Public schools have to be welcoming to all (except to David Parker)

Lexington Minuteman ^ | November 3, 2005 | Edith Sandy

[tutstar]

ping a ling...

[Lizavetta]

Their child's walking out whenever the children of same-sex parents talk about their families would certainly humiliate those children and make them feel "different,"

But I thought diversity was GOOD. I'm so confused.

[Wuli]

Please forward to David and his lawyers.

What the schools are now doing is not teaching "tolerance". They are demanding that the children be made to believe what the school wants the children to believe. It is a demand for "acceptance".

Acceptance and tolerance are not the same thing.

Tolerance reflects behavior, not what you believe but how you act, or do not act, on your beliefs.

Acceptance requires that your thoughts conform to a belief or set of beliefs.

Tolerance can be taught, but acceptance can only come from honest individual choice or brainwashing.

We are a tolerant society. That does not mean that we agree with someone else's beliefs and no one has a legal or moral mandate to force you to accept someone else's beliefs.

Tolerance is best taught in education by example, not by lessons that preach commands that children, whose families have different beliefs, "accept" each others beliefs. No, tolerance is reflected in how people behave toward each other, not by government demand they accept each other.

Tolerance is not taught by forcing children to read books like "Heather Has Two Mommies". Tolerance is taught through the behavior of the teachers and administrators towards "Heather" and by the behavior toward "Heather" they demonstrate they expect from the other students.

Tolerance does not require any "education" that it is "O.K." for "Heather" to have "two mommies". Tolerance is taught by teachers behaving and expecting others to behave respectfully towards "Heather", without any children having to be brainwashed into "acceptance" that the beliefs of "Heathers" "two mommies" is good, or right, or O.K.

The educators are failing to recognize that the belief that it is O.K. for Heather to have two mommies is no different than the beliefs of those who disagree - it is a belief, a secular type of religious understanding and it has no more place, as a form of indoctrination with Children than would an attempt to teach that you must be Saved by Jesus, in a public school.

The key here is the difference between tolerance and acceptance and the very different requirements that those two concepts can, and cannot be allowed to be imposed through our education system.

[Seven Minute Maniac]

There IS something wrong with same sex marriages!