I too think that we’re far enough into the info age to think of anti-gay parenting as a huge problem. If a child is gay, he or she is going to search independently for answers farther than those given by the parents. And a way to combat bullying would be for the gay teen to kick the bully’s ass. I could only imagining such adversity as being stregnthening agents.
That’s a bit disingenuous Shodan. SLC threw out all clubs rather than allow those odious gays to meet, yes?
And the FCA wasn’t given difficulty in “getting approved”, they were tossed out on their ear along with Future Homemakers of America, the Macintosh Lovers Club, and the “Glee Club”.
**Well, that’s the allegation. As I said, it is possible they wanted to resolve the issue without resorting to censoring based on content.
Right, which was pretty much my point. The FCA wasn’t treated any differently than the Gay-Straight Students Alliance. The school board said, in essence, “We shouldn’t be in the business of endorsing one set of ideas over another. You all can thrash it out amongst yourselves, we aren’t taking sides.”
Just like they shouldn’t be in the business of endorsing one religion over another (or none), one political party over another, or one sexual preference over another.
Wouldn’t you agree?
Regards,
Shodan
And what exactly is the “gay life”, since you bring it up? Perhaps we could have several gay members of this board detail their weekly activities for you and you could show us what aspects of those lives, since the people are gay, aren’t healthy?
Which includes both freedom from religion and freedom of religion. IOW, you have as much right to think God kills gay people on the spot because they’re gay as I do to say “You ain’t teaching that religious stuff in a public school”.
Guess which side gets ignored:rolleyes:
Quite right. However, you can emphasize to them that being gay does not necessitate same-gender sexual acts. Because, as we all hopefully know by now, sexuality does not require sexual acts. You don’t have to perform orally on a woman, if you’re a woman, to be a lesbian any more than doing so if you’re a man makes you straight.
Politically correct garbage? Hmm. I guess, included in that, is the idea that women should be allowed to vote, that white people aren’t the best, that women should be able to do anything men can do, that teenagers have rights … is all of this garbage? It’s Politically Correct, after all…
And, finally: sexuality does not determine life(style). My fiancee and I do many of the same things and we’re not both straight. I rather doubt that Czarcasm, who IIRC is married and has a son, has the same life(style) as I do, though we’re both bisexual. And I’m rather confident that Captain Amazing, who is a lawyer-like person living in the general Arlington, VA area, has a different life from that of matt_mcl, a gay man in his 20s who lives in Montreal, or Homebrew, a divorced man in his 30s with a child who lives in Texas.
Now, would someone ::cough His4ever cough:: like to show me how sexuality determines life(style)?
I don’t know that you’ve seen her around the boards, but my mother’s Christian and she doesn’t believe homosexuality is a sin any more than my father does, and he’s not only Christian but a monk to boot;)
I’d say it’s a combination of the teachings that sin is bad/evil and that homosexuality is a sin. It doesn’t take too many brain cells to make the equations “homosexuality is bad/a sin” and “sin is bad/evil” become “homosexuality is evil”.
Preview twice, post once. Missed one preview. That should say:
“that white people aren’t any better or worse than anyone else”.
Blah. Never take two months off from GD and then write your first post back in five minutes;)
I imagine it has a rather marked effect on who you have sex with, which is what fundamentalists object to.
Practicing gay men therefore live a lifestyle that tends to include sex with men, which is a type of sex considered sinful by most fundamentalists.
This is what fundamentalists can be understood to mean when they talk about the “gay lifestyle” - a lifestyle that includes gay sex. I have yet to hear from a fundamentalist that a celibate gay is living a sinful lifestyle - quite the opposite, in fact.
Obviously many assume that a “gay lifestyle” necessarily includes going into bars and finding partners for anonymous sex, which fundamentalists also include as sinful, but that is clearly not all that they object to. Which is shown by their opposition to gay marriage, which would not include the other sinful components of a gay lifestyle, but would still be considered sinful if it included gay sex.
In other words, you can tell what they mean by a “gay lifestyle” by the parts of it that they always consider sinful - which is the gay sex.
If this makes things any clearer. Welcome back to GD.
Regards,
Shodan
A large part of the problem is that we still live the silly superstition that homosexuality is a “disease” that “spreads,” and the lack of support for gay teens largely comes down to rhetoric that mentioning homosexuality in schools will “spread” this “disease.” People who believe that the mere mention of homosexuality in a positive context will turn their kids gay might want to ask why they consider homosexuality so attractive.
What irks me, though, when I debate the subject gay teenagers and high schools is not the positions of the homophobes, who (like their spiritual ancestors, the apologists for black slavery) arm themselves with pseudoscience and choice quotations from their holy texts. What I find frustrating are the positions of the “moderates,” nominally on our side, but willing to compromise – say, by presenting the homophobic point of view in the classroom, or by not letting the subject be brought up up at all in the classroom.
The truth isn’t always somewhere in the middle. For that to be true, both propositions on either side must make sense. We would balk at the idea now of having speakers come in to present their views on the inferiority of women, Jews, or blacks. Or of deliberately ignoring the contributions by members of any of those groups to history or literature. It is still acceptable, however, to leave contributions by homosexuals and bisexuals out of the curriculum, or to present anti-gay bigotry as an equal point of view.
We are no more dangerous to society, no more likely to inflict harm on anyone, than heterosexuals are. **Harm is the only measure of what is acceptable to society, and what is not. And in spite of the homophobes best attempts to connect us to paedophilia and suggest we are a danger to children, there has never been one piece of solid evidence to suggest that it’s true. **To persecute someone who is harmless, who has done nothing to deserve mistreatment, is wrong.
For schools to remain silent, to shut down school groups, to censor books and magazines and class material, to not provide necessary support services and to look the other way when bullying is going on: for schools to do these things is for them to perpetuate the persecution in the name of compromise. A school that perpetuates these forms of persecution is doing the dirty work of the homophobes, by making public school unliveable for gay teenagers, in the name of the private agenda of a small but vocal minority. There cannot be a compromise with homophobia that is not, in itself, homophobic.
Bullshit and you know it; therefore I conclude you are intentionally being dishonest. The other clubs were allowed before some students tried to start a GSA. The school board elected to ban all clubs rather than allow a GSA. They did not elect to ban all clubs to be neutral. Before the ban (which was rescinded in 2000) the schools had 46 clubs including Young Republicans and a Black Student Union.
You changed the quote, Shodan. It’s not “gay lifestyle”, it’s “the gay lifestyle”.
Shodan - I’m afraid I wasn’t clear enough in my post. I was trying to point out something along the lines of what Homebrew was saying, i.e. that:
IOW, I meant your cite of the SLC example was disingenuous. Or, IOW - I’m calling bullshit on your cite.
OK, the quote would have read:
Don’t see that it makes any difference.
Bullshit yourself, and a double dose for trying to tell me what I think.
The other clubs were allowed, implying that the school approved of them. Then some students wanted to start a gay-straight alliance. Realizing that to allow it would imply approval, they withdrew their approval from all the clubs - thus becoming neutral to all.
Conclude what you like. I find debates turn out better if one does not automatically assume that disagreement proves dishonesty.
YM, obviously, MV.
Regards,
Shodan
And IMHO it is extraordinarily sad that these people’s distaste for a “Gay Student club” is so intense that they would cut off their proverbial hand to spite their equally proverbial face.
I wonder who all those kids who couldn’t participate in their favorite activities anymore took out their frustration and anger on? The admininstration? Or the gay kids? One wonders, though not really. 
Anymore, I no longer think it matters what the fundamentalists think. It’s none of their damn business, not their right to judge others, and I don’t see why they even CARE what other people do in their own lives. I certainly don’t. The only way I’d care if someone was gay would be if it were my husband or boyfriend.
Otherwise-WHO CARES!!!
**
Since when do monks have children? Sorry for the hijack.
Marc
“These monks have taken a vow of chastity like their fathers and their fathers before them.”
Marc
pizzabrat, do you really believe bullying to be a strengthening agent, rather than something deeply destructive and unwanted?
some people become stronger from bullying, but somepeople will become withdrawn, depressed, deeply unhappy and suicidal.
personally i believe the damage of the latter ooutweighs any possible benefit of the former.
to draw ana analogy, if our children are left to provide their own food and ahelter, some of them may beome street-savvy entrepreneurs, but some of them will die starving in the gutter.
so we feed and house them.
The quote now implies that there’s only one lifestyle for gays. People that use that term note that some gays practice drug-use, sexual indescrimination, narcissim, crass materialism, fecal-fetishism, and other “morally depraved” things. Then they try to make a secular arguement against homosexuality by stating that “the gay lifestyle” is comprised of those things; things that even a non-Christian would object to. That wouldn’t work with quite the same with “a gay lifestyle”. That’s where most of the offense comes from, not just the mere pairing of “gay” and “lifestyle”.
Pizzabrat, I will never deny that bullying strengthened me. Unfortunately, it nearly destroyed me. It did not strengthen my best friend, it led to her having a nervous breakdown and leaving school. I would much rather not have been tempered in this way.
CJ
You explain things pretty well, Shodan.
Unfortunately, the gay teenagers in my high school in my day weren’t indulging in any sexual activity except possibly masturbation, but were still getting all the abuse. As agentfroot mentioned, the situation has only improved slightly.
If people are considered immoral or sinful because they behave in a sexually irresponsible manner, yet we do not give them any role models who can tell them what a responsible manner is, what can you expect them to do?
CJ