RUTHFULLY YOURS

A private school field trip to a sex shop in my hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, made national news recently.  This scandal from America’s heartland is merely a harbinger of worse to come as the insanity of same-sex “marriage” (SSM) spreads across the world.

Starri Hedges, the director of the small Gaia Democratic School with 25 students (including several described by the school as transgender), took pupils as young as 11 to Smitten Kitten as a conclusion to the school’s sex education curriculum.  “Everything deemed pornographic was off limits to the students, though sex toys and other products were visible,” Hedges later explained to reporters.  “The sexual health aspect, there is no right age for all kids,” Hedges said, as some “students…are already going through puberty at 10 or 11.” “It was certainly the first time we have taken that kind of field trip and it will probably be our last, which I feel bad [about] because the kids had so much fun,” Hedges added.

The school posted on its website a “Statement from Board of Directors” after the “field trip to Smitten Kitten, a locally owned business that serves as a community resource…received sudden media interest.”  “Smitten Kitten,” the statement argued, “specializes in sexual education that provides literature, classes, products and protection for people of all sexualities and points along the gender spectrum.”  The board “stands behind the premise of the field trip,” a voluntary “legitimate learning experience” judged by “participants” as “positive” and “educational” after “in-class discussions paved the way to a store visit.”

Smitten Kitten describes itself as a “sex positive space where…we’re really enthusiastic about sex” and “work to promote an inclusive, shame-free environment where it’s okay to talk about all kinds of consensual sex.”  “Our entire staff is made up of trained sex educators who love fielding questions about sex—the more obscure or challenging, the better,” although somehow the store’s “[e]vents are non-explicit and non-sexual.”  The store website has sections for Bondage, Domination, Sadism, and Masochism (BDSM) paraphernalia as well as “Anal Toys.”  “Anal penetration,” this section states while overlooking physical dangers, “can produce all kinds of amazing sensations, and it’s important to have the right tool for the job” like “butt plugs.”  Smitten Kitten “store rules” and “values” include “Don’t ‘Yuk’ my ‘Yum!’”

School parents like Lynn Floyd had less positive reactions to the field trip.  “It’s just a major breach of trust,” said to reporters the father of 11- and 13-year-old daughters who visited Smitten Kitten; “You just can’t erase those images.”  “Every sane individual I’ve spoken to about this, they’re struggling to wrap their minds around it,” he said and recommended that all parents withdraw their children from Gaia Democratic School.  He wanted Hedges “done and out, and that school closed…I want her away from children….It’s borderline predation.”

Floyd filed a police complaint against Hedges for exposing children to pornographic material and a police report recommended further investigation.  Minneapolis city code prohibits exposing those younger than 18 to “sexually provocative written, photographic, printed, sound, or published materials deemed harmful to minors.”  City inspectors also cited Smitten Kitten for having sexually explicit materials within view of minors.

Gaia Democratic School authorities are not the first in modern times to expose cavalierly children to explicit adult sexual material.  Center for Family and Human Rights President Austin Ruse noted a 2010 United Nations Mexico City conference with a “huge exhibit hall full of devices and toys for an audience of youth that you would only find in an adult bookshop.”  Previously in 2000 occurred an infamously graphic discussion of homosexual practices before Massachusetts schoolchildren as young as 12 at Tufts University.  As once described by Peter LaBarbara from Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, the LGBT movement’s “pathological drive” for self-acceptance knows no limits, including those of age.

Such sexualizing of children is perhaps not unusual in Minnesota since its legislature approved SSM in 2013, as my chance 2008 visit to a homosexual sex shop in Minneapolis indicated.  Visiting the city for my twentieth Edina High School class reunion, I walked around the Loring Park neighborhood of my boyhood church, St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral.  LGBT friendly St. Mark’s made gay history in 2003 as the host cathedral for the Episcopal Church’s General Convention where Gene Robison became the denomination’s first openly homosexual bishop.  Although I had no reason to know during my childhood, Loring Park is actually a center of Minneapolis’ homosexual community, as manifest in the neighborhood’s sex shop that appeared on my way, Rainbow Road.  A brief investigation found, among other items, sex toys designed to simulate the anal sex depicted by a photo of two naked men on the product packaging.

SSM has made such sexual behavior legally “all in the family” in Minnesota.  While Gaia Democratic School’s field trip shocked parents, Smitten Kitten’s wares merely facilitate and/or replicate the practices now considered a predicate for SSM.  Gaia Democratic School’s statements, meanwhile, offer no disagreement with Smitten Kitten’s approval of “all sexualities and points along the gender spectrum.”

Minneapolis city code concerning minors and sexual material stands out in such circumstances as a relic of a society in which the law protected children who lived with responsible parents in sheltered homes.  In SSM’s new sexual order, homosexuals may displace natural or carefully selected adoptive mother-father couples and subordinate the wellbeing of children’s lives to adult lusts.  Those whose objections to such arrangements include sexual indecency’s assault upon childhood innocence will apparently confront the new societal standard of “Don’t ‘Yuk’ my ‘Yum!’”  Given SSM’s past and probably pending victories in Ireland and at the United States Supreme Court, such thinking is spreading beyond the proverbial land of “Minnesota Nice.”