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Does the OECD want to force girls to be like boys?

The OECD has again determined that girls and boys are different in school and is again making wicked parents and environment responsible for this fact. Somehow it has to be possible to force girls and boys to become the same, even when girls do not want that at all, doesn’t it?

My wife and I have practically the same profession. She is a professor for Islamic studies, and I am a professor for the sociology of religion and theology. We have encouraged each other and have roughly achieved the same level professionally. In different ways and independent of each other we have become speakers for the World Evangelical Alliance, I for human rights and she for issues relating to Islam.

Still, our two children, each of a different gender, are the perfect pieces of evidence in support of the new OECD PISA results. I do not want to say more, since the private life of my children does not belong here. That our children are developing typical male and female interests is certainly not a question of the parents or of what we promote and encourage. My mother was a Chemist at Behring works and at the University of Marburg, so why should my daughter therefore not tend in such a direction? Since she was small, I have given her scientifically oriented books in order to balance out our one-sidedness with respect to the social sciences – apparently without success.

Could not the outcry of the OECD that even in Scandinavian countries, which have conducted ‘gender mainstreaming’ for a much longer period of time, more intensively, and at times with a wrecking bar, one finds that school girls are still better on average in different courses than school boys, rather be a sign of ideological and therefore unscientific reflexes?

Or stated another way: Should I force my daughter to do something else besides achieve her dreams and use her gifts and abilities so that the OECD and politicians are satisfied?

By the way, I know from my own experience that some female teachers downright despise boys and want to ‘turn them into’ girls. Why is this not picked out as a major theme by the OECD, given the increasing amount of evidence that boys are discriminated against in our school system? Why is it not considered discrimination that almost only women are becoming school teachers? Why is it always the same story, as if we still lived in the 1960s? I am a modern father (see my book Modern Fathers) and have no desire to measure myself against traditional wisdom that different slants and interests between boys and girls are only a consequence of societal and parental narrow-mindedness. Forty years ago one was not able to refute that, but today absolutely.

God created man and woman with equal value and with equal rights, but he did not create them as identical beings. This ancient insight from the first chapters of the Bible appears to me to me closer to reality and more revolutionary than the demands of fundamentalist streams in many religions, on the one hand, but also of the fundamentalism of gender mainstreaming dressed in scientific garb: what may not be cannot be.

I am in full and complete agreement with the following commentary by Dorothea Siems (Dorothea Siems, “Long live the Differences”. Die Welt dated May 27, 2009, p. 1): http://www.welt.de/die-welt/article3810235/Es-lebe-der-Unterschied.html

“The outcry is as loud as can be expected. The Pisa Report regarding the differences between girls and boys in educational achievement proves what educators and parents observe every day: Boys have an easier time with arithmetic, and girls read better. For politicians of equality this result is a scandal. After all they have been telling us the news for years that role models are only trained and a result of upbringing and societal pressure. Interestingly the forerunners of gender mainstreaming, who pursue the elimination of all gender differences, are standing there in northern Europe with results no different than ours. In countries such as Sweden or Norway women would rather study sociology than physics and would rather be nurses than lay floor tiles. OECD Experts themselves point to the fact that independent of their respective abilities, boys and girls have different interests: Ladies tend to choose a carrier in which they have to deal with people: boys, on the other hand, are more interested in facts and technology. That male pupils more often fall through the cracks also has to do with the fact that boys’ strengths stand too little in the foreground. . . . The strength of men lies in dealing with computers and jobs that are technical or mathematical in nature. If one were to only go by girls’ tendencies, boys would be able to quietly keep these territories. The spirit of the age, however, wants women to be equal in all fields.

Up to a certain degree gender differences will decrease. After all, long ago girls caught up in what used to be men’s domains such as medicine. Emancipation does not mean that women should become like men or vice versa. As a neuter, mankind would surely not be happier.”

57% of Americans are against Marriage for Homosexuals

As is generally known, the California Supreme Court decided on May 26, 2009 by a vote of 6 to 1 that the result of the referendum against homosexual marriage, known as Proposition 8 (“Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”), occurred in a constitutionally appropriate manner and is not unconstitutional. With this ruling homosexual marriage is again done away with by the same court that had introduced it at an earlier time by court decision. The court further decided that the 18,000 marriages of this sort are permanent.

In the referendum held on November 4, 2008 52.2% voted against homosexual marriage, and 47.8 % voted for it. The level of voter participation was an astounding 79.4% of the 17.3 million registered voters in the State of California. The 52% consisted of Catholics (above all Latinos), Mormons, Evangelicals, but also non-religious voters.

On the day of the court decision, Gallup conducted a survey of a representative population of the USA. 57% voiced opposition to homosexual marriage. Since 2004 this number has fluctuated between 53% and 59%. In 1996 this number was still at the higher level of 68%. The number of supporters went from 47% in 2007 to 40% in 2009. In 1996 this number stood at 27%.

Apart from the presidential election this was the most expensive campaign that has ever taken place in the USA. The supporters of the constitutional amendment that defines a marriage to be something only between a man and a woman took in 28.84€ million in contributions. The oppon22.7€ents had even more, namely million in contributions. That the American presidential candidate John McCain and other leading Republicans spoke out in favor of the constitutional amendment is hardly astonishing. However, that Barack Obama did not speak out in favor of homosexual marriage is astonishing. Obama does not derive the conclusion that homosexuals should also be able to enter into marriage from his support of a homosexual life style.

Occasionally Evangelicals are made responsible for the rejection of homosexual marriage. But here is some interesting information: The major supporters of the constitutional amendment were the California Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Mormons, the Orthodox churches, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, and the Republicans. The Evangelical element played a subordinate role. Many Evangelical pastors spoke out in favor of the amendment, but by far not all of them.

On the other side there were above all Anglican Bishops (the Episcopal Church), the Rabbis of California and other Jewish groups, the California Council of Churches, and the Unitarians. Additionally, all the large daily newspapers in California spoke out in favor of homosexual marriage, demonstrating an imbalance as well as the fact that the media can often represent less than one-half of the population and that the population can be amazingly resistant to the cumulative pressure of the media. Against the theory of an Evangelical coup is the following fact: 70% of Afro-Americans voted for the constitutional amendment, among them surely Evangelicals but not the right wing conservative Evangelicals who are normally meant. 53% of Latinos voted for the amendment. Among Protestants, 65% voted for the amendment – this number could never only be made up of Evangelicals – and 64% of Catholics. 56% of all union members voted for the amendment, whereby Evangelicals are also restrained when it comes to unions. By the way, 2% of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals voted for the amendment and against homosexual marriage. Even so, among opponents of George Bush, 40% of them voted for the amendment.

An additional comment: The threats and smearing against proponents of the constitutional amendment bear witness to problems with democracy. That the contributor’s list was used in order to find out who was in favor of the amendment and then to denounce and threaten them is also reprehensible. That the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival and the art director of the California Musical Theater had to resign because they made contributions shows that democratic decisions are not respected.

All numbers and sources are found in the exemplary Wikipedia entry.

My Great Grandfather’s Confession of Faith

My ancestors were Reformed Hugenots, who came from Salzburg to Prussia and finally settled in Danzig and Königsberg. My great grandfather Friedrich Schirrmacher (1790-1827), who was the director of the Petrischule (Petri School) in Danzig, left behind the following handwritten confession of faith, which is also my own conconfession:

My Confession of Faith
From the beginning the Evangelical church protested and must continue to protest, but first of all from a positive basis, namely that of unconditional belief in the free grace of God in Christ, and namely as it has been revealed in absolute form for all times in the writings of Paul, Peter, and John. And secondly, it protests on purely religious grounds and only against that which alters the basis for faith in some form.
Carl Friedrich Schirrmacher
born September 14, 1790
in Königsberg in Prussia

[Handwritten entry by Carl Friedrich Schirrmacher on the first blank page, or flyleaf, in a copy of Das Vater Unser: Ein Erbauungsbuch für jeden Christen (The Lord’s Prayer: A Devotional Book for Every Christian) by the vice president and senior court chaplain Christoph Friedrich von Ammon, D. Ch. G. Kayser’schen Buchhand lung F. Beyer: Leipzig, 1839 (in my possession)]

His son and my grandfather, Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher (1824-1904) left the following lines in the Danzig Reformed Songbook, which I also want to make my own:

Eins nur wünsch ich mir hienieden,
Jesu, Deinen Geist und Frieden,
Und von dem Ruhm an meinem Grabe,
daß ich Dich geliebet habe.
Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher

(There is only one thing I wish upon this earth,
Jesus, your Spirit and peace,
And from any luster at my grave,
that I loved you.
Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher)

[Handwritten entry in a songbook (Kirchen Gesang-Buch Der Evangelisch-Reformierten Gemeinde in Dantzig ( Church Songbook of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Danzig). Thom. Joh. Schreiber: Dantzig, 1745) in my possession. The first entry in the songbook is from September 14, 1777 by A. V. E. (presumably not a relative of the Schirrmacher family). On September 14, 1854 “Carl Friedrich Schirrmacher” dedicated the book to his son Friedrich Wilhelm, who wrote the quoted dedication without a date. The book in turn made its way via his son Leo Schirrmacher to his son Klaus Leo Schirrmacher, who on March 16, 1968 passed it on to “my loving brother Bernd Schirrmacher” upon the occasion of Bernd Schirrmacher’s birthday. Bernd Schirrmacher, my father, passed in on to me with the dedication “Christmas 1989.” (Compare to this Franz Kessler. Danzinger Gesangbücher 1586-1793. Einzelschriften der Historischen Kommission für ost- und westpreußische Landesforschung 15. Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk: Lüneburg, 1998. pp. 65-70 our songbook; also pp. 3-7 on the Reformation and pp. 6-7 on the Reformed in Danzig.)]

I have republished two of my grandfather’s books and provided introductions to both which carry the same wording. In a similar form the wording has appeared in the Biografisch-Bibliografischen Kirchenlexikon (Biographical-Bibliographical Church Encyclopedia) in German:

“Über den Verfasser.” pp. 5–28 in: Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher. Briefe und Akten zum Marburger Religionsgespräch (1529) und zum Augsburger Reichstag (1530). Geschichte – Kirchengeschichte – Reformation 21. Bonn: VKW, 2003

“Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher”. pp. 5–23 in: Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher. Die Entstehung des Kurfürstenkollegiums. Geschichte – Kirchengeschichte – Reformation 22. Bonn: VKW, 2003

“Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher (1825–1904)”. pp. 142–151 in: Thomas Schirrmacher, Klaus Schirrmacher, Ingrid von Torklus (eds.). Baumeister bleibt der Herr: Festgabe zum 80. Geburtstag von Prof. Bernd Schirrmacher. VKW: Bonn, 2001

“Schirrmacher, Friedrich Wilhelm”. 1226–1235 in: Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz, Traugott Bautz (eds.). Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon. Bautz: Herzberg beginning with vol. I, 1975, here vol. XIX, 2001

• www.bbkl.de
• See also Wikipedia: www.wikipedia.org