Pretty sure you can’t teach someone to be gay. If you can, what does that say about your religious indoctrination? Pretty weak sauce, if a flag can overcome the Word of the Almighty.
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i mean that seems the thing with all religions. there’s no outside point of reference as a true authority, no way to confirm or deny beliefs, it’s all internally self-referential
and to me that’s totally fine – so long as it also comes with the humility that the all knowing is unknowable, so absolutely no human should feel they have the answer. and while some religious people have that humility, very few religions do.
it seems a core tenet of evangelicalism in particular that “i know best and everyone else is wrong” – the very opposite of the humility needed for a multi-faith, multi-practice society to work together on anything(*)
it is very frustrating indeed.
(*) eta: and that’s by design, precisely to gain and hold power. which makes it all worse.
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I agree with everything except this part. This isn’t really directed at you, but the policies that give parents with kids in the school system all the say on how our collective taxes are spent regarding schools annoy me to no end. I’ve no kids, I still want my taxes going to fund good public schools.
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yeah, i think that conservatives by and large actually want that as an option so that they can pull money out of the school systems en masse and direct it to private religious and/or for-profit charter schools.
if anything, i’d love to see a revision of school funding that paid every public school from the same central pot – the same amount going to each school per kid regardless of location. ( or heck, better: pay historically disadvantaged districts more ) – cause right now we have the situation of nice white suburb, nice white school, and nearly everyone else gets shafted.
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Yep. And, not to get too off topic, but I also fear the right’s whole dipping the toe in the water in this regard is leading up to much more. Like, if I’m not into nature, can I divert or get a refund on the portion of my taxes that would’ve been spent supporting our national parks?
(I do admit, I wish I could “opt out” of having any of my taxes go to our endless, pointless wars, but that’s just not the way it works, or should work, in a representative society).
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Not sure that this is true-anyone can go to school board meetings and anyone can work to get onto their local school boards. Parents have no direct say in budgeting. In most districts that I know about the taxes are collected en masse and returned by an arcane formula, often linking local wealth to the amount dispensed.
This thing was really the opposite of what happened in Missouri, though. In Newberg, OR, a conservative school board voted to ban Pride and BLM symbols and the community pushed back, hard.
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Have you heard about the proposed voucher programs? Parents get “reimbursed” for the full amount of what it costs to school a youngster for a school year (which we all as a community chipped in for) if they pull their kids out of public schools, and can then apply those fund towards a private school/religious school tuition.
Again, apologies for going OT. But this shit is real. The right is trying to legally pull funding from public schools.
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it seemed similar enough in that school officials banned pride flags ( though yes, it’s cool the community there in oregon pushed back against that, and for human rights. i like that part 
)
it wasn’t clear to me in the oregon case where things wound up. any idea?
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Buuuuuut, speaking on Human Rights, the International Treaty on the Rights of the Child specifies that kids actually are people and have the right to be socialized in their community and to go to school - most signing countries (the US is one of like 3 in the world who didn’t sign on) interpret that right to mean that homeschooling should only be in exceptional cases such as disability/illness of the child, distance from nearest school, etc…
We’re already seeing fallout I suspect from the insane rates of homeschooled kids from the 80’s and 90’s.
Not going to find the link now, but read somewhere that one of the differences between the US and most countries in the world is that US parents consider their children their property. They “own” their kids and can dictate a ton of stuff that would be considered abuse in other countries, such as not letting them go to their neighborhood school.
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Yeah. Modern evangelical christianity is completely incompatible with democracy.
Much like wahhabism
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Time to lobby to change to a bear and otter.
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I have to be middle-of-the-road
Wait, what? Since when is banning any trace of support for one side considered middle of the road???
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John Wallis - please load up the moving van and come to Portsmouth, VA — we have a diverse and inclusive teaching staff in an inclusive community - in a purple state!
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The USA signed, but never ratified it, apparently making it the only member of the UN that never did. (It was good enough for the DPRK, the KSA, and Mauritania, though.)
According to Amnesty International (this may be as of the late 1990s, FWIW):
Q: What are the most common claims made about the Convention by its opposition?
A: Conservative religious organizations including the Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the John Birch Society, the National Center for Home Education, and the Rutherford Institute have spearheaded the efforts in opposition to the Convention.
These organizations have made a significant effort to portray the Convention as a threat. The majority of the oppositions claims stem from unfounded concerns related to national sovereignty, states’ rights, and the parent-child relationship.
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Oh, they’re not trying. They’ve succeeded. The appointment of Betsy DeVos was the icing on that crapcake, and what school choice advocates celebrated. The question is, what will it take to get control of school districts and push administrations back towards serving the public good, instead of catering to one group?
We’ve got people threatening school board members over mask policies. Like the teacher in this case, the good ones are resigning to avoid intolerance as well as the risk of violence. Guess who is ready to step in and fill those vacancies? This is why I remind people that there are elections every year. I don’t have kids, either, but I never miss an election. The opposition is no longer willing to rely on people taking their eye off the ball, they’re actively swinging the bat at us.
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The fellow holding the Jesus Love Homosexuals is a personal friend.
Gay rights parade Ottawa August 28th 1971
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It’s being challenged in court and the board is apparently thinking of rescinding it due to the backlash.
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Some of them believe in “OMG propaganda turning the children gay!” because they believe the opposite, that conversion therapy works, and if they can force a sexual or gender identity on people then so can we LGBTQ+ people.
The reality is that you can’t force people to be straight or cis, just like you can’t force people to be gay/bi/trans. You can force mental illness on your victims if you try though, and the vast majority of it is caused by conversion therapy* to be cishet. Then they go on to blame the mental illness on being queer, not on having continual abuse from caregivers.
* I’m including parental and religious abuse as well as pseudomedical treatment in my definition of conversion therapy.
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Simple solution: replace the pride flag with a regular rainbow flag.
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