Bill O'Reilly did a segment last night (embedded below the jump) about a short film supposedly being shown in some California schools. It's a cartoon about a cross-dressing boy who has fun wearing his mom's bikini, part of a package of gay-friendly films being sent out to California schools that request them. Youth in Motion, the San Francisco gay activist group distributing the films, claims that over 250 schools have requested their materials; here's the map showing the schools; without naming the schools, there's no way to verify this.
Here, from the group's own website, is its description of the "Bikini" film featured on O'Reilly (you can see part of the film if you go below the jump and watch the segment):
Bikini Lasse Persson 2005 7 min. SwedenAn animated musical, Bikini stars a young boy, dolled up in his mother's yellow swimsuit, who is afraid to come out of the locker room. With the encouragement of a pair of happy twins he emerges, but their lady friend would rather receive all the attention herself.
Set to the classic 1960 song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," this short offers an entertaining take on finding the courage and acceptance to express one's gender with honesty and style.
That's one of several short films included in this unit sent to schools. You're also encouraged to download the "curriculum guide," which includes passages like this:
Gender ExpressionWatch: Screen the short films eddie and Tomboy and pose the accompanying discussion questions (see page 12).
Discuss: Revisit the gender chart you created earlier. Do you need to revise the placement of certain terms or images? Is the class still able to define a "real man" and a "real woman?" Is there a growing gray area between these two genders?
Engage: Ask students to create a circle map or draw a picture of a perfectly gendered person--the ideal man or the ideal woman. Next, ask them to create a circle map or draw a picture of themselves (or use magazine images again to create a collage for each).
Ask students to consider the different ways they express their gender: In what ways do they conform to societal expectations for their gender? In what ways do they deviate from these norms? How does this challenge or change their definitions of male and
female, man and woman?
The curriculum guide that accompanies this stuff makes it clear that under California law, not only does a school not have to inform parents if it intends to show this material to schoolchildren, but parents are not allowed to remove their children from the classroom. Why? Because this is not intended as sex education (which does retain an opt-out provision), but "anti-bias training."
So: your California middle-schooler is shown the cute Swedish cartoon about a cross-dressing boy, and is asked in his classroom to consider ways he expresses his gender, and you, Mom and Dad, have no say in it. That's the law.
Where are we going with this? Why are we doing this? I agree with Bill O'Reilly, who said he wishes no transgender person any harm, and anyone who tries to harrass a transgender person should be strongly dealt with. But come on! You can teach basic respect and civility without getting into all of this advocacy. This is about imposing a radical cultural agenda on captive schoolchildren, and disempowering parents who might object. It is a hostile act toward traditional religious people and social conservatives, and ought to be seen as such -- just as a public school curriculum teaching gay kids that something is wrong with them should be out of bounds. Why do we have to bring the culture wars into public schools like this? No wonder people homeschool, or want out of public schools. Or want to leave California.
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Charles Foster Kane at 6:29 has the critical point Bill and Rod negligently missed: This group of films is being used by after school clubs for students dealing with gender/sexuality issues. (Which is what I assumed reading about it, since I don't take Bill or Rod's pre-emptive fear that children are being brainwashed as a go-to position.) This includes gay teens and cross dressing, but also their straight friends trying to show support and figure this out. By "this" I mean just what's in the study guide--what is masculine, what is feminine, etc.
Basil: "Moreover, he hasn't complained about the bloody result of opposition to same sex marriage in Florida, in which an anti-gay doctor refused to take a patient history from a same sex partner with power of attorney for an unconscious patient. This resulted in the death of that patient. Moreover, the hospital, Jackson Memorial, refused to let the partner of the dying patient stay with her as she died. Last weeks federal court decision legitimized everything the hospital did, certifying gays and lesbians as untermenschen that Christian or conservative doctors can murder at will."
The court decision stated that hospital trauma centers have no legal right to grant visitation...to anyone.
//well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/no-visiting-rights-for-hospital-patients/
“Decisions as to visitation must be left to the medical personnel in charge of the patient, without second-guessing by juries and courts,” Judge Jordon wrote. “A trauma unit is not like a regular hospital setting, and visitors may interfere with what medical personnel are trying to accomplish in a difficult environment.”
While Judge Jordon sided with the hospital’s legal argument, he was critical of the hospital’s failure to communicate with Ms. Pond’s family.
“The defendants’ lack of sensitivity and attention to Ms. Langbehn, Ms. Pond and their children caused them needless distress during a time of vulnerability,” the judge wrote. The hospital, he continued, “exhibited a lack of compassion and was unbecoming of a renowned trauma center; unfortunately, no relief is available for these failures.”
No relief...after all, this is an anti-gay state.
Please Rod, spare us the circus maximus routine about videos that might be shown to kids in school. GLBT rights is about things like what the Lagnbehn-Pond family faced. This is the reality that moves gays and their allies to get in the face of easily distracted individuals such as yourself.
Rod,
To tie this in to one of your earlier posts:
Last week you decried at length the lack of civility and the hatefulness of public debate.
and occasionally, as with this post, you decry an examples of ideological indoctrination in public schools, or legal oppression of home-schooling parents, or CPSC-mandated testing of lead in second-hand children's books, or other examples of ill-advised expansion of state power.
At some point, question needs to be raised about whether the long march of the state towards complete marginilization of the family, parents, religion, local community and everything crunchy that you hold dear can be arrested by calm, dispassionate, well reasoned debate. If you are correct that state law in CA already excludes parental dissent on what is presented in the classroom, this fact suggests that prospects are poor.
And in moments of dejection, you might remember what you have posted from MacIntyre [sp?], to effect that the two or more sides in the culture wars are so far apart as to basic beliefs that real moral discourse is fast becoming impossible. What passes for debate is in fact verbal combat.
It is a hostile act toward traditional religious people and social conservatives, and ought to be seen as such -- just as a public school curriculum teaching gay kids that something is wrong with them should be out of bounds.
Can you really not see that these things are completely different? One is inclusive and is a sincere (if flawed) attempt to promote self-expression and to cut off and diminish violence. It attempts to make kids feel better about themselves and engenders understanding in other children. It is exactly the opposite of telling the kids there is something wrong with them.
"Why do we have to bring the culture wars into public schools like this?"
"Like this," Rod? Haven't public schools been the main battleground for the conservative vs. liberal culture wars for some time now? Some memorable battles: desegregation; prayer in schools; abstinence vs. sex ed in schools; evolution vs. creationism in schools; homeschooling; charter schooling; gender equality in PE; pledge of allegiance; and, of course, now those propagandists who argue that folks fighting for marriage equality are actually just trying to sneak books about gay families into preschool curricula.
If there's any hopeful streak in this mire of deceit and mediocrity (the deceit of Bill O'Reilly once again raising the "they're after our children!" standard and the mediocrity of some California media production company creating silly gender-studies videos for high schoolers) it's that PEOPLE CARE ABOUT KIDS! People don't want their kids to be bullied, beat up, called names, discriminated against; alternately they don't want their kids to be forced to watch a silly cartoon about a boy in a bra top and have to fill out a worksheet about it. So at least we have that: both the left and the right wants what's best for their kiddos. But we sure have a weird way of showing it…
As for the opt-out issue; seems to me this is fairly unrelated to the "LGBT menace" (as so many have pointed out, schoolkids actually aren't being forced to watch this video, or videos glorifying evangelical Christianity, for that matter). But if parents were able to opt their kids out of any kind of lesson for philosophical reasons, it seems it might become an issue of where to draw the line: if it were legal to opt out of science classes because discussions about the biology of mammalian reproduction or the theory of evolution, or, say, the massacre of the native Americans, wouldn't special provisions have to be made for those kids when it comes to testing/grading them on the material? And do our public schools really have the money or time for ANY special provisions whatsoever in this era of NCLB education-as-test prep?
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