personal political

teddy bear

Many schools have a soft toy who gets taken home in turn by the kindergarten kids ... but this teddy in Sudan has created a potentially dangerous situation for a naive teacher.

7/7

It's 7/7 and I'm in London, where there are various remembrances going on. Today I'm going down to visit a friend in furthest south London (I'm in the north) and planning to take the long journey by bus rather than go on the Tube. Not rational, but then again, suicide bombing and war is highly irrational too.

I'm using Safari on a friend's computer and it doesn't allow me to do hyperlinks in Typepad (which is why I have Firefox at home). So here's a URL which you'll have to copy and paste to read some thoughts about the meanings of 7/7.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict/war_threads_3713.jsp

transnational islam?

Is there really a global jihad, as we are endlessly told there is?

Fred Halliday, an academic authority on the middle east, has an interesting short essay which looks at the competing claims of nationalism, religion and transmationalism in Islamicism.

end-time

Grist, an online environmental magazine, carried an article back in October 2004 about how right wing Christian fundamentalists, believers in an End-Time (the second coming, the apocalypse, the Rapture etc), could be the death of us all because of their nonchalance about environmental destruction. (Plagues? Pestilence? Tsunamis? Bring 'em on.)

It elicited a flood of mail from what seem to be mostly Christian readers.

catholic school/kids of gays

A Catholic school in California has been specifically targeted by a conservative group for enrolling the twin sons of two gay men into its kindergarten.

Randy Thomasson, of the Campaign for Children and Families said, "If this Catholic school allows these two boys in, when the boys start talking about their two daddies in the classroom, will the boys be told to stop talking that way? They should."

This is not that far removed from the sentiments of those who criticised Play School last year for showing a segment in which a girl mentions her 'two mums'.

One of my deepest fears is that my son will be made to feel (or told directly) that he should not mention his family to other children. That he will be made to feel that he should be ashamed of us - and therefore ashamed of himself, in some way.

According to Thomasson (who sounds like a nasty piece of work), children raised in homosexual households "become little homosexual voice boxes." They are emotionally weak in the first place, he said, but then are mentally exploited and "led down a road of false stability and false family values."

[What exactly is 'false stability'?]

I know of one teenage boy with two mothers who goes to a Catholic school here (I'm sure there are many more). As far as I know, his parents are not out to the school. I would find that an intolerably compromising position, both for me and my child.

There's no way I'd send my son to a Catholic school - for the obvious reason that we're not religious, but also because there is no way I could subject him to even the potential for this kind of moral fundamentalism, which seems to be getting an increasing grip on the Catholic church in the USA and here, under George Pell.

I know there are many wonderful teachers and families in the Catholic system (including the three teens we spent our Christmas break with).

But I'm glad to be in the state system, where, at least for now, I am a citizen whose child is guaranteed a good and non-discriminatory education.

I hope these twin boys and their dads stay protected from the attacks by their fellow families at the school.