How much of this is population control and how much is actual protection of children? Like don’t get me wrong, I genuinely don’t know about this and the article does not tell me enough about the proposed bills. All I know from my life in the west (I simply don’t know enough to judge the rest of the world), “protecting the children” has been a tool for extending surveillance.
In the meanwhile we have gutted education, social services and health services. More and more children live in poverty. Living in poverty increases the likelihood of abuse but doing something for real costs money, which our governors like to spend otherwise…
You’re completely right that these laws won’t actually protect children. Instead, they’ll give the government tools for targeting LGBTQIA2S+ youth and people seeking reproductive health care, censorship, and surveillance.
For some legislators, that’s actually the goal – one of KOSA’s sponsors in the Senate (and the Heritage Foundation, which backs the bill) has explicitly talked about using it against LGBTQ people. For others, the most charitable interpretation is that the people pushing these bills have succeeded in fooling a lot of legislators into thinking that these bills will be effective – and that the downsides that so many civil rights, LGBTQIA2S+, and reproductive rights organizations are warning about aren’t real… Also, there’s a lot of pressure on Congress to do something about the predatory way that big tech companies prey on kids and teens (and everybody else too) … so in some cases they probably know that the bills won’t really make a difference, but hey, at least passing a bill is doing something.
How much of this is population control and how much is actual protection of children? Like don’t get me wrong, I genuinely don’t know about this and the article does not tell me enough about the proposed bills. All I know from my life in the west (I simply don’t know enough to judge the rest of the world), “protecting the children” has been a tool for extending surveillance.
In the meanwhile we have gutted education, social services and health services. More and more children live in poverty. Living in poverty increases the likelihood of abuse but doing something for real costs money, which our governors like to spend otherwise…
You’re completely right that these laws won’t actually protect children. Instead, they’ll give the government tools for targeting LGBTQIA2S+ youth and people seeking reproductive health care, censorship, and surveillance.
For some legislators, that’s actually the goal – one of KOSA’s sponsors in the Senate (and the Heritage Foundation, which backs the bill) has explicitly talked about using it against LGBTQ people. For others, the most charitable interpretation is that the people pushing these bills have succeeded in fooling a lot of legislators into thinking that these bills will be effective – and that the downsides that so many civil rights, LGBTQIA2S+, and reproductive rights organizations are warning about aren’t real… Also, there’s a lot of pressure on Congress to do something about the predatory way that big tech companies prey on kids and teens (and everybody else too) … so in some cases they probably know that the bills won’t really make a difference, but hey, at least passing a bill is doing something.