Sunday 24 April 2016

Safe Schools

Just remember what those who oppose the Safe Schools program have said in public - then hastily scrubbed it, as it revealed too much about them. You'll find they quote one Dr Joseph Berger a lot. But not these revealing words of his.
I suggest, indeed, letting children who wish go to school in clothes of the opposite sex -- but not counseling other children to not tease them or hurt their feelings.
On the contrary, don't interfere, and let the other children ridicule the child who has lost that clear boundary between play-acting at home and the reality needs of the outside world. Maybe, in this way, the child will re-establish that necessary boundary.
It is a mistake for various interfering, ignorant, and biased busybodies to try to "counsel" the other children into accepting the abnormal. It is very healthy to be able to draw the line between what is healthy and what is sick.

1 comment:

Zosimus the Heathen said...

Sadly, I've encountered this sort of attitude in quite a few places online - one of the most notorious was the blog of some hardcore Catholic (one of those so extreme they apparently believe the Enlightenment was a terrible, terrible mistake) who once wrote a piece praising bullying as an invaluable means of "enforcing social norms", and advocating that LGBT folk in particular be subjected to it (indeed, he went so far as to say that violence against such individuals was not only justified, but positively laudable). So shocked was I by his drivellings on the subject that I promptly submitted them to the site "Fundies Say the Darndest Things", where they were not only reproduced, but also ended up on the list of the Top 100 most WTF?! submissions the site had ever received! (Funnily enough, the writer of the original piece ended up copping quite a bit of flak over it, and taking it down as a consequence, whining after he'd done so that all his critics had been, you guessed it, bullying him!)

I also remember this Australian conservative blogger I used to follow until the day I read him lament that men who dressed "effeminately" could now venture out in public without expecting to be automatically beaten to a bloody pulp by their peers. I never had too much time for him after that... (As it happens, while he used to come across as a halfway-reasonable individual, he appears to have since degenerated into total, gibbering crankdom, parroting every Far Right conspiracy theory, and singing the praises of a reactionary movement called "The Dark Enlightenment", which is just as ridiculous as it sounds! What's really scary about him is that he's apparently a GP in meatspace! I wonder how his patients would feel if they found out just what contempt he must secretly hold many of them in?)