aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, December 31, 2005

Teach the controversy

John’s new strategy for spreading the word that “gay is ok.” Bring it to the classroom:

If the intelligent design debate is going on in your school district, then put forward a proposal that all the health classes, social studies classes, science classes, and any other class that even vaguely touches on marriage, human relationships, sex ed, or sexual reproduction in humans or animals teaches that the preponderance of scientific research says that being gay is genetic, normal and healthy, but that some people disagree.

Here are a few choice quotes from the wackos to use against them:

• It is simply “healthy education,” he contends, to teach students about the controversy....

• The Christian educators’ advocate insists that government has no business banning viewpoints in the classroom. He says Judge Jones “needs to heed Dover’s recommendation to be open minded” and to allow all the available science to speak for itself....

• “If the educational community had held this position earlier in our culture, we might still be teaching students that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the Earth,” Laursen asserts. “But as new theories developed, the logical place to debate these things and discuss these things and study these things was and is in the educational community.”....

• He considers the recent court decision banning the mention of intelligent design in the Dover schools to be a serious blow to academic freedom as well as a case where ”[y]et another activist judge has forced personal prejudices on the educational community.”

• Nevertheless, Laursen promises, CEAI will continue to encourage its members to ”teach all the science available in the 21st century, whether it supports evolution or not.” He says the group will also go on urging teachers to bring supplemental science data and information beyond the mandated curricula into their classrooms.