Wintery Knight

…integrating Christian faith and knowledge in the public square

What do children learn in “anti-bullying” school programs?

The answer might surprise you. Take a look at this article that Lydia found.

Excerpt:

Young girls at a New York middle school were instructed to ask one another for a lesbian kiss and boys were given guidance on how to tell if women are sluts during an anti-bullying presentation on gender identity and sexual orientation, angry parents allege.

The special health class was held last week at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, NY. The students were separated by gender – with students from Bard College leading the workshops.

Parents are especially furious after their young daughters were told that it was perfectly normal for 14-year-old girls to have sex and there was nothing their parents could do to intervene.

The boys and girls were also given a sexual vocabulary primer – that included words like “pansexual” and “genderqueer.”

“I am furious,” said Mandy Coon, whose daughter was in the class. “I am her parent. Where does anyone get the right to tell her that it’s okay for her to have sex?”

Coon told Fox News that her daughter was upset by the classroom lecture and was confused about why she had to ask another girl for a kiss.

“She told me, ‘Mom, we all get teased and picked on enough – now I’m going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I could kiss her,’” Coon said.

She said the school told her that the purpose of the lesson was to “teach girls boundaries and how to say no.”

“They also picked two girls to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date,” Coons said.

Paul Finch, the superintendent of the Red Hook Central School District, told the Poughkeepsie Journal that the workshop focused on “improving culture, relationships, communication and self-perceptions.”

He told the newspaper those were issues the school was obligated to teach under the state’s Dignity for All Students Act.

The state law requires schools to create a safe and supportive environment free from discrimination, intimidation, taunting, harassment and bullying, the newspaper reported.

Parents said they were not notified about the class or the subject matter.

Now, the public schools are dominated by feminists and Democrats who think that it is a good idea to sexualize children as early as possible as a way of breaking their ability to marry and form stable families that will function independently of the state. The left does not like the traditional family. They would much rather that children are either aborted or raised fatherless. It is very important to the left that children grow up in situations where they take dependency on the state to be normal. It’s much easier to rule over a people that is used to receiving money from the government, and having the government intrude into their lives.

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Ryan T. Anderson explains marriage to Piers Morgan and Suze Orman

Here are the two clips.

Part 1 of 2:

Part 2 of 2:

Here’s a description of what happened from the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

Anderson, co-author of the book “What Is Marriage” and Heritage’s William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society, opened the show by explaining his view of marriage:

I think marriage exists to bring a man and woman together as husband and wife, to be mother and father to any children their union produces. And the Supreme Court, in the cases they’re hearing today and tomorrow, should really not cut short the democratic debate that we’re having. Citizens all across the country are discussing what marriage is and why it matters. And what we want to see the court do is uphold our constitutional authority to have that debate.

After peppering Anderson with several hostile questions on marriage — all of which he answered with composure — Morgan turned to his guest Orman to deliver an emotionally charged tirade in which she called Anderson “uneducated.”

[...]“What are you really feeling right now?” Morgan asked Orman. “Because this is the debate laid bare. This is a guy sitting a few feet away from you who says, ‘Nope, I don’t want people like you to have the same right to get married as people like him.’”

Orman, a lesbian who lives with her partner Kathy Travis, responded:

I feel compassion for you. And I’ll tell you why. Because I know you believe very strongly what you believe, but I also know that you’re very uneducated in how it really works.

I believe from the bottom of my heart that if you really understood why the government does need to get involved, why it does need to be legal on a federal level, if you really understood that, there’s no way that you would sit there and say what you are saying right now.

Anderson’s response:

Why do you assume that I’m ignorant? You say I just don’t know. I don’t assume anything badly about you. I just think we disagree. President Obama himself has said there are people of good will and sound mind on both sides of this issue. I agree with the President.

I’m not going to call you names and I’m not going to say you’re ignorant or don’t understand. But up until the year 2000, no political community on the face of earth had ever defined marriage as anything other than a male-female relationship. I think there are good reasons for that.

[...]Morgan, a British journalist recently schooled by Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro on gun control, ended the interview by cuting off the discussion and declaring, “The idea that you want to stop people like Elton [John] and David [Furnish] or Suze and K.T. from getting married in America in the modern era, I just find a bit offensive these days. It’s not fair, it’s not tolerant, it’s not American.”

Why is it that people on the left cannot bear to stay calm and listen to anyone who disagrees with them? Is it because they deliberately surround themselves with people who agree with them about everything? Maybe they just need to be more open-minded and tolerant of views they don’t agree with? I think that they should seek out more diversity of thought and critical thinking in their circle of friends. That would make it easier for them to listen to people who disagree, instead of trying to shame them, coerce them and silence them.

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CDC: risk of HIV 150 times greater for gay men than for heterosexual men

MercatorNet reports on the latest HIV-related numbers from the United States government’s Center for Disease Control.

Excerpt:

Recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on HIV infection in the United States reveal some disturbing trends concerning gay males or, in CDC terminology, “men who have sex with men” (MSM). In recent data the CDC estimated that 61 percent of the 48,079 HIV infections diagnosed in 2010 occurred through male to male sexual contact.(1) According to the CDC data, sexual contact and injection drug use are the predominant means by which HIV is transmitted.

The CDC data on HIV diagnoses came from forty-six states and five U.S. dependent areas. Some 29,194 new HIV diagnoses in 2010 were linked to male homosexual contact where no injection drug use took place. There were approximately 4550 HIV male diagnoses linked to heterosexual contact. Injection drug use was involved in 5481 cases. Women contracting the HIV virus through heterosexual contact accounted for approximately 8,800 cases. Another 47 HIV cases came from sources other than the four listed. Included in the other 47 cases were blood transfusions and prenatal exposure.(2) When CDC statistics are analyzed using the estimate of the MSM population at 4 percent of the American male population and assuming the other 96 percent who do not have sex with men are heterosexual, the risk of HIV infection from sexual contact for MSM was approximately 150 times greater than the heterosexual male population in 2010.(3)

To put the HIV risk for MSM into perspective a comparison with the health risks of smoking can be made. Smoking tobacco is a causative factor of many types of cancer, the most common being lung cancer. According to the CDC the risk of lung cancer for men who smoke is 23 times greater than for men who do not smoke. For women who smoke the risk is 13 times greater than for women who do not. Those who smoke are also 2 to 4 times more likely to suffer coronary heart disease and 2 to 4 times more likely to suffer a stroke.(4)

[...]Similar to smoking, homosexual behavior has other unhealthy side effects. The CDC stated that the rate of primary and secondary syphilis among MSM is “more than 46 times that of other men and more than 71 times that of women.”(8) Studies have shown that MSM are at higher risk of alcohol and drug abuse, anxiety, major depression, and thoughts of suicide.(9)

The footnotes in the MercatorNet article either go directly back to the CDC web site, or in some cases to peer-reviewed published research.

CDC numbers were also recently reported in the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

Teens and young adults now account for more than a quarter of the new cases of HIV identified in the United States annually, and a clear majority of those cases involve young gay or bisexual men, the federal government said in a major new survey Tuesday.

Of the nearly 48,000 new HIV cases identified in the United States in 2010, the latest year for which complete data are available, more than 12,000 involved teens and young adults, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found in its latest report.

About 72 percent of these new HIV cases in younger adults occurred in young men who are gay or bisexual, according to the CDC report.

[...]According to the CDC figures, black youths accounted for the largest share of new HIV cases, with Hispanic youths and white youths accounting for about 20 percent each.

About 1.1 million people are estimated to be living with HIV in the United States. Some 47,129 new HIV cases were identified in 2010.

The CDC’s new report, “Vital Signs: HIV Infection, Testing, Risk Behaviors Among Youths, United States,” estimated that youths aged 13 to 24 accounted for 12,200, or 26 percent, of new HIV infections in 2010.

Of these new cases, 7,000 were among black youths, 2,390 were among Hispanics, and 2,380 were among whites.

About 8,800 cases were attributed to male-to-male sexual contact.

HIV/AIDS is incurable, and an estimated 17,774 people with AIDS died in 2009. Some 619,000 persons have died of AIDS in the United States since the epidemic began in the early 1980s, according to the CDC.

If you really love a person, you don’t hide the risks of certain activities from them. You tell them the truth about the risks, so that they have all the information they need when making decisions. I wouldn’t let any of my friends smoke cigarettes without getting a stern warning, supported by evidence. Somehow, we’ve redefined love to mean approving of whatever people want to do, regardless of risks. Why is that a good thing? Telling people the truth about what they doing are should never be viewed as “intolerant”.

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Gay activist introduces bill to ban speech critical of homosexuality in schools

Central United States

Central United States

Not just public schools, but private schools, including Christian schools.

Take a look at this story from Life Site News.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Homosexual activists in Minnesota are pushing for a broad “Safe and Supportive Schools Act” that would outlaw speech that could interfere with a student’s ability “to participate in a safe and supportive learning environment.”  The bill is being promoted as the strongest “anti-bullying” law in the nation, but critics say it could have a chilling effect on free speech, especially in religious schools that teach Christian beliefs on sexuality.

“We agree … that school bullying is a serious issue that needs to be ameliorated,” said Pete Noll, education director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, testifying before the state legislature.  “All children are entitled to a safe, secure learning environment.”  But he disagreed that the “Safe and Supportive Schools Act” should apply to religious schools.

The bill, as written, would apply not only to public schools, but also to private schools that receive resources of any kind from the state.  As Noll reminded the legislature last Tuesday, although Catholic and other religious schools are forbidden to receive state funding, many of their students receive textbooks, testing and other services from the state.  He said he worried this might be used as justification to freeze speech in private religious schools.

“Combating bullying should never be a pretext to impose an agenda of groups of people, or to undermine the rights of parents to bestow their religious or moral values on their children,” the Catholic conference wrote in a statement.

The bill was introduced by state senator Scott Dibble, an open homosexual who “married” his partner in California before the passage of Proposition 8 (their marriage is not recognized by the state of Minnesota).  He announced the bill’s introduction in a guest post for the homosexual “Human Rights Campaign” website and thanked the group for their support.  He also credited gay activist group Outfront Minnesota for its role in the development of the bill, saying that the group “leads this work” and is “poised to push for a positive vote.”

A similar bill was introduced during the 2009 legislative session and passed both the House and Senate by overwhelming margins, but it was vetoed by then-Governor Tim Pawlenty.  If it passes this year, Governor Mark Dayton, who helped to write the bill, is expected to sign.

How would legalizing same-sex marriage affect you? Is it just about tolerance, or will you be forced to celebrate and affirm a lifestyle that you disagree with? Think about it now while you still have the freedom to do something about it, and vote accordingly.

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Gay activists pressure DC Comics to fire pro-marriage author Orson Scott Card

From Life Site News.

Excerpt: (links removed)

After pro-homosexual activists promoted an online petition demanding the firing of award-winning speculative fiction writer Orson Scott Card from an upcoming Superman comic anthology, DC Comics confirmed that Card’s portion of the project has been shelved indefinitely.

Card, who is Mormon, sits on the board of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and has been outspoken about his opposition to redefining marriage to include same-sex couples.

[...]In another commentary for Sunstone Magazine, he wrote, “[G]ay activism as a movement is no longer looking for civil rights, which by and large homosexuals already have. Rather they are seeking to enforce acceptance of their sexual liaisons as having equal validity with heterosexual marriages, to the point of having legal rights as spouses, the right to adopt children, and the right to insist that their behavior be taught to children in public schools as a completely acceptable ‘alternative lifestyle.’”

“It does not take a homophobe to recognize how destructive such a program will be in a society already reeling from the terrible consequences of ‘no-fault’ divorce, social tolerance of extramarital promiscuity, and failing to protect our adolescents until they can channel their sexual passions in a socially productive way,” Card continued.  “Having already lost control of the car, we now find the gay activists screaming at us to speed up as we drive headlong toward the cliff.”

Homosexual activists said his views should have disqualified him from being hired in the first place.  While his Superman short story was not expected to touch on gay issues, activists argued that to give him a paycheck for his work was tantamount to funding NOM directly.

The petition demanding his firing said, “To DC Comics: By hiring Orson Scott Card despite his anti-gay efforts you are giving him a new platform and supporting his hate.  Make sure your brand stands for equality and drop Orson Scott Card now.”

DC’s decision to shelve Card’s portion of the project came after illustrator Chris Sprouse backed out of doing the art for Card’s short story under heavy pressure from gay advocates and the media.  “The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that’s something I wasn’t comfortable with,” Sprouse said.

It’s very important to see which side of the same-sex marriage debate features the real bigots and the real bullies.

 

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