Thursday, October 7, 2010

Gays and Unwed Mothers Shouldn't Be in Education

According to Republican South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, gays and unwed mothers should not be allowed to teach this country's children.

This comes after a slew of widely publicized suicides by gay teens as a result of bullying.

The gay thing I can sort of but not really understand, considering the stereotypical Republican homophobia.  It's disgusting, but it's not that surprising, sadly.  But unwed mothers?  Seriously?

Naturally, it's the women who are the problem.  Women, who are loose, who engage in promiscuous, immoral, adulterous sex, who become pregnant, and who should be punished forever after on earth and in the afterlife for their horrific deed of copulation.  Not men, of course.  Unwed fathers are totally fine.  After all, it's normal for a guy to go around whoring himself out.  It's just not normal for women to let them.

Of course, this initiative would assume that we scrap the whole "you can not be fired or hired on the basis of gender" thing that also includes minor things like race and religion.  It's not like it was instituted for a reason, anyway.  A good reason, at least.  Let's just throw out all old legislation that people fought tooth and nail and sometimes to the death for, and everything will henceforth be awesome.

Naturally, this crap is totally revolting, but the much more frightening thing about that statement is that it implies that it doesn't matter whether a teacher is good or not, whether children actually get an education--what is far more important is that their precious little innocent, moral minds aren't endangered.  I have some slightly unpopular ideas about children, but I'm going to voice them, because it isn't likely that other people will and someone's got to present an additional side to an issue.

We learn morality.  We aren't born with it.  If we were, we would understand the concept of "stealing", which a baby clearly doesn't, or "honor your father and mother", which has to be learned after the toddler is taught that the word "no" is bad.  It's why children are so horrible to each other; it's why they steal from each other, from their parents, and from stores.  Children are often merciless; they have yet to come to terms with themselves and very few of them have room in their hearts for others on this planet.  They exclude each other, they think they're invincible, they care so little about the feelings of others, even their parents, that many will throw enormous tantrums in the middle of grocery stores when a parent refuses to buy them something sugary or something plastic and expensive.  They're messy.  They rip up flowers and experiment to see what they can tear apart.  Their unconditional love for their parents does not translate into a healthy kind of love that respects and acknowledges the parent's feelings; how many children do you know who take well to a new stepfather or stepmother?  In short, they are not perfect when they are young, and every aspect of whatever morality they grow into is one they have to learn from others.  They have to learn to control their own selfishness, which is really all morality is.  Suppress the good of the individual for the good of the individual and the group.

You've got to do something pretty drastic to corrupt children, like force them into being part of a savage army or to abuse them.  Everything else is just running with their own instincts of selfishness and survival.  Education is the only weapon we have to fight this animalistic side of ourselves that, if allowed unbridled freedom, will explode our race into chaos.

Children ask "why" all the time.  They want to know why they're supposed to do something or not to do something, and the answer "because I said so" is always considered stupid.  If you want to know why you shouldn't hit your sister, the best answer isn't "because it's naughty" but "because you could seriously hurt her here and here and she could resent you afterwards and start to hate you and you would constantly get into fights and make your sister stop loving you.  You could also keep hitting people and harming them and the police would put you in jail to keep you from hurting any more people, and to stop this before it starts, I as your parent would have to make you stop hitting her and if you will not learn this way, I will have to punish you to make you understand that hitting brings punishment."  It's long and involved, but it gets the idea across that the child's actions have results.

Or, later on, when the child is old enough to understand this, the idea that "you cannot just take whatever you want" can be thoroughly reinforced by history, with choice stories like the banishment of the Moors from Spain, the taking of the Alhambra, and the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition.  Or the snatching of the New World, the beginnings of slavery, and the constant deaths and wars against the Native Americans and their eventual cultural eradication, leaving us with a capitalistic culture that ruins and rapes our earth and causes us to breathe in polluted air, ruin our ozone layer, and kill off hundreds of species of animals.

Or the answer to "Why can't I jump off the roof" can be slightly more thorough than "You will hurt yourself" (because the automatic answer is "Why?"), because you can invoke physics, geometry, force of impact, and a bit of anatomy into describing how hard you will fall and what you will break, how badly it will hurt, and how long you will be out of commission.

Basically:  kids need education to bring them up as something other than animals.  And we are living in a society that thinks that the teacher's private life is more important than the good job he or she may or may not do?  Seriously?  You'd pass over an amazing teacher who is gay or a woman left alone with a child (or, heaven forbid, a single woman in her forties opting for in vitro fertilization) and you'd rather pick an absolute moron who couldn't tell his ears from his behind if he's heterosexual?  What kind of education would that give kids?  Hello, children, we care more about dominating your minds with our morals rather than to give you an actual foundation of learning that will help turn you into a complete human being!  School?  Pssssht.

It's like saying "Forget school; just send kids to Sunday school and they'll all be fine.  The Muslim kids will be fine, too.  And the Jewish kids, and the Hindu kids, and the Buddhists and Agnostics and atheists and Wiccans and who knows what else.  It'll all be AWESOME when we force them to sit and recite the Bible word for word.  And when we don't let them ask questions about it.  Let some other country win the Pulitzer Prizes and win all the wars.  Pretty soon, we'll be conquered by other nations who realize that we don't even care enough about learning to manufacture suitable defensive weapons!  Wheeeee!"

I foresee the burgeoning of the private school sector.  And the gradual death of American intelligence.


Let's all just listen to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, shall we?  They can spoon-feed us our daily dose of unquestioning idotic hatred of everything , and we will grow into resentful, angry animals.  Excellent.

0 comments: