Whenever I hear the moral panic about liberal agendas or whatever the fuck I think about my childhood
For all the faults my family has and the issues i have with my parents, I will say that I never grew up in an environment that limited my access to the outside world. What I mean by that is that I was raised sex positive, alcohol was never a taboo but just something to exercise some care around, weed and psychedelics weren't even considered drugs, none of my media was limited (save for appropriate age restrictions when needed) or considered corruptive, and even the conversations around hard drugs were pretty open. In summation, I was told "what someone does to take the edge off is their business. As long as they don't hurt anyone because of it, you can't make moral judgements on the things they do that only affect them."
I didn't realize how rare that was until i started growing a bit more. To me, that was just the way of the world because I wasn't taught any different. No one hid what sex was from me, or kept me from listening to that Satanic Heavy MetalTM, and instead of just being told something was wrong and bad, I was told the whole truth about things like drugs and alcohol and allowed to make my own informed decisions on them when I got older. Hell, just yesterday while we were looking for a new fridge, my dad joked about how one of the compartments would be perfect for storing my weed and then called me a dopehead.
And then I grew a bit more comprehensive. In a pretty small and very homogenized conservative town. In the most conservative province in Canada. I knew what religion and god was being from a Jewish family, but I was told that was my decision to make and that no one else could tell me what I believed in, and no one's beliefs were any better or worse as long as they weren't hurting anyone. Many of my teachers and classmates disagreed on that, and everything else I was taught.
Suddenly I had teachers and peers telling me that if I didn't believe in jesus that I was going to hell. Suddenly I had other kids' parents yelling at me and my parents because their kid told me that babies came from storks and I told them the truth. Suddenly the other kids weren't allowed to play with me because I was "corrupting" them. So I hung out with the very few and far between other kids from progressive families, but even then, I had an elementary school teacher send us to detention for trading pokemon cards at recess because she claimed that they were demons we were letting possess us.
Thing is, if it was just other kids parroting their parents' shitty beliefs, I could write that off and forgive pretty easily now, at 22, having matured quite a bit since my primary school days (I'd hope). But the fact that TEACHERS, adults who knew they had a certain amount of authority over the children in their care, abused that authority by indirectly punishing the kids that didn't conform to what they wanted precisely because they didn't makes this shit more than just a question of kids being their parents' mouthpieces.
I remember my days of early sex ed. I'm sure the conservative hell province that is Alberta would be happy to toss the very idea of it out of schools altogether, but it's federally mandated, so they had to teach it. But the federal government doesn't dictate what's in those curriculums, that's up to the province. Which goes about as well as you'd think in a province like that. My parents pulled me out of it after I came home parroting pro-life bullshit because they told us in class that the clitoris doesn't exist, and that abortions work by poisoning a full-term baby to death. If that makes me the first Albertan kid to get pulled out of sex ed because it was too conservative, I don't want that title.
This is all an extremely long winded way for me to say that if you honest-to-god believe that there's any such thing as a "liberal agenda" then you've never been a kid from a liberal family in a conservative town. However, as I've pointed out here, there is definitely, undisputedly a conservative agenda. And if you think about it for more than 2 seconds, you'll notice that all these things they tried to impose upon me were based on lies. My parents fully researched everything they taught me and didn't insult my intelligence by hiding things from me if I asked. I remember asking them things and they'd sometimes say "I don't know, let me find out for you" but that's what you're supposed to do, not just repeat the conservative propaganda that's been fed to you all your life. But every single thing that others took issue with was because of lies and puritan pearl-clutching. They had to build this "liberal agenda" strawman to justify their attacking a family who raised their kid on factual evidence instead of bullshit. And honestly, I think the self-projection hit them a little hard ie attacking a child for not hurting anyone in a way they didn't like and then claiming I was "shoving my liberal rearing down their throats."
snowghoul
2087
stormborns
prguitarman
titsay
