McAuliffe vs Youngkin - Opt-in, Opt-out or straight up brainwash?

Terry McAuliffe's doubling down against opponent Glenn Youngkin has a fatal flaw that people aren't bringing up - maybe a few flaws.

First, books not making it into curriculum isn't necessarily book banning. All education is curated. The fact that I read Animal House and 1984 for the first time in school and I ended up reading Brave New World and The Time Machine on my own time doesn't mean that the latter two books were banned - they just didn't make the curriculum.

To my knowledge, Youngkin hasn't called for Toni Morrison's novel Beloved to be removed from the school's libraries. Youngkin supports an opt-out if parents don't want their kids exposed to certain sexually explicit content - Beloved depicts a mother killing her two year-old child, sexually explicit scenes, assaults, and beastiality.

So, if you're hard left and you think that McAuliffe is right to take his position, think about it for a bit.

First of all, when I was in K-12, we had these things called "permission slips" - some of you may remember them. These were opt-ins. If we didn't produce parent's signatures, we couldn't participate. When my middle school history class showed an edited version of the film Glory, I needed to opt-in with a permission slip because I was still a kid and the movie was still fairly violent even after the edits. Was that movie banning or censorship? Is it movie banning or censorship to not let twelve year-olds into a movie like Mandy unattended?

That's all opt-in. McAuliffe doesn't want parents and kids to be allowed to opt-out. That's much much worse.

What's more, isn't Youngkin just asking for trigger and content warnings? I thought it was only libertarians and right wingers who didn't like trigger warnings. So, adults in college can throw fits if they don't get a trigger warning about, say, Titus Andronicus, which depicts the brutal rape and mutilation of a girl and, usually, if such warnings are provided, students can opt-out - right? But, when we're dealing with minors, there's something nefarious about asking for content warnings and the ability to opt-out - right?

With all of the real cases of sexual assault that have happened in Virgina public schools, maybe some of the minors who attend those schools deserve a little warning. McAuliffe is against it because he's a dictator and he wants kids to be brainwashed.