It’s not an easy decision. You are taking it on face value that the child is right. I have seen many children afraid to tell their parents something that they think will upset them, only for the parents to be totally cool with it. It’s very common.

Now, if you truly believe that the child is right, I do think there’s still a moral difference between not telling the parents and actively lying to them if they ask.

If asked, I think that probably the correctest decision is probably to refuse to answer and tell the parents that’s a conversation they need to have with their child? Idk.

I’ve seen a scenario where the parents were actively beating their kid if he got good grades because they wanted their kid to fail out. Should the school have lied to the parents about what grades he was getting? CPS refused to remove the kid from the home. What should the school have done in that scenario?

Ultimately, I think navigating when and how the state intervenes in parenting is tricky. It’s very case by case, and in most scenarios there aren’t really good answers. What’s the line where kids are taken away? What’s the line where the courts mandate training or intervention in the home? What’s the line where the state starts just actively lying to the parents about their child to protect them? If you’ve crossed the lying line, why haven’t you crossed the removal line?

I don’t know that there’s a good answer to a lot of these questions. But in general, I think that the state hiding things is usually the wrong answer.

I think it’s probably more analogous than you are painting it as. The trans community suffers elevated levels of suicide risk, and parents who are in the dark about what their child is going through are less equipped to get them the help they need if they need it. Parents of trans kids often have to get them emergency mental health services due to them being bullied or ostracized. If the parents are kept in the dark about it, they may not see the problem until it is too late.

And I agree that children aren’t property, but they also aren’t fully independent agents. Children need guidance. Children need to be raised by parents who love them and are involved in steering them to be a successful and active participant in society. Children should not be allowed to make every decision for themselves without question. They need to be required by an authority figure to eat their vegetables and brush their teeth.

They have agency certainly, but not unlimited agency, and we need to figure out what the left and right bounds of that agency are. And that will change as they age and get older, and will be different from child to child even. But who decides that? My gut is that it’s the parents. I feel like every other option is unpalatable.

I agree that the parents should be better plugged in with their kid and know what’s going on with them.

The question is more “to what degree should the state enforce good parenting.” Should being a bad parent be allowed by the state? Should the state be allowed to lie to you to trick you into being a better parent?

The parents in this situation seem like they probably suck. We don’t disagree on that.

I think I would agree for, like, a school counselor for instance. That’s much more analogous to something like a therapist. Teachers aren’t mental health professionals though. They’re there to teach.

But I think we need to have a more meta conversation about the idealized roles of parents and schools.

In my mind, the parent has the ultimate responsibility for the raising of their child. It is their job to teach their child how to be a good and responsible member of society.

School is there as an institution of formalized learning to help build an educated society.

School is not a day care. School is not there to teach your child how to be a good person. School does not obviate your responsibility as a parent to raise your child right.

Obviously teachers should model good behavior to the children in their care, as should every adult in their life, but the ultimate responsibility for that falls on the parents.

When the school actively lies to the parents about their child, they are taking away the parents ability to fulfill that responsibility.

Now, the school may be doing it for good reason. Many parents are bad parents, and are doing a poor job of raising their children. Most even. People suck.

But the state saying, “you’re not raising your children poorly enough that we are going to take them away from you, but we disagree with how you’re doing it enough that we’re gonna actively lie to you,” feels like a weird middle ground to live in that doesn’t feel great to me.

A slippery slope is saying “if we allow thing 1, then later we will allow thing 2.” That’s not what I’m saying at all.

I’m saying the current thing makes me uneasy, and trying to clarify the left and right bounds of when that one thing is okay to do, if it ever is.

I think we can all come up with instances where it’s wrong for the school to lie to parents. If you catch a kid smoking for instance, it shouldn’t be acceptable for the school to not tell the parents. And it should be doubly unacceptable if the parents ask for the school to lie to them about it.

Schools aren’t perfect. What I’m about to say might actually be a slippery slope, but if schools are allowed to lie to parents about their children, I don’t think it’s a far leap to say they will lie to cover up bullying and abuse to prevent themselves from being sued or held accountable. Bad schools can be just as bad at being a safe place for kids as bad parents.

But aside from that, I think there’s an important meta conversation to be had about what a parent’s responsibility to their child is. I think in addition to the obvious of providing a safe and loving home, a parent is responsible for raising their child to be a good member of society. It concerns me when the state begins to take that responsibility away from parents and put it on itself.

Now, sometimes that is something the state needs to do. If a child is being actively abused, the parents should be sent to prison, and the state should (in absence of another parental figure that can take in the child and is willing to do so) assume custody of that child. In which case it is the states responsibility to raise that child into a good and responsible member of society.

But these weird half measures where the state says, “you’re not an abusive enough parent for us to take your children away from you, but we don’t like the way you’re raising them enough that we’re gonna actively lie to you about what your child is doing at school,” feel bad to me.

To what degree should the state be allowed to hide things from someone’s legal guardians?

Like, I totally understand the impulse here, but I don’t know that it’s actually a good one.

What if the state refused to tell a kids parents that they were struggling with depression, and then the kid self harms, and the parents weren’t given the opportunity to provide the support network necessary to get them the help they need.

I’m certain that there are a lot of bad parents out there who would not handle this information about their child well. This article proves it even. But parents being terrible parents isn’t limited to this issue. Should the state be empowered to step in and force them to be better parents? Should the state be allowed to lie to them about what their child is doing at school in order to prevent them from making certain decisions about their child?

I’m not saying that the state has to reinforce the parents viewpoints. Far from it. Schools should be free to set curriculum to what they want and enforce whatever code of conduct makes sense for the school, parents be damned. But I feel a lot weirder about it when the state starts actively lying to the parents about what’s going on with their child while in the state’s care.

I think your edit outlines that we are just going to disagree. The US has its flaws, no question, but I’m a far cry from calling it an imperialist hellhole. I like the US as a whole, and we may not be the “Greatest Nation In The World”™, and we’ve certainly been involved in our share of bad stuff. But I also think we’ve been on the right side of history a fair few times as well, and the average American has it pretty well off.

Now, I think this current administration is certainly going out of its way to destroy a lot of that. I agree that ICE is certainly gestapo adjacent (though not what we were talking about when I brought them up.) I agree that the rule of law is being stretched a little thin at the moment.

But, crucially, this is all stuff we’ve seen before. Andrew Jackson literally told the Supreme Court to try and enforce their ruling with whatever army they had to do so, and then kicked off the Trail of Tears. We’ve literally had a full scale Civil War and come back together as a nation afterwards. It’s nowhere near as bad off as it has been before, and we survived it, and we absolutely will again.

It requires bold leaders in the civic arena who can stand up for decency and the rule of law. Not some tribalist nonsense where we advocate for killing anyone who doesn’t wave our particular color of flag.

I’m sorry you’ve given up hope, but I promise we’ve come back from far worse as a nation. Two years from now we’ll likely have a Democrat in the White House (if the party doesn’t screw the pooch again), and we can start rebuilding. We’re already seeing a blue wave take off in the House and Senate. In a couple years we can start rebuilding. Which doesn’t diminish the damage that has been done, which is extensive.

But I think what we’re seeing is the final throes of a dying party, and once the current administration is out, we’ll see a big restructuring of the Republican party, as most of their voter base is passing on. The Overton Window will shift a good bit left, and we’ll begin seeing slow but measured and sustainable progress forward.

They were the functional equivalent of Jan6 rioters. Sure, not all of them killed a cop. But they were at minimum actively involved in the destruction of property during a riot that escalated to violence.

I’ve already agreed the elevation to terrorist charges were bad. But let’s not pretend this was the gestapo pulling people from their beds for wrongthink.

Trump surrendered power after his first term. The pendulum was swinging away from authoritarianism. Everything was on the path to “just working out.” Then the Dems screwed the pooch by putting forward crap candidates and it began swinging back. The answer to this isn’t continuing to put forward awful candidates. And I have trouble coming up with one worse than a serial rapist with a Nazi tattoo.

The people printing the magazines were directly involved in shooting a police officer. The magazines were used as evidence to paint them as terrorists to get them longer sentences.

Now, I wholly disagree with painting them as terrorists to get longer sentences. That’s definitely bad, and I hope it gets overturned on appeal.

But they were pretty involved in active criminal activity in which an officer was shot in the neck. They weren’t arrested for “just printing magazines.”

Sure. I don’t usually do edits, as I’ve already admitted to using older data deeper in the thread, but if it makes you feel better, that’s fine.

Original statement has been edited with a basic summary of the additional, more recent data.

This is what always gets me. It’s not like there aren’t hundreds if not thousands of people who want the job.

I felt this way during the Kavenaugh hearings for the SC. If someone has anything big that would disqualify them if true, even if it isn’t, why push that candidate?

It’s not a court of law. We’re not throwing them in jail. It doesn’t need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They are just not getting a job they wanted.

I’ve seen people not get a job they wanted because they forgot a word during an interview. Why the hell can someone be credibly accused of rape and everyone’s like, “well yeah, but we still want them to get this job.” Just interview other candidates! There’s not a lack of people who would want to be a Senator or SC Justice or whatever. What the hell?

The stats were from both the Obama administration and the Biden administration. The Trump administration is not reflected on that Wikipedia page yet.

The Biden administration was only two years ago. It’s not like it’s ancient history.

Look man, you’re using a lot of phrases that don’t really mean what you seem to think they do.

“Dirty your hands” usually means that you’ll engage in some mud slinging or attack another candidates family or something. It doesn’t mean supporting someone who has violently raped multiple women.

To turn it back on you, using the terms correctly, are you saying that a rapist with a Nazi tattoo is preferable to a moderate Dem so long as they can pass a purity test?

Look, I don’t like Susan Collins. I’m not saying she’s a good choice. I’m saying she’s better than Platner.

If the Dems put forward someone who isn’t a rapist, I’m all on board.

At the end of the day, character matters. If I have to choose between someone who I disagree with but has morals and someone I generally agree with but is a bad person, I will pick the person with morals.

No, I just hadn’t looked at her numbers since the Biden administration and was working from memory.

Susan Collins isn’t a fascist.

I often don’t agree with her, but she voted with both the Biden and Obama administrations over 70% of the time.

And I reject that this is a “purity test.” This isn’t them not aligning 100% with some fringe ideology. This is someone who is literally a rapist. Literally raped real women by force.

If this is the best candidate we can put forward, we deserve to lose.

I’d rather have a milquetoast corporate Dem than a rapist. I’d vote for one quicker than for a rapist anyways.

Okay, calling me a liar is strong. I was going off the Wikipedia page for her political positions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Susan_Collins

This is what I was referring to with the 70%:

According to CQ Roll Call, Collins sided with President Obama’s position 75.9% of the time in 2013, one of only two Republicans to vote with him more than 70% of the time.

And:

During the Biden presidency, as of February 2022, FiveThirtyEight found that she has voted with Biden’s positions approximately 75.6% of the time.

A further review does show her voting close to 95% with the Trump presidency: https://votehub.com/trump-score

I do think “Trump Score” is a misleading statistic, in that not all votes are created equal, so knowing which votes someone defected on is almost if not more important than the number of votes. Look at Fetterman. He has a 40% voting rate with the Trump administration, but to hear it here he’s basically a Republican with a blue tie.

All that to say, Susan Collins has historically been very moderate, and has had reasonable and nuanced takes on important issues.

Planter has almost certainly raped multiple women.

Would I rather a solid Democrat over Susan Collins? Absolutely. But character matters. And that’s true for anybody of either party.

And painting Susan Collins as a far right lunatic is disingenuous at best.

He can step down now and the Democrats can replace him. Primaries aren’t controlled by the state. The party can do what it wants. So why wait?

He’s up against Susan Collins, the most liberal Republican Senator. She votes with the Democrats, like, 70% of the time. And, crucially, doesn’t have anyone accusing her of rape.

Edited correction: Has voted with the Democrats 70% of the time during the Obama and Biden administrations. She’s been with the Republicans 95% of the time with the Trump admin so far. But it’s a weird metric as not all votes are equivalent weighty. But is worth noting the the most bipartisan Dem this cycle (Fetterman) has only sided with the Republicans 44% of the time, so she has historically crossed the aisle more than he has.