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.
Churches in New York City will be allowed to return to public schools starting this weekend after winning a court order Friday.
District Judge Loretta Preska granted a preliminary injunction against the city’s ban on weekend worship services in vacant school buildings after determining that the plaintiff – the Bronx Household of Faith – demonstrated irreparable harm and will likely win its lawsuit against the Board of Education.
The judge wrote in the court opinion that the church has a good chance of winning based on the argument that the ban “fosters excessive governmental entanglement with religion” and violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment – which provides that “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].”
The city plans to appeal the ruling.
[...]The ban on worship services at public schools went into effect on Feb. 12, affecting more than 60 other churches in New York City.
[...]While Judge Preska recognized the Board of Education’s concern that allowing schools to be used for religious worship services could be perceived as violating the Establishment Clause, she stated, “In this Court’s view, losing one’s right to exercise freely and fully his or her religious beliefs is a greater threat to our democratic society than a misperceived violation of the Establishment Clause.”
Let’s hope that the injunction survives the challenge by Michael Bloomberg.
From the NY Post. (H/T Joy) There’s a petition to sign at the bottom of this post.
Excerpt:
Come Feb. 12, Mayor Bloomberg and the city Department of Education are set to ban religious groups from off-hour use of public schools for worship services. This contradicts New York City’s commitment to diversity, freedom of expression and accommodation of diverse religious beliefs — and there’s still time to reverse course.
[...]The US Supreme Court last month opted not to review a lower-court decision upholding the city’s “unequal access” policy. But even that ruling (by the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit) did notmandatethe city’s policy, but merely said the Constitution permits it.
In fact, no other major school district in the nation has a ban anything like New York’s extreme anti-worship policy. That’s why regular rallies across the city are urging the mayor to repeal this senseless targeting of religious groups.
By state law, the city opens its 1,200 schools on weeknights and weekends to community groups for any use “pertaining to the welfare of the community.” The public schools allow thousands of organizations — scout troops, labor unions, arts groups, etc. — to hold meetings, concerts and recitals. They’ve even allowed “Law and Order” to film in the schools.
Why single out religious groups and churches, by prohibiting them from conducting worship services in vacant schools when students are gone?
Bronx Household of Faith, a small evangelical church formed in 1971, triggered the current controversy in 1995 when it filed a lawsuit challenging the policy after being denied its request to meet in a public school. The federal district court in Manhattan issued an injunction in 2002 that stopped the city from enforcing the policy.
So for nine years, religious groups have met in public schools — and helped their communities by painting school buildings, offering academic help to all students and providing services to disabled children, people learning English and those seeking counseling and spiritual comfort. The “faith communities” have been good neighbors, bettering the quality of life in the city by helping those in need.
You can sign a petition here to stop the mayor from carrying out his plan. The petition is hosted by Truth in Action / Coral Ridge Ministries.
Philosopher Michael J. Murray wrote an interesting research paper that I think is relevant to the 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center by Islamic terrorists. The title of the paper is “Who’s Afraid of Religion?”, and he begins by discussing why it is that people are so hesitant to talk about religion.
He writes:
…we would be perfectly happy to have a discussion of claims like…”Mahayana Buddhism emerged in the first century BCE with the appearance of the Mahayana sutras.” … It is OK to speak of religion… as a historical phenomenon or a socio-cultural influence. It is something altogether different to discuss religious commitments that one owns. That is the sort of religion that troubles us.
And:
…think about the last time you heard a devoutly religious person argue, on explicitly religious grounds, that gay marriage should be banned, or that intelligent design should be taught in the public school biology curriculum, or that abortion is murder and thus should be outlawed.
Why are religious commitments difficult to discuss? Well, I think most people think that religious convictions, no matter what the religion, are not rooted in logic or evidence. That’s the perception of religion that many people have. Even religious people have this idea that religion, no matter which religion it is, is not really something that people have arrived at by a careful process of investigation and study. Many people believe that religions are just stories that religious people grow up with and they “believe” those stories in order to get along with the families or their cultures.
The problem is that people often act in public on the basis of these religious convictions. Sometimes, they just vote in laws and policies that we all have to live by. But other times, they take over airplanes loaded with innocent people and fly them into buildings. What are we supposed to do when people act on convictions that are not rooted in logic or evidence? How should we respond to that?
So what’s the answer?
In his paper, Murray argues that the evil actions of people acting on religion can be opposed by falsifying the underlying religion using reason and evidence. He points out that refuting of a religion is possible because religions all make testable claims. So, if we are afraid of the excesses of a dangerous religion, they we should argue that its testable claims are false.There is no reason to be afraid of expressions of religious belief when you are free to argue against the testable truth claims of that religion.
Here are just a couple different claims made by different religions that can be opposed using widely-accepted facts:
Hinduism is committed to an eternally oscillating model of the universe, but this model has been falsified by the measurements from 1998 that showed that the mass-density of the universe was not sufficient to halt the expansion of the universe. That means the universe will expand forever, and there are no cycles of creation and destruction, as required by Hinduism.
According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto, atheism is committed to an eternally existing universe, (See the first item: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”). If something non-material brought all existing matter into being, that would be a supernatural cause, and atheists deny that anything supernatural exists. However, eternal models of the universe have been falsified by the Big Bang cosmology, which requires that all the matter in the universe come into being out of nothing. The Big Bang has been confirmed by experimental evidence such as redshift measurements, light element abundances and the cosmic microwave background radiation.
So it’s quite easy to argue against an entire world religions like Hinduism and Atheism simply by using universally accepted facts.
How is it relevant to the 9/11 tragedy?
On the anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, it might be a good idea for us to consider whether there is any similar evidence, accepted by virtually everyone, that falsifies Islam – the religion that motivated the 9/11 terrorists.
And it turns out that there is. The Islamic Scriptures contain the following verse that Muslims must accept in order to be Muslims.
And [for] their saying, “Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah .” And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain.
They think that Jesus didn’t actually die – that he was never crucified by the Romans.
Now the interesting thing about this is that there is no non-Muslim historian who believes that Surah 4:157 is true. The crucifixion of Jesus is a fact that is acknowledged by atheist historians, Jewish historians, Christian historians, Buddhist historians, Hindu historians, and every other non-Muslim historian who has ever existed. There is not one shred of evidence that the Quran’s view, which is recorded hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, should supercede the attestation of Jesus’ death found in earlier Christian and non-Christian sources.
Eminent secular scholar E.P. Sanders of Duke University lists the facts about Jesus that the broad consensus of historians consider to be almost indisputable.
In his book, “Jesus and Judaism” (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985)., he lists the following almost indisputable facts about Jesus on p. 11:
1. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.
2. Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed.
3. Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve.
4. Jesus confined his activity to Israel.
5. Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple.
6. Jesus was crucified outside of Jerusalem by the Roman authorities.
7. After his death Jesus’ followers continued as an identifiable movement.
8. At least some Jews persecuted at least parts of the new movement . . . .
That book won the annual Grawemeyer Award in 1990 – a prize given to the best book in religion published that year.
The death of Jesus is corroborated in every source inside the Bible and outside the Bible, up until the Quran is written about 600 years after the death/non-death is supposed to have taken place.
Watch it disputed in debates
The best way to assess this testable claim made by Islam is by seeing how well Muslim scholars can defend this claim in formal, academic debates with non-Muslim scholars.
Here is a debate on the question “Was Jesus crucified?”:
And here’s a debate on the resurrection of Jesus featuring a Muslim scholar, which has a substantial discussion of the crucifixion:
So it turns out that there is a way for us to make sure that another terrorist attack like 9/11 never happens, quite apart from national security or foreign policy concerns. And the way that we do that is by arguing against religions and ideologies like Islam that can cause harm, using logic and evidence. There is no reason to treat religious ideologies- and non-religious ideologies – as being somehow above inquiry and investigation.
Students in New York City will be required to take sex education classes that include lessons on how to use a condom – a curriculum that the head of the school system said is long overdue.
It’s the first time in nearly two decades that middle and high school students will be forced to take the mandatory classes, according to a report first published in The New York Times.
One of the lessons includes instruction on how to properly use a condom.
“We must be committed to ensuring that both middle school and high school students are exposed to this valuable information so they can learn to keep themselves safe before, and when, they decide to have sex,” NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott wrote in a letter to principals and obtained by Fox News Radio.
Children as young as 11 years old will take part in discussions on a variety of topics ranging from the risks of unprotected sex to the appropriate age for sexual activity, the newspaper reported.
“I believe the school system has an important role to play with regard to educating our children about sex and the potential consequences of engaging in risky behavior,” he said. But there are concerns about the mandatory classes among New York City’s religious community.
[...]Until now, sex education classes had been left to the discretion of local principals, but Family Research Council senior fellow Peter Sprigg said now the city is trying to “impose a mandatory, top-down curriculum.”
“I think there’s a lot of virtue in allowing the local principals to make decisions based on the needs of their students,” Sprigg told Fox News Radio, noting that parents would have a lot of concern about the “explicit nature” of the lessons.
It’s a shame that taxpayers have to pay for a failing system that sexualizes children. If you want to opt out, you have to come up with the money for homeschooling or private schools. How is that fair?
RT @DiscoveryCSC: In advance of the release of DARWIN’S DOUBT, discover Stephen Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL—e-book $2.99 thru 5/27. http:… 9 hours ago
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