Sex Education in Public Schools

The Federal Government wants to be involved in the sexual education of your child.  They have written their standards for this education, and Illinois was one of the first states to adopt them.  If you live in other states, you might want to see where your state stands on this issue.  The Federal Government didn’t write them for itself. 

This doesn’t mean that every public school in Illinois will use them, but you should assume they do until proven otherwise.

You should know what they are, and if you know parents of children in public education, if you care about any of them, you might want to talk to them about this.

The new standards tell our kids that there is no such thing as normative sex.  Vaginal, anal, and oral sex are all equal sexual relationships.  So essentially kids have to try them all to see which they like best.  I would expect that biology would at least suggest that sexual organs are reproductive organs, but in fact they are merely pleasure tools for instant gratification.  If by chance a pregnancy occurs, no worry, we have an answer for that.

They are taught that sex was “assigned” at birth, and, really, they shouldn’t have done that.  Only you know what gender or sex you are. 

They are conflating gender with sex.  Maybe not all at once, but that’s the goal.  Boys can have vaginas, and girls can have penises. 

By the end of second grade, they want to diminish the value of the nuclear family by equating it with every variation and combination of adults.  Essentially, the idea is to affirm that a nuclear family is not necessarily something they should strive for or even want to have.  It is not better than other forms of family.  There are other options just as good.  So begin thinking about them.

They will also know the meaning of gender and gender identity, but it’s not your parent’s idea of gender.  Gender and biology are distinct from each other.

By fifth grade, they will learn to “distinguish between sex assigned at birth and gender identity” and “how they may or may not differ.”

They will “define sexual orientation” and “differentiate between sexual orientation and gender identity.”  And they will also learn “the range of ways pregnancy can occur.”  No need to limit your thinking to the traditional way.

The entire idea of male and female, man and woman, is outdated.  The concept of marriage between a man and a woman is just stereotypical and harmful to portray that as the ideal.

But actually the worst part of all this is that children are essentially being asked to choose a gender identity and sexual orientation long before they have ever even given any thought to whether they want children of their own, and before they even reach puberty and they see how they respond to the opposite sex. 

I consider that criminal child abuse. 

Oh, school districts can opt out of the program.  I have learned from a former health teacher in middle school in Illinois that the administration hid much of this information from the parents, so they did not know what they were getting when they opted in for the program.  You might want to check on that too.

Another look at religion and government

A reader of a local newspaper had a strong reaction against Darren Bailey, the Republican candidate for governor.  She felt that Bailey was injecting his religious beliefs into public policy. 

This reader is an abortion advocate, and she cites the Talmud as justification for her beliefs.  So essentially her religion formed her opinion on a public policy issue, and she is doing what she thinks Bailey should not.

We use the word ‘religion’ often when discussing politics, but I don’t think we fully understand what religion is.

Yes, a religion is a system of beliefs about God.  But that is a very narrow understanding of it.

A religion is a worldview.  It’s an all-encompassing description of life, what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, what is truth, what is false, what are the rules, are there any rules.

The fact is that everybody has a worldview.  Every country has a worldview.  It’s a system of beliefs that guide how it governs itself.

Religions are worldviews that include God as being a part of reality, actually a major part of reality. 

Our country is trying to impose a worldview on everybody that doesn’t include God.  And a lot of people are having a problem with that.  The reader’s worldview says that preborn babies are nothing.  The Bible puts an enormous value on preborn children.  Not only are they created in the image of God, but their whole future lives are already seen in God’s eyes.

So who is trying to impose whose worldview on the rest of us?  She thinks that this only affects individual women facing an unwanted pregnancy.  But it doesn’t.  It’s a total devaluing of human life that can translate into, for example, violence toward other people, because we don’t see them as being in the image of God.  Life is disposable.   

Worldviews affect everything, from what should be taught in our public schools, the role of government and government spending, the propriety of private property, and the value of human life.  It’s hard to teach our kids the value of human life apart from religion. 

Science can’t tell us the value of a human life.  All it can say is that life is an accident of nature, and the only purpose to life is to reproduce.  Life is also about the survival of the fittest, and all the countries that have embraced atheism have killed millions of their own people because they didn’t fit into their scheme of things, and they have been the most intolerant of those people who did believe in God.

We have representative government, and people who have a religious worldview have as much right to representation as any one else.  If there are differences of opinion, then let’s talk about them and try to understand why other people think the way they do. 

 

Climate Change: cause and cure

The climate is the most serious problem in the world right now.  Even more serious than racism.  I think.  But I’m white, so I could be wrong.

The single most important cause of climate change is carbon dioxide.

The recommended solution for this is to upend the entire world’s economy and reduce most of the world to poverty and starvation. 

Meanwhile, nobody is talking about the simplest way to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

Plant trees.  Trees use carbon dioxide for food and release oxygen as waste.  What a deal!

If this is the crisis this is, then we cannot rely on just one means of tackling the problem: the elimination of fossil fuels.  We must do everything possible.

Like, plant a billion trees. 

I remember years ago when I was attending college in the city and was sent to a clinic in Evanston.  I got off the train, and immediately I was struck by the freshness of the air.  Trees make a significant, noticeable difference. 

My question is: if this is so serious, why is nobody, nobody, talking about doing this?

Our earth went through a mini-Ice Age from around 1000 A.D. to 1500 A.D.  When all that ice was melting, and everyone was experiencing record hot temperatures and rising sea levels, I wonder if people were worrying. 

 

Hate the Haters

Sometimes I think our society has gone completely stupid.  We are constantly looking for things that people have said that we can construe to be wrong or hateful, and then we try our best to publicly shame them and ruin their lives.

We bemoan the current hatred in our society, but then we don’t try to alleviate it.  We look ourselves for people to hate and destroy.

Recently it was reported that the Republican candidate for governor in Illinois compared abortion to the Holocaust 5 years ago, and for this he must be publicly shamed and denied his run for office.  This was considered front page news.

Again, as is done so often, we see a three second clip of something and act as if that is the entire story.

Bailey compared the Holocaust to abortion and thinks that abortion is worse, or something like that.  I have no doubt that what he was talking about was that we have already killed over 62 million preborn children so far, and we are rioting in the streets to make sure that we have the right to continue doing this without any constraints. 

We know the Holocaust was pure evil, and Bailey does too.  He didn’t mention the Holocaust in order to minimize it, but to associate with what he considers another evil.

We can see the pictures of the Holocaust and read the books.  A whole nation was intent on the destruction of another people entirely because of their ethnicity.

Abortion is different.  We don’t have pictures of all the aborted babies.  They don’t have names.  Their lives are considered of little value because they are small, and, in many cases, not even fully formed.

These killings happen one at a time.  Like the murders in Chicago that happen day in and day out don’t get the same attention as when somebody kills a bunch of people at the same time.

We routinely get a dozen murders every week in Chicago, but they are mostly killed one at a time, so they matter less.  Less outrage.  Less news.

Those of us who believe in the Bible know that God values human life before it is born.  He has called people into His service before they were born, and our entire lives are known to Him before we are born.  Forgive us for valuing what we believe God values.

But this letter is less about abortion as it is about our quest to demonize people at every opportunity.  We need people to be angry at, to vilify, to contrast with our own virtue, because we know all the right things to be angry about.      

We hate the haters, and somehow that is supposed to make society better.