to regret giving my dd a gay packed lunch?

[pointydog]

Dd1 (12) was off on a fun school trip today with a mix of kids from high school.

I suggested a few things for her packed lunch this morning and she went off happily with a peanut butter sandwich, a fruitus bar, a kitkat, some dried apricots, a tub of home-made muesli and a bag of chipsticks.

The tuff kids laughed at her lunch - snorting particularly loudly at the apricots - and called it gay.

I feel like the mum in About A Boy.

watching the big questions atm...should you try and "cure" homosexuals?

There's nothing to 'cure', it's not a sickness.

note lack of swearing in post, and be glad you can't hear original reaction chez serenity

LG, you know i can kinda understand bi-sexuals...always like to keep my options open..ha ha ha

Got bored when the bickering started so only read the first few pages.

Was wondering has anyone come across the word gay used to mean happy/cheerful recently? I don't mean rereading Enid Blyton, I mean having been used recently.

like your taste in music hoochie

Things sound like harmless banter unless you're part of the group being insulted though, and you are feeling discriminated against for being in that group. If I was gay I wouldn't think everybody calling everything uncool "gay" was funny at all.

And I do think this is one way children learn to be prejudiced. I told my children the other day that I would only take the eldest to see Coraline as it was too scary for the others. My youngest son, aged 3, said: "well you'll be too scared then, because you're a girl". Where on Earth did he get that idea, at 3? And he saw me kill a poisonous snake the other day, so it's definitely not that he just thinks I'm a wuss

It's not that difficult to eliminate all of this kind of discriminatory language from your vocabulary, just by thinking about doing it and noticing when you say anything discriminatory. We should all do it, and make our children do it too. It doesn't mean you have to become all prissy and boring.

littleoldme - "we they graffittied the desk he sat at in about 5 class classrooms with XXXXX is gay"

So let me get this straight. You failed to deal with his behaviour so you chose the path of calling him names. You were doing it with far more knowledge of the bigger picture than he had. That makes you far, far worse than him, no?

Is this sort of punishment handed out regularly in your school?

you killed a snake, rupert?

overheard ds1 (12) with about 6 friends, girls and boys, a couple of weeks ago, someone said 'lesbian' as an insult. Ds1 said v clearly, 'there is NOTHING wrong with being lesbian or gay. We have a lot of gay friends' Cue silence, then friends making a lot of conciliatory backtracking noises.

Proud, moi?

M pi - To be fair it was a long time ago and it deal with the behaviour because he stopped calling evryone and everthing Gay - someone was doing it him and he realised he didn't like it so maybe other's didn't either. Believe me - more conventional methods had been tried.

yesterday I saw a man wearing a t shirt that said
dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians
...and was very confused, had always seen this on women before and assumed them to be lesbians...
have I been misconstruing it or was he, massively??

I own that T-shirt - have not been seen in public with it though

Men who wear it are just grim and slogan is on par with "remember my name you'll be screaming it later"

thank god I move in such restricted circles, have not come across that one!

I use to be gay. Especially at parties or on sunny spring days when life just seemed so good.

I think it's in bad taste to try and pretend it's a sexual term and you should be ashamed of yourself.

Anyone using gay to mean a sexual preference. After all according to this thread if a word meant something once it always does mean that thing - right?

So that means it actually means 'happy' since it once did.

LG, I would be running out of patience if I were you.
Or am I missing a joke again?

Well if you mean my post you might be missing sarcasm. Words change in meaning and what people mean by them depends on their intent and on context. In the case of the lunch box it was about it being dull/uncool which is one meaning. It was clearly not the start of a full scale assault on the rights of people who have a different gender preference.

aha!
I remember where I have heard this line of reasoning before!
Humpty Dumpty.

Probably from me, but not sure of the connection with eggs

'when I use a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, no more and no less'
OK if you live in Wonderland, not OK elsewhere!