Posted by
Playful Walrus on Monday, June 22, 2009 6:00:00 PM
The Alameda Unified School District has to know it has gone too far in homosexuality advocacy when the Los Angeles Times runs and editorial that says that they have.
In attempting to discourage taunting of gay students, the Alameda Unified School District turned what should be a basic lesson on treating others kindly into a primer on sexual identity. Its new anti-bullying curriculum for kindergartners through fifth-graders will begin in the fall and focus solely on gay and lesbian issues -- as if harassment based on race, religion or failure to wear cool clothes were nonexistent.
Kudos to the editorial board for recognizing that bullying in general is an issue. Address that, and there will be no need to sexualize our children.
Parents who might object cannot opt their children out of it.
Sure they can. They can pull their children out of the public school system entirely, and they should have already done so. Unfortunately, they can't pull their money out of it, and so must continue to support a broken system that attempts to impart an incoherent worldview.
It's a heavy-handed approach to take with students at a tender age.
Again, kudos to the editorial board. You won't read that often in this blog.
School officials defended the new curriculum as a necessity after some of the younger students used derogatory words about gay people.
What, did they say, "That’s so gay"? They didn’t even target anyone? It's not bullying if they aren't picking on someone in particular. You know what we used to tell kids who were targeted for mean comments? We used to tell them to remember that "stick and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." It is a good lesson for kids to learn, and I'm glad it was taught to me when I complained about "bullying".
As recognition and acceptance of civil rights for gays grows, schools will grapple with whether, when and how to broach the subject.
Which civil rights are they talking about? In California, sexual orientation is a protected class. I can fire someone because I think they are ugly, but I can't fire them because they are gay. In education, housing, employment, customer service, and all areas, homosexual people have the same civil rights as anyone else. The general public here seems to accept all of this just fine already.
But it went too far in adopting a curriculum that introduces topics involving sexuality at an age when most children are ill-equipped to consider them.
Thank you, editorial board. These kinds of things unnecessarily sexualize children. I know some people forget what it is like to be a kid, but the kids do not need this, nor do they want it.
The new curriculum familiarizes second-graders with the concept of same-sex couples and teaches fourth-graders the words "gay" and "lesbian." A year later, it calls on the teacher to write the acronym LGBT on the board and ask students the meaning of each letter (it stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the four main forms of alternative sexual identity).
But that leaves out Q-eer, Questioning, Undecided, Asexual, and so many others. What, are they in Alameda - bigots?
Bullying is bad, period. Unfortunately, if a kid fights back, they can be punished for doing so.