This evening, I dropped my kids off at a sleepover with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, who are visiting friends here but who live in California. They were talking with their friends about how they’re being forced to homeschool now because Congressional liberals and Gray Davis passed a law making kids from kindergarten on up learn sex ed and, in particular, learn about how “gay people are totally natural and not mentally ill and stuff,” as they put it. They said it also makes it so that parents have to specifically request and sign something to prevent their children from being taught this, reversing the old system of requiring permission slips in order to take sex ed. Is this true?
I found this page (this is Google’s HTML translation of the PDF file found here, which I provide the link to in case the HTML translation doesn’t work) that basically seems to confirm their claims, but a site with the name www.savecalifornia.com doesn’t fill me with confidence as to its impartial nature. And I couldn’t find any discussion of it here or on Snopes, which seems odd – but maybe I’m just not searching right. Does anybody have the straight dope on this?
I’m too pooped to investigate this too deeply, but my son started kindergarden this year, and there’s no mention of any sort of sex ed, homosexual or otherwise, in any of the PTA/parenting/cirriculum materials we’ve gotten (and there’s an awful lot of that).
Just for the sheer looney tunes nature of the claim, I’d initially peg it as “not even close to reality” until evidence to the contrary arrives.
Most school curicula that I’m familiar with don’t start sex-ed until fifth or sixth grade. Of course, California is pretty looney, so they’re probably deconstructing surrealist imagery in Ron Jeremy movies in between spelling bee sessions.
(Pretty nasty stuff, outlawing the promulgation of hatred on the school grounds.)
You can search for those three bills on the web and get lots of so-called “pro-family” hits. I note that many of them make the point that children now “as young as” kindergarten are “permitted” to be exposed to this stuff. Presumably, this means that the statements issued against hate crimes are not limited to children in middle school or high school, a point that the zealots have tortured to mean that kindergartners will be given explicit instructions on homosexual erotic techniques.
As to the problem with the schools explaining that homosexuals are not sick, that is simply the recognition of the decisions by the APA and similar groups that the prejudices of some people do not actually have supporting scientific evidence in the real world–a point that enrages those who know that anything other than heterosexual married relationship are obviously a perversion of nature.
Yes, that was actually something my brother-in-law complained about as well – that the godless liberals in the APA removed homosexuality from the DSM and have stopped calling it a mental illness, so psychologists who still believe that being gay is a mental illness can’t belong to the APA.
Oh, and he also said that the teachers who have spoken out against forcing kindergarteners to be taught about gay sex have been ostracized by their fellow teachers and fired by principals. Uh huh…
Hopefully you don’t mean its “okay” for a white kid to be “black”.
While I subscribe to the belief that you are born with your sexual orientation, I don’t see how one can teach someone not inclined to a particular orientation that it is “okay” to be the other orinetation(s).
Instead of promoting equality among a group, I feel that the statement above has a tone of “choose” your orientation, and we will not judge. I personaly would not like to be taught how to be gay. Which some could take from the statement. Let alone forcing this teaching (If it is indeed anywhere near where this interpretatin leans) on kindergarteners is a very dangerous mix.
I wonder, after stating the above, if a Miscomunication with the terms of “teaching someone to be gay is ok” is what caused the hub bub in the first place.
Are we talking about the concept for a group of people, or a personal take on the matter that one must “become” ?
I can see how you got that out of the statement, but I think you really pulled for it.
I take it to mean, that if you are having gay feelings, that’s it’s ok. I don’t take it to mean that if you’re straight, that you should look into being gay to see if you might like it.
Gee, and I guess they’re also teaching the kids that 2+2=4.
And stuff.
The phrase “kindergarten on up” obviously means that in each grade the curriculum is age-appropriate. So a kindergartner might be taught that it’s ok for two kids to hold hands, regardless of gender, so long as it’s consentual.
If you have a problem with that, maybe this thread shouldn’t be in GQ.
It sounds like election year scare tactics, just like those people who made pamphlets claiming that the Dems were planning to outlaw the Bible. Nobody is being trained in gay sex techniques or watching Jeff Stryker films in school. Any so-called “gay is OK” schooling is probably under the heading of tolerance, including that it’s not OK to ummmm burn crosses, hang blacks, smash gays with blunt instruments, gas Jews, or burn heretics.
Honestly I don’t see how you jumped to that conclusion.
When I was little I was raised by a single mom in a conservative community where everyone had moms and dads. When the other kids would find out I didn’t have a dad I’d get ridiculed and made to feel like I came from some perverted sick non-family. For a long time it was my dirty little secret and I lived in fear someone would find out dad wasn’t just out of town on business.
It would have been nice if the school had taught kids that it’s ok to not have a mom or dad, and it’s not ok to look down on someone because they don’t. That’s not the same thing as teaching kids they shouldn’t have dads.
You really think if the school teaches kids that girls are smart too, and can grow up and become whatever they want that implies the school is teaching boys to become girls? The school is really advocating gender reassignment surgery for all the boys?
No, you don’t choose your sexual orientation, but your school can choose to sit back and say nothing on the subject and leave it up to your kid’s classmates to make it clear to them that being gay is the most despicable thing on earth, so they grow up living in fear and self hate.
If you happened to have the only black kid in school you really want the school to just butt out of what’s none of their business and let all the other kids tease your kid mercilessly?
Kids can get pretty cruel, and when there’s no official school policy against a particular form of cruelty, you can bet the kids are going to jump on it.
So yeah, kids need to learn it’s ok to be gay, if that just happens to be what they are, or if it just happens to be what one of the other students is, or what their parents happen to be, or what somebody else’s parents happen to be.
I don’t either, but how much would it accomplish? They’re five years old. I guess the lesson would be something like “Don’t be mean to people because of who they are?” Anything more than that might be getting too detailed…
I hope that there’s some serious oversight to homeschooling in California because if your in-laws are such a pair of morons that they think the governor of the state of California and the federal Congress pass laws together, their children are going to grow up as stupid as their parents.
I agree what children are taught should be age appropriate. I distinctly remember having, not homoerotic feelings, but definite homoemotional thoughts & feelings by 1st or 2nd grade. By third grade though, I was having somewhat sexual thoughts, and about that same time I started fearing and hating what I was beginning to suspect I was. I didn’t have a name for it yet, but I already knew is was wrong & bad & was probably going to hell if I couldn’t “get over it.”
In any case, kindergartners certainly understand the concept that mommy loves daddy, and I don’t see anything wrong with kids understanding that sometimes people have two mommies or two daddies and they love each other too. Most of my nieces and nephews have had that explained to them before they even hit kindergarten, and I really wish someone had explained that to me sometime before I was a severely depressed 21 year old.
They were both based on the best available science at the time. We know more about psychology and human sexuality now than we did fifty years ago, and it turns out that the old ideas about homosexuality don’t fit with the current data, so the old hypothesis is discarded and a new one that does fit the data is advanced. This is generally known as “progress.”
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