For those who don’t click links:

RCW 41.56.120: Right to strike not granted.
Nothing contained in this chapter shall permit or grant any public employee the right to strike or refuse to perform his or her official duties.

…[S]tate law against public employee strikes is toothless. A Superior Court judge can issue an injunction ordering teachers back to work at the request of a school district or community group and level penalties against unions who defy that court order, but fines and punishments aren’t standardized.

According to data from the Public Employment Relations Commission, Washington has seen 78 school districts strike since 1976. Injunctions were filed in 25 of those. But in 12 of those historic strikes, teachers defied the injunctions and continued demonstrating.

Educators were on strike over getting more special education support and planning time, as well as a disagreement over the inflation metric used to adjust their wages.

According to the union, the agreement includes a flat percentage wage increase of 6.6% in the first year and 5.8% in the second year. In the third year, wages will be based on the Seattle-area consumer price index, with minimum and maximum thresholds. The district originally wanted to switch to a different inflation metric.

But I am not yet sold on the assertion: “Nobody is “Born that Way”
Starting with this truth – and demanding proof of those who claim to speak for The Science – may actually save you from some tedious exchanges.”
I don’t want this exchange to be tedious, and I don’t have deep expertise about homosexuality, but after reading Philip Ball’s 2023 book How Life Works, he suggests that more is going on than a straightforward connection between DNA/genes and birth results. Contributions from epigenetic factors, RNA, and other proteins all add extensive complexity to obtaining a final phenotype cell, tissue, or body, where each of these levels is responding to evolution by natural selection, as the situation requires [or eventuates]. There are also countless opportunities for “deviations” from the norm during the 9 month gestation process of hormone releases, etc. (including a surprisingly largish number of miscarriages!; whether realized or not?) Thus the possibility of being born that way regardless of DNA studies may still be valid. [Perhaps there is better evidence I have not come across just yet? Probably a tricky area for scientific study, both biologically and socially.]

As a boomer going through puberty with a strong hetrosexual orientation, I had no inclination to try to understand an alternative one until it became more “present” in our culture [1980;s and later?]. Then I had the view that if my feelings on the hetero side were that strong, then it was reasonable that someone having the alternative feelings on the homosexual side might have equally strong feelings, thus not experiencing or making a simple moral “life choice”, but perhaps a deep instinctual one.

The other factoid I am aware of was some [potentially invalid?] twin studies suggesting something not yet known was causing some 6% of twin pairs to be opposite orientation siblings. Another factor contributing to a more sympathetic view towards same sex marriage, etc., was the portrayal of two men loving each other by Tom Hanks in the movie Philadelphia. Not something very prominent in our (or at least my) culture prior to that point?

There are many good points to promoting marriage between opposite sex persons to sire/birth children and rear them into responsible members of society. But if the surveys are true that say homosexuals are 3% of the population (and transgender people are 0.6%), then we have been spending a lot of time and energy on a group with modest real impact on society from their sexual orientation (and some who have been very helpful outside of the domain of sexual aspects of existence — Turing and Grenell come to mind right away).

If there are truly definitive scientific results providing an answer on this question, I have not seen or heard of it just yet, so would welcome getting a suitable reference or two.
Peace.

This is part of the justification for school choice by voucher, charter or whatever; for defunding the Department of Education if it can’t be cancelled completely; and for torching the Tteacher’s unions and salting the earth (my mother was centrist Democrat, a teacher for over 30 years, and refused to join the National Education Association; she joined the state union only for their pension and medical benefits).

The infamous Randi Weingarten is president of the AFT, (American Federation of Teachers) a different union, even worse than the NEA. She is the former president of the United Federation of Teachers.

I didn’t even know there were THREE teachers’ unions; no wonder our educational system is such a mess.

NEA is headquartered in DC.
AFT was founded in Chicago.
UFT represents mostly NYC teachers.

No one represents students and parents and taxpayers.

It’s decades past the time we start pushing back or even reversing the left’s long march through our institutions.

“Conversion” therapy is nothing more than allowing a counselor and patient to discuss that.

Talk therapy which might save a young person from conversion with drugs and a scalpel should be encouraged, not banned.