There is a petition drive of sorts going on in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg (the corner state by Bavaria). It's an odd petition....leading against an odd change in local education policy.
Over the last two years....the Stuttgart-21 episode....upgrading on a massive scale the railway going into Stuttgart and a total rebuild of the old train station....have led to extreme politics being used on various new and different fronts.
The Stuttgart-21 episode led onto an election....where the local CDU folks lost (a historic loss, considering how they'd be firmly running local politics for several decades). So the Greens and the SPD run the state legislature now in Baden-Wurttemberg (the state).
Most folks expected that the combined Green/SPD agenda....was strictly anti-Stuttgart-21. Well....they were wrong.
There's another agenda item which has folks upset and leading this petition against the legislative establishment.
The state government, being run by the Green/SPD coalition....desires a general education effort on getting kids to accept sexual diversity. Naturally, you can only accomplish this....by operating a curriculum so that kids....get the 'state truth' on lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgender, transsexual and intersexual folks.
Lifestyles and relationships? Yeah. How each group functions? Yes. What makes a bisexual different from a lesbian? Well....it's hard to say. The thought process of a transgender versus a transsexual? Well.....that's a bit hard to say.
You can guess the general public view on this. A class atmosphere....prescribed text which must be read....absolute adherence by teachers over the prescribed class agenda....and parents questioning the direction and depth of this topic.
The news media? Generally, they've tried to stay focused strictly on the facts.....although they've gotten more and more interviews from the Greens....who can't help but say that this is a mark of racism, and Germans must learn tolerance at all levels.
Currently, at least sixty thousand signatures are on the petition, and likely to simply go higher by next week. I'd take a wild guess that it will top out at 150,000.
Where this goes? I'm guessing some of the SPD folks are a bit nervous. They picked up big votes after Stuttgart-21 became an issue, and enjoyed the success that the Greens brought to that one brief election in March of 2011. March of 2015 is not that far away. A practical political figure would not want to burn bridges over the next twelve months and suddenly find massive negativity existing with the independent voters of the state.
Tolerance or intolerance? Maybe at the gymnasium level (the higher-level of German high schools)....this might be generally accepted in a classroom, without any disruption.
Beyond that? I wouldn't want to be the German teacher stuck with this "script", dealing with twenty punks who will ask about anus activity, if a transgender can flip back and forth after the operation, or what intersexual means to a kid from Bulgaria or Turkey. Maybe three kids out of a hundred from the lesser schools will take anything out of the class....which means you invited disruption training more than you invited tolerance training.
I'm guessing that a couple of SPD folks will round up the tolerance crowd....have a private meeting and tell them to break this up into one simple lesson of forty minutes, with nothing of value gained except you can claim you started a tolerance class, period. All of this? Because of fear over massive losses in March of 2015. That's the political truth to a reality of modern Germany....everything relates to an election....sooner or later.
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