almost anything and adopting uniforms or dress codes close to a uniform.
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There’s no such thing as a non-political straight pride flag. Straight pride and hetero-pride flags are just a fuck you to the LGBTQ+ community, a smarmy way to advertise hate while claiming equality
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Yes, there’s a lot to be said, and none of what I said would be good about that. Starting with the financial impact dress codes/uniforms have to poor households. Moving to to free speech and how we should be fostering it in our teens. Sliding back around to how inevitably they are policing young women’s bodies with such codes.
Dress codes are ridiculous and should be tossed in the bin along with pledges of allegiance and other conservative propaganda that treats our children as objects we need to control, and not individuals who should be respected.
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Haha, go ahead and let them. Watch free speech laugh them out of the lunchroom. I don’t think “what if straight flag too” is what the board were thinking when they banned the pride flag.
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Human rights are not and SHOULD not be political. Like any “white power” flag or symbol, people deploying “straight pride” bullshit are looking to shut up the LGBQT+ community, not to celebrate “straight pride”… which is not a thing we need to celebrate, because it’s not been in danger of being regulated out of existence.
Stop with this bothsider bullshit. People are fighting for their lives here.
It’s literally the equivalent of waving a nazi flag or some shit. Fuck all that bullshit.
All it does is teach kids to be conformist assholes who have to hide who they really are, rather than learning who they are and want to become in the future.
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No, there’s not.
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On this side of the pond we get people defending school uniforms as levelling the playing field between richer and poorer students. But it’s not a like-for-like comparison - here most schools have a uniform, and there’s financial support to poorer households. Specifically for uniforms, but in general too. *
It’s not entirely successful. While everyone might be dressed approximately the same, the supermarket bag you took your sports shoes in was fair game to pick on the poor kids. Or if something was threadbare/poorly fitting because it’s handed down from an elder sibling.
* I was going to say that SNAP cards that can only be spent on ‘essential’ foods wouldn’t fly here, but there’s been some movement in that direction. Unfortunately.
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It’s literally just teaching kids to blindly obey authority, so that they are better worker bees.
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Dress codes are systemic racism here in the United States.
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The idea that schools should be vigorously and stringently apolitical is such an ignorant, lazy idea. Schools are children’s entire functional communities, every day of their lives. So many people have made the argument, during COVID lockdowns that schools should reopen because children are missing out on essential “socialization.” If true, what more valuable lesson than learning how to parse meaningful value statements (it is important to value all people’s identity expression) from bullshit ones (hey, as an asshole, that offends me for some fucking reason). These both-sides procedural arguments that strip away any examination of the underlying value or real life consequences are so asinine.
I was listening to a Natalie Rotter-Laitman standup routine the other day on Exploration: Live podcast, and she had this brilliant chunk about how people blame the insanity, drama and pace of life in middle school and high school years simply on “hormones.” The punchline was something like “ok, but imagine how stressful it would be if EVERYONE you know was all in a building with you all day every day, your friends, your neighbors, your boss and they saw and heard about EVERYTHING you did, you would be crazy too.” That kinda blew my mind, and while not 100% on topic, has really knocked me for a loop in thinking about the structural experience of kids in school.
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Nah. There really fucking isn’t. Let kids be kids.
And no, it didn’t “work out OK in your day”, you just didn’t know any better.
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