Penna Dexter
What happens when a Boston middle school holds a Pride Month Spirit Day complete with rainbow streamers, Pride banners and invitations to students and faculty to wear rainbow clothing in support?
In bright blue Massachusetts, one might expect that most kids would get onboard. But that is not what happened on June 2nd at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, a Boston suburb. As The Washington Stand reports, “Some students not only refused to bow to the rainbow idol, but also organized a counterprotest.” Groups of students wore red, white, blue or black, including face paint. They chanted, “U.S.A. are my pronouns.” Some of them got feisty and tore down decorations and ripped them up and stuffed them in water fountains.
The school’s principal, Cari Perchase wrote a letter to parents stating she was “extremely disheartened” by the protest. She complained that the protesting students “glared intimidatingly at faculty members showing pride.” She said celebrating students were shamed, causing some to remove rainbow stickers or cover up Pride messages on their clothing.
The Washington Stand’s Joshua Arnold observed that, the protesting “middle schoolers responded to peer pressure to celebrate LGBT Pride with peer pressure against celebrating LGBT Pride — and they succeeded.”
Principal Perchase’s letter prefaced her apology to Marshall Simonds LGBT-identifying students with this statement: “When one individual or group of individuals’ beliefs and actions result in the demeaning of another individual or group, it is completely unacceptable.” But, more than a few Marshall Simonds students do not buy into LGBT ideology. Doesn’t the school’s insistence that they celebrate Pride month “demean” them?
The Burlington Superintendent of Schools also sent out a letter. In it, he insisted. “We embrace everyone for who they are.”  Then he encouraged citizens to “join us in taking a stand against homophobia.”
To stand against oppressive, in-your-face contempt for traditional morality and simple biology is not homophobic. It’s courageous.  

Kerby Anderson
The American Psychological Association released a health advisory on social media. In fact, the report offered ten recommendations that involve various forms of monitoring, training, and technical adaptations to blunt certain adverse effects of social media.
James Spencer from the D.L. Moody Center was on my program recently to talk about the advisory and also to broaden the discussion about the place of technological advancements in our society. We talked about everything from social media to artificial intelligence.
He is concerned that these technology platforms have become an inevitable part of modern life, even though we know the problems linked to them. His family has taken steps to limit social media (very similar to the APA advisory) and found that some of the negative influences remain.
He also reminded us that this advisory is more than a decade after all the significant changes in social media were already implemented. “Twitter released the retweet function (2009), Facebook added the comments feature (2008) and “like” button (2009), and Instagram launched as a stand-alone platform (2010).”
As a society, we have engaged in a social experiment. The current advisory is too little, too late. He then reminds us how fast AI is coming into our lives. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in 64 days. It took Twitter five years to reach 100 million users.
Once again, we are moving at an increased rate and engaging in a social experiment. This time the social experiment is with AI without knowing any of the consequences. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another decade for an APA advisory on AI.
The obvious conclusion is for parents and grandparents to step into the lives of their children and grandchildren and limit these new technological advancements.