OK, please, please find me a cite to debunk this. My coworker (the fundie) smugly told me yesterday that California is planning to abolish Mother’s and Father’s Day as it “discriminates against same sex couples”. She got this nugget of wisdom from one of her church friends and I just can’t believe it.
However, I have been unable to find anything on it on the web and the friend is away from his computer conveniently enough. Help!
You cannot prove a negative. It is up to the person making a claim to prove it.
Yeah, yeah,…but I’d love to come up with a rock solid refutation I can throw in their collective homophobic faces.
::still looking::
“abolish mothers day/fathers day”. Neither is a state sponsored holiday. What are they going to do, send a bunch of state employees out with magic markers to cross it off of everyone’s calendar?
I believe the story comes from a single private school in New York (there’s a GD thread on the same topic) where the school officials have stated that they will not have the little kids do the traditional construction paper card for Mom and construction paper and tin can pencie cup for dad, since not every child has a father or mother at home. IIRC, while there may have been some reference to same sex couples, it should also be abundantly clear that there are many children who are raised in a single parent environment. And, so that one school, in deference to the fact that many of their kids would not be in a position to ‘celebrate’ one or the other of the holidays, instead made the statement that they’ll choose a ‘parents day’ where each child can make a gift for their parental figure.
Restauranteers and Retailers wouldn’t stand for the ‘abolishment’ of a fake holiday that accounts for a fair percentage of their annual take.
On another board, some one ran an entire article on this. It was supposed to have been in NYC. The article was attributed to Andrea Peyser for May 8th, 2001. It was posted to that board at 6:35am Central time. No link was provided. I googled on a couple of combinations including just the journalist’s name (she does exist.) Many of her articles are available on the web … NOT THIS ONE.
I suspect an UL.
Tinker
:rolleyes:
If you cannot prove negative, then you cannot prove that you cannot prove a negative, so stop saying it. Please.
I didn’t read the article, except for the headline, but it was the front page story of the Daily Express (in NY) on Monday. (it was discussing the school in NY)
Apparently they are discussing this the GD section. The link provided is http://www.newyorkpost.com/commentary/30052.htm
Thanks to yosemitebabe.
The thread is: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=70365
Tinker
I saw this on another board too. It was about the Rodeph Sholom Day School in NYC. The posting I read was cut and pasted from World Net Daily (with no link provided). A quick search turned up this story: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=22746
Read the story at the link. Notice that the subheading says it’s to avoid offending homosexuals. A statement from the school is quoted in the story, but no mention is made of homosexuals at all. I’m not too familiar with World Net daily, but a looking over some of their stories, they appear to be a questionable source for news, at best.
I also called the school. A spokesman by the name of Josh Chaplin read me a press release by the head Rabbi. It basically states that the children of that school will not make Mothers or Fathers Day gifts because not all of them have both parents at home.
Every gay person has a mother & a father so they can celebrate the days just as well.
This is apparently not the first time this school has done something stupid like this.
I found this article by Jonah Goldberg, an editor of National Review Online. He relates something that happened when he himself was a kid and attended this same school.
http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/nr_comment050801a.shtml
His mother used to draw a whale on his lunch bag. (Jonah, whale, get it?) The school asked his mother to stop doing this because it made other students with less pictorial names feel less special :rolleyes: .
That’s ridiculous because kids with same sex parents, if both are Mothers just celebrate Mother’s day with both Moms. Same thing with kids with same sex male parents. There’s no rule to say that you can only celebrate Mother’s or Father’s day with just one Mother or Father.
Kids with same sex parents who actually know and keep in touch with the other biological parent get to celebrate three times. Twice with the same sex parent on one parental day, and with the biological parent on the other parental day.
So the myth is utter bunk.
Please remember that alot of the fundies are quite willing to take an article from a small-town paper, and show it as proof that there is an anti (or pro) christian issue that needs to be addressed around the world. Remember the Onion article on Harry Potter that got turned by the fundies into proof that JK Rowling was an admitted Satanist who had admitted to converting 14 million children into her ‘Church’?
Oh, and let’s not forget F[sub]ourth[/sub]O[sub]f[/sub]G[sub]od[/sub] and his relentless assertion that Christians not only are in the minority in the United States but that the US media has long maintained a full scale assault on them.