SpeakSpeak News

AgapePress wants everyone to know that the Association of American Educators is urging extreme caution towards the “We Are Family” video.

According to Agape, a representative of the AAE “advises concerned parents to ask their principal if the video is being shown in their children’s school. In addition, ‘they can also ask whether a teacher guide or some document is going to be used along with the video. If so, parents have a right to look at those documents to see the types of issues that are going to be discussed. They can ask, if they like, [whether] the issues of homosexuality or sexual orientation are going to be brought up and if so, [parents] always have the right to exempt their son or daughter from those activities.’”

AgapePress points out that the AAE wants parents to be informed that the tolerance video “is an attempt by homosexual activists to indoctrinate young kids into acceptance of their destructive lifestyle.”

The Association of American Educators’ website includes links to several “character education” programs it endorses. These include the “Core Virtues” program (which intends to cultivate respect, courage, responsibility, and compassion, and “Lessons in Character” (promoting “respect for others, fairness, caring, and citizenship“).

Go figure.

From Free Press.

More from Market Watch.

Adam Theirer examines the issue in-depth.

At Progress and Freedom Foundation.

The California State Assembly has voted against legislation that would have prohibited viewing porn on in-car DVD screens visible to other motorists.

The bill would have outlawed the display of “ultimate sex acts, normal or perverted, actual, simulated, or
animated, whether between human beings, animals, or an animal and a human being” from a vehicle.

“We’ve had a number of people complain that stopping at a light they’ve seen sexual acts of the kind we don’t want to speak of displayed on the video screen in the car in front of them,'’ said Assemblyman John Benoit, R-Palm Desert (Riverside County).

He continues, “Try to explain to your 5-year-old what he just saw when he wonders, ‘Why was that man doing that to that woman?’ It’s a hard thing.'’

Ponch, John, and other California Highway Patrol experts agree that viewing-while-driving creates a dangerous distraction. They refused, however, to differentiate between XXX distractions and G-rated ones.

California’s Public Safety Committee quashed the bill on Tuesday.

via SF Chronicle.

Prior to the arrival of the video (and therefore, prior to viewing it) a handful of parents complained about the super-tolerant “We Are Family” video. So, one Colorado Springs school district decided not to show it in its 16 elementary schools.

“We just feel we have character ed programs already in place that address the same goals of tolerance and diversity,” said the district spokeswoman.

Colorado Springs Gazette

Ed Vitagliano, chief flak for the American Family Association, is trying to clarify the Right’s views on SpongeBob and other gay or not-gay cartoon characters.

First-Person: Setting the Record Straight on SpongeBob - Controversy Over Popular Cartoon Character Highlights Media Bias on ‘Gay’ Issue

Whatever regulation is enacted, the Dobsonites say, it won’t go far enough.

FoF’s CitizenLink.

In the African nation of Malawi, two journalists have been arrested for reporting on the Malawi president’s fear of ghosts.

They are being held apparently without charge.

From IFEX.

Analysis, with transcripts, of Stevens’ latest attempt to clean up culture.

From 3Martini.

Detroit Metro Times columnist Ric Bohy has a few choice words for sponge haters.

If you’re one of that supposed moral majority who blanches at even the thought of Sponge Bob recruiting impressionable young sponges into a homosexual lifestyle, let me calm your fears and settle the whole controversy: Sponges are hermaphrodites. Biologically, they can’t be gay. They can admire the ass on — and buy cosmopolitans for — any sponge they want, have twice the chances of going home with a cute poriferum, and choose whichever set of sex organs they need to keep it straight. Of course, if they strike out, they can always go home alone, fertilize their own eggs and produce little larvae with their own doubled chance of getting action on a Saturday night.

Read the rant.

An Indy op-ed: Those of us fighting censorship disguised as “indecency regulation” ought to climb off our “First Amendment high horse” and wave the white flag.

Whining media reject efforts to battle indecency in the Indy Star.