Sunday, July 3, 2011

Sexual identity: Another hill to die on

A little pop quiz for you (and take care -- it's trickier than it seems):

How many sexes are there?

If you answered "two" (as in male and female) you're a hopeless old fogey. The correct, up-to-date answer, according to an Oakland, CA, public elementary school, is "more than two." The abolition of childhood (Steyn's phrase) continues apace. Newsbusters' Erin R. Brown:
Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, CA has joined the chorus of those wishing to mainstream “gender-bending” by enacting a program this week that, according to a press release, tells kindergarteners “there are more than two genders.”

The kindergarten through fifth grade school hosted a 2-day program for students titled, “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training,” in which single-sex Hawaiian geckos and transgender clownfish were brought in to teach children that “there are different ways to be boys. There are different ways to be girls,” according to Redwood Heights principal Sara Stone. Students received gender diversity training as they learned about “boy snakes that act ‘girly’.”

This is only the latest example of what seems to be a New-Age, gender-bending agenda pushed into the mainstream media by those who refuse to accept the traditional sex differences between men and women. A couple in Toronto, Canada has sparked outrage because they refuse to assign a specific gender to their infant “Storm,” preferring instead to believe “a child’s sex should not determine his or her place in the world.”
But knuckle-dragging parents in Oakland are fighting back:
The Pacific Justice Institute is taking action against the school, providing outraged parents with legal counsel because it believes the school’s program “does not represent the values of the majority of families in Oakland,” attorney Kevin Snider said.
And it doesn't represent reality, either, if anyone cares.

Jonah Goldberg wants to know how to buy stock in homeschooling. Amusing, but I wonder sometimes why more conservatives aren't homeschooling. No one knows how many families (another outdated concept!) have removed their children from the destructive grip of state-run "education," but it ought to be more than it is. Homeschooling, especially in the lower grades, isn't rocket science. And there's all kinds of help out there today.

RS McCain has written that traditional marriage is a hill to die on. I agree. But when the basic concept of male and female is being undermined, when children are being taught from age five (or younger) that their sexual identity is a mere construct, that hill is going to get harder to defend.

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