https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/15/texas-granbury-isd-school-board-courtney-gore/
Courtney Gore, a Granbury ISD school board member, has disavowed the far-right platform she campaigned on. Her defiance has brought her backlash.
you know, good for her, i guess, but i absolutely fucking hate that they just paint this picture of her like a normal, well adjusted person who happened to get involved in some Weird Shit, because she has to have ignored or dismissed a LOT of red flags to get to where she was.
i'm glad she finally did her due diligence, but i don't think she deserves a glossy write up about how she did a little oopsy fucky wucky that may have made many children's lives measurably worse.
you know, good for her, i guess, but i absolutely fucking hate that they just paint this picture of her like a normal, well adjusted person who happened to get involved in some Weird Shit, because she has to have ignored or dismissed a LOT of red flags to get to where she was.
I have to mildly disagree here. Yes, some (I'll even go so far as to say the majority) of the blame falls on her for being willfully blind for so long, but there's also the fact that many of her colleagues simply tried shielding her from the information. Plus, in any case like this, you often don't know the true reality of the situation until you roll up your sleeves and start digging in yourself.
But I'm willing to give her a lot of credit. She was willing to have her beliefs challenged, she was willing to look at everything objectively, and she didn't follow her colleagues' lead in ignoring the evidence for their own political benefit because the facts didn't jive with their personal worldview (and apparently being willing to state as much, if only to her). That itself is a rarity in society today, where the only answer to extremism is more extremism, doubling down instead of compromising, and treating any attempt at admitting the other side may have a point as being a traitor to the cause. This holds especially true in the GOP, and even more so in places like Texas.
And in an area like that, I'd much rather have someone who at least seems to be willing to be objective and accept reality vs. yet another crackpot who wants a list of books banned because some of the words contain the letters G, A, and Y.
Also you have to allow people a way out. If you say they can never come back to reality, then they won't try.
It takes a lot to leave your social group, even if that social group is based on rage, lies, and bullshit. It's not entirely different from ex-Mormons or people leaving a cult.
Now is she actually gonna do something about her colleagues misleading her or continue being complicit due to willful ignorance?
Belief is a word for children. Adults either know or dont know. If you see an adult using the word believe youre staring at a red flag.
she has to have ignored or dismissed a LOT of red flags to get to where she was
Every news she watched told her a certain picture of how the world was.
Every person she talked to swears to her that the world is a certain way (and, if she starts questioning, they get real suspicious of her and maybe might ostracize her from their social circle).
It would be weird if she had arrived at the truth on her own before this point. And usually, it actually takes a lot more than just reading over the primary sources and realizing that they don't say what the news and all her friends said they say, before someone realizes the truth.
She didn't ignore any red flags, because the red flags exist in reality. You're well acquainted with some information about reality that she's not privy to, and so in your mind it was easy to spot. For her, her world picture is carefully managed and curated, and the instant that she saw some information that it wasn't the way she'd been told, she realized the truth, told everyone (alienating more or less 100% of her former allies), and started working to try to put it right.
Don't hedge your support for her, would be my way of looking at it. She wants to stop the Nazis. Okay, sounds great. I wouldn't kick Eisenhower out of the wagon train because he's a Republican, while the shooting against the ones who want to kill you and me and also her, is still going on.
Don't let a thirst for justice get in the way of finding allies. It's about the school districts and their future, not the individuals trying to fuck them up with religious indoctrination.
So, it's not "good for her" as much as "good for those kids". And what she deserves or not is less important than those kids futures of being brainwashed or not. She's just one person, and punishing her would accomplish nothing helpful, you're not going to scare off her old friends that way or anything.
She’s just one person, and punishing her would accomplish nothing helpful, you’re not going to scare off her old friends that way or anything.
They didn't say anything about punishing her, just that she shouldn't be applauded for switching from an asshole to less of an asshole.
I'm not going to applaud someone for abusing someone less. She is still a committed Republican who just decided this particular approach in imposing her terrible views was wrong.
“I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”
Sure, but I think improvement is worth acknowledging. We should not limit reward to just some kind of good enough.
People do not have to learn or grow, it is in no way required to be a live American citizen that exerts power in our system. If we want people to do it, it needs to be supported. Even if that is sometimes distasteful.
Afraid so. I believe in rehabilitation over punishment for criminals, with the goal being the eventual cessation of the behavior.
edit: Side note, not because I like it, but because it is necessary to fix our criminal justice system. We have a very abnormally high recidivism rate, where convicted criminals frequently go on to commit more crimes. Also, while relying on severe punishment may make us feel better, it does not actually work to reduce crime. It is also expensive.
So, as uncomfortable as it may sound, it's about treatment of the core problems with the goal of eventual release back into society. Even for animal abuse. It's a challenging issue, unfortunately.
conservatism is driven by ignorance. you cant really separate the 2. its why critical thinking is antithetical to republicans.
Or the violent video games, or gangster rap, or dungeons & dragons, or that rock n roll music...
Man, I remember when Harry Potter was under fire, that was eye opening as a kid.
It's reassurring to see that sometimes it really is just that someone has been misled, and that given the right opportunity they can change.
While I hope this is the case, she may have simply been backed into a corner on a promise she couldn't deliver.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Weeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans that she had fanned out on the coffee table in her living room and even across her bed.
Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth.
Greg Abbott, a Republican, was victorious in unseating five lawmakers in his own party and forcing another three into runoff elections after they voted against voucher legislation that would allow the use of public dollars for students to attend private and religious schools.
After Lang decided not to run for reelection in 2020, he asked Gore to join the “Blue Shark” show, a web-based program he founded and co-hosted with Criswell that produced videos taking aim at local politicians and officials considered insufficiently conservative.
At the time, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News obtained audio of the district’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, making clear to librarians that he had concerns about books with LGBTQ themes, including those that did not contain descriptions of sex.
The incident forced the district to adopt tighter security measures, including clearly posting signs prohibiting firearms and bringing in additional officers during board meetings anytime administrators expect that certain topics could lead to heated exchanges.
The original article contains 3,217 words, the summary contains 249 words. Saved 92%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This doesn't address what she found or the fact that her stance changed. TLDR below. From the article:
"But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.
The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”
Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”
So, in the spring of 2022, Gore went public with a series of Facebook posts. She told residents that her backers were using divisive rhetoric to manipulate the community’s emotions. They were interested not in improving public education but rather in sowing distrust, Gore said.
“I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”"
TLDR Far right republican ran on platform saying that schools are indoctrination students to be progressives. She spent many nights and weekends going over the curriculum for the district and found no evidence to support her previous claims and in her excitement, she told her supporters what she found. They didn't believe her and she was so disgusted that she changed her platform.
Irony. She sounds kind of similar to how Manchin and Smyrna are to the Democrats.
“Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.””
No, there isn't a prominent Democrat named Смирна.
Manchin isn't somebody who had an epimistological epiphany; he's somebody who is bought off by the fossil fuels industry and working in his personal financial interest.