In Alabama (via Good As You):
The lesbian mother of a 12-year-old girl has objected to a sex education pamphlet handed out at a Dothan middle school that describes homosexuality as not being a “legitimate lifestyle.”
In Alabama (via Good As You):
The lesbian mother of a 12-year-old girl has objected to a sex education pamphlet handed out at a Dothan middle school that describes homosexuality as not being a “legitimate lifestyle.”
[snip]
Question No. 8 is: “What can I do if I am attracted to someone of the same sex?” The answer includes the statement: “Too often, homosexuality is shown as a legitimate lifestyle equal to a heterosexual lifestyle.” It also says homosexuality is “contrary to the laws of nature.”
From the pamphlet itself:
If you or someone you know is struggling with same sex attraction, you can find help and obtain more information at these websites: narth.com; peoplecanchange.com; and couragerc.net.
The makers of the pamphlet also have a pamphlet entitled “The Top 10 Questions People Ask About homosexuality” (you can see it here: https://www.hh76.com/lit/9442qh.pdf). This pamphlet is filled with the basic boilerplate of the anti-gay crowd. I wonder if it is available in the school as well?
This appears to be an unconstitutional establishment of religion by a government entity to me, for there is no peer-reviewed study published in a credible scientific journal that supports this position, most commonly raised by the RELIGIOUS RIGHT. If I were that parent, I would go get counsel from the local ACLU attorneys.
There isn’t a heck of a lot of religion in there, but there are some references to religious authors and even a couple of groups, which is enough that they shouldn’t be handing them out. It is, however, filled with faulty information. I can’t believe anyones still quotes Santinover – didn’t he publish that absurd book “The Bible Code” in the mid 1990’s? We could spend all day counting the ways he has been discredited for that mess.
I would say this would be a slam dunk for the ACLU.
David
Some other lovely thoughts from the “Top 10 Questions Teenagers Ask About Sex”
“If you are saying No, but wearing a Yes, then your No becomes a Maybe. The simple fact is that a guy is more visually stimulated than a girl and will be more affected by how she dresses.”
Translation: If a girl isn’t dressed modestly then it’s her fault if she gets raped.
“A sexual relationship belongs only in marriage where a man and a woman have made a life-long commitment to each other and are open to the gift of children.”
Translation: Sex is only for procreation (when “open to the gift of children”) and so you should never use birth control. I doubt that the school board noticed this one. I don’t know the demographics of that Alabama area but I doubt it’s all Roman Catholic.
“A condom … cannot even guarantee protection from the HIV virus that causes AIDS, a routinely fatal disease.”
AIDS is no longer routinely fatal. And while a condom cannot GUARANTEE protection from HIV, when used properly has a very high reliability rate. From the Centers for Disease Control: “Several studies clearly show that condom breakage rates in this country are less than 2 percent. Most of the breakage is due to incorrect usage rather than poor condom quality.” https://www.thebody.com/cdc/factcond.html
“[Safe sex is] like loading a six-shooter with one bullet, spinning the barrel and pulling the trigger when the gun is pointed at your head. You may end up “safe”, or you may end up dead.”
Now there’s a good message. You might as well just have unsafe sex because “safe sex” has a one in six chance of killing you anyway. This isn’t pro-abstinance, it’s anti-safe-sex.
“These same sex “unions” cannot provide an adequate means of achieving a genuine physical relationship with another human being because this type of “union” is contrary to the laws of nature. There can be no real union because same sex bodies do not even physically fit together.”
Don’t physically fit together? Do they need a diagram?
“Masturbation is the ultimate form of selfishness.”
Well, no.
The ultimate form of selfishness is setting up a social system and laws that benefit you and punish those with whom you disagree.
The ultimate form of selfishness is saying “my love is valid and real and should be recognized by the government and the church but yours is unnatural and contrary to the laws of nature and should be excluded from equal protection under the Constitution.”
The ultimate form of selfishness is to go into a classroom in the South and tell some poor kid who is gay that he should become ex-gay and live his life celibate because that’s what you demand from his life just so that it doesn’t require you to accept the slight inconvenience of having to acknowledge that gay people exist.
Shouldn’t the Top 10 Questions about Homosexuality be answered by the lesbian mother?
What qualifies anyone who isn’t gay to speak on it?
Why doesn’t the school consult the other gay parents to those questions as well?
I’d be THAT kind of parent, wondering why the gay folks weren’t the ones allowed to teach on it.
Any school boards that got into anti gay hysterics, I would simply ask if they don’t stop their standards of history, and science and social studies at a year like 1932.
Why is information by and about gay people, subject to a standard established by an single observation from 2,000 years ago?
IS that school so ready also to accept history on minorities that black people are only good for labor and dancing, and not cerebral pursuits like the humanities? Observations made by anthropologists invested in white supremacy?
It seems the school is as invested in teaching on the inferiority of gay people.
As school teaching of old eliminated any contributions that minorites of color made.
But as pointed out here, that observation on gay folks, is a religious one. And cannot be favored by a government established school.
Years ago, I developed as loving and precious a friendship with a small town Alabama man. He’s a teddy bear of a guy with pretty blue eyes.
He’s as close to being my brother as anyone could be and we talk about everything. And it took a lot for him to develop trust that me, as a big city black woman, had a real interest and care about where he came from and what he cared about.
It’s incidents like these-that if I didn’t know better-I could easily take Alabama as a state too loaded up with ig’nint hicks.
But I do know better.
And this would embarass my friend too.
Hey Regan, you said “What qualifies anyone who isn’t gay to speak on it?”
I would just think that…being that you’re not gay you would see that it doesn’t matter so much whether someone is gay or straight, but what matters is whether they are able to speak what is true and what is helpful and loving. You do that quite often and I’m OK with you speaking out against this stuff.
So for me, the issue isn’t the fact that someone who wasn’t gay wrote this (after all, some of the worst homophobes are closeted gays), but what it was that they said.
From the Alabama News article:
“But Steve Stokes, chairman of the board, told the newspaper that the current board has not yet had the opportunity to vote on the program now in place. He said he did not consider it appropriate for his children.”
This seems promising, especially that last sentence.
Hi Christine,
Maybe what I should have said is a question I’ve raised before.
Why are all the gay people rendered liars, and the straight people with nothing good to say about gay people, the only ones who claim to know the truth?
I know I don’t know what it’s like to be gay, but JUSTIFYING the exclusion of gay people from all walks of life, despite talent for it, must be demanded beyond ‘the Bible says so’.
Explaining the existence of gay people isn’t illustrated there. Neither is what has been and is accomplished by gay people, either in spite of or without interference from anti gay straight people.
So, where recent historical context is concerned, if the truth is claimed-then these things can’t be ommitted.
Neither can what anti gay politics and social stigma has done to damage gay life.
Satinover’s bias has it’s foundation in religious belief-but the rest came from the same place older data did, from hospitals and a demographic already brought low from disease.
He wasn’t dealing with the high functioning, stable and healthy demographic.
So from that small group, he figures the others will follow the same fate, simply because they are gay and no other mitigation.
By that logic, one could say ALL young black men will end up in jail or in gangs, because so many young black men already live that way.
Same for young black women ending up with out of wedlock babies.
If THIS statistic regarding young blacks were taught in a school as a given, so therefore everybody throw up their hands and write off young blacks as unworthth of social equality-ESPECIALLY coming from a pamphlet,
imagine the outrage NOW.
And once upon a time, it WAS used as a weapon and justification to maintain Jim Crow.
Indeed, I’m already outraged.
But I’m having hard time letting this group know it.
I would love to help this mom and back her up in just this way.
I think it would be worth studying how many groups were hurt through sexuality.
Jews who were sterilized during the Holocaust.
The support of eugenics of Margaret Sanger.
The lynchings and segregation of black males based on accusations of advances on white women. The exploitation of black women.
The paranoia of gay sexuality and the compulsion to change it, regardless of the equal function in all aspects of gay lives.
And most of all, the impact of promiscuity on ALL human beings, not just the above demographic who were the only ones that had their sexuality legislated against them.
THAT would be important to teach in schools. Not just more of the same prejudices against a SINGLE group.
Here’s a link to the original, local article on this story: Sex pamphlet stirs debate
A quote from the story indicates that the particular group that is teaching this particular program have a secondary agenda: But it’s not just sex education, according to Honeysuckle Middle School Principal Patsy Slaughter. It’s also character education that is meant to help adolescent students understand and cope with the changes they are experiencing during what can be an awkward point in their life.The following is the next paragraph, which apparently is the principal’s disclaimer, as stated by the reporter:For a student to participate in the program, parents must sign a consent form. Some of the material is available for review at the school.But getting away from the consent issue, I’m assuming then that the “Christian Agenda” (vice “Homosexual Agenda”) of this particular program is teaching that being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender equates to being being a person without character.
That still follows what the other minorities at the fringes were accused of because of their backgrounds, not what they actually did in life or to other people.
HOw many people still believe these stereotypes?
Jews are greedy and can’t be trusted.
Blacks are not intellectually equipped, but are sexually immoral, aggressive and irrepsonsible.
Gays are sexually irresponsible, immoral and aggressive.
This taught as if a fact. If not in schools, than by parents raised to think it a generation ago. The character of people in these groups is still slandered and libeled regularly.
The fact that ANYONE is capable of sexual irresponsibility, or that it’s not considered a part of the controlling majority’s bad character is beside the point.
That’s why, in a school situation, in the 21st century when we’ve gotten past or should be trying to, a lot of damage that’s already been done to these groups.
The moral thing to do, is to teach about how people ACTUALLY treat each other that matters, not their background.
BTW…
As soon as they describe anyone’s sexual orientation as a ‘lifestyle’, despite it being a part of all humanity from the beginning, they don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
And therefore, are disqualified from their pamphlet being ‘teaching’ or ‘learning’ materials.
Period.