Republican rep.: Children should be taught 'traditional' gender roles

In a speech from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) said that young boys and girls should be taught classes about their roles in a marriage "at a very young age." Huffington Post characterized Gingrey's remarks as a treatise on preventing children from growing up to be feminists or engaging in same sex marriages.

Gingrey's remarks were related to the looming Supreme Court decisions regarding California's anti-same sex marriage ballot initiative Proposition 8 as well as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the Clinton-era federal statute designating marriage as between one man and one woman. Gingrey lamented the state of families in the U.S., insisting that "what's best for the child" is a traditional marriage with a mother and father, in spite of overwhelming evidence that children of same sex parent households do as well or better than children of conventional marriages on nearly every metric.

The answer, according to Gingrey, is early indoctrination with conservative principles to make things more like "Father Knows Best" and "back in the old days of television."

"You know, maybe part of the problem is we need to go back into the schools at a very early age, maybe at the grade school level, and have a class for the young girls and have a class for the young boys and say, you know, this is what’s important," he said to the House. "This is what a father does that is maybe a little different, maybe a little bit better than the talents that a mom has in a certain area. And the same thing for the young girls, that, you know, this is what a mom does, and this is what is important from the standpoint of that union which we call marriage."

Watch the video, embedded via C-SPAN, below:

[image of Rep. Phil Gingrey via the Flickr Photostream of ACU Conservative, Creative Commons licensed]