Wednesday, June 20, 2007

"You Should Lose the Assumption that Your Child Will be Born Heterosexual"

You wouldn't want to be guilty of 'heterosexism...'

From "Queer in the Crib" by Julia Reischel, posted 6/19/07 at VillageVoice.com

But we don't have to rely on the gay stereotypes to find gay behavior in kids. Some young children actually call themselves gay or announce that they're going to marry another child of the same gender. Go to any playground and ask around, and you'll be amazed at what parents will say is coming out of their kids' mouths.

"When I took my kids to the science museum to learn about birthing, my daughter, who was five at the time, decided that she would marry another girl and let her have the baby," says one mother at a playground in Boston. ("Oh, how cute!" exclaimed another mother nearby.) "My son has a very close friend," says the mother of a five-year-old boy. "He calls him his 'godbrother' and he does want to marry him. It's just kind of like that's what you do."

That's no surprise to Elaine Winter, principal of the lower school at the Little Red School House in Manhattan. "There absolutely is dramatic play in early childhood," she reports. "They'll say, 'This can be a house with two mommies,' because that's the book we read yesterday, or that's what Susie's family is like."

Inevitably, some of those kids are more serious about the lesbian role-playing than others. Whether they're saying they're gay or just embodying elements of a gay sensibility, kids who seem so queer so young thoroughly unnerve parents and educators from every walk of life. Parents come to the LGBT Community Center worried about their kids' sissy behavior. Others fret that they've "gayed" their own children.

Winter, the Little Red principal, is reluctant to talk about whether her kindergartners might be gay. "I would never make a presumption like that," she says. "What a child does at four may be different from what a child does at six." This is coming from one of the most progressive educators in New York, the head of a school that actively supports LGBT-headed families, encourages its youngest children to explore nontraditional gender roles, and has a float in the Pride Parade.

...Without that hope of a happy ending, all kids, gay or not, will be worse off. Which is why Allan Acevedo, the Point scholar who's only a few years out of puberty himself, thinks that adults should just get over it.

"You should lose the assumption that your child will be born heterosexual," says Acevedo. "If you're having children and you're not allowing the discussion of gayness, you're not allowing the option to exist."

Exactly Mr. Acevedo...If the option exists it is only logical to assume that, many, many more children will choose it.

Homosexual behavior is ultimately self-destructive. Even if gay activists eventually manage to silence every last one of us who are willing to speak that truth, that fact will remain. Homosexual behavior is physically, emotionally and spiritually devastating. It is a crime of the first order to assign a child to that fate - even if there IS a genetic predisposition toward it...(something the science does NOT yet support)

Read the entire article.

Note: the photograph that accompanies this article is a child dressed in 'leather gear.' Are they suggesting that babies are born sado-masochists???????