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Planned Parenthood’s Fight for Child Marriage
AUG 6, 2023 4:00 PM BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
“That pretty much made it clear I was not going to be able to do this”
Earlier I wrote about a Washington Post article that talked extensively about the persecution of gays in Lebanon, Iran, and other Muslim countries without ever mentioning the ‘M” or “I” word.
The LA Times can’t talk about the elephant in the room or even suggest that there might be anything wrong here with its side. So it focuses the bulk of its attention on the cliched story of a woman from an evangelical family who was pressured into marrying an older man when she was 16. What does any of this have to do with why child marriage is legal in California? Absolutely nothing because guess who’s keeping it legal?
While child marriage is recognized as a human rights violation by the United Nations, there is no minimum age requirement to become married in California…
The policy comes as a surprise in liberal California, home to some of the strongest sexual violence protections in the nation. What’s more surprising is that opposition to a prohibition on marriage under 18 has not been driven by Republicans as in other states but by progressive groups including the ACLU and Planned Parenthood — both of which have sway in the majority-Democrat Legislature.
Among their concerns is that a total ban on marriage of minors could be a slippery slope and impede constitutional rights or reproductive choices, including access to abortion.
“That pretty much made it clear I was not going to be able to do this,” former Democratic state Sen. Jerry Hill, who attempted to ban underage marriage in 2017, said of the unexpected opposition from the influential groups.
Child killers need customers and child brides may just help provide them.
The LA Times keeps claiming there’s something surprising about leftist opposition to child marriage because it sets up the false construct that child marriage is some sort of conservative thing. It’s obviously not because the opposition is coming from leftist groups and (buried at the very end) an immigrant group affiliated with the Bahai movement which is a spinoff of Islam and originates from the Middle East.
Unchained at Last, the group that is at the center of the California effort and the LA Times article, profiles a number of ‘cases’ of child marriage. About half of those are Muslim.
There’s Zubaida, Syeda from Pakistan, Mariam, from a “traditional African household”, Aliya, also from Pakistan, and Saira, whose husband worked in the UAE, and Sara Tasneem, from Guyana, whose father was “a member of a religious group, tangential to Islam”.
Why are the ACLU and Planned Parenthood defending this? Why are Democrats going along with this?
It’s a mystery to the LA Times which keeps talking about Christians and Jews instead of dealing with the elephant in the room.
Islam.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, criticized Republican state Sen. Mike Moon of Missouri in a Tweet in April for supporting marriage as young as 12 years old. Newsom’s office did not return requests for comment about California’s policy on child marriage.
As Rep. Ilhan Omar would say, some people raped some kids.
UKs Alleyn’s School Gets with the Program
AUG 7, 2023 2:00 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD
Some more recent school news to fill you with despair can be found in this story from last April:
Studies in Macbeth’s toxicity and queer readings in leading private school’s
diversity drive
by Anna Davis, Evening Standard, April 13, 2023:
A leading London private school has overhauled its English curriculum to introduce a diverse range of authors and challenge “white-centric, patriarchal and cis-gender ideologies”.
Pupils at the £25,000-a-year Alleyn’s School in Dulwich now discuss Macbeth’s toxic masculinity and read The Tempest through the lens of colonialism.
Sixth formers study “queer readings” of A-level texts such as Dracula, and the first text by a non-binary author has been included in the A-level curriculum. Half of the books read by students in years seven, eight and nine are by female authors, which “helps in some way to counteract the lack of equality in the set texts for GCSE”.
A-level students must also choose one coursework text by a writer of colour “in an effort to tackle the lack of diversity in the A-level syllabus”.
Alex Smith, head of English at Alleyn’s, said the same texts — such as Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird — have been “wheeled out time and time again” for decades, propping up a “pale, male and stale” reading list.
To Kill a Mockingbird was, of course, written by Harper Lee, a woman, and was very sympathetic to racial issues in the southern USA. How did the Head of English at Alleyn's not know that?
Writing in a school blog she said: “For the last five years, the Alleyn’s English department have been committed to a thorough and ongoing overhaul and genuine diversification of our English curriculum in the hope that every child will come to see themselves [sic]…
In other words, pupils are presumed to be unable to engage with what they read, unless those readings are “by” or “about” people much like themselves. Students of color should be given the opportunity to read works by black authors, ideally with black protagonists. Female students should be able to read women authors and discuss, endlessly, issues of cis-gendered toxic masculinity. No pupil should be expected to expand his or her comprehension of the world through imaginative literature; the books to be read will be “fitted” to their readers, to hold their otherwise flagging attention. Required reading will be chosen on the basis not of literary merit but of sociological significance. “Pale, male, and stale” writers are rightly on the wane in the Alleyn’s School curriculum. There’s a lot less Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Keats, to make room for Malcolm X, Cornel West, Betty Friedan, and Rigoberta Menchu. And when those “pale, male, and stale” writers are read — they can’t be eliminated altogether, alas, at Alleyn’s they will serve as jumping-off points for discussion of today’s woke concerns — sexism, racism, colonialism.
As well as introducing a more diverse range of authors, Ms Smith said the school has also changed the way pupils study canonical texts by “white, cis-male authors”.
She wrote: “Whilst representation is of the utmost importance, discussions of racial and gender equality, and the challenging of white-centric, patriarchal, and cisgender ideologies can also happen while studying canonical texts by white, cis-male authors.”
Year seven pupils studying Shakespeare’s The Tempest “explore ideas about the effects and inherent problems of colonialism”, while year 12 pupils reading the 17th century revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi unpack “the patriarchal system that imprisons the duchess literally and figuratively.”
If our students must study some “white, cis-male [sic] authors,” at least — Ms. Smith insists — let class discussion focus not on the literary qualities of the works, but how those works can be used to engage with issues of “racial and gender equality.”
She added: “We are also committed to representing alternative versions of masculinity to those harmful tropes so often seen perpetuated in popular culture and by the media. The toxicity of Macbeth’s masculinity — and, crucially, its consequences — is central to our study of that text at GCSE.”
So Alleyn’s pupils will read Macbeth not to learn about the literary art with which he presents o’erweening ambition, murder, and guilt, but about “toxic masculinity.” Have the Alleyn’s teachers forgotten about the toxic femininity of Macbeth’s partner in crime, Lady Macbeth?
Forget about iambic pentameter, metonymy and metaphor, Shakespeare’s plangent playing on two lexical keyboards simultaneously — monosyllabic anglo-saxon words set off the polysyllabic words of Latinate origin (Ophelia speaking of Hamlet as “th’expectancy and rose of the fair state”; Macbeth’s “No; this my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine/Making the green one red”). Such study contributes nothing to forging a society free of racism, sexism, and colonialism, which must be recognized as the true aim of education, at Alleyn’s School and no doubt, at many schools that will follow Alleyn’s School’s hideous example.
It comes after a report by campaign group End Sexism in Schools found that 77 per cent of novels studied by pupils in years seven, eight and nine are written by men, and 82 per cent of them have male protagonists. The group said that 99 per cent of plays taught to students in these year groups were by male writers.
77% of novels studied in years seven through nine are by men! And 82% of those have male protagonists! 99% of the plays taught in those same years are by men! An intolerable situation. So the Alleyn’s School teachers have spent hundreds of hours to prepare lessons on their new, much revised, list of required readings, so as to finally make a space — a very large space — in the curriculum for women writers, women writers of color, queer women writers of color. Down with the cis-gendered white male! Up with everyone else!
Pupils at Alleyn’s will now read The Tempest in order to “explore ideas about the effects and inherent problems of colonialism.” They will read The Duchess of Malfi to “unpack” the patriarchal system that imprisons the duchess. They will read Othello to engage with toxic masculinity and racism. They will read Hamlet to study family dysfunction. They will pay no attention to Shakespeare’s literary artifice: it’s only the “ideas” in the plays that speak to us today that matter.
Get with the program. Jump on the Juggernaut. Don’t be left behind. Remember, “pale, male, and stale” are out. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity are all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Dulwich, London
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