GOP CONGRESSMAN SEES THE LIGHT!!!

[Edi]

Atrocities said:
Oh I agree completely. The break down of the moral and ethical standard by prominently promoting anti-family values, gay sex, and free drug use has completely deteriorated the quality of our schools even more so than the lowering of educational standards so the stupid lazy kids can pass barely being able to read "see spot run" and add 2+2.

Hold on, are you saying what I think you're saying? That it's the godless, perverted, promiscuous gays who are behind the moral deterioration? Or did you just get your sentence structure completely mixed up? Because if it was not a mistake, you had better have an asbestos suit handy.

Promoting tolerance, giving kids an actual useful sex education (they will have sex anyway, so it is better if they know about contraception and condoms and use them instead of having unprotected sex that results in teen pregancy and helps spread STDs) and teaching them that gays are people just like everyone else sure as hell are not things that result in moral decline unless one's viewpoint is that of an uptight idiot with a rod up his arse. The thing is that if it does not result in objectively verifiable harm, then I do not see any grounds to call something bad even if it is not something one personally likes. If anything, kids who are taught tolerance and kindness and to treat others as normal even if they are not 100% conforming to the expectations of the majority will generally grow up to be far more ethical people than some of those so screeching about the destruction of moral values and social decay.

Drug use, that's a different thing entirely, and drugs generally have a lot of negative consequences, whether legal (e.g. alcohol and tobacco) or illegal (marijuana, heroin etc), so I'll leave that out. But from what I've seen, promoting free drug use is not something that is very widespread in the US.

Atrocities said:Thanks to the lax system we now have, more and more stupid kids are being coddled and allowed to pass onto the next grade when they shouldn't even be in the grade they are currently in.

That's a completely different issue. The problem there is that the bull**** educational theories that have gained prominence in the past 20 years all adamantly insist that nobody should ever reprimand kids for anything or fail them for anything because it'll damage their precious self-esteem. That's what's mainly responsible for the decline of education, and it's such a heap of manure that it makes the task of cleaning the stables of Augeias that was set to Heracles look like a pile of gnat droppings in comparison. But it's not the only reason. The whole US education system was designed the better part of 100 years ago to supply a substantially different workforce makeup with labor and it hasn't been changed much since. The system is broken on every level and a lot of societal factors go into it as well. The much touted No Child Left Behind law that Bush signed has only made things worse and has no redeeming qualities at all.

[Gandalf Parker]

I disagree that it is due to bull**** educational theories. Maybe in the 70's and early 80's. Now I think its more due to the fact that the schools have become assembly-lines. My son had classes that were larger than my entire graduating ceremony. Im not sure if any of his teachers even knew who he was.

Teachers cannot keep track of every kid and definetly have no desire to make next years classroom even more crowded by keeping anyone back. I blame it on the fact that we are not willing to pay for our kids educations. We dont have small enough classes (schools, classrooms, teachers), not paid well teachers, and they have cut back on nearly every program that isnt state-required.

[Edi]

As I said, Gandalf, it's one reason but not the only reason. According to a couple of American teachers I know, the whole system is broken down and nothing short of razing it to the ground and rebuilding it from scratch is really going to make much difference.

Underfunding, too big class size, teaching rote memorization instead of understanding and knowledge of the subject, incompetent teachers being protected by unions, NCLB, nncompetent administrators and teachers not being able to hold kids back for failing grades (for various reasons,one of which is the bull**** self-esteem argument) are all parts of the problem. This subject is so complex it needs its own thread, really. When I have a bit more time (at work right now), I'll look up a few good threads on SDnet and link those, because they have a far more accurate and indepth analysis of the situation.

[Atrocities]

Edi I was referring to the assembly held at the Bold High School a couple of weeks ago where the guest speakers promoted gay sex, masturbation, and drug use. I was not making a statement for or against gay parenting. A parent is a parent.

As to the Bolder HS issue, while many found the assembly to be a slap in the face of moral and ethical standards, many liberal parents felt that it was a ground breaking event and not only endorsed further similar assemblies, but congratulated the school for holding the first one. Tell me that you as a parent wouldn't be a bit miffed by some stranger telling your kid that s/he should engage in same sex relationships, do drugs, and masturbate? Correct me if I am wrong, but where does this fall into educating our children?

[Edi]

Ah, the confusion clears somewhat. Your post wasn't too clear on that point, so it lent itself to being misread.

As far as what I as a parent (if I was one) would be comfortable with:
Giving kids a good sex education. That does not mean telling them to engage in homosexual sex. Sex education means making sure that they know about the risks involved in unprotected sex, measures how to counter those risks and also about the emotional aspects related to it. With the stress being on "only when you feel you're ready for it". If the issue of homosexual relationships comes up, why would those be any worse than a normal one, because a straight person is not going to seek one out. Where masturbation is concerned, it is something that comes to humans naturally, so there is nothing wrong with that and it should not be labeled as something evil.

Drugs, that's a different issue altogether, as I said, and I have a fairly hardline stance about using drugs.

It's just that for some reason Americans have some completely unnatural need to roll drugs, sex education and homosexual relationships all into one as if they could not be dealt with separately, which is where one gets the kind of ridiculous strawmen and black/white fallacies that often crop up around this issue. If the speaker promoted all three, did he do so unconditionally? If he did not, his speech should be analyzed for its merits and demerits instead of dismissed entirely.

[Atrocities]

A very odd thing happened, A guy on the radio this morning, during a debate about the Boulder HS issue, commented that he believes that "Left wing liberals are todays anti-Christs."

He went on in some detail and actually made some sense from his point of view. That being a religious man and all.

This started to make me wonder, while I believe that there is far more good out there than evil, evil often prevails. But believe it or not, evil is in the eye of the beholder. One mans evil is another mans good and vise versa.

Some people believe that because "they" don't like something, that everyone else should be forced not to like it too. That belief, that our way is the best way, which is a fundamental edict of the liberal left philosophy, is something that I do not believe in and could never subscribe to. To me to force your beliefs onto others is an evil. However to educate others as to your beliefs and then allow them to make the choice for themselves as to whether or not they accept them, well that is good. Taking away a persons right to choose for themselves what they want to believe and then forcing them to accept it is an evil. Allowing a person to excerise their constitutional rights is a good, denying them the right to have rights is an evil.

Liberals love to to tell people what rights they should and shouldn't have. That is an evil. They want to re-write the constitution and do away with such things as the worthless second amendment, redefine and clarify the meaning of the first amendment, and devalue the worth of our Republic by demising that which makes us unique. That is an evil.

They want to break down the moral and ethical boundaries of our society by forcing parents out of the role of role model and giving that position to the Government. The government should teach our young how to behave, how to think, and what to do. This has been tried before and I need not say where because we all know the historical out come of many of those examples.

When I was growing up school was tough, my parents spanked me when I misbehaved, my friends and I could horse play, play cow boys and Indians, cops and robbers, and generally felt safe and happy. It was ok to go to Sunday school and play baseball. To walk to the store a mile away from home, and to ride in the openness of the back of my dads pick up truck.

Now school is anything but tough, well you can't hug your friends any more, unless your gay of course. Parents no longer have the right to enforce proper discipline upon their ill behaving young. Now they must give them a time out, negotiate with them, and try to get them to understand what they did wrong. Wanna guess how these kids turn out when they throw a temper tantrum because mommy won't buy them a new toy and all she can do is "talk" to them? We have all seen them in the stores and we have all thought the same thought.. don't deny it. Appropriate and measured discipline, including the reserved and aptly applied use of spanking will yield far better results than the politically correct handcuffed way that parents are now forced to employ. Spoiled undisciplined children often grow up to be rude and nasty adults that society then blames the parents for. Never mind the fact that they were bound by law not to discipline their child, it is still their fault that their kid grew up to become a drug using, anti-social, criminal.

Forget about horse playing or games like cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, that isn't politically correct any more and is generally frowned upon. In fact if you even make gun with your fingers at school, many school will call the police under their zero tolerance policy. (Yet they still allow kids to call fat kids fat, and dumb kids dumb....)

It is now become politically incorrect to send your child to Sunday school because the many liberals believe that it is the first step by the religious right to indoctrinate your child into their cult. You cannot even wish someone a merry Christmas now because it offends a few non christens. And look out, the ACLU will sue any school if they try to put on a Christmas or easter play. It is hard to deny that the word God has become the new dirty word in the liberal left vocabulary. To many of them, only dumb souther hicks and self righteous anti-womens right to choose zealots believe in God. No one should ever be embarrassed to say that they believe in God or subscribe to a religion of their choice.

Baseball has been replaced by TV, X-Box and playstation. God help us if we try to get our young to go outside and play. I mean how can a parent compete with the advertising onslaught of todays consumer driven world?

No parent in their right mind would let their kids walk a mile to the local store because of all the sicko's and child molesters out there. (Not to mention that the local store is no more than likely next door in what used to be the huge open hay field of farmer Jo.) What have we become that we now must fear our neighbors so? And where did all of these sick, creepy, child molesting, kidnapping SOB's come from? LA perhaps? And why must I hear about them each and every night on the news?

Heaven forbid if you get caught letting your kids ride in the back of your truck today. You'll end up with a one way ticket to jail and your kids will be on their way to "protective" foster care. Your face will be plastered all over the tattle tale news as the "evil parent" pervert of the day. You'll be divorced by your wife, be shunned by your neighbors, fired from your job, loose your home, go bankrupt, do jail if not prison time, loose all your rights, and only get to see your kids after you paid all your back child support and passed all of the state mandated child care classes. And then you'll only be able to see them on altering Sundays once every four months or so.

One mans evil is another mans good. Its all a matter of your point of view.

[Edi]

That's a completely distorted, head-buried-up-the-neck-in-rectum strawman of the politically liberal position. It's a completely delusional caricature mostly perpetrated by conservatives who have, if they are lucky, perhaps one working synapse.

The position of most liberals (aside from the second amendment, which I will exclude, it is a separate issue that follows a slightly different divide) is that unless you can show how something is objectively harmful, the government or the community has no business banning it by law or butting its nose in. This is a marked contrast to the position of many conservatives, especially religious conservatives, who seem to think that their values should be forced down everybody's throat, with the full force of the state if at all possible.

The idea that liberals want to remove parental responsibilities and turn them over to government is nothing but a fever dream. Do you have any idea of how much that would cost and how much damage it would do? Outlawing spanking is very different from taking parental rights away. Most proponents of spanking like the "good old days" excuse when it was okay to beat your kids black and blue, but it's not. That's assault, and because the target is a dependent and unable to do anything about it, it is especially heinous. There are other ways of disciplining kids than hitting them. If parents are so damned spineless that they give in to all of their kid's whims, the fault is with the parent, not the kid.

It is up to the parent to decide how to raise their kids mainly, and Sunday school is a perfectly acceptable part of that. So are other religious activities. It does not mean that such activities should be protected from criticism if there are objective flaws about them.

As for getting kids to go outside vs playing on the X-Box, well, the parent has the right to take the X-Box away and make the kid go outside and tough crap, the kid needs to deal with that. The parent is the one in control, not the kid, and it looks more and more like this whole rant of yours is nothing but a collection of conservative soundbites that are so ludicrously bizarre that whoever came up with them was ingesting seriously illegal mind-altering substances.

The US as a whole needs to grow a spine, your nation looks like a washed-out drunk beating its chest about how bad-*** it used to be and blaming everything on others instead of taking a long hard look in the mirror. Most European countries are seriously more liberal than America and we don't have these social problems to the degree that you do. How the hell do you explain that FACTUAL OBSERVATION?