Is anybody really teaching 3rd graders that it's ok to be gay?
I would think that unnecessarily young.
It is a difficult situation, with no easy solution. I think that many gay men remember the time when they discovered they were gay. They remember fear, and hatred, and physical abuse, and self-loathing, and contempt, a pretty vicious emotional cocktail. They imagine what a difference it might have made to them if there had been someone there to tell them "you are human, there are others like you, and there is no reason that you cannot live a full and rewarding life". And they want to tell the other children "go easy on these people, they are no different from you, they hurt when hit, they have families, they are no threat to you".
An understandable objective, which can be reasonably argued to have entirely positive motivations. Unfortunately, there will always be parents who see it as an effort to steal their children away and make them gay.
My off-the-cuff reaction would be to conduct studies in as scientific a manner as possible, with the aim being to discern the age by which a majority of gay people came to realize that they were gay (I would guess early adolescence) and begin dealing with the subject then.
This will not please everyone; neither will anything else.
I believe that all sexual matters are ideally handled by parents. Unfortunately, huge numbers of parents have abdicated the role of sex educator, leaving it to be taken over by the peer group. The school is hardly an ideal venue for sex education, but it is better than the playground or the street corner.
|
