If I go into a convenience store, should I make arrangements beforehand to establish that I’m not going there to rob it? The police shouldn’t be arresting people on the appearance of impropiety. This isn’t a gay rights issue, this is a fourth amendment issue.
It’s entirely possible to fight pedophilia without arresting everyone who acts suspiciously.
You know, couldn’t you argue that NOT teaching about homosexuality is on the basis of religion? (Since some feel that it’s wrong because of religious beliefs?) So, therefore, for proper SOCAS, you can teach about it-and if anyone has a problem with it, they can tell their kids what they believe at home?
I mean, plenty of people have problems with race, or science-why should we let religion influence what we teach?
By banning clubs for homosexual teenagers, you are dictating to all teenagers, regardless of religion what is wrong. Essentially, you are imposing your version of Christian morality on all people.
I’m not gay, but I grew up in an environment where I could not walk down a hallway without being insulted, without being treated like I was less than dirt. As a result, I nearly committed suicide and wrestle with it to this day. Is homosexuality really worse than driving a person to suicide, to, in effect, killing them? Is a straight bully who knocks out a kid with an iceball more sinful than the homosexual whose comforts that kid later?
Bullying is part of what we’re up against. I was watching The People’s Court today, and one of the cases involved a fight when one man called another “a bitch”. In modern day American society, one of the worst things a man can call another man is something which implies he’s either effeminate or homosexual. I’ve heard kids in my own church say, “That’s so gay.”
Somehow, we have to manage a cultural shift to the point where it’s not an insult to imply that someone is homosexual. Unfortunately, I don’t how to go about that, except by fighting battles where I can, including in that old church of mine. I am also all for teaching kids that cruelty is never acceptable conduct.
His4Ever, cruelty kills, as surely as the knife that was pulled on me in 11th grade, and a lot more slowly and painfully. The spirit can be murdered, as well as the body, and in some ways that’s worse, because the body lingers on. Even if you believe homosexuality is an abomination, should homosexual teenagers be told every day of their life that they are worthless, unfit to live, and things I will not sully this forum with until they become so convinced of their wretchedness they choose to end their lives rather than endure? Like I said, I’m not gay, but that is the way I grew up and it is by the grace of God and the friendship of a few decent people, one of whom is gay, that I survived.
It’s up to us, folks. I don’t have kids and I’m not a teacher myself, but, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve taught a little Sunday School and done a bit of work with kids. We have to work with children and adults to tell them that discriminating against homosexuals, or showing cruelty to them in any form is wrong. We have to be willing to speak up. It’s easy for me – I’ve never had much to lose. I’d also be willing to bet I’ve got some of the finest people on this Board on my side. I’ve got a strictly metaphorical white horse within whistling distance at all times – let’s go get us some windmills!
No intent to get into a shouting match, His, but I addressed the basic concept you’re espousing here in my OP. However, there are some questions worth addressing as regards the points you make:
How is it interfering with the rights of parents to teach their children the moral values they hold, to ban Gay-Straight Alliance groups?
Is there a way to promote the idea “homosexuality is sinful” without in consequence attempting to impose legal sanctions on it? Or encouraging gay-bashing, which I know you’ve indicated is evil in your view?
If a kid feels sexual desire for a person of the same sex, what would his recourse be? To whom can he talk about it?
Is the teaching of tolerance evil in your eyes? Because your belief is strong that homosexuality is sinful, is telling your child that he should respect the rights of gay people who don’t think it’s sinful to do what they wish, a violation of your parental rights? Why?
Do the rights of parents extent to putting a child in an inmate-style “ex gay ministry” where shock treatment is used? Where physical violence is used? Where humiliation is used? Where sweet and loving guidance and prayer is the sole means of attempting conversion? Where are the limits on what such institutions? Does society have a right to set such limits?
What are the kid’s own rights? Where are the limits on what he can feel and believe and do as an individual? To what extent do his parents’ beliefs override his own?
They’re not easy questions, and I’m not asking them in an aggressive or offensive tone (or at least not intending to). They’re the sort of things that do need to be answered, though.
Gay teens, condemned by the church, by society, by their friends, do commit suicide at an alarmingly high rate. (We had a debate once on exactly what that rate was, and there appears to have been an overestimate publicized, but it’s still far too high.)
What do we do to help them? What do we do when their parents hold your beliefs and we do not? Am I expected to stand by and watch a teenager kill himself because of his parents’ religious views?
By the way, any kid can be accused of homosexuality, not just those who are homosexual. From what I understand from our own agentfroot who graduated from my old high school not all that long ago, taunts about one’s sexuality are still about as common as they were in my day. This, to me, is the climate we need to change.
While I’m certainly sensitive to the reality of the insecurity that a mature gay person can have when dealing with interaction with young gay people, I do believe our law enforcement needs to be just as vigilent for the protection of young gay males as it is for young females. If anyone seeks out an underage person particularly of known and preferred sexual persuasion , gay or straight from a relationship on the internet, forgive me if my first reaction is not positive. Improper sexual advance by older men on underage sexual prey via the internet appears to be quite common these days.
Your other points that I questioned have generally been supported in this thread. The entrapped journalist point however appears to me to be rather hollow, isolated, and without merit as a prerequisite to solving the problem of gay suicide.
Listen, the idea wasn’t, Oh, if only journalists had free access to gay youth, then things would be utopic and perfect, and I think you know it. The idea was, a lot of people are scared to death of something like this happening, because of pedophilia hysteria coupled with homophobia. It seems to me extremely obvious that if you scare off older gay people from talking to younger gay people, the younger gay people are going to miss out on the support and advice older gay people can give them.
You’re right , I know exactly what your point is, as you’ve just restated. All I’m trying to assert here is that the example you’ve provided could just as easily be regarded as a pedophilic issue on its own couldn’t it ? You don’t seem to want to accept that. There is no evidence that Mirkin was targeted because he was gay and every reason to believe that the undercover cop was presented on the net as bait for paedophiles who as we know are no indication for sexual orientation.
Your other child protection lamentations can all be viewed as indicative of measures that society should do away with if we are to address the gay suicide problem. I took your intention of identifying these measures as indicating areas that needed correction. I certainly didn’t think you were throwing your hands up in the air.I don’t however believe our society today has gone overboard in its protection of children from pedophiles, and I believe that mature gays like you yourself are now should not allow pedophilephobia to get in the way of proper relationships with and mentoring of children. After all, us straight men face the same problem.
Well, this I agree with, but it falls back on the eternal problem of public schooling. What to allow, what not to allow? I would say we should make all ideas available but not endorse any of them. But does this mean that white supremacist journals can be housed in the library, NAMBLA can leave pamphlets with teachers, etc.? And what about classes whose subject matter is inherently charged with political/religious overtones? Do we allow a majority of parents to dictate, or if not then what rights to the minority of parents have to allow/disallow materials? Public schools are a nightmare when it comes to these conflicts, an inescapable quagmire of confusion.
We presently balance the parents’ rights to raise their kids “how they see fit” with the kids own safety interests. I think only safety interests can merit limiting parents’ power justifiably. So we don’t allow parents to beat their kids, even if their “religion” dictates that they ought to. How far does psychological damage go in limiting parents rights? Raising kids in a “homosexuality is sin” environment perhaps causes psychological damage to gay teens. So do we forbid it? If so, where do we draw the line between allowable belief systems and unallowable belief systems? There are probably any number of situations in which otherwise harmless belief systems have one oddball quirky belief which might screw up the kid depending on his nature.
The problem will hopefully fix itself over time. Information is waaaaaaaaaaay more available now then it was even 10 years ago. Fewer people are isolated, and the internet provides a way for even small town kids to learn ideas that they never would have encountered in their homogenous communities. Over the next generation, I suspect that isolating a child from any idea will be pretty much a hopeless undertaking.
Well, from my half century of perspective, the entire subject of homosexuality was very much hushed up and almost totally not dealt with seriously by the overwhelming majority of adults up until well after Stonewall. (The revolutionary attitude of the Sixties and the feminist movement laid a groundwork for gay lib. to follow.) Thirty years ago the overwhelming majority of debate in a forum of this sort, if one had been possible at that time, would have been heavily populated with people whose opinion on the issue resembled that of His4Ever (though in many cases without the strong doctrinal underpinning that she brings to it) and there might have been one or two Mr. Barely Visibles on the opposite side. Progress does occur.
Rex, what I hate most about absolutism of any sort is the idea that even moderate change can be the top of a slippery slope. No one has defined clear-cut guidelines for what is intolerable, but I confess to being sufficiently convinced of the collective common sense of the American people that I think it would be possible to move in a direction of greater freedom of data dissemination and still stop well short of the extremes you specify. (Please do not take that as a criticism of you or your post – you raise a valid point: that there is indeed no clear line dividing what most posters here feel would be a good thing from the spectres you raise that I believe most posters think would be a bad thing. But not all slopes are steep or slippery enough to cause problems, and I think this one is gentle and quite adequately provided with friction-producing footings that one need not worry.)
I am interested in your “balancing” concept – this is a point often brought out in law, in which the rights of the individual must be “balanced” against the welfare of the community in situations where they clash. Would you be willing to address that more at length with reference to parental rights vs. community concerns for psychological damage to children, as you began to do?
One thing we’re up against is that up until recently, bullying hasn’t been seen as a hazardous or damaging to teenagers; it’s just been seen as a part of life. When I was growing up, the usual response to it was that it was normal and I should just toughen up.
The rash of school shootings a few years ago brought the issue of the real effects of bullying to the forefront. I still remember outraged parents saying, “Our children aren’t safe in our schools,” and those of us who were bullied saying, if only in private, “Some of us never were.” On the other hand, this fall there was an incident were a local boy was “tea-bagged”* by fellow members of the high school football team. When the entire team was punished by being withdrawn from the playoffs after players would not admit who did it, there was some outcry about how unfair this was to the players.
Bullies tend to pick on those they perceive as weak or different or those society deems acceptable targets. I think homosexual teenagers meet all three categories. Realistically, we probably can’t eliminate bullying completely. We can, however, try to change the way homosexuals are perceived. We should also try to make it clear that there are no acceptable targets.
His4Ever spoke earlier of Christian values. Bullying and teasing others are not Christian values. In my opinion, they are far greater violations of Christian values than who one is or is not attracted to in that it involves far more conscious choice.
We need to make it clear that bullying and teasing kill. We need to somehow educate teachers and others who work with children so that they can see patterns and be aware of when things get beyond friends joshing each other or routine disagreements and start to become dangerous. Left to themselves, kids will not show it; one of the first lessons I learned was that, if you cry, the teasing gets worse. On the other hand, in my case, things got out of hand to the point where when I confessed to a suicide attempt in a class full of 11th graders, nothing was done and the bullying got worse.
If a person feels he has no recourse, that no one will listen to her, that there is nothing he can do to change things, is it any surprise that she might consider or commit suicide? We need people to step up and say they will listen and that there is some recourse.
Sorry if this is overlong, but this issue cuts close to the bone for me.
You could have a school with the biggest library full of all sorts of different ideas available to the students but the school would still find itself endorsing some ideas over others. It is impossible to have any meaningful curriculum without endorsing one idea over another.
I’ll try to make this fairly brief, since I woke up early to work on essays due later today and I have procrastination issues.
First off, what CJ said about our alma mater (I hate to call it that…) is true. I graduated in 2001, and homosexuality was pretty much unheard of until my senior year. A girl transferred to my school, and she was the first openly bisexual person I had seen there. Now I had been struggling with my own sexuality for the past year or two when I met her, but of course I never told anyone except for my closest friends. In high school, I was already an outcast (though the bullying eased during the last 2 years because a few of the popular girls started being really nice to me and told off anyone who dared open their mouth to insult me), why make it worse? Anyway, after the bisexual girl came, rumors went flying. Just about every conversation I heard dealt with her. She acquired a girlfriend, and suddenly several other people were out of the closet. People were shocked, gossip surrounded the tiny “gay” crowd, etc. I’m not sure if any gay-bashing occured, but it probably did. After graduation, I learned from friends that several other people either came out of the closet or were so relieved to be out of the homophobic school. My high school never had a gay/straight alliance, and I doubt it ever will. One probably wouldn’t survive for more than a few hours unless it went underground. What’s especially odd is that a couple years ago, the new principal had to resign because he was arrested for some public nude gay sex ring or something (I’m not quite sure what it was, but it was something like that), and of course that brought up all sorts of morality issues with the town. Where I went to high school, any deviation from normal heterosexuality was a crime. Of course, things got really different when I got to college (we have 2 gay groups, plus a special interest house, and any gay-bashing is minimal and strictly punished).
I don’t care if you believe homosexuality is wrong. There is never an excuse for cruelty. Plus, someone else’s sexual preference is absolutely none of your business. People do nothing but show hate towards GLBT teens, and then they wonder why they kill themselves. It’s disgusting.
I’m nearly 20, bisexual, Wiccan, and celibate. I have friends all over the sexuality spectrum, and acceptance is a big issue with almost all of them. Homophobia is rampant in school systems. Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it? Where are the toleration programs? Why are the gay groups stifled? Why do kids turn their eyes and walk away when they witness a gay kid thrown into a wall and pummeled? It makes me sick.
as to His4Ever’s post,
all the chrsitians I know tell their kids that homosexuality is a sin.
However, does this promote hatred against gays from these children?
i don’t know.
Myself, my son is almost 10.
If I told him homosexuality was a sin (we haven’t talked about it or sex, he’s had no questions yet), I would most definitely tell him all people are different, not to make fun of or look down on people who are.
He’s already mentioned to me he thinks fat people look bad.
I tell him God doesn’t care What a person looks like,its whats inside that matters.
Are we establishing a general principle that parents should not be allowed to teach their children things that might make them unhappy, or are we limiting it to what parents are allowed to say to their children about homosexuality?
And Polycarp - no offense, but it is a little disingenuous to state:
And then, when challenged on it :
to reply innnocently that you are just talking about allowing Gay-straight alliance groups in local schools:
If that is all you mean, fine - allow the alliance groups. In order to avoid the issue of censoring speech based on content, you must therefore allow fundamentalist groups the same opportunity to meet and recruit as any other group on the other side of the issue, on school grounds, with a teacher leading, whatever the alliance group has.
Or ban extra-curricular groups altogether, as has been mentioned. I would not necessarily assume that this was to silence the gay groups, but to avoid the issue of censorship altogether. You cannot endorse gay advocacy without also endorsing the right of students to advocate non-violent opposition to gay behavior.
It might help the debate along, therefore, if we can make two assumptions
[ul]
[li]It is possible to advocate for homosexual acceptance without advocating pedophilia[/li][li]It is possible to morally disapprove of homosexual behavior without advocating violence against gays.[/li][/ul]
Christianity teaches a great many things are single. I think that by singling out homosexuality as opposed to, say, not honoring one’s parents or covetting one’s neighbors possessions, teaching homosexuality is a sin singles out some kids for abuse and implicitly makes it ok to pick on them. All three examples are sinful (I took the other two from the ten commandments), but somehow one gets focussed on more than the others.
But seriously, yes, Xiantiy teaches that gay sex is a sin, along with many others. But you never hear that failing to clean one’s room after being requested to do so by one’s parent is an “abomination before God”, yet the Bible warns of the same dire consequences for disobedient children as it does for practicing gays. There is a real double standard in place there, IMHO.