Bowser--
If I'm impressed, don't take that sarcastically. Many points to consider ...
But I must start, emphatically, with this:
Maybe the lifestyle of a teacher who practices beastiality doesn't harm anybody (we will assume that his chicken is a willing partner, okay). Do we want that individual teaching our children. Would we be offended if he displayed a picture of his love-pet on his desk? "Golly Mr. Green Jeans, who's that chicken in the picture?"
Phillip Ramsdell, of the Oregon Citizens' Alliance, was fond in '92 of trying to equate homosexuality with certain deviant sexual practices:
* pedophilia
* bestiality
* necrophilia
Phillip Ramsdell's a pinhead, and I honestly--again, without sarcasm--think you're far more intelligent than that.
Hell, look at the internet--do you really think it's those girls' mommies taking pictures of them grinding with the family dog? Or is it just some sinister gay man with a misogynist bent because his mother spanked him with a rattan cane?
But, you've been kind enough to take a whack at one of the tougher questions. I thank yo kindly.
A school system which assumes the privilege of COUNSELING my children in there sexual orientation is my fear. This goes beyond biology class or carrier guidance. The schools have no business going there with my children, no more than they have any business teaching or counseling my children in their religious convictions.
I just figure a school counselor should have the opportunity to prepare themselves for whatever comes along. I mean, it's not like they're going to be calling children in one by one to petition their sexuality.
As a sensitive question ... when I was in eighth grade, one of my less fortunate classmates suffered an erection while showering after phys ed. Later that day, he was beaten senseless for being a faggot. How might a school counselor handle that one when it lands on his or her desk?
* Does anyone remember "casualty days" at school, when the whole world came grinding to a halt because something terrible had happened? Imagine ... Kristen died in a car accident, come talk if you need help with this. David was shot in an accident last night, come talk if you need help. Joey died last night, and we can't say how, can't say why, and if you need help, go somewhere else.
Here are a couple statements. You tell me which is more appropriate in the classroom:
"Some people have sex with there own gender."
"It's okay to have sex with the same gender."
Do you see the difference?
I would offer a few of my own: Johnny asks his health teacher what a faggot is.
* "I'm not allowed, by law, to answer that question." (This statement, from a teacher, would be untrue; for the teacher
can answer the question.)
* "It's a stick." (My fifth grade teacher used that one to quell faggot-talk.)
* "A faggot is a word to describe dangerous people who do certain unwholesome things." (This answer is not disallowed by the OCA's measure.)
If groups of kids are beating up gay-suspect kids (and it happened in my day ...), how can the school deal with that?
I had one particular teacher in high school who taught an alleged ethics class. She had some personal problems, the sum of which meant that the only "right" answers to her hypothetical constructions reflected Catholic doctrine. This was a private school, so I had no problem with getting an "F" every time I argued my real opinion. But in a public school ....
Okay, I'm not going to equate homosexuality with religion, but the analogy works for another aspect:
* If we passed an absurd law that made it illegal for schools to "promote, encourage, or endorse" Judaism, how would a teacher be obliged to regard a school report drawing heavily from anti-Semetic literature like
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and presented historical slanders as fact?
To make that a parallel: Will a teacher be obliged to cancel
all student-initiated exchange on the subject of homosexuality? Or if a student writes a term paper on
The Crimes of the Perverts, and uses spurious sources, will the teacher be able to stop the student? If the teacher awards a poor grade, and points out more reliable information that contradicts bad research, is the teacher "promoting, endorsing, or encouraging" homosexuality?
Will Oregon have to drop its
Cable in the Classroom participation? What about those media resources that will have to be bowdlerized in order to meet the curriculum standard? I mean, a blank screen every time there's information on civil unions in Vermont?
Will a student researching, say, an election, be able to gather adequate information from the school's internet resources, or will the state pay someone to filter any gay-positive information which might be accessed from publicly-funded computers?
Anyway, yes, people do feel suspicious of those who would bring something of this nature into our schools. I feel there IS an effort to normalize homosexuality within the minds of our children, and it's being accomplished through our schools. I think you will agree with this because you are part of that effort here.
I accept that perspective, but offer this consideration: As more homosexuals moved into the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, police began performing no-knock raids, the kind we see in the modern Drug War, searching for deviant sexual practices. Even at that time, protests against police action were seen as an effort to normalize homosexuality within the minds of children.
I think it more appropriate that they identify the problem and then notify the parents.
What, then, of the host of kids I knew who would never, in their lives, discuss these kinds of issues with their parents? From both extremes, to be fair: A girl gets pregnant and her father beats her to death in his slef-righteous rage; a girl gets pregnant and her mother drives her at gunpoint to an abortion clinic. Analgously speaking, I can understand why a youth confused by his or her sexual inclinations would be hesitant to take the issue up with their parents. My own parents were most definitely
not violent (strangely, the closest they ever came to violence was when I cut my own hair into an obnoxious 80's floppy something). But despite the fact that they were generally reasonable about a good many things, there were things I simply did not talk about with them. A friend of mine used to get into fistfights with her mother about the stupidest things; I can honestly say that her family would not take well at all to the announcement that she was in love with another girl.
Hmm... Public mention or a child's education, Tiassa?
I want to clear up here what we mean when we say "child's education". First, we should consider what age at which we introduce students to the idea of sexual reproduction. We should also consider whether or not to discuss social disease and methods of transmission, and at what age.
But we are, apparently, looking at an attempted expurgation of the Universities, as well. At some point, it
does become public mention; I recall a number of events at the University of Oregon in which various preachers of more severe forms of Christianity would use school facilities to editorialize about homosexuality. (One was a van-traveling stump preacher ... can't even begin to describe this guy.)
University curriculum, civic events, libraries ...
Once again, the majority DICTATES by vote and, probably more so, by SOCIAL DISCRIMINATION (yeppers...I said it) the common principles and acceptable behavior by which our society functions. It's this common and more popular standard which keeps our society from corruption and destruction.
It might be an operational truth, but that's because the participants in that truth choose to be that way; that underlying notion is part of what needs to be broken. Think of it for a moment in terms of guns: the society's getting more violent, so I might consider getting a gun, except that to me, it seems like I'm doing nothing to reduce violence in society by arming myself and being paranoid. Likewise, I worry about discrimination in society; I don't think that the solution to the troublesome discrimination in society is to accept it and find new ways to discriminate. I might as well cure my headache with a .357. I might as well treat my lung cancer with a pack of Kamel Reds.
If I might consider "common principles" and "popular standards" which our society is holding up in its effort against corruption and destruction:
* Women & the vote
* Women & birth control
*
Reefer Madness (The Burning Question ....)
* Spice Girls, Brittany Spears, Backstreet Boys ...
* HMO's
* African slavery itself (and its accompanient menagerie of delusions)
* Puritan Massachusetts
The grand point here being that common principle and popular standard are randomly absurd. Now, some things do seem reasonable, but it really does sound like what you're doing is justifying discrimination.
What popular standard landed us with George Dubya and Prince Albert?
What common principle made the Drug War so bloody racist?
What common principle distrusted women with the vote?
I recognize the value of common principle and popular standard, but I beg you to recognize that it's often tasteless and occasionally very, very wrong.
I can only imagine all of the varied knowledge that will come from the gay community if allowed to educate whithin our schools. Just imagine the society it will create.
You and I probably imagine polar opposites on that. But I'm quite sure that many of the diverse personalities in the world that happen to be gay have much to contribute as teachers.
I know you didn't miss my point, Teassa. There are limitations to free speech within the classroom. I hope we have resolved your concerns about the First Amendment issues regarding this initiative.
Unfortunately not. You're talking about the censoring of actual speech, and setting content standards for books and media.
I wanted to comment on your comment to Flash:
The OCA initiative will help keep them honest.
Hmmm ... I'm being told what I cannot say. That's honesty?
The victims are those who learned oral sex at school.
Here I must confess something odd about my schooling. Somehow, I managed to avoid certain vital classes. I never took 9th grade health (in which they taught oral sex) ... this isn't unusual, to me, because my last actual grammar studies were in 6th grade, my last lifesaving in 7th, and I got my high school health credit in a nutrition class. There's a host of basic classes I never took, for some reason, but I must admit I never had the oral sex class.
The point of that being, so long as we're both working with broad generalizations, that, while I may not be as reckless as some of my associates from Junior High, I have a vastly different view of sex (usually regarded as a "liberated" position) than many people I know who did take the "gory details" health classes. It's of the manner where I would assert that my own observations indicate that the people I know who took the oral-sex health classes are actually more conservative about their sexuality than I am. Now, we might say, at this point, that such an assertion overlooks myriad factors affecting the individuals in question, but that, I think reinforces the notion that it might not be a bad idea to be at least somewhat explicit in schools.
Think of it in terms of information availability. What of other moral questions about sexuality in schools? I can tell you what the result would have been if condoms were handed out in my school for free, as was a particularly controversial trend at the time: people would have no more or less sex, but the student pregnancy rate (and abortion rate) at my Catholic high school would have dropped slightly. In another thread in the World Affairs section, I was babbling about this footnote in Lysander Spooner's
Vices are not Crimes which indicated that the age of consent for a girl in Massachusetts in 1875 was
ten years old. Actually, I think we ended up discussing reproductive notions versus life expectancy in the thread, which would have worked except for a book I heard about this week called
Taking the Trade, which seeks to document the extraneous and almost arbitrary abortion rate among girls in colonial America. Spooner noted that the 10 year-olds could consent even in a form essentially equivalent to prostitution (in exchange for gifts or funds) ... how many would say yes if they knew what they were doing to their bodies?
Yeah...like they are going to suffer because of a lack of homosexual sex.
They
will suffer a lack of homosexual conseling resources.
And students heterosexual and homosexual alike will suffer statewide as their counselors and teachers become less prepared by mandated revisions to the Universities' curricula.
Logically speaking, heterosexual parents will always have more invested in the public schools than the fruitless homosexual (hey, there's a contradiction of terms!) minority. With that being said...YES! IT'S MY SCHOOL! STAY OUT!
You might have missed that Flash said, "...it's not
just your school ...."
She's right. These
are my schools, if I am an Oregon taxpayer. What if I'm an Oregon taxpayer who
* hopes primarily for my child's happiness
* hopes my child will come to me with questions about sexuality
* hopes that the counselor at school is well-enough prepared to handle whatever my child feels--for whatever reason--s/he doesn't want to, or cannot by some perception--discuss with me.
My own mother once thought my best friend was gay. She cracked me up next by confessing that she also worried that he and I were a couple, but her only reason for wanting me heterosexual is that she wants grandchildren. At least she was honest with her reasons.
Consider a youth who thinks he's attracted to his own gender. He's scared senseless of his father, who thinks the faggots need a good ass-whoopin', he can't ask his preacher because his preacher says the feelings themselves are sinful and evil and wrong, and he can't go to his school because his school counselor is neither trained to handle, nor allowed by law to handle the situation put in front of him. Maybe he'll turn to one of those evil perverts the OCA likes to remind us of, and whom we all know are out there.
School performance at that point fails to equal the value of my tax dollar.
The way I see it, letting teachers and cousnelors do their job doesn't assume the worst in people. Gagging them does.
After the kid has shared his tears with his counselor, do we then use our authority and twist the arms and ideas of those kids who don't appreciate that lifestyle.
If I might stick my nose into your post to Flash again ...
So, what do you tell the kids who violently don't appreciate the lifestyle? Why is it wrong to beat up the faggot? After all, he's just a dangerous pervert and, in the affected schools, there will be no information allowed to refute such infantile notions.
Censorship, at the least.
If you want to narrow it down to the facts and the nature of the HUMAN BODY, Flash, THEN we would be getting somewhere.
Ever read
Lysistrata, by Sophocles (I think)? Great play: men go to war, women are sick of war; women barricade themselves in city and suspend contact with men until the men end the war; in desperation, the women turn to each other for earthly comfort.
Homosexuality has a rich cultural history that's worth noting. Oscar Wilde and Truman Capote may end up being gone from the Universities. Hey! Lysistrata means the comparative literature class I took at the University of Oregon is out under the proposed law.
So if we narrow it down to the facts of nature and the human body, what do we do about teachers who've had plastic surgery or fertility drugs?
Take the OCA's website, for instance. I just read through their page on
Homosexuality/Pedophilia. The word
pedohilia occurs once on the page, in the title. The words
pedohilia, pedophile, and
pedophiles do not occur anywhere else in the text of the page. I think here we're seeing what this is all about: the OCA has a bent against gays and will slander them by trying to link them to pedophilia in order to carry out their agenda. Phillip Ramsdell, in the 1992 Oregon Voters' Guide, asserted falsely that 95% of all child sexual abuses were committed by homosexuals.
And I'm running out of steam tonight, myself. Your last post wasn't up yet when I started this, so I'm sure I'll hear from you when the zeal returns ....
Teachers are like everyone else ... they're irresponsible in many ways. But as it stands, nobody's ordered to do anything in Oregon. I had teachers who talked about the fun of learning to drink heavily ... I had a teacher that brought petrified human feces to class for no good reason other than it was petrified human feces. I've also listened to teachers describe the joys of marriage, which I think is nearly a crock, given the divorce rate in this country. Certainly it would be inappropriate for Mr. Gayman to get up on his desk and say, "I'm gay, and this is why you should be, too."
But if we pass a law specifically against that kind of irresponsibility, what else will qualify?
I should also mention that this is about religion, as well ... when you were at the website, did you read Lon Mabon's newsletters? And the
Women's Cornerp by his wife? I've tried to be merciful to the OCA by pretending that they were separating themselves from their religious zealotry, but unfortunately it's not true.
Consider this: by
allowing only condemnation of homosexuality, do you foresee integration problems? Even postdoctoral programs will run into this law. Does a high school have any obligation to teach students human interaction? So you spend twelve years in the Oregon public schools and then pop over to the University ... you graduate and suddenly you have a job at a desk next to a gay man. Geez, you shouldn't have to put up with that, right? After all, what scant information you ever received about gays in school tells you they're dangerous, and, well, they had to pass that
law to protect us good folk from these deviants, so why the hell should a guy have to put up with one of these faggots at his workplace? That's my means of supporting my family, man, I shouldn't have to put up with this kind of corruption at the office ....
Do we foresee any human interaction problems?
But, as I've finished the dry-heave, I see I've vomited nicely all over the page. I promise that something in here should make sense ...
thanx,
Tiassa
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We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and important to us. (Ranier Maria Rilke)
