1. Schools are setup to ‘desperately need’ federal funding.

2. Federal goverenment are ‘dependent’ on extremist and agitators.

Also, the ‘minority group’ being done ‘psychological harm’ by teaching sex-ed is a few religious extremist parents. And the Bush administration has ‘modified the curriculum’ to make them feel better. This, however, is not the point of my original jab.

You’re still being disengenuous (unless you truly believe this, in which case you’re just wrong) when you say that right-wing oponents of sex ed think that parents should teach their children the facts about sex ans safety rather than schools. The oponents of sex ed think that children shouldn’t get any (factual)sexual education at all. Furthermore, I think they would say that such an education is ‘psychologically damaging’ to their kids.

The point of my original jab is that right wingers have modified school curriculums to remove certain facts that they don’t want anyone’s kids to be exposed to, and you made no comment. Now left-wingers have modified school curriculums to remove certain facts they don’t want minority kids exposed to, and you’re outraged.

boose: ?? I wasn’t atlking secretly about muslims… I don’t know anything about the crusades, I thought the changes in the article were mostly to circumvent the holocaust to protect germans and jewish kids. But yeah, if you had clear evidence of recent events where teaching about the crusades led to physical violence against muslims, I’d say we should look into not teaching that stuff in public schools for awhile.

In the case of the t-shirt, we certainly have ample evidence of homophopbic speech and slogans leading to violence against gay students. So I’m not sure in what way you’re being a devil’s advocate; your example works perfectly as a thought experiment, it just isn’t empirically true.

It’s my fault. When you were defending the court’s ruling that preventing psychological harm justifies censorship I wrongly took that to mean you believe censorship is okay if it prevents psychological harm. Though you defended that position, you apparently didn’t believe it, which is fine as you were just playing devil’s advocate.

We agree people should be able to express speech that might be psychological harmful to other people.

As for this matter of the Bush administration and sexual education, I don’t know what you are talking about. If I had to guess, I suspect John Steward said something about Bush attempting to get sex education courses to teach abstinence as the only means of safe sex. A potential rationale for wanting abstinence only is because teenage sex could be psychologically harmful. To avoid such psychological harm schools should not teach young teenagers about sex.

The problem with this variant is that nobody on the right makes this argument. I sure as fuck don’t make this argument which is why your jab at me failed so miserably. Conservative reluctance towards sexual education is predicated on determining who gets to teach sexual mores to children. Teaching a child how to use a condom seems, from an educational value perspective, dramatically different than teaching the same child how to solve for x. This debate is not about psychological harm to children, but who gets the authority to teach sexual mores.

The story Diatribe linked to was all about psychological harm. Historical events were not being removed to insure that the proper authority was teaching sexual, or other types of mores, but rather to prevent psychological harm to minority children. Crucial to my analogy is understanding that in both either citizen rights or education curriculum were modified merely to protect a ‘minority’ group from ‘psychological harm’. I oppose compromising my rights or education in the name of protecting some minority group’s psychological well being, and apparently so do you Darwin.

steve- Just to start with, because it’s an old point we keep coming back to:
“But then again, I’m old fashion. I interpret the constitutional right to free speech to mean every single citizen is free to speak.”
Man come on, every time we talk about a free speech issue, you say you’re for free speech always for everyone, then I bring up a lot of situations where you’re aginst free speech (ie, where it hurts or endangers somebody), then you say ‘well yeah, I don’t mean free speech always for everyone’, then I say ok, then a few weeks later you say ‘I’m for free speech always for everyone.’ Seriously it’s getting old.

You’re against free speech when it actively endangers someone (yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, giving away military secrets), and if there was no reason to think that T-shirt wasn’t actively endangering gay students at the school, I would be against having it removed. But gay students get beat up all the time, if I remember correctly there had been violence at that school previously over gay issues, and we all remember a gay student who was tied to a fence and beaten to death with stones. You can pretend all you want that this is about someone’s feelings getting hurt, but it just means you’re ducking the issue- what was at stake was the threat of real, plausible, physical violence and harm. That being the case, there’s no connection between the T-shirt thing and this current situation.

“Those against sex education in the public schools don’t oppose it as a way to avoid hurting children but because they believe it’s not the place of public schools to teach such topics.”

You really think that? You honesly believe that the christian coalitions who try to get Sex-Ed removed from schools also distribute packets to parents with advice on how to demonstrate proper condom use to their children at home? Get real.

But your relevant point here is that people aren’t banning sex-ed because it makes the students uncomfortable, which is true. However, I’m surprised if you actually care about the motivation behind this government intervention more than about it’s effects.
The effects in both cases are the same- students are not being taught a certain piece of factual information. To me, this is miles away from censoring some teenager who puts their opinion on a T-shirt.

Hmmmmmm, i wonder which places of worship are putting forth charged versions of the holocaust and crusades?

Teachers are dropping controversial subjects such as the Holocaust and the Crusades from history lessons because they do not want to cause offence to children from certain races or religions, a report claims.

A lack of factual knowledge among some teachers, particularly in primary schools, is also leading to “shallow” lessons on emotive and difficult subjects, according to the study by the Historical Association.