I Can't Let It Go (*Updated)

*Thanks to H.Hertzberg

Last Friday night I was in a debate on The Total Tutor's radio show along with a fellow liberal and a couple conservatives. I want to talk about one of the conservatives, A Conservative Teacher, and what I see on his blog as well as on some other right-wing blogs. U.S. passport applications have substituted "Parent 1" and "Parent 2" for "mother" and "father" to the consternation of the religious right, and A Conservative Teacher:

People who voted for Obama and the Democrats did indeed vote for a change in America- they voted for a brave new world where it is 'old' to have a mother and father, and where it is an 'improvement' to instead have 'parent 1' and 'parent 2'. The attack on the traditional family continues, and rather than a family structure built as God intended with a mother and a father parenting children who honor them we are having the government (provided for by taxpayers like you) push for a family structure where parent 1 and parent 2 have children who call them impersonal names like parent 1 and parent 2.

Back in the late 1980's and early 1990's I ran a small summer day camp for a local temple. It was considered (and still is) one of the premier day camps in town. It was a temple camp, so it was affiliated with the congregation, but it was not a religious camp experience. Not at all, especially during my time there, as the Jewish atheist director.

Anyhoo, the applications had a space for the names of the parents--mother and father. The problem was that I knew of more than a couple gay families where there were two fathers or two mothers. I knew these people, liked them, respected them, and felt it was a rather silly thing to have an application where an assumption was made that was wrong--that a particular child had a mother and a father raising them.

So, without fanfare (or committee approval) I changed the wording on the application to Parent 1 and Parent 2. Nobody seemed to care--until one of the gay families came to me to say thank you for my sensitivity, to tell me it was unnecessary, but very much appreciated. That was the end of it, and it remains to this day, 20 years later.

A Conservative Teacher is clearly a right-wing religious fanatic, and he teaches children. Let's hope his intolerance doesn't seep into his instruction (you know it does).

In another post, and on a different topic, ConTeach (as I will now call him) is up in arms about Obama's lack of "natural grace, dignity, and energy" that apparently was on display during the Bush administration.

Is this guy for real?  He is a union buster.  He is a right-to-lifer.  He is intolerant.  He teaches children.