Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Legislature 'Don't Say Gay' Makes Its First Appearance of the Year
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 5:06 AM
- Photo courtesy of The Advocate
I've been thinking about the things heterosexual folks do together, and I think it's worth pointing out that your elementary school teacher would be forbidden from saying, "Johnny, when two men love each other very much, sometimes they want to live together and be a family." But your elementary school teacher could totally legally say "Johnny, when a man who likes to dress up like Rhett Butler loves a woman who likes to dress up in a Mickey Mouse costume, sometimes they like to spend special time together spanking each other." Or "Johnny, sometimes a man likes to have special times with two women at the same time." Or "Johnny, sometimes when a man wants to remember the special times he has with a girl who works for him who is not his wife, he'll take pictures of her that her boyfriend will find and use to blackmail him so that he has to quit being a state senator."
Imparting knowledge of all these things is supposed to be less problematic than two dudes or two chicks who love each other? Considering how heterosexual people in this state carry on, maybe we'd be better off with a "Can't Say Straight" bill.
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What we really need in this state is a policy of "Don't Say 'Yea'" to stupid legislation.
can we say faggot, queer, meat grinder, chip tooth, dyke, lesbo, .....jesus christ, what is this world coming to????
I can tell by the number of thumbs down on my first comment that there's a lot more queers in Nashville than I thought!
and its the Continual crap like this Bill that will Keep people from Visiting,or touring TN.......Heck, Id love to go to Dollywood.....But I refuse to spend my Tourism dollars in a state that isn't diverse...TN will be another state in this Hateful country to avoid.
Unfortunately, this further demonstrates what has been a totally bipartisan problem for at least a generation--the extremely low quality (mediocre is far too generous) membership of the Tennessee General Assembly. Does anyone really believe the 132 very best, most qualified, most thoughtful, most intelligent individuals represent us in Nashville? Does anyone see these people as the best leaders available from their districts? Or are they just 132 people who are basically half-assed at whatever professions they have -- second-rate lawyers, inept insurance salesmen, lazy auctioneers, ineffective pharmacists or morticians or realtors or whatever -- who have been sent to Nashville by their communities just to get them the hell out of the way back home? Would anyone who is actually a success in life lower himself or herself into the cesspool, the intellectual wasteland, the smarmy pit of sexual harassment and lobbyist-driven corruption and talk-radio dominated demagogery that is our legislature.
Don't say gay, bathroom policing, voter suppression, guns in parks and at schools and at the workplace, pandering to the liquor lobby, persecuting the poor, drug testing the unemployed, crusading against teachers, returning to the spoils system, fouling the environment -- this is what we get from this embarrassing bunch of nitwits.
God it makes me so ill to see these things. Christians or better yet..."Christians" are so concerned with gays when there are so many more horrifying things going on in the world. I tell you all this, my younger brother is gay and when he came out to me he was CRYING. Why? Because he was ashamed, because we were always taught that you are evil if you're gay, our father told us that he'd send us to straight camps if we ever turned out gay. My brother is the sweetest boy in the world, and he was ashamed of himself. Why would a devout christian such as himself put himself in a predicament where he could be a social outcast? Because he is truly in love with men. How is this a crime that's worth more attention than all of the rapists, murderers, and crooks in D.C. COMBINED? I feel as if the people in the Education Subcommittee really need to take a look at priorities. NO ONE SHOULD BE SAYING ANYTHING TO ANYONE THAT'S NEGATIVE ANYWAYS! School is supposed to be a safe place but this bill would put MANY students in social jeopardy.
I'm just growing so sick and TIRED of all of this family value, god loving, god fearing, cookie cutter life CRAP and having SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT EVERYWHERE I GO. This country was settled under the idea that we can live free of religious persecution and that we can all come here to accomplish our dreams, but now all of these governors, senators, representatives, and presidential candidates are twisting and manipulating our rights.
I love my hometown of Murfreesboro, I love my Capital Nashville, I love my state Tennessee. But I DON'T love how corrupt, hypocritical, and hateful our lawmakers and leaders are.
Government needs to be tiny and totally out of my life!
...'cept of course when I need it to tell people where they're allowed to stick their peters, who they're supposed to marry, what diety to pray to, what teachers are allowed to teach or say in a classroom, why they're not allowed to ever burn a flag, and what they can and can't do with their bodies even in a doctor's care or in the privacy of their own homes. Then I want it to run roughshod over the evildoers. America! America!
Everyone who gave my other two comments A THUMBS DOWN THAT IS A QUEER or wants to be a queer, give this comment a thumbs down too...Come on sweetie, TELL THE TRUTH!
OldHickoryDumbass - The truth is you're a rube. Your own discomfort with the subject suggests you haven't yet come to terms with your own sexual identity. You are scared because you fear you might like penises. Guys who are comfortably heterosexual don't display such fears. What do I give a shit what homosexuals do? Or anybody else for that matter? Like any other bigot, you leap at any opportunity to imagine yourself as better than anyone else.
To be fair, he's right. There _are_ more homosexuals in Nashville than he thinks. Some of them are likely his friends and he doesn't even know it because his bellicosity has them treating him with kid gloves.
On this issue, of taking more care with what our education of children suggests, Stacey Campfield is correct, and it is time for gay rights' advocates, to stop their accusations of "homophobia" and to accept it.
How we may be imprinting young children's minds to respond to sexual stimuli remains our personal choice to mold and to select. Let me say at the outset, while I have no phobia nor hostility toward adult gay lifestyles or sexuality, what I do have however, is my concern for our nation's children. Gee!, how trite some are thinking? Nevertheless, while I tend to believe that homosexuality is largely the result of conduct imprinting individuals through tantalizing childhood experiences, I feel that we are missing the critical point here when it comes to childhood education about the family. To teach children that households headed by same-sex partners are every bit as "normal" as ones headed by heterosexual parents, is to sanction, or, at the very least, promote, the righteousness of irresponsible parental conduct.
Children raised by a same sex couple household are not simply presumed to have, they actually have, both, or at least one of their biological parents no longer in the picture. This is where I have my reservations. Just as I take serious moral objection, to the practice of anonymous sperm or egg donation and its supporting legal framework on which a father or a mother, has, without some unfortunate cause, the ability to completely abrogate, their responsibility for their offspring; I, likewise believe that donors, male or female who would engage, anonymously in the commerce of selling off their own children, (i.e.) at the rate of say $25 per squirt or per/egg should be placed permanently in a barnyard, for all I care. It is this abject immorality, that I disavow, and consequently, I believe it stands as the only palpable question of conscience which absolutely must be raised to a discussion level relative to LGBT rights.
At any time, if I am aware of children being raised by a same-sex couple, the very first question which comes to mind is; where are that child's biological parents? Who's parental responsibility was abrogated? Just because I don't believe that a family, headed by a same-sex couple is inherently detrimental to a child's well being, that does not mean, that that child growing to adulthood, wondering how another human being (their parent) capriciously discarded them, is a subject we can avoid discussing. You can choose, as most gay rights' advocates do, to dismiss it, but the circumstance remains an existential fact, and therefore, the unrelenting pretext to any same-sex family with children.
By simply allowing an early educational agenda to promote gay rights, without first, seriously, addressing this pretense of "beneficial" biological parental abrogation of responsibility, is to grant sanction for the creation of human life in the absence of procreative love and without a new born individual's right to know it's parentage. To suggest that biological parenting is the same essential love which exists in the same-sex couple's procreative purview, and thus completely normal, ignorantly and militantly stands to disregard what anyone, who has spent time around adopted and foster children already knows. To selfishly direct someone else's life-experience include the coldness of parental abandonment, is to pretermit the infliction of a wound and emotional scar, one which most individuals abandoned never lose, and yet one which is effortlessly propogated through the use of pro-gay rights childhood education in the school curriculum.
Take it easy on Dude--he may grow up a bit when he hits fifth grade.
Tony, it seems to me you wandered off the subject somewhat, but I did find your points about the morality of sperm/egg donation (and presumably, though I don't think you mentioned it, surrogate pregnancy) interesting. Would you, then, outlaw such arrangements no matter what combination of people is going to bring up the baby? Also, since a kid adopted (in the more traditional way) by same-sex parents is no more bereft of his biological mother and father than one adopted by opposite-sex parents, it doesn't appear your argument would apply to that situation. Does that mean you have no problem with traditional adoption by a gay couple?
Pete I really don't have a problem with it per se. What I do have a problem with and why you sense I am straying off topic is that I have a very large issue with teaching children that a gay household is every bit as normal as a conventional biological parent headed household.
Everyone knows that any kind of step-parent adoption is potentially fraught with problems but to suggest to kids that it is OK to form family units premised upon the deliberate excision of a biological parent is something I cannot support. Surrogate pregnancy using anonymous donors is also something I cannot support. Handing over one's progeny for money or a promise of anonymity is where this entire problem begins and ends for me.
It is the absolution of biological parental responsibility, as some enforceable "right," of any parent to adopt I find objectionable. Unwanted children are a tragedy. To knowingly create more children without their biological parenting, simply because you are in love with a same sex partner, is selfishly and presumptuously amoral.
Most of the gay rights issues have to do with money and property rights and some perceived need for societal recognition. I get that, what I am saying here is that the quest by LGBT rights advocates to have gay familial relationships involving children who have been stripped of biological parenting, deemed to be perfectly normal, should be prohibited.
That is the crux of Campfield's argument.
What's a "normal" family unit? Is a same-sex couple who are good, caring parents worse than opposite-sex parents who are indifferent or abusive? I think there are variables that are much more important than that one. If opposite-sex couples are allowed to obtain (terrible-sounding word, sorry) children who are not biological progeny of both parents, then I have no problem with letting same-sex couples do the same.
And you don't make a clear argument against that belief, though I don't think you share it. You say that you don't think a "gay household is every bit as normal as a conventional biological parent headed household," but your main argument deals with the lack of biological kinship between the child and the parents--a situation that can involve both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. You say, "To knowingly create more children without their biological parenting, simply because you are in love with a same sex partner, is selfishly and presumptiously amoral." Why do you specify "same sex partner" there?
Possibly you are concerned about a same-sex couple as parents because that joint parentage is CLEARLY and OBVIOUSLY owed to the contribution of a now absent biological parent, whereas the contribution of the absent biological parent to an opposite-sex couple's child is not obvious and can be disregarded for all intents and purposes. If so, you are apparently concerned about maintaining the family which is biologically traditional IN APPEARANCE as a social institution, even though it often will actually be no more "natural" than the family of a same-sex couple. Is that an accurate assessment? There can certainly be value in compromised social institutions, though I personally don't think the exclusive acceptability of traditional biological families is one of them.
I do have a friend, by the way, whose father was gay (though married to my friend's mother until her death) and whom some people gave a hard time because of it. At one time his opinion was that gay couples shouldn't have (or adopt) kids simply because it was too rough on the kids socially. He stated that opinion a long time ago, though, and I believe his thinking has changed with the times. A gay parent isn't nearly as scandalous as he/she used to be, and with more same-sex-headed families, there will be more acceptance. Society gets used to itself after a while.
I am interested in your argument against nontraditional means of conceiving and gestating a baby, though. You think they are immoral, and the main reason you give seems to be that the child will be haunted by the question of why someone would donate half the child's DNA, or carry the child to term, and then disappear. I suspect you also think that there is something else that is inherently wrong--in a creepy way, perhaps--with passing sperm, egg, embryo or fetus around, especially when money is involved. I can kind of understand that, though I won't really be agreeing with you, and I think you've glossed over that feeling because it seems easier to cite the harm that this supposedly does to the child. A third line of argument you could have used is: does the world need more children so much that we've got to bring science to the process? The answer, of course, is that we don't. There are more people in the world than there should be as it is. That answer is tough to give a couple (of either sort) that really wants a child, but it is not a wrong answer.
You say "Unwanted children are a tragedy" in the middle of third paragraph. That is a non sequitur. Think about it. A child who is conceived through arrangements by a couple with a surrogate mother, or a sperm donor, or an egg donor, is not unwanted. Two people wanted that child before it was even a zygote. Yes, there is some person who contributed to the existence of the child but plays no part in its life, and that is perhaps a bit sad, but I really don't think it is going to bother the child nearly as much as knowing he/she is adopted might. In your first post you state an opinion that a same-sex couple cannot give a child the same "essential love" that opposite-sex biological parents can, and you refer to the example of "adopted and foster children" as evidence. This is verbal sleight-of-hand on your part. There is a big difference between adoption and the donor-assisted conception and gestation of a child. An adopted child quite naturally may wonder why his or her mother (and, probably to a lesser degree, father) didn't want him/her. It can be a big hole in the child's perception of his/her place in the world. A child whose birth was planned, though assisted by a donor, has much less reason to wonder. Someone helped his or her parents have him/her, and that might be a little weird, possibly a little puzzling, but it's not nearly the compelling mystery that an unknown woman who decided not to raise her baby is. I really think you are exaggerating the negative importance, to the child, of the absence of her surrogate mother, or egg donor, or sperm donor. I rather wonder whether this sort of absence actually causes them any problems whatsoever. I feel certain that it does not compare to the insecurity that the knowledge of being adopted sometimes causes, much less the troubles of parentless foster children. "Unwanted children," in the sense that anyone ever means the term to have, are created in the traditional way! To use the term for children who were in fact "wanted," but were conceived and borne through the help of others, is to twist it beyond recognition. This was the most ridiculous part of your argument.
My opinion is that you simply don't think same-sex couples should be parents, and have put together an argument against it that makes you look less homophobic than you might if you used other arguments. This argument happens to condemn an option that is also used by opposite-sex parents to have children, and it may very well be that you'd rather they didn't use the option either, but I think you are really much more interested in applying your argument to same-sex couples. I suspect it is a rationalization of an opinion the real roots of which are different.
>while I have no phobia nor hostility toward adult gay lifestyles or sexuality, what I do have however, is my concern for our nation's children.
Well we're even, because while I have no phobia nor hostility toward adult prejudiced lifestyles, what I do have however, is my concern for our nation's children.
I have a very large issue with teaching children that a prejudiced household is every bit as normal as an open minded household.
Pete you make some great points but at the end of the day I remain with the abiding sense that instructing kids in a curriculum of the inherent normalcy of same-sex parenting is to, (however speciously or subtly you characterize it), undermine the nuclear family.
I have dear friends and family who are gay and whom I know are pained deeply by my conclusion, but it does not advance the cause of civil freedom to undermine or deconstruct the traditional family. It certainly doesn't help anyone, when people are opposed to this, if they remain suspicious of this premise.
So, there is absolutely nothing wrong with delaying this particular educational subject until high school. We don't start grade school kids in calculous.
I disagree with you about whether same-sex parenting is okay, Tony, but since you at least dropped the rationale I was rebutting, I'll leave it at that.
