Me:

Children can and do administer over-the-counter and prescription drugs to themselves in homes, libraries, stores, museums, parks, and just about every single other institution that they encounter in their daily lives, with the sole exception of schools.

PG:

Homes have parents.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I was 13 years old, I was at home when my parents were not. Sometime I even took an Advil when they weren’t around, and without having checked with them first.

Children in libraries, stores, museums and parks generally are attended by parents.

I think you’re underestimating the amount of time 13 year olds spend outside of immediate parental supervision. But even if you weren’t, I don’t know what I’d be expected to infer from what you say here. If, when parents are around, 13 year olds aren’t generally subjected to zero-tolerance policies where they absolutely cannot consume prescription or even mild OTC drugs except through the mediation and supervision of their parents, then that would seem to indicate that the school’s policies are out of touch with what responsible 13 year olds are able to do, and in fact do, outside of the school. Which was my point.

Moreover, librarians, storekeepers, docents and rangers never have been deemed to stand in loco parentis. Schools have been, which is why you see this exception.

I’m aware of the legal reasons that government schools have felt compelled to adopt this kind of policy. But I think that’s an explanation of the policy, not a justification of it, and it is absolutely not a justification of using invasive and sexually humiliating methods to ensure that it is rigidly enforced.

As for standing in loco parentis, I think it’s a funny sort of justification for imposing policies that are far more invasive and busybodying than the practices of actually-existing parents. Of course, I know the legal reasons why this is so (specifically, the threat of a lawsuit), but that’s a good reason for dealing with the out-of-whack legal situation, not a good reason for anti-ibuprofen policies.

Constant: the emancipation of the slaves by a decree from a victorious Washington DC was still very right.

Yes, I agree, and this in spite of my belief that the Southern states should have been left alone to secede in peace. Forcing white Southerners back into the Union at bayonet-point and achieving power over them through conquest and occupation was a moral crime, but using that position of power, once achieved, to declare Southern slaves emancipated, is no crime; kidnappers and robbers have no right to go on kidnapping and robbing, so there’s no victim in that particular case. And it’s a very foolish form of libertarianism that would object on “federalist” grounds. I think, actually, that most libertarians would agree, in the case of emancipation, and that “federalist” objections to Roe v. Wade really have much more to do with ambivalence about abortion than they do with a consistent decentralism.

Constant: And similarly, we might say, Roe v. Wade was handed down by Washington DC, and thus Rad Geek was really twisting the facts with his summary of what happened, but it was still a great thing for Washington DC to do.

Well, my claim wasn’t that Roe specifically didn’t originate in D.C. Obviously it did. I was making a causal claim, to the effect that something other than the good graces of the Nine made it inevitable that either Roe, or some similarly sweeping victory, would eventually be won. So the facts that I cite as an explanation are those that I think best support the relevant counterfactuals. If the Nine hadn’t handed down a (mostly) pro-choice ruling in Roe, then (I would argue) the abortion law repeal movement would have won through a different proximate cause, such as state-level legislative repeal, and/or through a growing network for safe and affordable illegal abortions. On the other hand, if not for the repeal movement, I doubt that Roe ever would have been handed down. Hence the claim that the movement is a better explanation for the eventual repeal than the Supreme Court is.