Same Sex Marriage Survey

[davidc4430]

a week out from result day and allready cracks apearing on the govt side,

Same-sex marriage: 'More than a dozen' conservatives prepare alternative bill to protect religious freedoms

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-09/conservatives-to-sponsor-alternative-same-sex-marriage-bill/91...

any chance a simple change to the law "IF" the survey says YES, looks doomed allready.

we were promised, if we allowed this stupid survey to be held and if it was a yes result then it would be a simple change to the wording of the act and that will be that.

oh but here come the 'well, how about we add this, and this, oh and we dont want that.....ect ect.

again i fully expect malcom to be a 'yes' man, saying yes to whatever the guys keeping him in the PMs chair say.

[not_for_sale2025]

If the Bill is passed, then maybe it might be helpful if some of the concerned religious parents attended a few lectures with their children. They may learn that gay people experience love, also care about others, are providers and work just like normal people. Wouldn't it be wonderful if just a few parents identified that being gay isn't just about sinful sex. We never know, they might even come to see them as being less abhorrent.

[springyzone]

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@lyndal1838 wrote:

Sorry, but it is a fact that if the Yes vote gets through there are going to be a lot of things taught in the schools that are very controversial.

Personally I think Yes is the right way to vote, but it does open a can of worms in the education system as well as in religions which find it abhorrent.

I think there are going to have to be a lot of safeguards in the Bill before it is introduced into Parliament or it will not get through, no matter what this postal vote indicates.

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I'm retired now but was a teacher in primary schools.

There were a lot of things coming down the pipeline that I wasn't as keen on.

You have to remember that teachers are the bottom of the food chain in education. Politicians are the top & every new govt wants to make changes. It all gets quite stressful at times, like the week we were all told we were to start teaching Indonesian in our classes the next week. The Indo teacher would take a lesson & we had to stay & watch & deliver 2 follow up lessons. Didn't matter that most of us couldn't speak a word of it at that stage.

That's how quick change can be & teachers are also exposed to new ideas. A lot are creative types & will adpot some of these, which isn't all bad, but all I am saying is those delivering the sex ed won't necessarily have much expertise or notice. They probably won't have any say over content.

The idea of terms such as boy or girl being banned from our schools is under discussion. It's not in yet, but the idea is out there.

In my opinion some sex ed is fine as long as it is age appropriate & to me, the ideal would be to have sessions after school, perhaps early evening, where parent/parents came along with their child. Kindergarten age is too young for any but the most basic information but if we can't use the terms boy/girl or male/female it's going to be a challenge.

[davidc4430]

maybe if handled properly, early teaching of the facts of their being more than boy/girl male/female in reality might help to avert homophobia. to explain to kids that all kinds of people make up this crazy world.

boys, girls, transgenders, lesbians, male gay, people who believe in a god, people who dont believe in god, and a lot of different mixes.

some who until recently shunned by mainstream society. some who still are (mentally afected). its still not uncommon to hear someone say 'i wouldnt want to live next door to a crazy person' so we get a situation where someone ends up locked up in a prison, not because they are a criminal but society doesnt want to face a challenge and help that person into the right place in his/her world.

[lyndal1838]

Springy I know how the education system can change in a heartbeat.......my grandmother was an infant's school teacher from the early 1900s till the 1960s.   She went to school in a little one teacher school in the "country" just outside Liverpool NSW and as the eldest student she used to help with the younger children.

She was good at it and the teacher suggested that she should do it as a job when she left school.  She worked well past the normal retiring age as the headmistress did not want her to retire....she kept asking her back every year as a "casual".

By the time she finally left the system she was saying it was time as she was not keen on the way the system was going.....and that was 50 years ago.

A friend of mine was a high school teacher in the 1970s to 90s....she was a Maths teacher who was often asked to teach English and History.  Luckily she had been good at both subjects as a student so she was not completely lost but heaven help the students if a teacher was thrown in at the deep end to teach Maths.

Indonesian is becoming very popular.....I used to belong to a club with a number of Indonesian Uni students in it and I picked up a smattering.  My eldest daughter did it at school and was rather good at it.  When my youngest granddaughter started learning it she thought she was being smart and walked into the room and greeted us in Indonesian.  She nearly fell over when her Aunt and Grandmother answered in Indonesian.

David, have you ever had any experience of young children?  Infants school children (usually between the ages of 4-8) cannot process much more than the basics of boy/girl or male/female.  As for religious education, that also needs to be age appropriate.  Why do you think they have Sunday School for the littlies rather than stick them in the ordinary services.

I know I am old (an old fashioned) but when I was young there was no s3x education in the schools until high school biology classes.

The schools organised lectures which were entirely voluntary.  The girls attended with their mothers and the boys with their fathers and no child could attend without their parent or guardian.  If a parent did not feel their child was ready for the lectures they just gave it a miss that year and went the following year.

It was probably not ideal but at least it put the ball in the parent's court as to how much they thought their child could cope with and they could continue the education at home.

[springyzone]

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@davidc4430 wrote:

maybe if handled properly, early teaching of the facts of their being more than boy/girl male/female in reality might help to avert homophobia. to explain to kids that all kinds of people make up this crazy world.

boys, girls, transgenders, lesbians, male gay, people who believe in a god, people who dont believe in god, and a lot of different mixes.

some who until recently shunned by mainstream society. some who still are (mentally afected). its still not uncommon to hear someone say 'i wouldnt want to live next door to a crazy person' so we get a situation where someone ends up locked up in a prison, not because they are a criminal but society doesnt want to face a challenge and help that person into the right place in his/her world.

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I may be old fashioned but like lyndal, I don't know that kindergarten is the place to be specifically teaching about transgenders or lesbians, gays etc, not unless a child  asked about a situation.

To me, a child that age doesn't need much in the way of 'sex' education as such, it would be more about body parts. Children that age are usually fairly egocentric, more interested in things that directly affect them.

There might be times when a child meets another child who is a member of a one parent household or a gay household or is in such a household & I don't see it requires anything much beyond a basic acknowledement.

It may seem fine to say-Yes, so & so has 2 mums (or 2 dads), but in 99% of the cases, this is in fact not biologically true and it is quite misleading when you think about it.

This is the thing with sex education as opposed to social ideologies. Sex education should be based on facts & I think sometimes people are in danger of totally confusing children.

When I was teaching, children would sometimes ask me a lot of broad questions about my own beliefs, such as is there a god, is there global warming etc

My usual answer (depending on what the question was) was that people had a lot of different opinions about it, eg some believed in God, some didn't & there were different religions, so maybe it would be a good thing to talk to their parents about. Or in the case of global warming, to read about & study to see what different people say.

I don't think (in state education anyway) that it is the teacher's place to push their own views on children. On controversial topics, better to just stick strictly with facts.

[springyzone]

PS I should add my classes were about 35% strict muslim background and about 35% strict Christian background and the rest were other religions or not strict anything, so it paid to tread carefully.

Doesn't mean we never spoke about religion, we did, but more along the lines of broad historical overview, main celebrations etc.

[this-one-time-at-bandcamp]

Sorry, but it is a fact that if the Yes vote gets through there are going to be a lot of things taught in the schools that are very controversial.

And you know this, how?  Please cite your "facts".

[lyndal1838]

Read the No vote brochures....they give you the facts of what will be taught in the schools and the Education department does not deny it.

The fact that some schools are already teaching the subjects indicates that it will spread anyway, no matter what the outcome of this vote is.

[tezza2844]

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@lyndal1838 wrote:

Read the No vote brochures....they give you the facts of what will be taught in the schools and the Education department does not deny it.

The fact that some schools are already teaching the subjects indicates that it will spread anyway, no matter what the outcome of this vote is.

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Reading the "facts" in their brochures is showing a bit naivety. In their ads on TV (which I said in a earlier post) , the word mostly absent from these messages is the word marriage. Of course they are going to promote their views right or wrong, they definitely won't give you any facts/information that will contradict their beliefs/propaganda. Already we have been showered with alternate facts about same sex marriage, but you keep forgetting the vote is about same sex marriage not about what the no voters think will occur if the yes vote wins this useless and non-binding plebiscite. Some of the claims about what will happen if  the yes vote gets up are astonishingly untrue eg children will not be allowed to called their parents mum or dad, that they will be forced to participate in same sex habits in kindergarten, or parents will lose the right to free speech and so it goes on  The only threat to free speech on racial sexual or religious speech in this country are our present defamation laws.

[lyndal1838]

And what you are also ignoring is the fact that some of these teaching are already out there in the schools and the Education authorities are not denying that it will be spreading to all schools.