Another example of right wing evil

That's one of the most heartbreaking and repulsive stories I've ever heard.

We in CA were next....for a little while.We're working on getting it back. Stupid Prop h8.

I know the racial demographics are pretty strong, but general public opinion has been slowly but surely swaying in the right direction. More and more people are seeing that legalizing gay marriage really doesn't have any effect whatsoever on anyone else; nuclear families don't remain stable any more or less frequently when you legalize gay marriage, people don't suddenly turn gay, and the world in general does not actually end.It's hard to argue against that. Enough states have recognized gay marriage that, if the bigots were in any way right, we would have seen some of their predicted effects, and we simply don't. Instead, we see more families, more marriages, and that's about it. Just like what the equality advocates have been saying for years.Even people who disapprove of homosexuality can't try to sway others the way they did in the Prop h8 campaign, claiming vague "threats" to "normal" marriage. You can't run a campaign on "protecting marriage" any more when it's blatantly obvious in multiple other states that there's simply no enemy to defend marriage from.

Surely you comprehend the difference between legality and morality, the difference between whether an act is legally permissible and whether an act is morally acceptable.This thread is about morality, not about legality.

Well, just to quote a bit from the OP: Barring suicide counseling for gay kids on the sole basis of their sexual orientation is absolutely evil. Imagine an identical situation where race or religion replaced homosexuality; would it be ethical to provide counseling for whites or Christians, but refuse those same services to blacks or Jews on the sole basis of their race or religion, simply because the counselor was barred from mentioning nonwhite races or non-Christian religions?Of course not. And so this, too, is morally reprehensible. You can't provide a service and then deny it to a single subset of the population just because their sexual orientation is different. It's exactly the same as providing a drinking fountain and denying its use only to blacks because their skin color is different, and it's morally wrong for the same reasons. Imagine if all literature having any mention of Christianity or Hispanics were to be thrown out.As it is, the Bible mentions homosexuality. There goes the Bible. Imagine if teachers were forbidden to mention Jews. That would make every History class a de facto class supporting the denial of the Holocaust. Forbidding teachers from mentioning that, along with the Jews, the Nazis also murdered homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other "undesirables" during the Holocaust denies the crimes committed against those victims; it implies that their murders were not really wrong, or somehow counted less.That is absolutely morally wrong.Just think about it for five minutes, Artemis, and insert some other class of citizens in place of "homosexuality." Would a law banning all mention of the female gender (not the male, but only the female gender) in public schools be morally acceptable to you? What about a law that banned only mention of blacks? Jews? Christians? Native Americans?Gays have been fighting a civil rights war for decades, every bit as important and deserving of recognition as the racial civil rights movement. Gay people are every bit as much people as any other subset of the population. Mandating by law that teachers must pretend that they simply don't exist, have never struggled, etc is nothing at all more than a giant "fuck you, fags" on the part of the despicable representatives who authored and supported this bill.

I thought the "witchcraft" bit was rather telling.Freedom of religion is protected under the Constitution. That includes "witchcraft." If a child wants to investigate "witchcraft," or Christianity, or Judaism, or Atheism, or Wicca, or Satanism, or anything else regarding their religious beliefs or the lack thereof, they should be allowed to do so.Yet the good Senator clearly disagrees.I think it's very clear that the Senator sponsors this bill because it bars teachers from teaching things that he personally disapproves of, even if there is no real state interest in adding such an additional restriction.He claims that "teachers are telling us they're doing this already" is no different whatsoever than McCarthy holding up his "list of Communists." It's bullshit. He's presenting vague references to nonspecific cumulative anecdotes and treating them like they're actually relevant data. We have no way of seeing how frequently K-8 teachers reference homosexuality and in what context. We don't even have any way of verifying the Senator's anecdotes because he only vaguely refers to "teachers" who "tell him" things, without names or anything specific at all.The best "evidence" he brought up involved an anecdote about a contracted Planned Parenthood employee who taught sex education to 10th graders and mentioned that the anus is an erogenous zone (hint - it is, and that's just as relevant to heterosexuals as homosexuals, as just about anyone with a brain and genitalia knows). Since he was teaching to 10th graders, this law wouldn't have covered him anyway.The whole law is absurd.