Names in school (Project 2025)

Here’s another passage from the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, from Chapter Eleven, concerning the Department of Education — which, this chapter says, should be eliminated. So much is left unaddressed in this chapter. Just one example: despite graphs showing declines in reading and mathematics, there are no suggestions to improve those outcomes. Let the states figure it out, I guess.

But this document is clear on several points. For instance, in all K–12 schools under federal jurisdiction:

No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate, without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.

No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.

No public institution may require an education employee or contractor to use a pronoun that does not match a person’s biological sex if contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.

As always, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary kid called, again and again, a name or pronoun not of your choosing. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary teacher or staff member referred to, again and again, with the wrong pronouns. Imagine too the dilemma the first of these prohibitions would create for a sympathetic teacher who wants to honor a student’s choice of name. And notice too: even if a student has written permission regarding their name and pronouns, a teacher or other employee cannot be required to honor that request. Again, cruelty abounding, and I have to wonder what kind of “moral convictions” would prompt a person to be so unabashedly cruel. The deeply sinister message here is that individual identity is not one’s own to decide.

Practicalities: if such a policy were ever to be implemented, every Ash, Barb, Cal, Dee, &c., &c., had better bring a note from home.

Teachers, incidentally, are identified in this document as a special-interest group in the world of education.

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

You and *I, you and me

I was driving when I said it: “people like you and I.” And I couldn’t believe that I had said it.

Such is life when you hear it the wrong way again and again, and when you read writers telling you there’s nothing wrong with it.

I just kept driving — I didn’t slam on the brakes and pull over — but I immediately corrected myself. That’ll never happen no more, as the song says. I hope.

Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles

It is to laugh: Melania Trump just hosted a fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group devoted to LGBTQ+ rights. “This Republican Party is one for ALL Americans,” the group proclaimed.

Perhaps the Log Cabin Republicans should have a look at the Project 2025 Policy Agenda. Chapter Fourteen, devoted to the Department of Health and Human Services, leaves no doubt that these aspiring makers of policy view marriage as a heterosexual union. Here’s a passage from the plan for the HHS Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education for Adults initiative:

Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.

For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.

Look at the details:

~ The federal government is to maintain a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family. But while marriage can be a religious institution, it is, in the United States, also and always a civil institution. And “biblically based” has an uncertain meaning. I trust that the Project 2025 idea of a biblical model does not allow for polygamy, concubinage, or death by stoning for disobedient children.

~ There’s no acknowledgement of the woeful life consequences that may befall children raised in dysfunctional heterosexual households.

~ If the average length of same-sex marriages is indeed half that of heterosexual marriages, that might have something to do the fact that same-sex marriage became legal in every state only in 2015. Many same-sex marriages can now be, at most, just under nine years old.

~ This document leaves little doubt that the only form of marriage it deems legitimate is marriage between a man and a woman (unrelated!). Marriage, the document says, is between “not just any two adults,” as if the partners in a same-sex relationship are just randomly paired people.

~ The roles assigned mothers and fathers are curiously retrograde: a mother provides “love and nurturing”; a father provides “play and protection.” Cannot any parent, male, female, or otherwise, provide all those possibilities?

The broad outlines of Project 2025 are frightening enough. Reading the details makes it all look much worse. Log Cabin Republicans, you’re kidding yourselves.

The document is available here.

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

Windows Notepad advances

Daring Fireball notes that Windows Notepad is getting spellcheck and autocorrect: “Better late than never, but it’s kind of wild that Notepad is 41 years old and only getting these features now.”

Which reminds me of my pre-Mac adventures in “Amish computing” — writing in the Windows app Notepad2 and using a spellchecking script.

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

You know, perhaps, that ever since I have been ill, I have been working on a long book, which I call a novel because it isn’t as fortuitous as memoirs (it is fortuitous only to the degree that life itself is), and the composition is very severe although difficult to appraise because of its complexity; I don’t know how to describe the genre. Certain parts take place in the country, some in one kind of society, others in another kind; some have to do with family life and much of it is terribly indecent.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Louis de Robert, between October 7 and 15, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Louis de Robert (1871–1937), novelist and Dreyfussard. Proust listened to his nightly accounts of the trial.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Eleven suggestions from Robert Reich

Robert Reich offers eleven suggestions “to prevent America and the world from falling into fascism.”

Relative frequency (Project 2025)

In Chapter Fourteen of the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, covering the Department of Health and Human Services, the words addiction, birth control, and hunger do not appear; the word fentanyl appears once; the acronyms HIV and AIDS appear once each; and the word nutrition appears four times.

But the word gender appears twenty-two times, and the word abortion appears 143 times.

Among the anti-abortion strategies this project seeks to implement: the use of “every available tool, including the cutting of funds” to require each state to report “how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” The idea here is to counter what the document calls “abortion tourism.” And abortion is explicitly equated with “taking a human life.”

As for birth control family planning, this document addresses only “modern fertility awareness–based methods,” said to have “unsurpassed effectiveness.” (Planned Parenthood says they are “about 77–98% effective.”)

Project 2025

Did you know that there’s a Project 2025 website? And a thirty-chapter agenda?

My Project 2025 is to do what I can (with modest means, admittedly not much) to prevent their Project 2025 from being realized.

Fran Lebowitz at the Morgan Library

“When you look at manuscripts or letters and they’re written in the hand of the writer, you are closer to that writer, you’re closer to the person”: Fran Lebowitz looks at manuscripts and letters at the Morgan Library.

Related posts
A visit to the Kolb-Proust Archive : Gregory Corso’s poem “I Held a Shelley Manuscript”

”Huh?“

At least I know I’m not alone in thinking it a problem: Why are the right- and left-quotation marks on iOS’s keyboard reversed?

[The post title is deliberate. RSS might not display the reversed quotation marks — ” “ — as I intended.]