alt Hacker NewsEven though you’ve widely missed the point, ironically complaining that others can barely read, let’s engage with your argument to show how it’s not so easy.
Libraries today carry the Bible. Libraries, as non profits, also get grants from various entities including local, state, and federal governments. So then is the argument we should we then ban all government funding for libraries? I’m going to assume your response is to say “no, just don’t use federal dollars for this stuff” although it’s not wild of someone of your presumed political persuasion to also be in favor of this option. Is that easy though? It’s not like there’s a magical fairy that attributes “book A was purchased from this funding stream and book B from this other”. “No no” I can hear you saying. You do this with block grants - that solves the mixing problem. Except it doesn’t - I have pool A of money from the federal government and pool B from some other source. I normally might use A and B equally to buy some books but now I just buy the banned books from B and A to by the rest. So now I’m not using federal dollars but I’m still buying all the same books with the same input stream of money. If you’re literate you understand this is the exact same problem we have with “this tax or penalty or whatever will be used to fund schools” which is meaningless because they just then decrease the school funding by that new revenue amount, thus effectively funneling it into the general fund.
> There’s no need to be reading the bible, a comic book, a book about being gender queer, etc; when students can barely read to begin with.
If you're talking about “can barely” read it’s important to be precise about what you mean because excluding the pandemic, scores have been pretty constant over the past 20 years. And by the way, reading different texts with different subject matters with different ways of understanding and interpreting the subject matter is precisely important for developing reading skills.
But you’re right - for those in this thread who are struggling with basic reading and critical thinking skills to understand the points people make in the comments, maybe we should recommend them some starting materials.
You’re overcomplicating a simple issue of budgetary standards to avoid the actual point. Calling a federal funding restriction a "ban" is a massive reach. If I refuse to pay for my kid to buy a certain video game, I haven’t "banned" the game from existence; I’ve just exercised my right to decide how my money is spent.
Your "Pool A and Pool B" shell game theory is exactly why these federal restrictions are being introduced. If schools are just shuffling money around to bypass community standards, then the federal government has every right to put a hard "no" on its portion of the tab. It’s called fiscal accountability.
Also, the argument that "reading anything helps literacy" is a weak excuse for including sexually oriented or gender-theory materials in a taxpayer-funded elementary curriculum. If the goal is literacy, we should be funding proven phonics programs and the classics, not social experiments. People aren't "missing the point" just because they don't want to subsidize your specific social preferences with their tax dollars.
The bill specifically carves out text for "preserving instruction in science, classic literature, art, and world religionS.