Anabaptist cultural engagement

[HondurasKeiser]

Does anyone have some wisdom for Falco in regard to his initial question.

Live in the world but not of it. You don't have to embrace everything going on in your community to still be a part of it.

In our great grandparent's generation it was hemlines, dance halls and saloons. For my grandfather it was boys with long hair and girls with short hair (and pants). For my father it was the commercialization of Christmas and rock music. Today it is apparently drag queen story time at the local library and rainbow flags. In another generation it will be something new.

Those are all bad things and now we are stuck with the legacy of them:

- Alcoholism, drug addiction, and DUIs
- Fatherless children due to destruction of gender roles
- Christmas reduced to an orgy of consumer activity and buying plastic garbage polluting the planet

You seem to celebrate the destruction of the polity. I don’t.

I don't read Ken as celebrating these things or 'a destruction of the polity' as you put it. Rather, he is, in characteristic fashion, blasé and rather unconcerned with what he sees as different lifestyle choices that don't amount to much in the end. I think he's wrong of course and the notion of reaping and sowing is helpful here: As a culture we may engage in harmless enough activities e.g. taking our children to drag shows, gender-bending, or to Ken's example, raising the hemline. What we reap though is much less harmless, much more fraught with destruction - a deeper enslavement to sin and death.

[Ken]

Live in the world but not of it. You don't have to embrace everything going on in your community to still be a part of it.

In our great grandparent's generation it was hemlines, dance halls and saloons. For my grandfather it was boys with long hair and girls with short hair (and pants). For my father it was the commercialization of Christmas and rock music. Today it is apparently drag queen story time at the local library and rainbow flags. In another generation it will be something new.

Those are all bad things and now we are stuck with the legacy of them:

- Alcoholism, drug addiction, and DUIs
- Fatherless children due to destruction of gender roles
- Christmas reduced to an orgy of consumer activity and buying plastic garbage polluting the planet

You seem to celebrate the destruction of the polity. I don’t.

I don't read Ken as celebrating these things or 'a destruction of the polity' as you put it. Rather, he is, in characteristic fashion, blasé and rather unconcerned with what he sees as different lifestyle choices that don't amount to much in the end. I think he's wrong of course and the notion of reaping and sowing is helpful here: As a culture we may engage in harmless enough activities e.g. taking our children to drag shows, gender-bending, or to Ken's example, raising the hemline. What we reap though is much less harmless, much more fraught with destruction - a deeper enslavement to sin and death.

I'm not celebrating anything. I'm putting things into context.

Specifically with respect to drag queens doing story time at libraries? Here in Washington State I can find little evidence of it even happening outside of a couple of instances that were in the news in 2019, one in Vancouver and one in Spokane. Perhaps they do it in Seattle, I don't know but it doesn't make the news. Shrug. If it is something that you are horrified at, then the prospect of your children inadvertently coming face to face with it here in Washington State are vanishingly small. If you are fearful of going out in public or engaging in the community because there might be drag queens lurking about you can rest assured that there aren't. There might be other valid reasons to distance oneself from one's community, but fear of drag queens isn't one of them. I prefer to be concerned about real issues in my community not made-up culture war issues coming from out-of-state. And writing laws against it as Honduraskeiser suggests is probably the surest way to attract more of it.

And yes, I don't see fear of drag queens in 2022 as being anything really different from previous generation's outrage at hair styles and dress. I still remember walking around the Belleville Sale Barn (market) as a kid with my grandfather one summer in the early 1970s to a constant stream of commentary about the horror of seeing men with long hair and women with short hair and wearing pants/shorts. I'm not sure his concerns from 50 years ago were any less Biblical or valid than those today who are concerned about drag queens and so forth. I remember sitting through various Sunday afternoon family dinners in which he endlessly lectured my female cousins about cutting their hair and wearing pants citing chapter and verse from his well-worn KJV Bible. Probably the same exact verses used to preach against drag queens. His grandfather probably lectured the girls of 1900 about the immodesty of skirts that showed their ankles. Or course us boys mostly got off the hook.

[HondurasKeiser]

Does anyone have some wisdom for Falco in regard to his initial question.

Jake Meador, editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and no one's idea of a 'Christian Nationalist, has some thoughts on what to do if something like what happened to his friend recently, befalls you:

Suppose you find yourself in a situation like the one facing one of my friends in their blue state context:

Your 7th grader in the local public school walks into her homeroom and is shown a video about “gender reassignment” that includes footage of a penis being cut off and “made into a vagina.”

Our response to this needs to be layered:
1.If possible, get your kid out of that school.
2.Use what political levers you can to try and challenge school curriculums that teach these things.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
5. Pray

[Ken]

Jake Meador, editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and no one's idea of a 'Christian Nationalist, has some thoughts on what to do if something like what happened to his friend recently, befalls you:

Suppose you find yourself in a situation like the one facing one of my friends in their blue state context:

Your 7th grader in the local public school walks into her homeroom and is shown a video about “gender reassignment” that includes footage of a penis being cut off and “made into a vagina.”

Seriously? Is this like the "friend" who breathlessly reported litterboxes for 'furries" in local schools that turned out to be made-up Facebook nonsense?

Which state, school district, school etc. shows graphic videos of sex reassignment surgery as part of their 7th grade health curriculum?

[RZehr]

Does anyone have some wisdom for Falco in regard to his initial question.

Jake Meador, editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and no one's idea of a 'Christian Nationalist, has some thoughts on what to do if something like what happened to his friend recently, befalls you:

Suppose you find yourself in a situation like the one facing one of my friends in their blue state context:

Your 7th grader in the local public school walks into her homeroom and is shown a video about “gender reassignment” that includes footage of a penis being cut off and “made into a vagina.”

Our response to this needs to be layered:
1.If possible, get your kid out of that school.
2.Use what political levers you can to try and challenge school curriculums that teach these things.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
5. Pray

Or better yet:
1. Pray.
2. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. If possible, get your kid out of that school.
5.

[HondurasKeiser]

Jake Meador, editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and no one's idea of a 'Christian Nationalist, has some thoughts on what to do if something like what happened to his friend recently, befalls you:

Suppose you find yourself in a situation like the one facing one of my friends in their blue state context:

Your 7th grader in the local public school walks into her homeroom and is shown a video about “gender reassignment” that includes footage of a penis being cut off and “made into a vagina.”

Seriously? Is this like the "friend" who breathlessly reported litterboxes for 'furries" in local schools that turned out to be made-up Facebook nonsense?

Which state, school district, school etc. shows graphic videos of sex reassignment surgery as part of their 7th grade health curriculum?

If you want to call Jake Meador a liar just say so, though I’ve never read him to be anything but measured, balanced and honest. Just because it’s hard for you to believe or you can’t imagine something like this happening except for in the fever dreams of right-wing nuts; doesn’t mean it’s not true. You’re whole, ‘if I can’t see it, it isn’t happening’ schtick is getting a bit tiresome. I’m old enough to remember when you told us all emphatically that gender reassignment therapies weren’t being performed on minors because…that’s just absurd. That rant hasn’t aged well.

[ohio jones]

Each state in the country has its entire health curriculum and standards online. My state's health curriculum standards are here: https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/l ... -materials

Did someone say that this incident was part of the health curriculum?

[HondurasKeiser]

Seriously? Is this like the "friend" who breathlessly reported litterboxes for 'furries" in local schools that turned out to be made-up Facebook nonsense?

Which state, school district, school etc. shows graphic videos of sex reassignment surgery as part of their 7th grade health curriculum?

If you want to call Jake Meador a liar just say so, though I’ve never read him to be anything but measured, balanced and honest. Just because it’s hard for you to believe or you can’t imagine something like this happening except for in the fever dreams of right-wing nuts; doesn’t mean it’s not true. You’re whole, ‘if I can’t see it, it isn’t happening’ schtick is getting a bit tiresome. I’m old enough to remember when you told us all emphatically that gender reassignment therapies weren’t being performed on minors because…that’s just absurd. That rant hasn’t aged well.

I know nothing of Jake Meador. I'm saying if this is actually happening there should be some evidence of it somewhere. So it sounds like an apocryphal tale he made up to make a point. Each state in the country has its entire health curriculum and standards online. My state's health curriculum standards are here: https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/l ... -materials I expect here in my community, if any teacher chose to show graphic sex reassignment surgery videos to 7th graders they would be fired that same day. Of course it is impossible to prove a negative so is it possible that some random teacher somewhere in the country pulled some graphic video off YouTube and showed it in class? Sure. But someone making that sort of defamatory claim in public should have the goods to back it up if they want to be taken seriously.

I don't know what conversation you are referring to where I said sex reassignment surgeries were never being performed on minors. The only conversation I recall is pushing back on Josh's absurd claim that it was happening to 13 year olds IN SCHOOLS without the knowledge or consent of parents, or something to that effect. Details matter.

The article was written with the title: "Alternatives to Culture War". It occurs to me that using the example that he did in an apocryphal sense would exacerbate culture war tensions and inflame passions and run counter to the stated purpose of his argument. I took his claims at face-value, without need for a link to a closed-circuit camera of the classroom in question, because as I stated before I've always found him to be balanced, honest and fair and a writer that tries to put the brakes on culture-warring and political polarization. What's more, given what I see of actual photos, videos and transcripts from classrooms, individual teachers and school board sessions and given the anecdotal evidence of what I am told from teacher friends in the U.S.; Meador's claim maps perfectly with the current zeitgeist of schools around the country deconstructing gender in the classroom and exploring sexuality. Perhaps you don't see it in your school and community, and perhaps you've taken the right approach by simply filtering all of that stuff out of your internet consumption. Perhaps I should too. Nevertheless, stuff like what Meador claims is far more prevalent in schools around the country than what you're willing to concede. This isn't fake news or culture-warring or conspiracy theories; it's happening, it's coordinated and it's evil. Meador, in his mild-mannered way, is attempting to offer a kind of 'third way' on how to navigate such a situation if and when it befalls us as parents.

[HondurasKeiser]

Each state in the country has its entire health curriculum and standards online. My state's health curriculum standards are here: https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/l ... -materials

Did someone say that this incident was part of the health curriculum?

Additionally, we all know that teachers and schools and districts have a lot of freedom within the proscribed state-curriculum to teach what it is that they want. I'm sure most of us had teachers with axes to grind that had little or nothing to do with the stated state-curriculum.

[HondurasKeiser]

Does anyone have some wisdom for Falco in regard to his initial question.

Jake Meador, editor at Mere Orthodoxy, and no one's idea of a 'Christian Nationalist, has some thoughts on what to do if something like what happened to his friend recently, befalls you:

Suppose you find yourself in a situation like the one facing one of my friends in their blue state context:

Your 7th grader in the local public school walks into her homeroom and is shown a video about “gender reassignment” that includes footage of a penis being cut off and “made into a vagina.”

Our response to this needs to be layered:
1.If possible, get your kid out of that school.
2.Use what political levers you can to try and challenge school curriculums that teach these things.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
5. Pray

Or better yet:
1. Pray.
2. Act like Christians in our personal interactions with everyone.
3. Don’t lie about the schools, teachers, or administrators.
4. If possible, get your kid out of that school.
5.

I'm curious about your rejection of "using political levers" - is there something wrong with attending asking a school board to review/change the curriculum, for example?