Decision will harm children

Regarding the article, “Mukilteo School Board adopts policy on transgender students”: The newly adopted “anti-discrimination” policy passed by the Mukilteo School Board was an utterly absurd decision that will, to the extent it is enacted, harm the children they are commissioned to serve. Someone please enlighten the members expressing that judgment with a dictionary and a book on logic!

“Discriminate” means to make relevant distinctions between different entities in order to make right decisions. Contrary to the article, it is not a dirty word. Everyone exercises discrimination on all sorts of matters throughout our day. Logic is the standard for ensuring our arguments are framed rationally. This committee is guilty of two gross rational errors. They have committed the double-standard fallacy by their decision to refuse discrimination concerning a few people, while imposing discrimination against another group of people (consisting of individuals too). And they have betrayed defenseless girls and boys, as well as adults, who deserve to have their modesty protected and rights to privacy secured.

When the board fixated on the “internal sense of gender identity” of transgender students, they failed to affirm the internal sense of gender identity of everyone else. The burden of proof on this matter lies with the board, not the casualties from their decree. Their decision rests both on assumptions about sexual identity that cannot be scientifically proven, and assertions which they cannot establish concerning the character of every professed transgender they simply presume to be sincere. Yet every time we open the newspaper we are reminded that the track record of human nature as a whole is replete with acts of dishonesty. So their naïve confidence in transgenders commits an additional double-standard infraction! All the while, young bystanders are being treated like guinea pigs for their ill-considered experiment. Truly inmates are running the asylum.

Gary Jensen

Pastor, Zion Lutheran Church

Snohomish

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