A California school district recently adopted a new tolerance curriculum which includes a book, “And Tango makes Three”. The story — about gay penguins, is geared towards Kindergartners. The curriculum is being billed as age appropriate and claims to teach tolerance about human differences and helps to thwart bullying. The curriculum changes in every grade to correlate with grade level, eventually challenging what children may consider the “normal” family. Every few years the “Gay Penguin” debate resurfaces as parents and school administrators struggle for authority over whether this instruction can be mandated by school officials or if parents have the right to a) know about it and b) opt their children out of it if they deem the material to be inappropriate.

The additional controversy taking place in California is that parents aren’t able to opt their children out leaving parents to challenge the school district with threats of law suits.

According to World Net Daily, the parents claim the California school district is violating federal law, under the following regulations:

Under the regulation, parents must be notified and given an opportunity to opt-out, if the evaluation addresses topics such as:

* Political affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student’s parent;

* sex behavior or attitudes;

* religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or student’s parent, etc.

In the past, debates have centered around this “opt out” policy which allows parents the option — to have their children pulled out of controversial subjects, especially in earlier grade levels.

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Bitch.

Whore.

Scrawled in white shoe polish on my car in my high school parking lot were words, which nearly 20 years later still put knots in my stomach.

The note on my windshield continued the hateful tirade. I was a horrible person. I shouldn’t even bother to come to school again. No one liked me.

At the bottom of the letter were the names of my three closest friends.

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A couple of years ago we signed the girls up for karate lessons. Friends of ours had enrolled their son in Tae Kwon Do classes specifically so he would be able to defend himself against a physical threat which they believed would more than likely present itself at some point in his life. I remember thinking that he’d have to be very unlucky to get attacked, and that they were perhaps being a little paranoid. And yet you hear these stories of young men getting themselves into fights by walking past the wrong nightclub at the wrong time and getting in the way of the wrong guy coming out of the club, and you can understand why they might want their son to be able to fend off that kind of attention. Still, he’s only a kid, surely that was years away?

We signed our two girls up for karate because we would like them to be able to defend themselves against an attack, but mostly because we wanted them to have the confidence that comes from knowing you could defend yourself. I don’t know if it’s an urban myth, but there was a young girl, about 11 years old, who was grabbed from behind by a man who then tried to get her into the back of his car. It happened in broad daylight at the local shopping centre. The girl had been practicing Tae Kwon Do since she was about five years old. Apparently, that’s long enough to learn how to escape a man’s clutches, spin around, and kick him square in the face and render him unconscious. Apparently he started to come round as the police were handcuffing him.

Great story.

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