Originally published at: Florida teacher tells school board, "No one is teaching your kids to be gay! …I have math to teach" | Boing Boing
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Although LGBTQ people are the target of the moment for conservative hatemongers, in some ways the idea of a kid becoming numerate is as frightening and dangerous as their becoming gay for the duopoly party that serves financial grifters.
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“There are only integers. Follow the science!”
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If the teachers teaching kids to be gay are as effective as the teachers who vainly tried to teach me math, conservatives have nothing to worry about.
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Which is not happening. Like, at all. It’s not a thing. A teacher might discuss LGBQT+ history, or the spectrum of human sexuality and gender, or they might discuss current events, such as the fascist attack on the LGBQT+ community… but what is NOT happening is teachers “teaching” kids to be gay. That is a right wing talking point that must be countered at every point, because it’s a lie.
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If the teachers teaching kids to be gay are as effective as the years and years of teachers teaching kids to be straight, they have nothing to worry about. It is just simply not a teachable thing.
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It’s funny, many people look back at the Bush and Clinton years right now as a time “before the craziness”. Yet that was when books were being banned for teaching about biological evolution (or at least replaced with books that had biblical interpretations and “intelligent design”).
I would clarify that LGBTQ2I+ people have ALWAYS been a target for hatemongers and the hate never really died down - the media just stopped paying much attention for a while. The long con has always been to keep people dumb so they’ll accept what is shoved down their throats, and playing on their surface fears about non cis- straight people is a great way to do it.
ETA: I also think the conservatives genuinely hate gay and trans people, regardless of how else they are trying to manipulate the population. They are both pawns and direct targets.
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Exactly. I was exposed to all sorts of straight, cishet indoctrination and still turned out to be a gay trans woman even though I really didn’t want to be. It’s who I am, who I always have been, and nothing anyone says or does can change it. All I could do is pretend to be something I’m not, even though that cost me my mental health and removed any chances I might have at being happy.
Of course, now I’m mentally ill and unhappy because my community is under intense, constant attack from these assholes, but somehow I’m still doing much better than when I was in the closet… 
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Yep… Math is teachable, one’s sexual orientation and gender is not…
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Sorry, my comment was not intended to imply that “teachers teaching kids to be gay” actually exist anywhere outside the fevered imagination of the Right. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that most people here know that. But in hindsight, I think your clarification is worthwhile.
Although I’m also pretty sure that the people who are spreading this particular lie believe that acknowledging that gay people exist (let alone that they have a right to exist) amounts to “teaching kids to be gay”.
Which is interesting because it suggests that gayness is so seductive that if you don’t constantly tell your kids NOT to be gay, the next time you turn around they’ll be covered with rainbow flags and holding same-sex make-out sessions in the breakfast nook. Heterosexuality, in their eyes, is clearly ugly and tedious, whereas the alternative is apparently damn-near irresistible.
They might be right, at least where they’re concerned. Certainly, hardly a New York minute seems to elapse between some right-winger decrying the evils of homosexuality and the same right-winger being caught with an underage rent-boy in the bathroom of a Motel 6. It’s pretty clear that same-sex relationships hold a powerful sway over their minds in more ways than one.
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No, let’s not do the thing where we pretend that homophobia is all the fault of closeted gays either. It is very much a problem with straight people. People who feel insecure in their masculinity, yes, but all self-inflected by that minority, no.
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You jest, but there are those who maintain that irrational numbers are impossible because God, somehow. If you tried to explain transcendental numbers, their heads would explode.
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It was certainly true in some places in the past that any kids who were gay or, much more so trans, and never realized that it wasn’t just them, simply suffered in silence and hoped they could hide being different or “weird.” The “explosion” of trans-ness recently is simply due to more folks realizing that they are not alone, that there are others like them, and there are those who will stand up for their right to be themselves. Those folks were always there, and always will be, no matter how oppressive the climate becomes. The only question is how openly they can express themselves and how safely they can be themselves.
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“God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”
Apparently, the quote comes from Kronecker, but it’s possibly misattributed.
And anyone who studies abstract number theory will know that you can start with the definition of a counting or natural number, and work your way up to complex numbers and beyond, so there is a little bit of truth to it.
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CW:
I have suspicions that some of the kids in the past who died in tragic “accidents” were either suicides or murdered by homophobic/transphobic relatives.
The behaviour of Republicans and TERs recently only reinforces this belief.
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Putting the blame for homophobia on gay people doesn’t help. While there might be some closet cases driving bigotry, the bigotry exists outside of that context, and I highly doubt it’s the main driver of that bigotry. Plenty of people who are straight are perfectly willing to keep driving anti-LGBQT+ for a variety of reasons that has nothing to do with their own internalized self-hatred. As @chenille noted, insecurity with their masculinity is one such reason.
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This teacher should not say that. Wait until those assholes aware math was taught using Arabic numbers.
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