Читать книгу The Twenty-Third Century: Nontraditional Love онлайн

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We have to be afraid of our own children, for they may naively blurt out our secret.

They are always asked provocative questions in kindergarten or elementary school: “Who puts you to bed?” “Who fixes dinner in your family?” or “Who helps you do your lessons?” In the upper grades, when schoolchildren have definitively formed their sexual outlook, they are trained for adult life: in their “History of the Ancient World” lessons, they read excerpts from the Old Testament, which demands capital punishment for those convicted of heterosexual tendencies. Beginning in the ninth grade, the back cover of every school textbook contains the biblical prohibition against heterosexual love: “If a man lies with a woman as with a man, both have committed an abomination: they shall be put to death.”

When they reach the age of eighteen, we can take a risk and try to tell our children the truth. Not everyone is able to understand, forgive or endure such a shock. For many it creates an enormous amount of stress. To go through their entire lives with the stigma of not being conceived in a test tube! There have been instances of suicide – after learning about their inferiority, adolescents have slit their veins or poisoned themselves…