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Uncle Jay Should Move To Budapest

A western European expat loves raising his family in Hungary because his kids aren't propagandized by gender ideology
Screen Shot 2021-04-20 at 9.29.41 AM

In my initial exploring of my new city, Budapest, yesterday, I met a man from western Europe. We started talking, and when I told him who I was and what I was doing here, he said he once read an interview with me in one of the French papers. That was a pleasant surprise. He went on to say that he moved to Budapest because his wife is Hungarian, and given his profession, he could work from here too. He said he finds life here to be more agreeable than in the western European city from which they came.

“One great thing about living here,” he said, “is that you don’t have put up with these damn people teaching gender ideology to your kids.”

I hope he’s reading this blog this morning, because this Twitter thread, sent to me by a reader, is going to vindicate my Budapest interlocutor:

It goes on like this. Then:

Read it all. 

This is evil. This is simply flat-out evil, what they’re doing to these children in Ontario. And you know, of course, that it’s not just in Ontario.

Parents in liberal cities don’t have much of a chance. Back in the year 2000 — that’s right, twenty-one years ago — I wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard about something horrible going on in Massachusetts, and what happened to the parents — Brian Camenker and Scott Whiteman — who stood up to it. Excerpts:

Furthermore, Whiteman was called a “slanderer” by a member of the Board of Education, he says. “I knew I wasn’t lying. I knew I wasn’t making it up. I knew I wasn’t an alarmist.”

Frustrated by official indifference, Whiteman secretly took his tape recorder along to the 10th annual conference of the Boston chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, at Tufts University on March 25. GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”) is a national organization whose purpose is to train teachers and students and develop programs to, in the words of its Boston chapter leader, “challenge the anti-gay, hetero-centric culture that still prevails in our schools.”

The state-sanctioned conference, which was open to the public but attended chiefly by students, administrators, and teachers, undercut the official GLSEN line–that their work is aimed only at making schools safer by teaching tolerance and respect.

The event, backed by the state’s largest teachers’ union, included such workshops as “Ask the Transsexuals,” “Early Childhood Educators: How to Decide Whether to Come Out at Work or Not,” “The Struggles and Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School Curriculum” (with suggestions for including gay issues when teaching the Holocaust), “From Lesbos to Stonewall: Incorporating Sexuality into a World History Curriculum,” and “Creating a Safe and Inclusive Community in Elementary Schools,” in which the “Rationale for integrating glbt [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] issues in the early elementary years will be presented.”

Whiteman sat in on a “youth only, ages 14-21” workshop called “What They Didn’t Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class.” If “they” didn’t tell you about this stuff, it’s probably because “they” worried they’d be sent to jail.

The raucous session was led by Massachusetts Department of Education employees Margot Abels and Julie Netherland, and Michael Gaucher,an AIDS educator from the Massachusetts public health agency. Gaucher opened the session by asking the teens how they know whether or not they’ve had sex. Someone asked whether oral sex was really sex.

“If that’s not sex, then the number of times I’ve had sex has dramatically decreased, from a mountain to a valley, baby!” squealed Gaucher. He then coaxed a reluctant young participant to talk about which orifices need to be filled for sex to have occurred: “Don’t be shy, honey, you can do it.”

Later, the three adults took written questions from the kids. One inquired about “fisting,” a sex practice in which one inserts his hand and forearm into the rectum of his partner. The helpful and enthusiastic Gaucher demonstrated the proper hand position for this act. Abels described fisting as “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with,” and praised it for putting one “into an exploratory mode.”

Gaucher urged the teens to consult their “really hip” Gay/Straight Alliance adviser for hints on how to come on to a potential sex partner. The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together, and Gaucher told the kids that male ejaculate is rumored to taste “sweeter if people eat celery.” On and on like this the session went.

Camenker and Whiteman transcribed the tape and wrote a lengthy report for Massachusetts News, a conservative monthly. Then they announced that copies of the recorded sessions would be made available to state legislators and the local media. GLSEN threatened to sue them for violating Massachusetts’ wiretap laws and invading the privacy of the minors present at one workshop.

The tapes went out anyway and became a talk radio sensation. On May 19, state education chief David Driscoll canned Abels and Netherland and terminated Gaucher’s contract. But Driscoll also insisted that the controversial workshop was an aberration that shouldn’t be allowed to derail the entire program. Abels fumed to the press that the education department had known perfectly well what she had been doing for years and hadn’t cared until the tapes had surfaced. Camenker, ironically, agreed.

Then the Massachusetts legal system got involved, with the judge issuing an order forbidding the media from talking about it. Almost none of the media protested. Both Alan Dershowitz and Harvey Silverglate — two liberal, high-profile lawyers — told me on the record (their quotes are in the piece) that the law and the media in Boston have very different standards when it’s a liberal ox being gored.

Here’s more from the piece which, remember, was published over two decades ago. It was prescient:

GLSEN/Boston boasts the most advanced programs of its kind in the nation. As goes Massachusetts, in time, so may go the rest of America. Camenker and Whiteman are on the front lines of a battle likely to spread to school districts from coast to coast, as the powerful GLSEN organization, with sponsorship money from American Airlines, Dockers Khakis, and Kodak, presses its radical agenda under the innocent-sounding guise of “safety,” “human rights,” and “suicide prevention.”

“That money goes down a rathole to fund gay clubs in schools, and gay rallies and conferences,” fumes Camenker. “None of the people who get the money are legitimate suicide prevention groups. They’re all these gay groups.”

GLSEN will be holding its annual leadership training conference next month in San Francisco, to be preceded by a two-day workshop teaching students and educators how to push the gay agenda in local schools–even at the kindergarten level–as a human rights issue. Books available from the GLSEN website include Queering Elementary Education and Preventing Prejudice, a collection of elementary-school lesson plans built around themes such as “What Is a Boy/Girl!” and “Freedom to Marry.”

Schools’ surreptitiously introducing this material to students, says Whiteman, “puts kids at risk and puts parents completely out of the loop with the sexual identities of their children. The schools take this elitist attitude that they know best.”

The point of this activist drive, warns Camenker, is to desensitize children to gay sex at a very young age and counteract moral instruction to the contrary given by their parents and religious leaders. If you protest, he warns, be prepared to be stone-walled and sneered at by school officials, smeared in the press, and denounced as a hatemonger and a bigot by gay activists.

Yet what choice is left to parents but to fight? “We’re facing an incredible evil here. It chills you to the bone,” says Camenker, an Orthodox Jew brought closer to his faith by this struggle. “The only way we’re not going to get run over is if people wake up to what’s happening to our children.”

There is a straight — ahem — line from the lies that GLSEN and the State of Massachusetts told back then, and that the Boston legal and media culture abetted, and what is happening in Toronto today. My belief then, and my belief today, is that bullying should NEVER be tolerated in schools. That gay kids, and all kids, must be protected from bullies, with no exceptions. That everyone has the right to be treated with respect. But what GLSEN was doing, and continues to do, is to use the just and necessary cause of anti-bullying to smuggle in radical ideology to lessons for children.

By way of contrast, here’s news from Hungary from 2018:

A quote:

“The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women,” Orban’s chief of staff said in August. “They lead their lives the way they think best, but beyond this, the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.”

Last May, Hungary’s parliament voted to define male and female according to biological sex. 

Naturally, the media and Western observers had a gran mal seizure.

Then, this happened last December:

The Hungarian parliament passed a measure this week amending the national constitution to more clearly enshrine the meaning of family and gender as traditionally understood.

In direct opposition to gender theory, the amended text states that “Hungary protects children’s right to an identity conforming to their birth gender and ensures education in accordance with the values ​​based on Hungary’s constitutional identity and Christian culture.”

The constitutional amendment — Hungary’s ninth — spells out the definition of family as “based on marriage and the parent-child relation. The mother is a woman, the father a man,” in what pro-family organizations are hailing as a victory for marriage in the midst of an increasingly hostile and ideologically charged environment.

It’s almost like Hungary is defending … reality. Meanwhile, in the United States, even conservative states have difficulty passing far more modest reality-defending legislation, because Woke Capitalism threatens them economically.

No wonder that western European expat likes raising his kids here in Budapest. Maybe Uncle Jay should move here. Viktor Orban is not perfect, but tell me, where are the American conservative politicians who do things like this to protect their society from a poisonous, cruel ideology? If Donald Trump had had the intelligence and political skill of Orban, he might have been able to pull it off. But he didn’t, and so now we have to depend on the Senate filibuster to save America from the Equality Act.

By the way, here’s the Uncle Jay propaganda video:

 

UPDATE: Let me advise you Hungarian anti-Orban commentators who are coming here to give their opinions. You are welcome to do this, and to disagree with me, but if you are going to insult me personally, you will not be published. And, for the record, I am neither an Evangelical nor a Boomer. If you’re going to attempt to insult me, at least have the good sense to understand who I actually am.

UPDATE.2: It is telling that because I support the Fidesz’s government’s moves on gender ideology, a number of Hungarian commenters are assuming that I approve of everything the government does. I praised Joe Biden in this space the other day for his Afghanistan withdrawal. So far, I have yet to see conservatives condemn me as a Biden flunky. I criticized Trump a lot, but praised him when I thought he got something right. When I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper praising one of my US senators for voting to impeach Trump, I said that Trump did some things right, but overall he deserved impeachment the second time for the way he behaved post-election. A left-wing friend of forty years ended our friendship because, as she explained it to me, even though I did not vote for him, and I supported his second impeachment, my great crime was that I said that Trump did some things right. For her, that was enough to end our friendship. I feel confident that these Hungarian gripers are like her.

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