Few people disgust me more than those who think their religion entitles them to a say in other people's choices. He's not doing his son any favors by trying to confine him to a bubble. When people told me I wasn't allowed to learn about something, it just made me all the more curious. Christians, acting in the name of Christianity have inflicted far more damage on this world than gay people ever did. I would rather live next door to a gay person than a religious nut case any day.
I realized I was gay when I was eight, back in the Paleozoic Era when dinosaurs roamed the earth, oil was being created, and the Beatles were popular.
I was told "being gay" was the WORST thing someone could possibly be, and "good people" did not learn about THAT BEHAVIOR or THOSE PEOPLE
The more I learned about THOSE PEOPLE, the more I realized I was one of them and I really wanted THAT BEHAVIOR.
Eventually, I learned God had FAR more important things to do than to fret about two guys sleeping together, given that both of us were consenting adults.
My same-sex partner and I will be together 36 years this June. We still hold hands when we're driving in the car; and we still sleep in the same bed.
Now this is the kind of happy story I like! Okay, I mean the part where you are with the one you love. The first part must have sucked for you and I'm sorry.
The first part DID suck; and it was what I call "a shitty gift". Truth be told, when I realized I could not "pray away the gay", I made a serious suicide attempt when I was 17. The reason I'm here today, writing this, is because the rope broke.
Here's where the "gift" part comes in: being gay has made me a LOT more understanding, and a LOT more accepting of people who are not like me.
If parents can remove their kids for religious reasons then they should use this tool to opt out of the incursion of Christians into the schools. Ten commandments required to be on the wall of every classroom? Yup, Johnny can't sit in that classroom. The school is required to use books from a Christian publisher that contain false information? Not my son. You want to require my son learn about the bible? I don't want my son exposed to that DEIty crap.
What kind of control freak nut job is this guy? Oh yeah, a Christian.
This irrational, deluded man is now forcing his son's the school to help him prevent his son from learning that gay people exist, and that civil rights are a thing. When the child gets older, will Alan remove him from history classes for large chunks? What will he do when, at kindergarten pick-up, the boy sees one of his classmate's two dads kissing?
This will go one of two ways: the child will learn about gay people and civil rights from his bigoted dad and become a bigoted bully who is in constant trouble at school, or he will get the information because of the "forbidden fruit" aspect of seeing his classmates get things he isn't allowed. Surreptitiously gaining forbidden knowledge will pile up so much guilt on this child's shoulders it will break him. In both cases I weep for this child and the fact that he has such a massive pile of shit for a father.
Did you consider what would happen if the Court had ruled the other way? Probably civil war, and spurred on by a hard-right Jan 6 Trump who would override SCOTUS whenever he felt the need to. And the Christian theonomists who began the civil unrest would have full confidence Trump would do with them what he did for the convicted Jan 6 riot leaders.
The correct solution, given that non-heterosexual lifestyles are absolutely in the minority, is to force all gays, trannys and their supporters to move to one of the 4 bluest states or be denied the right to vote on anything. Out of sight, out of mind. If you live in a blue state, you can normalize all the "other" bullshit you please. If you live in a red state, you are guaranteed no school your child attends will be using lgbtq-themed bullshit.
This whole business of how people with extremely opposite viewpoints are supposed to "learn to live together" sounds about as hopeful as a marriage that has done downhill. It proves that the gay and tranny lobby are equally as lost in their idealism as Christians are in their own bible-based views.
We allow divorce because of reality...we do not just ceaselessly cry "work it out" when two people have discovered they simply cannot tolerate each other any more.
Sorry, but my response after that ruling would be to tell Alan that sorry, we can’t accommodate your needs, your son is going to have to attend a different kindergarten. Because the only way to really do what he wants is to put his child in a room by himself with almost nothing in there, and I’m pretty sure that would violate some educational standard. Not to mention that it would tie up a caregiver to look after a single child. If that’s what Alan wants, he can hire a nanny to keep the child at home all day.
Alan ultimately is fighting a losing battle here. Regardless of what his child may or may not be exposed to in school, sooner or later, that kid WILL discover that there are men who partner with men and women who prefer the company of women in that madness which is generally known as THE REAL WORLD. And that doesn't even mention bisexuals or trans people or the other variants on human sexuality that Alan seems to be determined not to acknowledge.
Doesn't change the fact that we are out here ... and we're not going anywhere.
This is pretty clearly a situation of "controlling the narrative."
These parents want to be certain that their child's first exposure to the concept of LGBT is something like, "Those people are ANIMALS, and God hates them."
Seeing harmless, normal LGBT+ people in normal, harmless families makes all that more difficult to communicate.
As well, Trump has made it pretty clear that the pathway to Perfect Parenthood is for a parent to never allow their children to open a book...or their mind. (Also known as "0% personal responsibility".)
Please explain, in detail, how simply knowing that LGBTQ people exist is harmful to your child. Also, please explain what DEI is, how it is taught to kindergarteners, and why learning that women and people of color should have the same rights as weight men is harmful to your child.
None of these Christian Nazionalist bigots can give a satisfactory answer. I doubt this bigoted father can.
I've just thought of something (and yes, it's somewhat tongue in cheek):
Kindergarten teaches children that elephants exist. Teaching that elephants exist does not turn children into elephants. Ergo, teaching children that 'other' people exist, will not turn children into 'other'.
(For 'other' insert marxist, lesbian, muslim, trans .....)
On the point of Alan's request of 'no DEI' - the article mentions that the boy has got a special education plan, which indicates to me that he might be a special needs child, i.e. that the boy has got a disability.
Given that DEI is deliberately inclusive of disabled people, why would his dad object to policies which would actually benefit his child?
Christian fascists rarely know the meaning of words that they toss around, except what the Christian fascist were told by their clergy, leadership, and fox channel! Usually the opposite or a different meaning than what the word actually means. Christian fascist won’t look up the meaning of words in the dictionary, because they think dictionaries and encyclopedias are books written by the devil!
It's nothing more than a means by which to LEGALLY require that ALL jobs be offered to WHITE MALES over any other demographic...and corporations are already being investigated for "violations".
He shouldn’t have been allowed on the ballot in 2024 in the first place. Unfortunately, the other traitors in Congress and the Unsupreme Court forced it through so the remaining traitors could vote him in.
One of my daughter's beat friends in kindergarten had two moms. How is that going to work at that school during class plays? Is one mother going to have to going hide in a refrigerator box? Do they switch? And what if another parent's religion is that their child has to be shielded from assholes. If this father too going to have to hided in a refrigerator box. Do we have to mark these boxes differently? I just don't think they thought of all the logistics.
Alan is hoping that by then, he will have instilled his hateful into his child. I'm hoping that plan backfires spectacularly, and the child grows up rejecting hate.
It did in my case. My father was a martinet and an egotist, perhaps borderline narcissist. He was convinced of his own rectitude and made sure everyone knew how RIGHT he was. That made me utterly determined that I was NOT going to be ANYTHING like him.
I hold my father up as my role model when deciding how to act as a father. If I am unsure of how to behave in a given situation I think of what my father would likely do. Then I do the opposite.
In one of Garrison Keillor’s books there is a character who is furious with his father not because his father was always wrong but because his father was wrong in wrong ways. The guy spent his life doing the opposite of what his father did only to discover that he was still wrong.
One of the things that I realized when I was a teenager was that my family was not normal. Not that I had any idea of what normal meant. But I remember visiting my best friend‘s family once, and they were discussing catching public buses, and which ones to catch. It surprised me that anybody took a public bus. That wasn’t normal.
By the time I was a young man and out on my own, I made a very conscious decision that I did not want to grow up to be my parents. I recognized that they were good things about them, but I remembered my early lesson that they were not normal people – not normal in the best sense of the word. I simply did not want to grow up to be them. So a lot of my choices were about being better than that.
I am intrigued about your comment about taking a bus - if you/your family didn't take the bus, then how did you get around? And what was the reason?
Apologies if these questions are too personal. It's just that where I grew up the transport options were shank's pony, a bike, the bus or getting a lift. And the latter option wasn't really a possibility, given that my mum didn't drive and my dad worked shifts. So, it was the bus.
We either walked, or rode our bikes, or our parents drove us. I remember we would occasionally take a bus, but it was very rare and I knew nothing about bus schedules are taking buses I have no idea what the reason for that was.
Just for some comparison, I grew up in Montgomery, AL. The high school I attended (Class of '93) was at the time named Robert E. Lee High School, and while the school's fight song had already been changed from "Dixie", the mascot was still Bob Ed and yes, there was a statue of Lee (facing north, of course) in front of the school. The rival school was Jefferson Davis, and I'm sure you can figure it out from here.
In 2022, the school went through what I would term a rebranding, and it's now Dr. Percy L. Julian High School using different school colors and has a phoenix for a mascot. From what I can tell, the only serious mistake is not moving the place, the building was falling apart back when I was in high school. Several other schools around the city have gone through similar changes to their names.*
While I have no doubt at all that there was considerable hand-wringing and hair-pulling from some corners, my honest feeling on the matter is that it was well past time. The past is the past, and while we might still learn from it today, living in the past never did anyone any good. Those confederate flags and statues were nothing but the dying gasp of ideas that humanity never needed.
What would this bigoted twerp do if he actually read his bible and discovered that his Jesus cured the "servant" of a Roman Centurion?
I put servant in quotation marks because this passage in the bible is a mistranslation of the Greek texts. Instead of servant, the Greeks used the word "pais," which has a VERY different meaning. A pais was a young male lover.
Oopsie! And since Jesus is God, he must have known what the relationship between the Centurion and the pais was. He never uttered a word about it.
Why would the bigoted twerp look into the actual biblical scholarship that's out there? All he has to do is memorize the handful of bigot verses from his preferred translation that his pastor tells him to.
Slightly different angle - Jesus actively expressed his support for the outcasts of his day, such as customs inspectors, poor people and women with loose reputations (I was tempted to write 'prostitutes' but my bible knowledge is not good enough to use such a word when I mean Mary Magdalene.)
I read this that Jesus was in favour of tolerance towards discriminated groups. Which means that a follower of Christ should actually be in favour of tolerance towards marginalised groups. And not pile in hating these groups.
Sometimes I really can't with these American 'christians'!
You might not want to use Jesus against the Christians, because then YOU would have to pick and choose. Jesus wanted disputes about him to break families apart (Matthew 10:34 ff). He required his disciples to demand that future followers obey "all" that he had previously commanded (28:20). That would include his specifying that while his followers not imitate the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, they were still required to obey the Pharisees' teachings (23:3). He also required the mothers and fathers who followed him to give up their kids in the same way they were to give up their homes and farms (19:29).
Trying to find little places in the NT where Jesus appears to be supporting minorities, will probably backfire on you.
Centurions were typically gay, which meant they weren't encumbered by wives and children and therefore could go out, conquer and plunder. It was not unusual at all for centurions to have male lovers, sometimes young male lovers.
Jesus knew very well that when the centurion came up to Jesus and asked if he could heal his "pais" (lover), that the two were romantically and sexually involved. Jesus had no problems healing the centurion's lover.
One would hope that the other parents in the child’s classroom would be able to speak out about the harm this man is doing to their children’s education. The school should parade the other parents through the court to make it clear that their “parental rights” are being abridged by his childish behavior.
This person should be sending his kid to a Christian school if he’s not willing to expose his child to other people. Public school is for all students, including those who might have families that don’t fit his narrow bigoted definition of family, the students might be LGBTQ, or other religions, their education matters, their safety matters, their existence matters and if he doesn’t want his child exposed, then it’s his responsibility to remove him from the classroom, he can homeschool or send him to private school. It is not the teachers’ responsibility to facilitate his bigotry. So what if the child has an IEP and needs special education and won’t be accepted into private school, so what if dad isn’t trained or doesn’t have the time to educate him himself. The kid just won’t get educated then, it’s not like he’ll be educated at the public school anyway, not with all the restrictions put on the teachers. The other children don’t deserve their educations damaged just because he’s an asshole.
Question (apologies if this has already come up in the discussion): I am trying to take this a step further - the school/kindergarten and its teachers now have got clear instructions that they can never ever mention anything which is not cis/hetero in the boy's earshot. If it's one boy (who by these accounts is having special instructions elsewhere for some of the day), then this is manageable. What if the other 25 parent(s) are turning up with similar but different demands? What if (and yes, these are ridiculous examples) a violently vegan parent demands that their kid not be shown any depictions of non-vegan food? What if a parent objects to any descriptions of any animals whatsoever? What if [insert ridiculous example of choice].
If the teacher has to run 25 separate lesson plans to take into account 25 separate special wishes (there's a great word in german meaning special sausages 'Extrawurst'), then they will never be able to do story hour.
You make an excellent point. Forcing teachers to jump through parents' hoops strikes me as a bridge too far. The school has a curriculum it follows, and it has worked hard to create it. If you don't like said curriculum, find another school or home-school your kids.
Expecting a public school to cater to individual bigotries is madness.
THIS ! I am a retired teacher and I spent many parent interviews explaining a couple of facts: Half of the population must be below average and teachers do group instruction. Private tuition is gonna cost $.
I'm an atheist, but I find that the State tries too hard to educate children. The scholarly stuff is fine, but in a land that allegedly promotes religious diversity, the parents should be the sole persons in the child's life educating him or her about religion and sexual identity. It may very well be that when we get serious about how Americans disagree with each other on those matters, the public schools will be prohibited from doing anything to normalize political minority lifestyles. Parents should have the ultimate say in when and whether to draw their child's attention to the moral diversity that plagues this stupid greedy duplicitous nation.
Anecdote: When my child was small, I helped at a birthday party she attended. The children piled their plates with party food and a boy asked the host-mum, 'Are these sausages vegetarian?' as he munched one. She was horrified for a moment as she'd forgotten his family was veggie. She admitted they had meat in them. To which he replied, 'I thought so, they taste much better than the veggie bangers we get at home.'
Middle school science class, "You can't teach *my* kid that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. I've raised him on our religion's truth that the Earth is 6,000 years"
How about a parent who objects to his kid being exposed to anything having to do with religion? Is there a storybook with a drawing that includes a church steeple in the background? Outrageous!
This is Dark Ages mentality. Denying a child knowledge of the real world because his father believes in a mythology that has no evidence to support that it is anything but made up. Locking up Galileo so others couldn’t hear the truth about our solar system, denying the reality of the overwhelming evidence of Evolution because it destroys the myth of Adam and Eve and the basis of original sin, the Christian control method. Or as Hitchens so perfectly describes: creating you sick and demanding you get well by believing dogma and following the self chosen God communicators who bring you truth you are forbidden to question.
Except that these are the consequences for the stupid people who think America's founding fathers intended the Constitution to support the nation-destroying ridiculousness that happens today.
I made a similar comment, that a kindergarten or school cannot accommodate 25 separate and maybe contradicting lesson plans. It would be the end of not only story hour but any kind of public (secular) education.
This sort of reasoning is also used to prevent mandated vaccination for school attendance--unfortunately by both parents on the right and left. And then, of course, quarantine of infectious children and adults will be decried as an infringement of civil liberties.
Few people disgust me more than those who think their religion entitles them to a say in other people's choices. He's not doing his son any favors by trying to confine him to a bubble. When people told me I wasn't allowed to learn about something, it just made me all the more curious. Christians, acting in the name of Christianity have inflicted far more damage on this world than gay people ever did. I would rather live next door to a gay person than a religious nut case any day.
"I would rather live next door to a gay person than a religious nut case any day." Duh. That's not a hard choice at all.
Depends is "free beer and barbecue" a religion? If so the choice is a little more difficult.
Sounds more like part of the 𝑮𝒂𝒚 𝑨𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒂.
𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑚𝑒 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑛'𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑖𝑡 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑚𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠.
Hear ye, all you Christian men! Barbra Streisand strikes again! 🤣🤣🤣
I realized I was gay when I was eight, back in the Paleozoic Era when dinosaurs roamed the earth, oil was being created, and the Beatles were popular.
I was told "being gay" was the WORST thing someone could possibly be, and "good people" did not learn about THAT BEHAVIOR or THOSE PEOPLE
The more I learned about THOSE PEOPLE, the more I realized I was one of them and I really wanted THAT BEHAVIOR.
Eventually, I learned God had FAR more important things to do than to fret about two guys sleeping together, given that both of us were consenting adults.
My same-sex partner and I will be together 36 years this June. We still hold hands when we're driving in the car; and we still sleep in the same bed.
Outstanding! My very best wishes to you both!
Now this is the kind of happy story I like! Okay, I mean the part where you are with the one you love. The first part must have sucked for you and I'm sorry.
The first part DID suck; and it was what I call "a shitty gift". Truth be told, when I realized I could not "pray away the gay", I made a serious suicide attempt when I was 17. The reason I'm here today, writing this, is because the rope broke.
Here's where the "gift" part comes in: being gay has made me a LOT more understanding, and a LOT more accepting of people who are not like me.
That's great!
Greetings to you and your partner, best wishes to the both of you.
Early congratulations on your anniversary! Here's to many more years of love and happiness between you and your sweetie.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0a669a374261ee06726f81aea09e71380d4f308ddc45696a763d138659f5a13f.jpg
Meanwhile, xtians want to push the 10 Commandments in public school classrooms.
Do parents and teachers get an "opt out" of THOSE, Judgey Wudgey?
Silly NOGODZ20 - the only people "protected" by this Court's (SCOTUS's) rulings are the RWNJs - not other people.
IANAL but it sure seems like the Mahmoud case could be used to object to the 10C posters. Talk about needing to do damage control.
Now, that would be an interesting court case .....
If parents can remove their kids for religious reasons then they should use this tool to opt out of the incursion of Christians into the schools. Ten commandments required to be on the wall of every classroom? Yup, Johnny can't sit in that classroom. The school is required to use books from a Christian publisher that contain false information? Not my son. You want to require my son learn about the bible? I don't want my son exposed to that DEIty crap.
Oh, but THAT is bias against Christians! PERSECUTION! 😭😭😭
Exactly it. The only way to fight these people is on their own grounds.
"DEIty crap"
Good one. 👏
𝐼𝑛 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑡, 𝐴𝑙𝑎𝑛 𝑛𝑜𝑤 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑣𝑒𝑡𝑜 𝑝𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑚𝑎𝑦 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑎𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑢𝑔𝑔𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑠 𝐿𝐺𝐵𝑇𝑄 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑡𝑦.
What kind of control freak nut job is this guy? Oh yeah, a Christian.
This irrational, deluded man is now forcing his son's the school to help him prevent his son from learning that gay people exist, and that civil rights are a thing. When the child gets older, will Alan remove him from history classes for large chunks? What will he do when, at kindergarten pick-up, the boy sees one of his classmate's two dads kissing?
This will go one of two ways: the child will learn about gay people and civil rights from his bigoted dad and become a bigoted bully who is in constant trouble at school, or he will get the information because of the "forbidden fruit" aspect of seeing his classmates get things he isn't allowed. Surreptitiously gaining forbidden knowledge will pile up so much guilt on this child's shoulders it will break him. In both cases I weep for this child and the fact that he has such a massive pile of shit for a father.
I hope control freak Dad doesn’t have a daughter. I think he would be even worse, if that is possible, for a girl.
Did you consider what would happen if the Court had ruled the other way? Probably civil war, and spurred on by a hard-right Jan 6 Trump who would override SCOTUS whenever he felt the need to. And the Christian theonomists who began the civil unrest would have full confidence Trump would do with them what he did for the convicted Jan 6 riot leaders.
The correct solution, given that non-heterosexual lifestyles are absolutely in the minority, is to force all gays, trannys and their supporters to move to one of the 4 bluest states or be denied the right to vote on anything. Out of sight, out of mind. If you live in a blue state, you can normalize all the "other" bullshit you please. If you live in a red state, you are guaranteed no school your child attends will be using lgbtq-themed bullshit.
This whole business of how people with extremely opposite viewpoints are supposed to "learn to live together" sounds about as hopeful as a marriage that has done downhill. It proves that the gay and tranny lobby are equally as lost in their idealism as Christians are in their own bible-based views.
We allow divorce because of reality...we do not just ceaselessly cry "work it out" when two people have discovered they simply cannot tolerate each other any more.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the civil war is on, all around us, on every side.
Sorry, but my response after that ruling would be to tell Alan that sorry, we can’t accommodate your needs, your son is going to have to attend a different kindergarten. Because the only way to really do what he wants is to put his child in a room by himself with almost nothing in there, and I’m pretty sure that would violate some educational standard. Not to mention that it would tie up a caregiver to look after a single child. If that’s what Alan wants, he can hire a nanny to keep the child at home all day.
Alan ultimately is fighting a losing battle here. Regardless of what his child may or may not be exposed to in school, sooner or later, that kid WILL discover that there are men who partner with men and women who prefer the company of women in that madness which is generally known as THE REAL WORLD. And that doesn't even mention bisexuals or trans people or the other variants on human sexuality that Alan seems to be determined not to acknowledge.
Doesn't change the fact that we are out here ... and we're not going anywhere.
Shielding the kids from the facts will only turn them against the parents later.
In this case that sounds like a good thing.
Been here loooooong before religion was invented.
This is pretty clearly a situation of "controlling the narrative."
These parents want to be certain that their child's first exposure to the concept of LGBT is something like, "Those people are ANIMALS, and God hates them."
Seeing harmless, normal LGBT+ people in normal, harmless families makes all that more difficult to communicate.
As well, Trump has made it pretty clear that the pathway to Perfect Parenthood is for a parent to never allow their children to open a book...or their mind. (Also known as "0% personal responsibility".)
Alan L, bigot:
Please explain, in detail, how simply knowing that LGBTQ people exist is harmful to your child. Also, please explain what DEI is, how it is taught to kindergarteners, and why learning that women and people of color should have the same rights as weight men is harmful to your child.
None of these Christian Nazionalist bigots can give a satisfactory answer. I doubt this bigoted father can.
I've just thought of something (and yes, it's somewhat tongue in cheek):
Kindergarten teaches children that elephants exist. Teaching that elephants exist does not turn children into elephants. Ergo, teaching children that 'other' people exist, will not turn children into 'other'.
(For 'other' insert marxist, lesbian, muslim, trans .....)
They have to put litter boxes in classrooms because some kids think they are cats.
(tongue in cheek, /s, it's a joke, you can't be too careful : )
On the point of Alan's request of 'no DEI' - the article mentions that the boy has got a special education plan, which indicates to me that he might be a special needs child, i.e. that the boy has got a disability.
Given that DEI is deliberately inclusive of disabled people, why would his dad object to policies which would actually benefit his child?
I don't understand.
Alan has no understanding of what DEI is, just the far right rhetoric claiming it is somehow making white men second class citizens.
Christian fascists rarely know the meaning of words that they toss around, except what the Christian fascist were told by their clergy, leadership, and fox channel! Usually the opposite or a different meaning than what the word actually means. Christian fascist won’t look up the meaning of words in the dictionary, because they think dictionaries and encyclopedias are books written by the devil!
Trump now claims that programs for the blind are "DEI".
"Trump Officials Plan To Drop Army's Preference For Blind Vendors"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-blind-vendors-preference_n_6949a499e4b099a75cbdb8b1
What's their next target...wheelchair ramps?
His pastor told him that DEI and LGBTQ+ people are BAAAAAAAD ... and apparently, that's all he thinks he needs to know.
His loss.
His pastor won't be able to answer, either. Just relaying the bigotry with cherry picked bible verses that he thinks back him up.
The whole DEI policy is madness.
It's nothing more than a means by which to LEGALLY require that ALL jobs be offered to WHITE MALES over any other demographic...and corporations are already being investigated for "violations".
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/12/29/dei-fraud-trump-investigations/87947879007/
OT
Today is the day in 2021 that a traitor fomented an insurrection to prevent the certification of a legal election.
Never forget.
You couldn't pay me enough to forget.
Haven't forgotten; and I'm still mad as hell about it!
A candidate that should never be allowed to participate in elections again.
He shouldn’t have been allowed on the ballot in 2024 in the first place. Unfortunately, the other traitors in Congress and the Unsupreme Court forced it through so the remaining traitors could vote him in.
Traitor, child fucker, baby murderer, draft dodger, and 34 times convicted criminal.
A day that shall live in infamy.
One of my daughter's beat friends in kindergarten had two moms. How is that going to work at that school during class plays? Is one mother going to have to going hide in a refrigerator box? Do they switch? And what if another parent's religion is that their child has to be shielded from assholes. If this father too going to have to hided in a refrigerator box. Do we have to mark these boxes differently? I just don't think they thought of all the logistics.
At some point or other, Alan's bigotry will collide with the real world. What do you do THEN, Alan???
Alan is hoping that by then, he will have instilled his hateful into his child. I'm hoping that plan backfires spectacularly, and the child grows up rejecting hate.
It did in my case. My father was a martinet and an egotist, perhaps borderline narcissist. He was convinced of his own rectitude and made sure everyone knew how RIGHT he was. That made me utterly determined that I was NOT going to be ANYTHING like him.
And I would like to think I succeeded.
I hold my father up as my role model when deciding how to act as a father. If I am unsure of how to behave in a given situation I think of what my father would likely do. Then I do the opposite.
In one of Garrison Keillor’s books there is a character who is furious with his father not because his father was always wrong but because his father was wrong in wrong ways. The guy spent his life doing the opposite of what his father did only to discover that he was still wrong.
One of the things that I realized when I was a teenager was that my family was not normal. Not that I had any idea of what normal meant. But I remember visiting my best friend‘s family once, and they were discussing catching public buses, and which ones to catch. It surprised me that anybody took a public bus. That wasn’t normal.
By the time I was a young man and out on my own, I made a very conscious decision that I did not want to grow up to be my parents. I recognized that they were good things about them, but I remembered my early lesson that they were not normal people – not normal in the best sense of the word. I simply did not want to grow up to be them. So a lot of my choices were about being better than that.
I am intrigued about your comment about taking a bus - if you/your family didn't take the bus, then how did you get around? And what was the reason?
Apologies if these questions are too personal. It's just that where I grew up the transport options were shank's pony, a bike, the bus or getting a lift. And the latter option wasn't really a possibility, given that my mum didn't drive and my dad worked shifts. So, it was the bus.
Not too personal at all. 😀😉😘
We either walked, or rode our bikes, or our parents drove us. I remember we would occasionally take a bus, but it was very rare and I knew nothing about bus schedules are taking buses I have no idea what the reason for that was.
For what it's worth (and for those of us stuck in the deep south, that's quite a lot)...
I rarely see confederate flags anymore. In fact, I can't remember seeing one in weeks.
If that's because Trump supporters don't want to be seen as racist, then it's likely a good thing. (And I'm sure it's not universal.)
Maybe there are some MAGA-types already rejecting hate?
Just for some comparison, I grew up in Montgomery, AL. The high school I attended (Class of '93) was at the time named Robert E. Lee High School, and while the school's fight song had already been changed from "Dixie", the mascot was still Bob Ed and yes, there was a statue of Lee (facing north, of course) in front of the school. The rival school was Jefferson Davis, and I'm sure you can figure it out from here.
In 2022, the school went through what I would term a rebranding, and it's now Dr. Percy L. Julian High School using different school colors and has a phoenix for a mascot. From what I can tell, the only serious mistake is not moving the place, the building was falling apart back when I was in high school. Several other schools around the city have gone through similar changes to their names.*
While I have no doubt at all that there was considerable hand-wringing and hair-pulling from some corners, my honest feeling on the matter is that it was well past time. The past is the past, and while we might still learn from it today, living in the past never did anyone any good. Those confederate flags and statues were nothing but the dying gasp of ideas that humanity never needed.
*Ye Olde Wikipedia Pagee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Percy_L._Julian_High_School
Thank you, Whitney.
I don't want to be dissapointed, but there do seem to be some signs of hope.
What would this bigoted twerp do if he actually read his bible and discovered that his Jesus cured the "servant" of a Roman Centurion?
I put servant in quotation marks because this passage in the bible is a mistranslation of the Greek texts. Instead of servant, the Greeks used the word "pais," which has a VERY different meaning. A pais was a young male lover.
Oopsie! And since Jesus is God, he must have known what the relationship between the Centurion and the pais was. He never uttered a word about it.
Why would the bigoted twerp look into the actual biblical scholarship that's out there? All he has to do is memorize the handful of bigot verses from his preferred translation that his pastor tells him to.
Slightly different angle - Jesus actively expressed his support for the outcasts of his day, such as customs inspectors, poor people and women with loose reputations (I was tempted to write 'prostitutes' but my bible knowledge is not good enough to use such a word when I mean Mary Magdalene.)
I read this that Jesus was in favour of tolerance towards discriminated groups. Which means that a follower of Christ should actually be in favour of tolerance towards marginalised groups. And not pile in hating these groups.
Sometimes I really can't with these American 'christians'!
You might not want to use Jesus against the Christians, because then YOU would have to pick and choose. Jesus wanted disputes about him to break families apart (Matthew 10:34 ff). He required his disciples to demand that future followers obey "all" that he had previously commanded (28:20). That would include his specifying that while his followers not imitate the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, they were still required to obey the Pharisees' teachings (23:3). He also required the mothers and fathers who followed him to give up their kids in the same way they were to give up their homes and farms (19:29).
Trying to find little places in the NT where Jesus appears to be supporting minorities, will probably backfire on you.
You're exactly right!
Centurions were typically gay, which meant they weren't encumbered by wives and children and therefore could go out, conquer and plunder. It was not unusual at all for centurions to have male lovers, sometimes young male lovers.
Jesus knew very well that when the centurion came up to Jesus and asked if he could heal his "pais" (lover), that the two were romantically and sexually involved. Jesus had no problems healing the centurion's lover.
One would hope that the other parents in the child’s classroom would be able to speak out about the harm this man is doing to their children’s education. The school should parade the other parents through the court to make it clear that their “parental rights” are being abridged by his childish behavior.
This person should be sending his kid to a Christian school if he’s not willing to expose his child to other people. Public school is for all students, including those who might have families that don’t fit his narrow bigoted definition of family, the students might be LGBTQ, or other religions, their education matters, their safety matters, their existence matters and if he doesn’t want his child exposed, then it’s his responsibility to remove him from the classroom, he can homeschool or send him to private school. It is not the teachers’ responsibility to facilitate his bigotry. So what if the child has an IEP and needs special education and won’t be accepted into private school, so what if dad isn’t trained or doesn’t have the time to educate him himself. The kid just won’t get educated then, it’s not like he’ll be educated at the public school anyway, not with all the restrictions put on the teachers. The other children don’t deserve their educations damaged just because he’s an asshole.
Spot on, Val!
Question (apologies if this has already come up in the discussion): I am trying to take this a step further - the school/kindergarten and its teachers now have got clear instructions that they can never ever mention anything which is not cis/hetero in the boy's earshot. If it's one boy (who by these accounts is having special instructions elsewhere for some of the day), then this is manageable. What if the other 25 parent(s) are turning up with similar but different demands? What if (and yes, these are ridiculous examples) a violently vegan parent demands that their kid not be shown any depictions of non-vegan food? What if a parent objects to any descriptions of any animals whatsoever? What if [insert ridiculous example of choice].
If the teacher has to run 25 separate lesson plans to take into account 25 separate special wishes (there's a great word in german meaning special sausages 'Extrawurst'), then they will never be able to do story hour.
You make an excellent point. Forcing teachers to jump through parents' hoops strikes me as a bridge too far. The school has a curriculum it follows, and it has worked hard to create it. If you don't like said curriculum, find another school or home-school your kids.
Expecting a public school to cater to individual bigotries is madness.
THIS ! I am a retired teacher and I spent many parent interviews explaining a couple of facts: Half of the population must be below average and teachers do group instruction. Private tuition is gonna cost $.
I'm an atheist, but I find that the State tries too hard to educate children. The scholarly stuff is fine, but in a land that allegedly promotes religious diversity, the parents should be the sole persons in the child's life educating him or her about religion and sexual identity. It may very well be that when we get serious about how Americans disagree with each other on those matters, the public schools will be prohibited from doing anything to normalize political minority lifestyles. Parents should have the ultimate say in when and whether to draw their child's attention to the moral diversity that plagues this stupid greedy duplicitous nation.
Anecdote: When my child was small, I helped at a birthday party she attended. The children piled their plates with party food and a boy asked the host-mum, 'Are these sausages vegetarian?' as he munched one. She was horrified for a moment as she'd forgotten his family was veggie. She admitted they had meat in them. To which he replied, 'I thought so, they taste much better than the veggie bangers we get at home.'
I like this!
Middle school science class, "You can't teach *my* kid that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. I've raised him on our religion's truth that the Earth is 6,000 years"
How about a parent who objects to his kid being exposed to anything having to do with religion? Is there a storybook with a drawing that includes a church steeple in the background? Outrageous!
This is Dark Ages mentality. Denying a child knowledge of the real world because his father believes in a mythology that has no evidence to support that it is anything but made up. Locking up Galileo so others couldn’t hear the truth about our solar system, denying the reality of the overwhelming evidence of Evolution because it destroys the myth of Adam and Eve and the basis of original sin, the Christian control method. Or as Hitchens so perfectly describes: creating you sick and demanding you get well by believing dogma and following the self chosen God communicators who bring you truth you are forbidden to question.
The AGE OF IGNORANCE is what religions promote, that is the only way the religions can keep power and control!
Except that these are the consequences for the stupid people who think America's founding fathers intended the Constitution to support the nation-destroying ridiculousness that happens today.
what if the father was objecting to mixed fabrics or shellfish? how much are the courts willing to humor the rediculousness?
I made a similar comment, that a kindergarten or school cannot accommodate 25 separate and maybe contradicting lesson plans. It would be the end of not only story hour but any kind of public (secular) education.
Which is what they want.
This sort of reasoning is also used to prevent mandated vaccination for school attendance--unfortunately by both parents on the right and left. And then, of course, quarantine of infectious children and adults will be decried as an infringement of civil liberties.