Sesame Street is produced, in part, by our tax dollars, and aired through public television. Parents are the arbiters of their children's best interest, and this includes medical decisions. It is not the role of the government to fund money to produce propaganda in the name of "educational television" to cause children in elementary school to believe that they should be vaccinated, and (implicitly) that their parents are "wrong" in not having them vaccinated. That is not the role of government. I know that the Soviet government and Nazi Germany lionized children who snitched on their parents for thoughtcrime, but this is still America, and our tax monies should not be used to undermine the status of parents as the arbiters of their children's best medical interest.
This isn't an advocacy for parents being the final arbiters in things such as genital mutilation or not providing medical treatment for inoperable cancer, but the COVID-19 vaccine being administered to a 5-11 year old is not that kind of decision. Nor is a 5-11 year old child capable of making that sort of decision. These sort of things are propaganda aimed at children. That's not OK on the taxpayer's dime. The idea that vaccinating 5-11 year old children against COVID-19 is the best course of action for such children is far from settled science at this point.
I'm interested to hear what possible justification you could have for the bolded portion, Fuzzy. There is far, far more science demonstrating the efficacy of vaccines and the reality, gravity, and anthropogenic nature of climate change than there is for this alleged epidemic of children being harmed in any significant number by transitioning prior to adulthood. Why should parents be allowed to act how they choose in spite of the scientific consensus in the one case but remain cautious despite a lack of meaningful science saying they ought to do so in the other?
At the end of the day, if you'll permit my saying so, I think you rail so hard against this idea of taking choice away from parents because you hate in them what you see in yourself. You have no actual moral commitment to giving parents the final word, as is demonstrated by your contempt for them when they choose to support their trans kids. At the end of the day, you, like the people you criticize, just want people to raise their children how you personally think they ought to be raised. When you think parents are making choices closer to what you want than the government would, you defer to the parents; when the reverse is true, you defer to the government. All this hemming and hawing about parents is nothing more than a flimsy post hoc justification for this tendency dressed up in rhetoric designed to appeal to parents' anxieties, which we tend to hold as sacrosanct in this culture for whatever reason.
