Parents and teachers who oppose the state policies sued, claiming their parental, free speech and religious rights were violated.
The Supreme Court on Monday barred California from enforcing state rules that restrict when schools can notify parents about students who come out as transgender and requires teachers to use children’s preferred pronouns.
The court, on a 6-3 vote on ideological lines, allowed a federal judge’s ruling in favor of parents who oppose the policy on religious grounds to go into effect. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had put the judge’s decision on hold pending further litigation.
The court’s ruling focused on the parents’ claim that their rights under the free exercise clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment were violated. The court also said they have valid parental rights claims under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Putting children in danger is a very Christ-like thing to do.
God damnit, this timeline sucks greasy orange balls.
I mean, the Bible includes a story about children who get mauled by bears as punishment for making fun of a bald man… So yeah that tracks.
I’m convinced the god of the OT and NT aren’t actually the same. One is vengeful, powerful and directly intervenes in the visible world, the other is merciful, subtle and their defining ability is the judgement of the dead, but they somehow need a blood sacrifice to shield them from the wrath of the first one? Doesn’t line up to be the same, imo.
I’ve got a full head canon here, if anyone cares.
Go ahead, please
I posit that there are two gods in Christian mythology, neither of which are as omnipotent and omniscient as their followers make them out to be, and neither of which is strictly benevolent.
We have one we could call Creator who fashioned the material world. It made humans, gave them curiosity to explore it, but also withheld the ability to judge good or bad or really form an independent free will so that they would remain subservient.
Then we have another, who I’ll call Judge, who also sought dominate humanity, but had no control over the material world. It disguised itself as another creation and leveraged their curiosity to open the humans’ minds to its concept of justice, revealing that enslavement.
The fruit is just a metaphor for the willingness to entertain and follow the line of thought. Likewise, the shame before their Creator isn’t strictly shame about physical nudity, but acute awareness of their vulnerability.
The Creator, wrathful that his creation was no longer as naive and easily controlled, cursed them with mortality and denied them the leisure they had enjoyed until then, figuratively throwing them out of paradise and locking it away, coercing their obedience by controlling the necessities of life instead.
As humanity multiplied, the Creator grew weaker. At some point, it decided to pour its power into mortal shape to anchor itself in the material world, hoping to re-establish its rule through a mortal avatar.
That didn’t go as planned: the Judge managed to influence that vessel, leading it to adopt (and subsequently teach) a highly controversial and definitely not wrathful-Creator-compliant philosophy that promised a way out of the trap of guilt and shame. It promised a heaven, a return to that paradise.
This eventually put that avatar at odds with the authorities, saw him sentenced to death and all. But while the Creator had obsessed over controlling the mortal world, the Judge had grown in power in the spiritual. When the vessel died, with all the power anchored to him, that power was absorbed by the Judge.
That cry of “My father, why have you abandoned me” was about the Creator’s last-ditch effort to withdraw when it realised the plan.
Anyway, the Judge proceeded to expand its control, using the shame and guilt sowed by the Creator as stick and the promise of salvation as carrot. Because obviously it couldn’t just deliver absolution without attaching strings and threats to compel obedience. Adopting the pretense that it was still the same “one true god” was a useful bait-and-switch to maintain legitimacy. That is, by the way, the same reason the Roman Emperors typically adopted some name of previous Emperors into their list of bynames: They might not actually be descended, but it’s useful to pretend.
The reason I chose to name it Judge is that it mirrors the place in Christian Eschatology that the Creator occupies in the Creation myth: Both lay claim to the title of King, both claim to be the one true god, but their roles are different. One decides what to create, the other what to destroy.
And both are callous, power-hungry egomaniacs, because that’s apparently the type it takes to reach for power in the first place.
Note: I don’t consider this an actual, serious theology to base a religion on. I’m an atheist, I don’t believe either god exists (though a thing doesn’t need to be real for the idea of it to have influence).
I just like thinking about mythology and symbolism. Human stories reflect human nature and human experience.
You might, for example, consider that absorption of power a metaphor for the way a martyr may posthumously rally followers away from one position and to another: it doesn’t have to be an instant transfer so much as a process of shifting influence. You might consider the “influence” of the Judge on the young Jesus simply be the application of critical judgement, which would be the Judge’s initial gift to humanity. You might consider the whole thing a cynical comment on how, for all our enlightenment and progress, we as a species spend so much time destroying instead of building.
But that’s what I tried to do here: Create a story, taken from things others have come up with and combined in a way I hope is both original and interesting.