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Posted on 11/05/2002 5:44:44 AM PST by Lance Romance
Gay bias uproar puts school board on spot
By JEN SANSBURY
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
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Appeals Monday night on behalf of a popular black youth motivator -- and counterdemands to end harassment of gay students -- underscored DeKalb County schools' ongoing struggle with diversity.
Avondale High football legend Danny Buggs sat quietly in the audience at a school board work session at Avondale Middle School as eight speakers rose to defend him. It was the first public meeting since system officials suspended and reprimanded Buggs for making anti-gay religious remarks recently to a captive audience of about 500 male students at Stone Mountain High.
Kevin Oliveira, a former DeKalb teacher, said he has just finished a documentary film about Buggs called "Attitude of Gratitude." He called Buggs a "man of impeccable integrity" and criticized the condemnation of Buggs and the notion of keeping religion out of schools.
"Two women do not make a child. Two men do not make a child. . . . I'm talking straight biology," he said. "We can talk about Harry Potter and . . . Halloween, but we can't talk about the righteousness of God."
Buggs' supporters were followed by four speakers representing a coalition -- including the ACLU, Enlight Atlanta and the Anti-Defamation League -- that is asking the district to revisit its policy on bullying to address verbal as well as physical force and intimidation.
Audrey Galex, a Shamrock Middle and Oak Grove Elementary parent said the district gave Buggs a "bully pulpit."
"What are you going to do to enforce the harassment policy when it is not enforced when it comes to homophobia?" she asked district officials. "We need to enforce the code of conduct that you made me and my children sign."
Lakeside High teacher Nicole Wilson, who sponsors the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, said she has heard nothing from the superintendent or any board members in response to another recent case of discrimination against homosexuals.
Her club's posters for National Coming Out Day were torn off the walls at the school, although the ones taken down by the principal were hung back up within an hour.
"I think it's time for DeKalb County to make this a top priority for all of our students," Wilson said. "All of our students deserve defending and protecting."
Board Chairman Brad Bryant said he did not know what the district's response should be.
"We have got more work as a school district to try to figure out how to work with all of the different types of diversity we have in DeKalb," he said.
Buggs has worked for the district for 21 years, trying to keep youth out of trouble through motivational speeches and his program, the Winning Circle.
Chike Akua was among several speakers who said the district should be thanking Buggs, not punishing him, for his efforts, which also include taking students on college trips and visiting with incarcerated and homeless students.
"It did not seem he's received the amount of support from the county that is proportionate to what he's done," Akua said. "He is responsible for the transformation of literally thousands of young people in DeKalb County and throughout America."
Public schools are dead as far as education and maintaining traditional values are concerned.
If you love your child, take him or her out of these meat factories and put them into private schools where education is paramount!!!
Don't have the money, you say? Nonesense! Run your old jalopy until the wheels fall off....Cut your vacations.....Forget designer clothes....budget your everyday expenses. Millions of Americans are doing it...So can you.
Screw the government school system. Many public school teachers are functionally illiterate in their fields...the curriculum is totally PC...the hard sciences are essentially ignored...and there is no discipline in the classrooms.The existing public system exists totally and absolutely for the well-being of the teachers unions and their democratic party lackeys whom they support.
If you love your child, let the "un-natural" folks continue to take over the public school system....Work to re-build America on traditional values.
Good luck!
If homosexuality weren't "sinful" would it still be wrong?
If it would still be wrong, why do you use the word sinful, which automatically marginalizes all those who would support your cause on rational grounds but do not agree with your religion. Is the only reason you oppose murder because it is a sin?
It is almost impossible to talk rationally about the evils of homosexualtiy because the religious have turned it into a religious issue. It is fine for it to be a religious issue for the religious, but if that is the only grounds you have for opposing it, you have no grounds for opposing it politically. Of course, the real grounds are that it is a perversion of human nature and requires a mental assent to desire over reason to excuse what is self-destructive.
By turning the homosexual debate into a purely religious issue, the religious have done more to advance the homosexual agenda than anything the homosexuals have done.
Hank
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
Notice the media doesn't use the term "captive audience" when referring to Diversity assemblies.
This is of course simple fact, but has nothing to do with "gay rights". After all you don't have to make a child to have rights.
It's the God talk the "gays" object to, not that he did anything to limit their rights or even deliberately insult them. In short, he's an infidel to them.
Well, if God is out of the picture, then anything goes. There is no sin, therefore nothing is wrong, and that includes MURDER--since murder would only be criminal because the majority of people believe it is so, and will kill or imprison the murderer. It's simply brute-force at play.
In the end, "what if there is no sin" is answered by looking around you. The world we live in now, with the absolute collapse of societal morals, the family, and even simple civility, is what you get when you have a people who no longer believe in a higher power that decrees what is right and what is wrong.
BTW, I suggest it is you MORAL RELATIVISTS who have done most to advance the homosexual agenda. Saying "you who call homosexuality a sin" have done wrong is the very same as those peace-niks who say that the U.S. is "at fault" for the 9/11 attacks.
I will be patient with you, because I think you are excited. I never said it was wrong to call homosexuality a sin. I can read Romans 1 as well as you. There is no moral relativism in anything I said.
Please understand, I am not at all opposed to the religious grounds for rejecting homosexuality as a God condemned sinful practice.
What I am saying is, if we make the homosexuality issue strictly a religious issue, which it is not, you place into the hands of all those who want to promote homosexuality the right to claim that opposition to homosexuality is strictly a religious prejudice, which it is not. But never pointing out the very real objective reasons for condemning homosexuality and the homosexual agenda, and always only emphasizing your personal religious views acutally promotes the arguments of the pro-homosexual.
Hank
In this world, nothing is forgiven and every act and choice has a consequence, and it is impossible to violate the laws of nature and reality and get away with it. Only God forgives, not nature. Only God has the power to permit, what nature and men can never permit.
Hank
I eagerly look forward to what you have to say. This view has caused untold harm. Those who hold it never seem aware they have made values arbitrary, not objective.
Hank
I am by no means a religious person. I was not raised in in a religious household, was not indoctrinated into any creed. My closest association with religious "upbrining" would be four years of Jesuit High School, and I was already very much who and what I currently am by that point.
My faith can be best described as suspicious and skeptical agnosticism. I suspect there is something akin to what many call God, I am suspicious of any attempt to rationalize or "prove" God's existence or specific characteristics, and I flatly refuse to call "knowledge" that which is plainly a deeply-held but nonetheless unproveable belief in an undemonstrable assertion.
Despite all this, I am an extremely ethical person.
Yet, going by the venom which so often spews without check or let or thought from the lips and fingers of the "no God = anything goes" crowd, I MUST BE an immoral, unethical, savage beast prone to rapine and slaughter, who avoids personal responsibility, and leads an unswervingly self-serving life. These people feel free to unilaterally judge me and those like me, irrespective of all facts, testimony, and reasoned argument to the contrary. And they will consistently fail to see either that they are in error or that their judgements are quite insulting, let alone quite possibly blasphemous (something I will explore more thoroughly later, but which hinges on Job and a few little excerpts from the New Testament).
So, part one of the harm these people cause is very simple and incontrovertable: They irritate ME, and those many like me, who are rigidly ethical without resort to the trappings of faith, and in so doing weaken the cause of republican constitutionalism by sowing divisiveness through needless slander.
The usual suspects showed up.
Exactly! Catch h*ll for standing up for anything not aberrant! "I'm a Christian" T-shirts banned while "Gay Rights" T-shirts are OK. This is the grand lie of political correctness which is nothing more than a means to tear down the values of a great nation!
Where's the outrage? Are things going to have to become so bad that anarchy is the only course of action left? I sure hope not, but the pro-aberrant fools are sure making it tough for pro-accountability folks!
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