Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Only if the discussion was *about* their sexual orientation though, right? And only if it's "instruction or material" provided by the school. So a spontaneous discussion among students would not be prohibited, and I think you're stretching the limits in terms of even mentioning gay people and their partners, etc.
Nope. Discusses orientation, not a discussion explicitly about their orientation.
You're splitting hairs Joph. Those are the same thing. It's about discussing sexual orientation, not mentioning that someone is gay. You get that you can do one without having a discussion about sexual orientation, right? In the same way you can mention what you had for dinner last night without "discussing cooking methodologies".
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And it never says "only if provided by the school"; while two student chatting in the hallway wouldn't be forbidden, a teacher answering a student's question about why Ellen Degeneres has a wife would absolutely be.
Lol! Didn't you just do this? I'll change the bolding in case that's your problem:
ONCE AGAIN, the TN law wrote:
Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, no public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.
It explicitly says that it must be provided by the school. It also explicitly limits this to "instruction or material" which the school provides. A spontaneous conversation doesn't count. Instruction means that there's some formal class instruction. That's what instruction is. A teacher answering a question is not "providing instruction". A planned lecture to discuss something *is* instruction.
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It's a very cut and dry banning and it's funny that you're stretching so hard to insist that it's not.
Only for those with a very poor grasp of grammar.
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You said the fault you had was it exempted heterosexual orientation which is why I asked the questions above.
And you failed to read the actual law apparently, because you got it wrong on both counts.
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There's no need to discuss someone's sexual orientation, regardless of what it is. Kids can noodle out that if you mention two men or two women as partners or spouses, that they are gay
So then there's certainly no harm in mentioning it either.
No, there isn't. And the law doesn't prohibit that either. It just says you can't mention it for the purpose of providing instruction or materials discussing sexual orientation. In the same way, that mentioning Washington and his wife isn't a discussion about heterosexual orientation, mentioning Ellen and her wife isn't a discussion about homosexual orientation. It only becomes so when you decide to start talking about **** or heterosexuality, what it means, what the differences are, how it affects people, etc.
I'll point out again that the obvious purpose of this law was to prevent the kind of curriculum mandates seen in the California law cropping up in Tennessee. I see nothing in that law which prohibits mention of gay people. It only prohibits directed instruction about their orientation. That's not the same thing. We don't automatically discuss what it is to be straight every time we mention a straight person, do we? Why then assume that you can't mention a gay person without a discussion about homosexuality?
