Derail from Planned Parenthood video thread

[Sparko]

I think he meant "kowtowing"

[Roy]

I think he meant "kowtowing"

So do I. Is it a moo point?

[Mountain Man]

Cow-towing

[Starlight]

The Catholic Church also consistently holds that anyone who can't fulfill the conjugal act, can't be married... Anyone who willingly denies his wife or husband, the conjugal act, aren't married.

Well when you say "consistently", I'll grant you that in recent centuries, this has consistently been their position. In the first several centuries of Christianity, there was a lot of idealization of marriages where both spouses pledged celibacy.

Unless you think coitus interuptus as effective contraception, then its really only with the invention of the condom and the birth control pill, that effective contraception has been in the hands everyone.

Non-vaginal methods of sex have been around since the beginning of time. People have known how to give each other sexual pleasure in ways that didn't lead to children since forever. If you don't understand this, then I guess it shows the need for better sex-ed classes.

Sex between unmarried consensual adults, was not really something people were okay with until the sexual revolutions of the sixties and seventies.

Though I suppose those events never happened, or were really only entirely about something else, like knitting flower sweaters, fat hypocritical indian gurus, music, drugs and the Vietnam war?

You're being a bit myopic in your focus on the modern Western world... the Roman empire was, for the most part, extremely sexually liberal - more so than the modern West in some ways.

A sex-ed class is not the same thing as a geology class.

True. A sex-ed class is highly relevant to the subsequent lives of >99% of the children, while a geology class will be subsequently relevant to <1% of the children. Gee, I wonder which one it would be better to make compulsory...?

there's no good reason why parents of a different cultural persuasion shouldn't be allowed to have their children exempt from such classes.

The reason is simple: I have zero percent certainty that those parents will actually teach their children important and relevant facts on the subject. The parents are extremely highly likely to try to teach a certain amount of 'morality' on the subject and virtually zero factual information. This will lead to their children growing up and making extremely uneducated and uninformed sexual decisions that lead to unwanted pregnancies, STDs, subsequent abortions etc and cause stress, suffering and disease for themselves their families and society in general. These evils can be lessened or prevented by education.

The types of parents who want to take their children out of such classes, are the types who wrongly believe that such classes teach morality and not facts. People who believe this will believe it because when they think of "sex ed" they think of teaching morality, not facts. Hence when they teach sex ed to their own kids - if they do - then they will teach morality and not facts. Children taught by such parents will thus learn zero facts or skills. Thus, it is exactly the parents who try and opt their children out of sex ed who are least equipped themselves to teach it, since they themselves don't understand what it is that they are supposed to be teaching.

The only way you could possible argue otherwise if you don't consider homeschooling something that shouldn't be a legitimate option.

I would trust sufficiently dedicated homeschooling parents to teach maths a thousand times better than I would trust them to teach sex ed. While I want to see homeschooling banned in general, I think that if homeschooling was to be allowed, then the most important subject to actually have compulsory courses for would be sex ed. However, there are other priorities: the quality of sex ed in public schools really needs to be improved and standardized, and made compulsory, before we get around to making it compulsory for homeschooled children to attend a course not run by their parents.

The only way this could be done, is if you consider the state greater than the individual, and that the weight of society is on the state.

That sentence makes so many assumptions about different concepts that I simply don't share, that the sentence reads as pretty meaningless to me. I'm happy to tell you why each piece is wrong if you did want to break down your ideas into smaller chunks for me.

I'd say the family makes up the unit of society

Firstly, there's a disturbingly massive amount of social engineering and utopian social ideals in that sentence. Nobody seems to hold a candle to Christians when it comes to engaging in social engineering on a unimaginable scale... and then accusing others of wanting to do it for their usual bonus hypocrisy points.

Secondly, hiding behind the word "family" is nearly always an attempt to disenfranchise the majority of people. Within the family itself, the children and wife are generally expected to be subservient to the desires and will of the husband, who is the 'head' of the family. Equally, anyone in the public sphere that doesn't fit properly into the stereotype of belonging to a 'traditional family' gets disenfranchised or ostracized. For all practical purposes and in all practical ways, rhetoric about 'family' structures and basing society on 'family' ends up having the practical effect of funneling power, authority, and rights to heterosexually married adult males and away from the majority of other people. Your own explicit purpose of bringing up the family in this conversation is as justification for why the education of the child and desires of the child are irrelevant compared to the whims and will of the parents, so you are openly in favor of disenfranchising the child in order to give the parents more power. But children are not the only ones whose freedoms tends to get stripped away in 'family'-based social engineered 'utopias' - the voices of women, single men, those from broken families, gay people, etc all tend to also get silenced. I hope you can see that you are openly advocating the loss of freedom for some people and advocating giving their freedoms and choices to other people to make those choices for them.

and the state should be made on the consent of those it governs

That's generally what democracy is about. There is always the problem, of course, of minority dissent, and how to deal with that is always going to be an issue, since you never get complete consensus on any topic.

I have not said that children shouldn't be educated on these things, I have said that they should have the freedom to opt out of the sex-ed class in public schools. That's about it. I very much think that children should be educated on the facts of life. However there is no way to do this comprehensively, in a way satisfies the cultural values of everyone. To some 'alternative' families, are a moral evil. I'm all for teaching respect and kindness towards homosexual couples, and those values should be inherent to any Catholic sex-ed class. However, 'respect' is interpreted very differently. And I don't trust secular governments to distinguish between acknowledging that someone is doing something bad, but that one can treat that person kindly, and that this is something Catholic students are allowed to say.

I think it's hilarious that you think that schools would teach something like whether homosexuality is good or bad. When schools teach the topic of sexuality, the focus is on things like "what does the word 'gay' mean?" which is something many adult Christians I encounter simply don't know.

I did recently see a much more values-based school workshop/intervention on sexuality that seemed to have an anti-bullying theme, that the Ministry of Education here had done a review of. I assume some Christian parents would be horrified their children are encouraged not to bully gay kids at school, since some Christians appear to think bullying gay people at every opportunity is a core Christian teaching (I wish I lived in a world where this sentence could be sarcastic).

[Starlight]

I can't see any of the ignored posts for technical reasons, but I suspect I don't want to know what mr. infanticide-should-be-legal-up-to-3-months says.

I don't really understand why trolls like this post on forums. She's not even pretending to be adding value with her comments.

[mossrose]

I don't really understand why trolls like this post on forums. She's not even pretending to be adding value with her comments.

She adds far more value than you.

[Christianbookworm]

She adds far more value than you.

Who does he think is a troll?

[Sea of red]

I think he meant "kowtowing"

Thanks man. I was like "is it cowtowing, cow-towing, moo! moo! I'm a cow, or have nothing to do with cows?" and I wasn't going to use an online dictionary - I've seen the results of others doing that.

But in honor of the joke being on me, here are some cute cows.

loving-mother-cow-and-calf1.jpg

[Sea of red]

Who does he think is a troll?

You.

[mossrose]

Who does he think is a troll?

You, darlin'. Just keep ignoring him. His own trollishness is quite apparent.

[Christianbookworm]

Um... I don't know what he says. He's annoying, so I put him on ignore. He can ignore me if he wants also. I don't care either way. Just that I want some popcorn when Judgement day come for him and all fundy atheists and all prochoicers and all abusers. But I don't like popcorn...

[Starlight]

You, darlin'. Just keep ignoring him. His own trollishness is quite apparent.

I consider you a troll too. The way to not be a troll is to discuss the topic and not the people. Try adding to the discussion using thoughtful and logical and informed posts, rather than just insulting people.

Just that I want some popcorn when Judgement day come for him and all fundy atheists and all prochoicers and all abusers.

Cool, you hope to see others suffer. How stereotypically Christian.

[Irate Canadian]

I don't really understand why trolls like this post on forums. She's not even pretending to be adding value with her comments.

We could say the same about you. I'd rather carry on a conversation with other non-believers, just because of the same reasoning you think CBW is a troll.

On that note, you think CBW is a troll? hahahahahhahahahahahahahahahaha

Go visit 4chan and see how your definition of troll is wrong.

[Irate Canadian]

I consider you a troll too. The way to not be a troll is to discuss the topic and not the people. Try adding to the discussion using thoughtful and logical and informed posts, rather than just insulting people.

We've discussed this before if I'm not mistaken.

From Wikipedia(who I'm just using for now, because the matter regards the internet:

n Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,^[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response^[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion

[Christianbookworm]

We could say the same about you. I'd rather carry on a conversation with other non-believers, just because of the same reasoning you think CBW is a troll.

On that note, you think CBW is a troll? hahahahahhahahahahahahahahahaha

Go visit 4chan and see how your definition of troll is wrong.

Indeed. Though, maybe I should be impressed that I have annoyed StarDim! Thanks for the compliment! Remember star, I can't see what you say, cause you're on ignore!

I bet Starlight thinks anyone who does not agree with him is a troll. Kneel before Starlight!!!! Wait, wrong guy.