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October 01, 2006

Waaaaaaaaah

The recent decision by a Norwegian school district that schoolboys have to urinate sitting down rather than standing up has sparked controversy. Predictably enough the extreme rightwing have pounced on it to get some publicity.

Citing the original WorldNetDaily piece, TimeBomb2000 generated a thread which was emailed to my by a rightwing cyber friend of mine.

According to the news report, the rule was announced for boys at Dvergsnes School, prompting outrage from Vidar Kleppe, the chief of The Democrats Party.

He's accusing the school of "fiddling with God's work," and now he wants the issue discussed at the executive committee level of the area council, according to the newspaper "Dagbladet."

"When boys are not allowed to pee in the natural way, the way boys have done for generations, it is meddling with God's work," Kleppe, whose group is a splinter group of former Progress Party hardliners, said in the newspaper.

"It is a human right not to have to sit down like a girl," he said.

On Kleppe's contentious "stand" on making political waves, no comment was the response from school principal Lise Gjul.

But she did tell Norwegian Broadcasting NRK that the restrooms are used by both boys and girls, and the young boys are not "good enough at aiming" in order to have "a pleasant toilet."

First of all it needs to be noted that Kleppe's new far right political party suffered a stinging rebuke in it's initial attempt to gain seats in the 2005 national assembly elections, receiving a laughable 0.1% of the vote despite having run a fairly high profile campaign. Indeed, contrary to pop usage of the terms here in America, the Norwegian "Democrats" and "Progress Party" are in fact far right political parties with quite bigoted policy planks and who openly pander to Christian conservatives - which largely explains why WorldNetDaily and TimeBomb2000 picked up on the story.

Occam's Razor would seem to dictate that publicity rather than principle is the guiding force behind this Kleppe character's feigned outrage.

Secondly, it seems to me that excusing poor potty habits by boys as somehow their inherent right by virtue of God's supposed will is but a short slide from excusing inappropriate sexually aggressive behavior by older boys using the same excuse. I for one am insulted by such suggestions that the male gender is incapable of civilized behavior.

It's been suggested to me that the root problem here is that this school is trampling on parental territory by trying to force these young boys to learn new potty habits which their parents chose not to teach them. But, setting aside the whole toilet issue, aren't these same schools teaching things like reading, writing and math which the parents also declined to teach them? What's the difference? Are the school similarly violating sovereign parental rights by teaching the children how to read and write and do math?

The whole thing strikes me as nothing more than a tempest in a tea pot. It's an excuse for social conservatives to demonstrate just how illogical and unreasonable their root beliefs really are.

Posted by Kevin at October 1, 2006 12:07 PM