by The exclusive private Choate Rosemary Hall school in Connecticut hosted that great American, Karl Rove, earlier this week. Recent Fox News and Time correspondent, Rove, denied media access to the event in which the school’s wacky headmaster compared a student wearing a sweater, instead of the mandated uniform, to jeopardizing undercover intelligence agents and national security by outing Valerie Plame.
Oh, Buffy!
One student really challenged Rove. Thanks to the Hartford Courant for capturing the following exchange.
Then there was Marla Spivak.
Spivak, a senior from Hamden, was one of the students invited to have lunch earlier with Rove. That left her somewhat emboldened as she stood before the crowd and asked Rove to explain how giving gay people the right to marry would endanger other people.
Rove took issue with the way the first gay marriages came about, through the Massachusetts Supreme Court. An issue as important as the definition of marriage should be resolved by a legislature or a referendum, not a court, he said.
Gay couples could gain the legal rights of married couples through legislation without actually getting married, he said.
But wouldn’t creating a separate body of legislation for gay people be creating a separate but equal system, a step back?, Spivak asked.
Rove replied with an answer about Mormons changing their views on marriage to conform with the nation’s laws.
Spivak kept pressing. “You never actually answered, how does it threaten anyone?” she asked.
Rove asked, what’s the compelling reason to throw out 5,000 years of understanding the institution of marriage as between a man and a woman?
What, Spivak countered, was the compelling reason for society to allow interracial relationships when they had once been outlawed.
Then Rove invoked the Declaration of Independence before Spivak interjected that its reference to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” seemed to support her claims.
Their verbal ping pong match tapered off after Rove brought up polygamy and Spivak acknowledged that she did not know enough about polygamy to answer. Rove later asked when she planned to run for political office.
The kids are alright!
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.