A Holiday Poem

Posted on December 11, 2007 by David

(Or, for those who wish to pretend there are no other holiday traditions being celebrated at this time of year, “A Christmas Poem.”)

A reader sent this to us back in 2004. Three years later, the Grinches are grinchier than ever, and even more unhappy. Our heartfelt wish for them is that they find the ability to “think of something they haven’t thought of before.” We’ll do our best to help with that process.

How the Grinch Stole Marriage
–by Mary Ann Horton, Lisa and Bill Koontz
(with apologies to Dr. Suess.)
Every Gay down in Gayville liked Gay Marriage a lot……
But the Grinch, who lived just east of Gayville, did NOT!!

The Grinch hated happy Gays! The whole Marriage season!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps, his Florsheims were too tight.
But I think the most likely reason of all was
His heart and brain were two sizes too small.

“And they’re buying their tuxes!” he snarled with a sneer,
“Tomorrow’s the first Gay Wedding! It’s practically here!”
Then he growled, with his Grinch fingers nervously drumming,
“I MUST find some way to stop Gay Marriage from coming!”

For, tomorrow, he knew… All the Gay girls and boys
would wake bright and early. They’d rush for their vows!
And then! Oh, the Joys! Oh, the Joys!

And THEN they’d do something he liked least of all!
Every Gay down in Gayville the tall and the small,
would stand close together, all happy and blissing.
They’d stand hand-in-hand. And the Gays would start kissing!

“I MUST stop Gay Marriage from coming! …But HOW?”

Then he got an idea! An awful idea!
THE GRINCH GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!

“I know what to do!” The Grinch laughed in his throat.
And he went to his closet, grabbed his sheet and his hood.
And he chuckled, and clucked, with a great Grinchy word!
“With this beard and this cross, I look just like our Lord!”

“All I need is a Scripture…” The Grinch looked around.
But, true Scripture is scarce, there was none to be found.
Did that stop the old Grinch…? No! The Grinch simply said,
“With no Scripture on Marriage, I’ll fake one instead!”
“It’s one man and one woman,” the Grinch falsely said.

Then he broke in the courthouse. A rather tight pinch.
But, if Georgie could do it, then so could the Grinch.
The little Gay benefits hung in a row.
“These bennies,” he grinned, “are the first things to go!”

Then he slithered and slunk, with a smile most uncanny,
around the whole room, and he took every benny!
Health care for partners! Doctors for kiddies!
Tax rights! Adoptions! Pensions and Wills!
And he stuffed them in bags. Then the Grinch, with a chill,
Stuffed all the bags, one by one, in his bill.

Then he slunk to the kitchen, and stole Wedding Cake.
He cleaned out that icebox and made it look straight.
He took the Gay-bar keys! He took the Gay Flag.
Why, that Grinch even took their last Gay birdseed bag!

“And NOW!” grinned the Grinch, “I will pocket their Rings.”
And the Grinch grabbed the Rings, and he started to shove
when he heard a small sound like the coo of a dove.
He turned around fast, and off flew his hood.
Little Lisa-Bi Gay behind him sadly stood.
The Grinch had been caught by small Lisa-Bi.
She stared at the Grinch and said, “My, oh, my, why?”
“Why are you taking our Wedding Rings? WHY?”

But, you know, that old Grinch was so smart and so slick
He thought up a lie, and he thought it up quick!
“Why, my sweet little tot,” the fake Shepherd sneered,
“The judges are evil, the other states weird.”
“I’ll fix the rings there and I’ll bring them back here.”

It was quarter past dawn… All the Gays, still a-bed,
all the Gays still a-snooze when he packed up and fled.
“Pooh-Pooh to the Gays!” he was grinch-ish-ly humming.
“They’re finding out now no Gay Marriage is coming!”
“Their mouths will hang open a minute or two
then the Gays down in Gayville will all cry Boo-Hoo!”

He stared down at Gayville! The Grinch popped his eyes!
Then he shook! What he saw was a shocking surprise!
Every Gay down in Gayville, the tall and the small,
was kissing! Without any bennies at all!
He HADN’T stopped Marriage from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling: “How could it be so?”
“It came without lawyers, no papers to sort!”
“It came without licenses, came without courts!”
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!

“Maybe Marriage,” he thought, “doesn’t come from the court.
Maybe Marriage…perhaps… comes right from the heart.
Maybe Marriage comes from all the words the Gays say.
Words like Husband, like Wedding, and Spouse who is Gay.”
And what happened then…? Well…in Gayville they say
that the Grinch’s small brain grew three sizes that day!

And the Gays had their Weddings. They promised for life.
They swore to be faithful, to Wife and her Wife.
The Husbands were happy, to each other they vowed
To be Out and be Honest, be Gay and be Proud.
They told all their neighbors and friends of their Spouse,
They told of their Marriage and sharing their house.
They said “We got Married.” They shouted it loud.
Their marital status was “Married and Proud.”

And the minute his heart didn’t feel quite so tight,
He whizzed with his load through the bright morning light.
And he brought back the rings, cake and Gay birdseed bags!
And he… …HE HIMSELF… hung the Gay Rainbow Flag!
…

The Lord looked down, at the proud and the tall,
and said “These are my children, and I love them all.”

____________________________________

Copyright (c) 2004 by Mary Ann Horton. Permission granted to copy in whole, with attribution. This is a parody of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

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Can of Worms

Posted on December 4, 2007 by Jonathan

Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by Watergate “hatchet man” Chuck Colson, is based in Loudoun County and receives a huge tax exemption from our county government. They publish a blog and a daily newsletter, and when these contain particularly funny anti-gay propaganda, I forward the trope of the day to the Equality Loudoun discussion list under the title “We ran out of prisoners again.” PFM “runs out of prisoners” a lot, and they really like to talk about the GLBT community. What they don’t like, though, is when the GLBT community talks back.

A November article on their “BreakPoint” blog by Allen Thornburgh praises the Patrick Henry College student body for their spiritual maturity and graciousness toward him after he delivered a speech that, in his words, “stunk.”

In a comment to this post, Brian G. Murphy, a West coast Soulforce Equality Rider and regular BreakPoint commenter, criticized PHC’s response to last year’s Equality Ride and attempted to engage the bloggers, saying that he wished that the students had been allowed to demonstrate those qualities during that visit. Allen was cordial and dismissive.

Should you to ever desire to visit PFM, and I hope you do, I’ll happily welcome you and look forward to discussing myriad topics over coffee or a meal…while I understand your disappointment and find it to be a reasonable response, I’m less sympathetic to the frustration and feelings of mistreatment at PHC’s hands.

To his credit, Allen admitted that he did not “know enough to have an opinion” about the Ride. However, PHC alumna and fellow BreakPoint blogger Faith Schwartz did have an opinion. She defended PHC’s response:

PHC was not hostile, they were more than happy to meet with your friends at a location off campus…But I know of several alumni and students alike who would have loved to dialog with them… and still would. The invitation is always open.

“Not hostile”? PHC “more than happy to meet with your friends”? No, they were not. We were there, and in contact with Soulforce as they tried for months to negotiate terms for a meeting. The Riders have reconciled their religion – Christianity – with their sexuality – queer – and they came here to talk about that. PHC found that topic to be totally, totally out of bounds and the college demonstrated by their own actions – a lockdown and massive police presence – that they were very, very serious about not trusting their students to be exposed to queer Christian experience.

I challenged Faith’s statement to Brian that PHC was “happy to meet with your friends at a location off campus”:

Your 2:59 comment was not factually correct. Equality Loudoun hosted an off-campus event. PHC students were discouraged from attending.

At this point, Allen and Faith quickly made it clear that this “not hostile” attitude and receptivity to Brian’s friends (including Equality Loudoun, one would think) did not include a willingness to discuss the PHC Equality Ride visit on the BreakPoint blog – especially not with first hand witnesses who could refute Faith’s made up story:

Look, I don’t see the point of continuing to beat the SoulForce drum on this thread…

To be honest, I’m doing my level best to suppress a massive eye roll about this whole matter, but it is getting increasingly difficult…

Well Jonathan, I appreciate your statement and I’m just going to leave well enough alone. As alumni, we were made aware of your coming and were invited to attend the event. But I’m not going to get into a giant debate on the topic.

And to prevent that “giant debate,” moderator Gina Dalfonzo terminated the thread. Faith, however, was not satisfied, because she still had more to say about Patrick Henry. She was personally hurt by Hanna Rosin’s book God’s Harvard and feels that the reputation of PHC has been unfairly tarnished by various media portrayals. Something had to be done, so in a “What would Colson do?” moment, Faith tried to perform a cover-up. She redirected the conversation, in a new post, to an abstraction: PHC’s “virtuous” mission:

If you want to praise someone, praise the parents who had the guts to raise their children as godly men and women — parents who emphasized culturally lost virtues like courage, patriotism, diligence, respectfulness, humility, excellence and justice…Patrick Henry College has advertised itself to families who cherish and pursue virtue, and has consequently reaped the reward from attracting that particular group of individuals.

Oh, boy, those pesky worms. Can you feel them squirming?

Faith knew that the PHC administration’s behavior during the Equality Ride poked a hole in her claim to virtue (she witnessed it too), so she ruled discussion of that topic out of bounds. “I’m not here to reopen that ridiculous can of worms,” she announced.

Fair enough. Let’s not talk about the Ride, or who expected what, or what the difference between dialogue and debate is. Let’s talk about whether the behavior of the PHC administration fits the definition of virtue. I posted this in a comment:

With respect to Patrick Henry College, I’ll refer you to the re-writing of our blog’s posting policy by the “Office of Communications, Patrick Henry College.”

http://archive.equalityloudoun.org/2007/04/24/open-dialogue-would-embarrass-phc/

That action was not virtuous. It was unethical…

Moderator Gina again quickly tried to close the persnickety can of worms:

I let the dialogue under the previous post go for so long because, as Allen pointed out, the Equality Ride visit to PHC was related at least slightly to what he had written. But Faith specifically said that this was not what her post was about, and the site rule is that commenters stick to the subjects raised in the post on which they’re commenting. Unless that rule is followed here, I will close this thread as well.

I then told David about the “conversation” and he contributed this comment – one that never made it through the PFM censor’s filter.

The topic of this post is whether PHC cultivates virtue in its students.

I have personally seen the values of justice, courage, honor and respectfulness enacted by the group of PHC students who have asked for an apology from their administration for distributing a falsified version of Equality Loudoun’s commenting policy, behavior that would have been grounds for disciplinary action had it been carried out by a student.

These students have the integrity to simultaneously disagree with the mission of our organization and to demand that their administration not bear false witness against us. They furthermore did their own research to determine that they had been lied to, and provided documentation to that effect. They, and we, are still waiting for that apology.

I would like to know how you can justify this behavior. If this is the standard of integrity being modeled by the administration, then any virtue on the part of students must come from a different source. If you are unwilling to honestly engage different viewpoints on this topic, then perhaps you should not have opened it up.

It looks like they really didn’t want to talk about virtue, either, at least not concretely. I emailed Gina and asked her to reconsider her decision to censor David’s comment. Gina responded:

Jonathan, Faith made a statement in her post about what she was and was not willing to discuss, as the Equality Ride issue had already [not] been discussed at another post, and as she had already discussed it with you elsewhere. That was her right. I kept an eye on the thread to make sure that people honored her wishes. That was my right and my responsibility as editor and moderator. You not only insisted on going against her expressed wishes and the rules of the blog, as did David…

Interesting. I don’t see anything in David’s comment about the Equality Ride; it addresses the topic of virtue, as requested.

One more time: Using the same IP address, I posted under the transparent pseudonym “Loudoun Citizen” and asked whether anyone at the college had been disciplined for their un-virtuous actions, or had apologized to Equality Loudoun. The reaction to this comment was predictable and furious: Gina, the moderator, suspended me for my “deliberate attempt at deceit.” As a blog administrator myself, I know that Gina knows my IP address; if my intent were to “deceive” her, I would have been successful. This demonstrates two things: That she is willing to block the hundreds of other potential commenters who share my IP address in order to suspend one who can reveal the deceit of BreakPoint writers, and that she is capable of recognizing “deceit” when she wants to.

It must be frustrating to have a blog, present topics for discussion, and then discover that you really didn’t want to discuss them after all. Maybe the blog was a mistake for PFM, or maybe they want the kind of blog that only presents their own viewpoint and doesn’t invite discussion.

As for Faith’s duplicity, may we bring up PHC’s abstract principles? This objective is straight from the Spiritual Profile of a Patrick Henry Graduate:

Have the humility to listen to others thoughtfully, and the conviction to stand unwaveringly for the principles of the Word of God.

In the tradition of thinking Christians like the Apostle Paul on Mars Hill and C.S. Lewis, the ability to engage the world in debate requires us to truly listen and consider the opinions of others, while never compromising our commitment to God and His Word.

The Social Profile of a PHC graduate instructs him to “Understand the culture in which he lives.”

Good principles. So why is the fact that some of their own students tried to put them into practice such a can of worms?

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As predicted, another teachable moment

Posted on November 28, 2007 by David

The earth is flat; isn’t that obvious? I mean, it’s just so obvious, go outside and look. What!? How dare you suggest I don’t know! You have no right to force everyone to play along with your “world-not-flat” fantasy!

I think we should have compassion for ignorant people, I really do. But what about people whose ignorance is willfully, militantly, self-imposed? What about people who would hang their heads in shame if they were capable of realizing how baseless and uninformed their hatred for other people has been?

We reported here on the unanimous passage of the Montgomery County ordinance prohibiting discrimination against transgender people. As we said then, the unbelievably vicious opposition has been fixated on a single, fictional notion: That people will no longer “know” what kind of genitals the other people using a public restroom have. Seriously, folks. This is the focal point for the people opposed to this law.

To illustrate, here is a verbatim comment (in response to this one) from a local flat earther:

It is real easy, let me see if I can help you here.
1. If you are born with a Johnson, use the mens room.
2. If were born without a Johnson, use the ladies room.
3. If you were born with a Johnson and you pay someone to lop it off have your head examined.

It is not for society to re-work the bathroom arrangments that have worked perfectly well since the dawn of public restrooms in order to accomodate a handful of confused nuts who can’t make up their minds wether they are a he or a she or something in between.

-G.Stone

You may recognize Greg Stone as the “what part of illegal don’t you understand” guy, so things being “real easy” for him is to be expected. To be fair, Greg does get one thing right, and the Montgomery County Council agrees (as do I). People don’t need the government to help them go to the bathroom. Each of us is quite capable of determining which bathroom is the appropriate one to use, and the idea of potty police is about as literally nanny-state as you can get. Yet, this is precisely the argument of these pitiably anxious people: Regina Griggs of PFOX complains of the ordinance, “nowhere does it say you cannot use the bathroom of your choice.” Let’s make sure we understand this: They want The Government to promise them that when they are imagining the genitals of the person in the stall next to them (and you may reasonably ask why they would be doing that), they are not imagining the wrong ones.

Those of you who use public restrooms of either variety, feel free to weigh in here. Do people in either of these settings display their genitals to other patrons (other than the obvious minimal exposure at the urinal)? Has anybody ever seen that? No, of course not. The logical conclusion, then, is that we don’t know what they look like. Heads up, potty people. You have been going to the bathroom in the presence of transgender folks all this time. And, apparently, you have survived.

If you can remove the fingers you have jammed in your ears for just a moment, I will explain something to you. Human beings do not simply arrive in the world on two conveyor belts labeled “Johnson” and “No Johnson.” In most cases and for most purposes this is a good enough approximation, but it is not the biological reality of sex. We’ve done a good job of pretending otherwise, what with surgically erasing people (many more than most of you think) who are born with ambiguous genitalia and other states of being that refute this simplistic conceptualization. Covering up reality, however, doesn’t change it. I’m not going to give you a dissertation. See ISNA. See Dr. Dana Beyer’s comment here.

The bottom line is that sometimes people are assigned the wrong gender at birth, and they transition. At the point in their transition where it makes sense, they start using the bathroom designated for the gender they are living, because it would be silly and dangerous and look really weird for them to use the other one. The fact that this is just now coming to your attention pretty much demonstrates what a non-issue it is. Oh, one other thing – this usually happens long before they have surgery, if they have surgery at all.

Actually – and this is purely based on anecdotal evidence – the people who tend to get harassed in public restrooms are women with short hair and no makeup. Alison Bechtel did a hilarious strip (I can’t find it online, unfortunately) in which a conventionally feminine transwoman friend stands up for butch Mo in a public restroom after Mo’s appearance scares some poor lady. “Can’t you see this is a woman? Look a little closer next time, hon,” she says. Women don’t want to share public bathrooms with men (I have yet to hear any men complaining about “women” in the men’s room, but for the sake of parity we’ll just assume that as well). We get that, and no one is asking them to. That’s exactly why Greg’s construction above is so ridiculous. If women are uncomfortable with masculine women in the bathroom, just imagine how uncomfortable they would be with transmen. I don’t think they would be at all happy with that little scenario.

Now, maybe you are one of the folks who just feel that transgender people can’t really exist, and you express your feeling with phrases like “men who think they’re women.” Maybe you are one of those people who has trouble accepting that something you can’t see and touch – the neurological state that is gender identity, everybody has one – is biological. Please refer to the beginning of this post. The earth is not flat, and your refusal to personally get on a plane and prove this to yourself does not make it flat.

I am less patient than Dr. Beyer, who suggested to one such person that he must think epilepsy should be treated with exorcism. He, unsurprisingly, took offense at this. After all, maybe a couple hundred years ago it was “obvious” that epilepsy was caused by possession, but we know better now. It is indeed insulting to accuse someone of thinking that epilepsy should be treated with exorcism. There is a good reason for that, and it is called “knowledge.” We continue to acquire more of it, and sometimes it challenges things we have taken for granted. It’s not bad to find this uncomfortable, that’s a very human response. But, that is how the acquisition of knowledge works. Discomfort passes once we understand something. It requires a willingness to be open to new information, but I think most people have that.

A few of you have not removed the fingers jammed in your ears, because you have an agenda. You are only interested in trying to erase, by any means necessary, anyone whose existence causes you discomfort. You are the people whose ignorance is willfully, malevolently imposed, not only on yourselves, but on anyone else you can infect. You are uncomfortable because you choose to be – and frankly, you deserve worse.

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How many ways are there to say we’re winning?

Posted on November 26, 2007 by David

I don’t know why, but this just made me chuckle.

Blogger Phil Chroniger is posting a series of presidential candidate analyses in which he discusses the appeal of each candidate to both their own and the other party. In his analysis of Bill Richardson’s “Dem appeal” he lists opposition to the Iraq War, support for universal health care, etc.

Under “Cross-Party Appeal to Republicans” he includes this item:

Supports civil unions, not gay marriage.

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Sorry for your discomfort

Posted on November 24, 2007 by David

Look – it turns out that the Montgomery County Republicans have produced their very own imitation of Eugene Delgaudio:

“Heil Hitler!” Adol T. Owen-Williams II, a Montgomery County Republican Central Committee member, shouted immediately after the vote from his third-row seat in the council chamber. “Wait until little girls start showing up dead all over the county because of freaks of nature.”

Isn’t that nice? At least they have the good sense not to let this character run for public office.

The occasion was last week’s unanimous council vote amending county human rights law to ban discrimination against transgender people. County Administrator Ike Leggett signed it into law on Wednesday.

The opponents of this bill have shown themselves to be unbelievably selfish, nasty, deceptive and manipulative. Their entire campaign has been based on an imagined scenario in which transgender women would threaten the privacy and safety of “girls and women” in public facilities. The central idea they are trying to establish is a flat out lie: That people decide on the spur of the moment to identify as one gender or another just by putting on some clothes, and that therefore “men” will suddenly have legal access to facilities designated for women. “Family Leader Network” in particular displays this trait, referring to transgender women with almost comically uninformed language:

“Think of what this means for public schools! A biological male student and teacher claiming they are female could enter the girls’ locker room…”

“Males who identify themselves as females will have open access to changing areas designated for women and girls…”

“The women’s changing room should be ‘safe’ for women and girls without the fear that a biological man will be exposing himself.”

Recall that the public policy director of “Family Leader Network” is none other than Lynn Chapman, the guy that Loudoun Republican party leadership chose to run against David Poisson in Eastern Loudoun. They actually managed to find someone worse than Dick Black to run for that seat. Black may have been monstrously intent on doing harm to the GLBT community, and he may have promoted the fake “science” and public policy analysis of groups like PFOX, CWA, Eagle Forum, and the like, but he wasn’t actually directing one of them to manufacture this nonsense.

The stupidity of these claims is hard to overstate. Bans on transgender discrimination are in place in over 100 jurisdictions, and these silly scenarios don’t happen in any of them. People who are not transgender do not claim that they are in order to invade locker rooms. People who are transgender do not “strip naked” in public places; in fact that’s about the last thing a person undergoing transition would do. Yet, the opponents of the bill (the same peculiar trifecta that opposed the revised Montgomery County human sexuality curriculum) have chosen to frame the issue in exactly this way: “Legalized Indecent Exposure,” and then, as they became increasingly unhinged, “MEN IN THE GIRL’S SHOWERS.”

JimK at Teach The Facts argues convincingly that their objective is to reframe the issue so that it’s about scary predatory men, not transgender people – but I think it’s even worse than that. I don’t think, in any of their lurid talk about young girls being “exposed” to “biological males,” they even make a distinction between transgender women and the completely fictional red herring of men (always men) pretending to be transgender. Their real objective is to create the impression that transgender women and scary predatory men are one and the same. As I indicated above, I think the quotes from the “Family Leader Network” material are actually intended to be read as referring to transgender women. Language like “men who think of themselves as women” and frequent use of the term “drag queen” (as in a “suggested talking point” for the media that imagines a four year old girl “running into the exposed male genitals of a drag queen”) is evidence enough of that.

Also, is there some sort of annual award (I’m thinking along the lines of the IgNobel Prize) for the cheekiest framing of victimhood? I would definitely nominate this crew on the basis of the following statement: That this bill actually constitutes discrimination against them, described as “anyone who believes it is best for women to remain women and men to remain men.” Check it out: They are claiming that they are victims of discrimination if they are restricted from discriminating against a group of people who are publicly insulted and ridiculed, summarily fired and evicted, often physically abused and disowned by family members, and most alarmingly, murdered with an unusual degree of brutality because of who they are and for no other reason. And they’re serious about this claim.

Asked about the bizarre testimony, hate mail (“Hopefully it will be one of your daughters who gets raped first!” wrote Gabriel Espinosa from PFOX, in 40-point font) and threats of divinely inspired retribution unless transgender people are adequately discriminated against, the sponsor of the bill said: “The bottom line is I am not going to stoop to their level. I’m sorry they are uncomfortable with the [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community. This bill speaks to the fundamental principals of law.”

I’m sorry they are uncomfortable, too – but their comfort is just not as important as the right of other people to live their lives in safety and with dignity. People who are uninformed about transgender people can remove the source of their discomfort and fear simply by becoming informed. Transgender people can’t become someone else, nor can they forgo the need for employment, housing and safety.

Are the perpetrators of these lies themselves so ignorant of transgender issues that they believe their own talking points – or, are they doing this with full knowledge of their deception? I’m sad to say that I think it’s the latter. The real issue, and the effect of this bill, is that transgender people will no longer be subject to legal discrimination based on nothing more than small-minded prejudice. The need for opponents to invent another issue does nothing but reveal that they know better than to defend that small-minded prejudice. They can’t. It’s indefensible.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the transgender residents who have recognized this shrill pogrom as a teachable moment, and have done so with grace and kindness in the face of all this ugliness. There must be some degree of compassion for those who fear what they don’t understand, and simply don’t know any better. And those who refuse to even try to understand will continue providing these teachable moments.

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Must…attack…the gays

Posted on November 22, 2007 by David

I suppose this doesn’t really merit a whole post, but it’s just too funny:

…Days like this make me feel good about being a social conservative.

Equality [fill in the blank] members can eat crow here.

This remark concerns the advance in biomedical science, announced yesterday, that allows adult human skin cells to be turned into stem cells.

(At this point you may be wondering when Equality Loudoun has taken a position on stem cell research, or how in the world this might relate to our mission. Yeah, I can’t find it either.)

It looks to me like a person who goes by the name “Singleton” has such an itchy axe to grind that he couldn’t wait for a topic that’s actually relevant, and had to settle for this. I picture a kind of Night of the Living Dead scenario, in which he could no longer to resist the urge to engage in that..behavior. Must…attack….the GAYS…

I really can’t think of a better illustration of the fact that equality is winning.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all, enjoy. Even you, Singleton.

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Virginia just says no

Posted on November 15, 2007 by David

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Governor Tim Kaine has eliminated state funding for federally mandated “abstinence-only” programs; Virginia now joins 13 other states that have rejected this kind of fake sexuality “education.” The premise here shouldn’t be hard to understand; if we’re going to spend public money on an educational program, that program needs to be evidence-based, not driven by ideology.

We had some exposure to this type of program in Loudoun earlier this year via the appearance of self-identified “educational comedian” Keith Deltano in a few of our high schools. “Abstinence-only” (also sometimes known as “abstinence-only-until-marriage”) is a misguided approach to sex-ed that is more indoctrination than education. Some parents like because it reflects their beliefs, but it leaves young people without the basic information they need to make responsible decisions and to protect themselves when they do become sexually active. Deltano’s program is typical of the genre in that it misrepresents medical research, relies on fear and shame to control behavior, and reinforces dehumanizing gender stereotypes.

For more information on the failure of these programs, see:

What the research says about abstinence-only-until-marriage programs
SEICUS review of the Keith Deltano program in Loudoun
Emerging Answers 2007 (comprehensive review of the research)
The Education of Shelby Knox

In addition to its ineffectiveness in reducing negative outcomes, the “abstinence until marriage” standard where marriage is not an option sends the harmful message to GLBT youth that they should not expect to have healthy adult intimacy. There is no acknowledgment in these programs of human sexuality other than for the purpose of procreation within marriage between a man and a woman.

Kaine’s plan to cut this wasteful funding from the budget was made public over six weeks ago, so it’s not clear why it’s just now making the news. Predictably, the Some Families Foundation types “reacted angrily,” and complained that the decision was “hidden” from them. Don’t they have people whose job it is to track this stuff? How interesting that they suddenly noticed this and decided to pitch a fit – after the election.

Not Larry Sabato points out that Fairfax Senator Ken Cuccinelli, whose district does not even participate in any “abstinence-only” programs and was not receiving any of this funding, is now the ringleader of those threatening to reverse this decision. Cuccinelli very narrowly won re-election (a recount is in progress) by downplaying his extremist ideas about sexuality; we surmise that he won’t be running for this seat again.

If anti-family, anti-science candidates like Cuccinelli considered this to be a winning issue, we would have seen it trotted out as campaign fodder. The fact is that most parents want their kids to have accurate information, and support comprehensive sexuality education. This is not a issue on which these folks can win elections – but it is good material for the beleaguered “pro-family movement” to paint themselves as victims (poor things) and use to try to reinvigorate their base after the smackdown they received at the polls. Expect much apocalyptic hand-wringing at this evening’s “Virginia Family Foundation Gala” in Richmond.

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