That will be the new mantra of students — giving tests has a secret agenda to brainwash you. Charles Van Zant, Republican wackadoodle from Florida, thinks standardized tests will turn children gay. This is all in response to the commission of a company to administer tests statewide.
These people that will now receive $220 million from the state of Florida, unless this is stopped, will promote double mindedness in state education, and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can. I’m sorry to report that to you. … I really hate to bring you that news, but you need to know.
He doesn’t know the half of it. I’m not gay, so my tests only inculcate atheism in all of my poor victims students. If I try harder, maybe I can get all of the students who take biology here to emerge as gay socialist godless abortionists, just by asking them questions about mitochondria or recombination or Sonic Hedgehog.
But the esteemed legislator does ask everyone to look at the website for the testing company, AIR, so I did. I’m not much of a fan of standardized testing — I think we lose sight of the individual when we develop a single instrument to measure — but a lot of what they say does makes sense, and I couldn’t find anything about their magic gayness-inducing tests. I did see stuff about standards of care for “many LGBT people [who] face harassment, violence, stigma, rejection, and discrimination in their families, schools, employment, and social settings”, or improving the well-being of LGBT youth or ending LGBT youth homelessness. I don’t see what there is to oppose in that, unless you think that LGBT kids should be treated violently, not be healthy, or not have a home.
We also have AIR’s official statement on the issue.
AIR’s Health and Social Development program develops knowledge and understanding about LGBT youth that takes account of their experiences and needs. AIR also enhances opportunities for the healthy development, well-being, and safety of LGBT children, youth, and their families by providing workforce training and technical assistance to service providers across systems addressing behavioral health, child welfare, education, juvenile justice, and homelessness.
Those all sound like desirable things. I guess it’s only if you’re a Republican that caring about children without reservations about their sexual orientation is considered wicked.
I can’t believe that phrase has been uttered by a human being in a developed country in this century. I kow it’s tragic, but that sentence is just absolutely hilarious.
All that insistence on using #2 pencils was just to tempt me into desiring anal sex!
Anagram of #2 pencils: penis 2 c#l. COINCIDENCE? I think NOT!!!!!
I think the idea is that if you provide any consideration specific to LGBT kids, it’s an acknowledgement that sexual minorities (1) are a real thing you can identify as, and not just a phase for everyone to make fun of until you get over it (2) morally neutral. If everyone else just agreed to pretend that LGBT kids didn’t exist, maybe they wouldn’t feel like it was so darned important not to lie about themselves, and then they wouldn’t be harassed or get kicked out of their houses in the first place. Ususally with a side of, “Well, if I’d tried that in high school, I would have gotten my ass kicked” — therefore, how dare kids today expect more respect and acceptance than Conservative Guy got back in the 60s. I don’t know.
And there’s a general conservative prickliness about any attempt to de-universalize all things white, straight, and cis. Holden Caufield is All Teenagers, and if you can’t see that, it’s because video games / feminists / the Gay Agenda / the internet has warped your brain. At least, that’s what I vaguely remember from when I was a conservative teenager.
attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can
That’s the Gay Army slogan. Gay all that you can gay.
Is it OK if I just go far enough to learn how to tastefully decorate my house?
But you can’t deny that Common Core will turn kids into !
” I guess it’s only if you’re a Republican that caring about children without reservations about their sexual orientation is considered wicked.”
You could have just stopped after children you know.
@6 moarscienceplz
I understand what you are trying to do there, but could you please not…? That stereotype is very, very silly…
Oh, God. I wonder whether last week’s algebra final turned any of my students gay. Or straight. How many lives have I blighted?!?
“… attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can…”
With no consideration of the possibility that most kids possibly can NOT (be gay). Another variation of the anti-gay marriage mantra. Allowing gays to marry does not mean every marriage must be gay, and _allowing_ kids to be gay does NOT mean every kid will be indoctrinated to being gay. Which leads me to a bigoted conclusion; that That is how Their minds work: “Education = Indoctrination”, “everything Allowed is Mandatory”. I know it is wrong to think that of Them, but I do see them falsely implying that (without saying so outright). Like a recent statement that He, “opposes Gay Marriage because M/F Marriage is so important to maintaining the population and blah blah blah.” Leading to the obvious question, “How is M-F marriage affected by M-M and F-F marriage?” and so on: “How does recognizing that gays have the same rights as hets reduce the hets’ rights?”
—
Florida! ;-(
I am 100% on board with this initiative.
That’s Sonic the Hedgehog, I’ll have you know!
Why would anyone want to turn everyone gay? Who supposedly profits from that? How? What?
I….can’t… http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h37/DunesVladHarkonnen/mindblown.gif
Can we just for a second recognize that it is the homophobes who want to force all the children to be straight? I’m not trying to control anyone else’s sexuality by insisting that as my kids grow up and their sexuality emerges, they not be bullied, vilified, denied basic rights or imprisoned if that sexuality does not please the bigots. Besides that, if it were that easy to change sexual orientation, why have the bigots failed to turn us all straight? They certainly pulled out all the stops trying to achieve that goal.
The mind, she boggles.
Sven #13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog
twas brillig @ 11:
Mind-boggling, innit? I just cannot figure out how these peoples’ minds work. I’m only judging by my own experience, and I’m assuming they’re doing the same: I quite literally couldn’t turn gay to save my life. I can only assume that the same is true (in reverse) of gay people.
These homophobes apparently feel that all it would take is a little “gay propaganda” to turn them! I think this says more about them than it does about gay people or the “gay agenda”.
Same here! I even tried it a couple times, and never turned gay. Maybe that made me “tolerant”, i.e. “too liberal” for the Repubs to bear.
IMO, Standardized tests do warp your brain, but not in the way that this rethuglican thinks.
I know a lot of gay people, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has taken tests! Checkmate, Gay Agenda!
You gotta hand it to Charles Van Zant, Republican wackadoodle from Florida, when it comes to entertainment value. That’s some weapons grade, off-the rails-black comedy he’s got going on there. He’s like a parody of himself.
Synaptic sludge so deep it’s hard to fathom.
Charles Van Zant, Republican wackadoodle from Florida, is a Baptist with eight unlucky children.
Michael
Scott
Charles, Jr.
Kimberly
Katie
Daniel
Joshua
Lydia
Actually, I apologize for my #16. I’m sure there are many gay people who have tried to turn straight quite frankly “to save their lives” as I put it. I didn’t mean to sound flippant about it.
All I meant was I just don’t remember this juncture where I sat down with my chin in one hand like Rodin’s Thinker and said to myself: “Self, I can choose to be attracted to women, or I can choose to be attracted to other men…let’s see…whatever shall I do?” It just seems as if these gay-bashers can remember such a decision point in their lives, and that puzzles me.
Well, my thought on this is that, as we know, very few people are actually “pure” straight or “pure” gay, and most people actually sit on a spectrum between extremes. Thus most people of think of themselves as “straight” will actually have a few “gay” tendencies, and may even find themselves attracted, from time to time, to a person of the same sex.
Now, it is probable that this applies to the gay-bashers as well as to everyone else. Making the assumption that their homophobia is most likely something they were taught since early childhood, there probably comes a time for many of them when they first realize/recognize some of these “gay tendencies” within themselves. And with that realization probably comes, for many of them, a period of shock and panic and perhaps even self-loathing, followed by a desperate attempt to force themselves to conform back to their “pure” heterosexual ideal. So they will remember a decision point in their lives where they forcibly rejected ALL the homosexual tendencies they recognized within themselves, even if it is only a tiny bit.
And they will think of that as choosing “not to be gay”.
one could only hope it would have such an impact.
The entire world could do with a few more cultural Marxists, frankly.
Amphiox @23
Yeah. I am a straight woman. I like men. But every now and then…
I’d do Lucy Liu in a heartbeat. A heartbeat. Seriously.
I mean, assuming she’d be interested.
Which she wouldn’t.
Damn it.
There are certainly some issues with the over-reliance on standardized testing, but that ain’t one of them…
Yeah, under it all, I keep hearing “you’ve take way the blacks and browns, I still need someone to look down upon, and if you take the GLBT away from me, I have nobody to look down upon, therefore I am doomed to be non-superior. WHAAAAAA.”
#15 chigau
Oh. Well…
Carry on, then.
The Gay Army jumps to conclusions, Randomfactor, where Charles Van Zant merely seeks to answer the question: To Gay, or not to Gay?
Zeno
Was it linear algebra?
Huh. They’re turning kids gay? Is that supposed to be a Bad Thing?
Otram #25 – Yes, that’s the female equivalent of the “David Bowie doesn’t count” calculation in the Kinsey Scale scoring.
And I really enjoyed the New Math when it first came out. (And really, I hadn’t intended that pun at all until I got to the end of the sentence and found it was unavoidably there.) And when I was in elementary school enough decades ago to have said that, they made us take the California Test and the New Jersey Test and some other standardized tests, but somehow I ended up straight and married anyway, though I didn’t end up having kids (unlike some of my unmarried neighbors and some of my gay coworkers.)
hetero —> math —> teh ghey
In my aerial robotics course , we have to grapple with homogeneous transformation matrices. I guess this is the kind of abomination the “wackadoodle from Florida” was referring to.
What about “homogenized” milk? It’s even used in ice cream—children’s ice cream, Mandrake!
@32 Billstewart
In my time that became “Ville Valo doesn’t count”. I see a pattern here….
@ #11 -“Education = Indoctrination” – It’s, as always, projection. Most of these folks do believe education should be indoctrination (hence the majority of the home-schooling movement). Since they are too close minded to believe others may think differently, it naturally follows that when others are edumacating their kids, they are also doing it to indoctrinate.
rereading my @11, the last line, in particular: I just gotta throw out a joke I recently saw somewhere. “There must be something about Floridated water that drives all the Floridians so crazy.” :-D
Seriously, statements like Van Zant’s just make me laugh instead of angry.
[ummm he’s no relation to Stevie Van Zant of the E Street Band, right Stevie is Van Zandt, right?]
shorter van zant:
Or Cary Elwes.
when I saw the name I hoped it would be a relative of this guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx4PsxUvMqY
Townes Van Zandt
but alas just another ignorant small minded nut case.
uncle frogy
#40 unclefrogy – I was actually hoping for Stevie Van Zandt
“will promote double mindedness”
I’m curious to hear the good Congressman from Florida’s definition of ‘double mindedness’
I guess I’m too old and inflexible to have a “it doesn’t count if it’s …” male icon. Perhaps if Doctor Who has a female incarnation….
Hey! I’m gay and my bestest skill in life ever is scoring high on standardized tests. There must be a correlation!
Although… I knew I was gay when I was 5, long before my first standardized test. Maybe the causation works the other way: standardized tests are deliberately designed to give a competitive edge to the ghey.
Has nothing to do with age.
That, on the other hand, is something to look forward to.
(For several reasons.)