Football is sacred. Even in the liberal elite northeast.
…and they offer IEP*s for gay students, too, right? They at least make an attempt, right? Oh, they don’t? Go figure.
*for the record, my son has an IEP also.
Damn. That would get physically separated from its antecedent, wouldn’t it?
Hmmm…I seem to have discovered a geographic corollary to Gaudere’s Law.
Anyway, my last substantive post was left in the dust about six pages ago, so I’m just playing catch-up on the reading right now.
Yes, which is why they need to be taught more facts …but do you think that a presentation about the facts of mental illness would be met with the same resistance as one about gay tolerance?
Because, of course, physical health and knowledge are so similar. :rolleyes:
I started reading this thread at 8:30 a.m. EST.
It is now 9:47 a.m. (I got up a couple of times to get something to drink, close the window, so I haven’t been reading this whole time.)
In that time, this thread has gone from 7 pages to 9.
My mind is now boggling.
Now for something to add to this train wreck of a long thread:
Eleven is in no way too early to learn about sexuality. I was ten when my elementary school did the old “separate the boys from the girls to run the puberty filmstrip” thing. I knew about sex before then (I have no idea how I learned though. Soap operas, I think.)
Middle school was even more sexually charged than high school. At least in high school we didn’t have kids making out in the bushes during school hours and at after-hours functions. Three girls in my eighth grade class were pregnant. We all knew exactly how that happened.
Flash forward about five years. When my best friend’s little sister was in fifth grade, she said her classmates were already talking about who was having sex with who. To claim that normal 11 year olds today don’t know about or understand sex is, IMO, denial at its finest.
And now I go back to lurking to see this thread deteriorate further.
What is even more amusing is those people that think they can control when their kids learn about sex. Or control anything a child does. Has anybody in history ever raised a kid to think, learn, and be just like the parent wants them to be? Well, after teenage rebellion?
I agree with you there. However, the school district (and only the school district) can dictate and control the curriculum of public school classes. In this case the teacher denied them the right to that control. I don’t care what she was teaching; that sort of behavior is not acceptable.
Actually, people do have the right to do those things (re: First Amendment). You may believe them to be morally wrong, but that doesn’t give you the right to trample on their rights to believe what they want to and say what they want to.
Then why are you arguing with me?
I like how you didn’t even quote what I had in parentheses. I am comparing it only in that they are both aspects of sexuality that are outside the norm. The reason I used pedophilia was because any other example (being an ethnic minority, being obese, etc.) would doubtless have been rejected on the grounds that it was not the same as being in a sexual (for lack of a better word) minority. I knew also that some people on these boards considered it to be an orientation, so I assumed it as one to make my point.
I think it is, in some places. But that’s not the point. As I said above, I wasn’t comparing them in ethical rightness, or general acceptability, or anything like that. I was comparing them only as two forms of sexuality that are outside the norm.
But you’ve been saying the whole time that it’s right for homosexuals to act on their feelings. Stop contradicting yourself.
I think Guin said something about this.
Super Gnat, two things:
First of all, read the fucking thread. NO DISTRICT RULES WERE VIOLATED. This is a case of one board member getting her panties in a wad.
Secondly, pedophilia is in no way analogous to homosexuality, any more than it is analogous to heterosexuality. Pedophilia is not an “orientation,” it is a pathology.
Homosexuality is not “outside the norm.” It is considered a “normal” orientation by all contemporary psychiatric standards.
Please take the old “pedophile” strawman outside and shoot it in the head please.
Thanks for recognize their are other legitimate views out there even though you many disgree. I would agree to any program that teaches that no one should be mistreated or physicsally abused, etc. Violence isn’t the answer to anything. The program would be allright as long as it didn’t promote the gay lifestyle as being acceptable or okay and acknowledged that some believe it to be wrong as you said very well in your post.
I still would like to hear some discussion of the difference between ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’.
I haven’t heard anyone come out against tolerance, so I believe we have a consensus that gay people should not be insulted or beaten up. But every time someone demurs from saying that they accept that homosexual behavior is perfectly acceptable, they get blamed for teen gay suicide or get called a bigot.
No one is advocating gay bashing. I have even seen most people come out in favor of tolerance education.
But that isn’t enough. One side is not content to agree to disagree (and to agree to agree that violence or insults is wrong).
What they propose is tolerance education. What they seem to want to bring about is indoctrination that overrules the parents’ right to teach morals.
I am not talking about gay-bashing or violence. I am talking about how you treat people who you consider are wrong.
So I re-ask the question I tried to ask about six pages ago. Is there any distinction between teaching “gay people should be left in peace, same as everybody else” and teaching “gay behavior is absolutely fine, and anyone who thinks differently is a murderous bigot, even if he never hurts a fly”?
Are we teaching “everybody is different, and that’s OK”, or “some people think different, and that’s bad”?
Regards,
Shodan
And I’ve had people (hell, you witnessed it when JanL and co. came here!) tell me that if I’d just accept Jesus I wouldn’t need my Paxil-which is only a ruse to drug me up and get my money.
:rolleyes:
This is a fair question. However, I think this problem should be dealt with more practically.
I do not believe that some sort of “sensitivity training” is sufficient to prevent attempted suicide among at-risk teens. I tend to fall in the “gay behavior is absolutely fine and everyone should just accept it” camp, but I would like to believe that there room for disagreement and ultimately compromise.
Like Shodan said, there is a consensus for toleration, and there is certainly a consensus for suicide prevention. Is there a way to foster the dignity of gay kids without undermining the (possibly debatable) parental control over their children’s moral/sexual education?
His4Ever:
So it’s okay to tell your kids not to hit or beat up gay kids, which is fine. What we’re talking about here is more than just physical violence, though.
Many times in threads about homosexuality, you’ve said that it’s not only your right, but your duty, to make sure that gay folk know at every opportunity you can grab that they’re sinful, evil people who are going to Hell unless they stop being gay. This, right here, is what fosters the atmosphere where gay teens feel that they’re worthless and better off dead.
Simply saying “don’t beat them up” is not enough. You’re wrong, at the root of the issue, and that’s the simple truth. I’m tired of keeping my mouth shut in the interests of general PC tolerance of all opinions. You’re just wrong. Period.
Holy Shit. How about you read the damn thread.
I’ll review.
- From the original news story here…
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MrVisible already quoted the relevant DISTRICT POLICY…which states that local school administrators should be kept in the loop on controversial speakers etc…
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This was not just about a damn school board member…it is about a local school administrator who was not properly notified of a controversial speaker. It is about a “possible” violation of district policy.
I note with amusement that MrVisible (and you…and others) has yet to retract the repeated assertions that no district policies were violated…when the facts clearly suggest that policy violation IS the potential problem here.
Good Lord, how this thread has grown.
I have a bunch of points to make, and I’m going to start posting before I finish reading everything, just to make an effort to address what all has been said.
As many as are needed. Sorry, Marc, but every person is entitled to his or her own rights, even if she is the only dwarfed half-Sioux/half-Eskimo left-handed wheelchair-bound bipolar Lesbian on the planet. It’s not majoritarian, it’s individual.
Re: Jodi
Kirkland, you might note who all is disagreeing with you on your indictment of her – almost all the people whom you can count on to agree with you on gay issues.
Add me to that list.
Jodi is a quite liberal Methodist with a history of posting in support of gay rights over the past three years that I’ve known her as an online friend.
She is saying something quite different from what you’re attributing to her in your fury at having someone disagree with your stance on an issue with special meaning to you – that parents have a right to vet what special presentations are made to their pubescent children. (Which, in general, I agree with.)
She is not saying that gays are evil, nor that gays should not be allowed to make such presentations, nor that she would withdraw her children from such a presentation. (In passing, I get the impression that Witch is taking much the same stance.) Her issue seems to me, on reading this, that the parents get a say about what gets told to their kids in an in-school presentation, and the opportunity to have their kids withdrawn from a presentation they find inappropriate. Nothing more than that. From what I know of Jodi (and from Witch’s overt statement on page 6) I have reason to believe that both would approve of the OP presentation and encourage their children (excluding Witch’s special-needs child) to attend and pay attention to what’s being said. But they want the right to know and potentially to object to who’s coming in and teaching their children what.
And, Kirk, do a search: pick a keyword having something to do with gayness, Jodi as poster, forum Great Debates, time unlimited. You’ll be extremely surprised at what you find, I think.
Marc – Your point on “tolerance” vs. “acceptance” was well stated. I made a similar one in a GD thread two years ago. They do seem to be used synonymously by most users here, despite the clear distinction of meaning between them. Thanks.
His4Ever, I’d be interested in knowing a bit more about how you would draw your distinction here – and what “promoting the gay lifestyle” would entail in this context. Thanks.
I suspect strongly that you did not get the point of the “tolerance” issue addressed early on in this. The sentence in your second post that is italicized was the key point to the presentation, from what I’ve been able to put together about it from the threads going on here. Not “It’s all right to practice gay sex” but “Do unto others, including gay and transgendered kids your age, as you would have them do unto you.”
If you consider the last concept as “promoting homosexuality,” then we need to have some serious words on moral issues. However, I think that it’s simply a case of your misinterpreting what Mr Visible meant by “tolerance” in the early part of this thread.
There is, however, one critical issue that has not been addressed in re the parental notification hijack – supposing that you (the posters concerned about parental issues) have no objections to the idea of such a presentation but only strong feelings on the rights of parents to be informed…
What about the point (I think made by Hamish) that many gay and transgendered teens feel that the only way to keep their parents’ love and affection is to completely hide the fact of their gayness or transgenderedness? Is it inappropriate, as a general question, to make resources available to kids with this problem without their parents’ consent? Note that I’m not speaking of the school presentation issue, but the wider question of how a kid is going to deal with his own self-knowledge and his idea of what the community as a whole, including his family, would think of what he knows about himself.
I think there’s a major unanswered question there that needs addressing.
Diogenes made a salient point:
I’m not interested in his second statement about “ignorant, bigoted parents.” There’s a key issue of what behavior is acceptable by a student towards another student that is, absolutely, the policy of the school. It does not matter whether His4Ever believes that all gay people should be shunned and teaches her (hypothetical) child that – but what His4EversKid does vis-a-vis gocub (a hypothetical gay kid) and how he/she treats him/her is, emphatically, the province of the school district without parental moral standards entering into the issue, so long as both are students at that school.
Which was Lib’s point. However, what about the parent, or the kid, who cannot afford a private school? At what point does a parent’s right to have a say in a child’s education become a matter of money? And why is this moral?
Nice drawing of a line in the sand. However, as I noted earlier, the question of whether or not a parent may be advised of what is being presented to his/her kids is not the same question as the one you’re raising. It might surprise you how many people who have disagreed with you fall on the “good” side of your last sentence’s line. Including, to my certain knowledge, at least three people you’ve demonized in this thread alone.
As someone who, not being in a parental capacity but a “trusted adult” to early-school-age children, has had to deal with the same sort of situation, may I applaud you, Jabba. And I’ve bolded and italicized your conclusion as a breath of fresh air in this hot-and-heavy thread.
Administrative approval and parental consent were NOT FUCKING REQUIRED!
Where did you see that? What I saw was the teacher being accused of not following procedure and another teacher saying that teachers at that school normally did not follow procedure. Just because the rules were often violated does not mean that the teacher was right. Now if you point out some previously-disregarded post, then I’ll eat my words. If new evidence shows that the teacher was following procedure, then I’ll echo your sentiment. But from right here I don’t see what you’re talking about.
I’m sorry. By “outside the norm” I meant that a majority of humans are not homosexual. Quotes from this thread and others place it at something like 3-10%. Cite cite, and cite. What I was not trying to do was make any judgement whatsoever about homosexuality.
And I was attempting to treat pedophilia as an orientation for the purposes of this thread. IANAPedophile, and I don’t know (or want to know) nearly enough about it to determine whether it is a pathology or an orientation. I’m sorry; I was trying to think of a sexuality that outside the norm (by the above definition) that is also not generally accepted.
I wasn’t using it as a strawman, although it has turned into one. What I was originally trying to say was that if the district can’t approve whatever special thing the teacher is doing, then we don’t know what the teacher is doing. Pedophilia was a bad example, but I was trying to think of something related to sexuality. If you can find something, from this thread or a follow-up link that shows that the teacher was perfectly within bounds, and this is just some random school board member, then I retract all of my comments relating specifically to this school (although the principle still stands). My entire argument was predicated upon the fact that the teacher wasn’t doing what they were supposed to. If the teacher was in fact doing what she was supposed to in bringing in a guest speaker, then the objections of that school board member are incendiary, reprehensible, and self-aggrandizing, and I will join you in desiring to grind his face under our collective heel.
As I eat my words…
However, she still should have at least gone through the motions of asking for permission before embarking upon her own little civil disobedience. Or passed out pamplets. Or whatever.