NOTE TO READERS: the following Americans For Truth transcript, derived from an audiotape recording of a speech made at a 1997 GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network) conference, is at the source for the current “Harry Hay-NAMBLA” controversy surrounding GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings — President Obama’s “Safe Schools” deputy at the Department of Education. (The left-wing group Media Matters cites it HERE.) This transcript was provided by Brian Burt, then a volunteer writer/reporter for the Americans For Truth publication “Lambda Report.” We will endeavor to provide the tape to the public to counteract the absurd attempts to discredit this and other first-hand AFTAH reports on Jennings and GLSEN simply because AFTAH is a conservative organization. — Peter LaBarbera, President, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, www.aftah.org

P.S. It would seem fairly easy for Jennings to clarify his position on NAMBLA — all he has to do is issue a clear statement of his opposition to this evil “man-boy love” organization. Homosexual activist groups and leaders similarly denounced NAMBLA — which marched in early “gay pride” parades and whose “right” to do so was enthusiastically defended by “gay” icon Harry Hay –  when they perceived that being tied to the notorious pederasty group was an impediment to their progress.

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Have Kevin Jennings and GLSEN almost won? Obama Department of Education appointee Kevin Jennings looked forward to the day when people would shrug their shoulders at the news that “gay” groups like the one he founded (GLSEN) are “promoting homosexuality” in schools. Has America become so corrupt and decadent that this “queer” activist’s twisted vision has become true?  TAKE ACTION: write Education Secretary Arne Duncan (arne.duncan@ed.gov) or call him (202-401-3000) with the message that you do not want your tax dollars spent on “promoting homosexuality” in schools. Also, urge your Senators and Congressman (202-224-3121) to call on Duncan to withdraw the appointment of Jennings — an anti-religious bigot who said (in a church) “[F**k] ‘em” and “Drop dead” to religious traditionalists — as “Safe School” Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Education. Photo at left is from MassResistance’s coverage of the 2009 homosexual “Youth Pride” parade.

The following transcript of a 1997 speech by Kevin Jennings is reprinted from the Lambda Report, Jan.-Feb. 1998 [LR, published by Peter LaBarbera, preceded Americans For Truth About Homosexuality]:

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GLSEN’s Jennings: ‘That is our mission from this day forward’

The following is a transcript of GLSEN founder and executive director Kevin Jennings’ comments before “Looking to the Future” panel at GLSEN’s Mid-Atlantic conference, held October 25, 1997 at the Grace Church School in New York City. A few incidental words and phrases have been removed for clarity:

Two years ago, one of our board members, one named Ann Simon, was called to testify before Congress when they had hearings on the promotion of homosexuality in schools. And we were busy putting out press releases, and saying, ‘We’re not promoting homosexuality, that’s not what our program’s about. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ And my best friend, who’s a straight women who lives in London, e-mailed me…and she said, ‘So what if you are?’ And I thought of how I can get so wrapped up in my own defensiveness, and…the day-to-day struggle, and stuff, that being finished might some day mean that most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say ‘Yeah, who cares?’ because they wouldn’t necessarily equate homosexuality with something bad that you would not want to promote. And when we were talking there, and Mike said, ‘You know, and I’d like five years from now—right now let’s face it, for large swells of people they think of GLSEN and kids, and they think, ‘GLSEN is bad for kids.’ They do because of their stereotypes and misinformation—I’d like five years from now for most Americans when they hear the word GLSEN to think, ‘Ooh, that’s good for kids.’’

I’d like you to step back for a second if you can, and I know that many of you here are going to return to meetings on Monday where the euphoria of today will dissipate quite quickly…But if you could just close your eyes for a second. I know this is very Californian. Close your eyes for a second and think, ‘What would the world look like if we were through with our work? If we were done. If we could close the doors on 27th street [GLSEN’s New York City headquarters], and shut down the chapters, and disband the board. What would be happening?’… [Audience responses]

…As the son of a Baptist preacher from North Carolina…I can remember a time when having a conference like this, for me, certainly as a teenager, seemed completely impossible. And I would see in certain people’s faces when people would say certain things, or this visioning part, and we’d get little snickers, like,  ‘Yeah, [bulls--t].’ This is the only thing that can stop us, is if we believe that our dreams cannot come true.

One of the people that’s always inspired me is Harry Hay, who started the first ongoing gay rights groups in America. In 1948, he tried to get people to join the Mattachine Society [the first American homosexual “rights” group]. It took him two years to find one other person who would join. Well, [in] 1993, Harry Hay marched with a million people in Washington, who thought he had a good idea 40 years before. Everybody thought Harry Hay was crazy in 1948, and they knew something about him which he apparently did not—they were right, he was crazy. You are all crazy. We are all crazy. All of us who are thinking this way are crazy, because you know what? Sane people keep the world the same [sh*tty] old way it is now. It’s the people who think, ‘No, I can envision a day when straight people say, ‘So what if you’re promoting homosexuality?’ Or straight kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you and your boyfriend come over before you go to the prom and try on your tuxes on at my house?’ That if we believe that can happen, we can make it happen. The only thing that will stop us is our lack of faith that we can make it happen. That is our mission from this day forward. To not lose our faith, to not lose our belief that the world can, indeed, be a different place. And think how much can change in one lifetime if in Harry Hay’s one very short life, he saw change from not even one person willing to join him to a million people willing to travel to Washington to join him. You can see the same changed happen in your lifetime if you believe you can.’’

– Brian Burt, Lambda Report, Jan.-Feb. 1998

Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network and President Obama’s new Deputy Assistant Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools.

Rainbow Agenda in Schools: GLSEN, the group that President Obama’s “Safe Schools” advisor, Kevin Jennings, founded, promotes books like “Rainbow Boys” that recklessly advance the idea that homosexuality and “gay” sex are normative. Read pro-family advocate Linda Harvey’s description of “Rainbow Boys” HERE. Who decided that America’s taxpayer-funded schools would become pro-homosexuality indoctrination zones?

Leave it to Matt Barber to get to the heart of a matter, in this case the scandalous appointment of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network) founder Kevin Jennings to head up President Obama’s “Safe Schools” efforts. The real issue in this controversy is Jennings’ promotion of homosexual and gender-confused lifestyles — to innocent children in schools, using stealth tactics and misleading euphemisms like, well… “safe schools.” Since when did tax-funded schools become pro-homosexuality indoctrination zones for impressionable kids?

Homosexual practice is wrong (sinful), unnatural, physically destructive — and most important, changeable (hence the many ex-”gays” living happy lives). Homosexuality is not and never will be the basis for a healthy “identity.” Even if Jennings hadn’t failed to report a predatory situation involving one of his sophomore students (”Brewster”); even if he he hadn’t used the F-word in a church to denounce the “religious right”; or if he had never presided over “Fistgate” — an unbelievable educational atrocity in which Massachusetts minors were given perverted “how-to” talks about “fisting” by homosexual adults — Jennings should be removed from his government job because his whole life’s work is to promote immoral sexual and gender lifestyles to children.

Come hear Matt as the keynote speaker at AFTAH’s fundraising banquet on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009 at the Christian Liberty Academy in Arlington Heights, IL. And if you can, pay for a student or your pastor to come — to encourage you to do so, we’ll cut the price in half from $50 to just $25/student or pastor. Young people and our spiritual leaders need to hear Matt’s bold, unapologetic approach to the “culture wars.” You can sign up online using the “Online Banquet Sign-up” form at www.americansfortruth.com/donate/. Thank you! — Peter LaBarbera

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Here is Matt’s piece on Kevin Jennings:

Commies, Fascists and Perverts, Oh My!

By Matt Barber
Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Obama’s inner-circle is shaping-up like the bar scene from Star Wars. It’s a swollen throng of unaccountable czars and policy advisors comprised of some of the most bizarre fringe leftists imaginable. As mom always said, you’re known by the company you keep and Obama keeps some downright creepy company.

Here’s a sampling: First, we have disgraced former green-jobs czar Van “tinfoil hat” Jones. Jones, a self avowed communist and 9-11 “truther,” was forced to resign after revelations of his extremism became public.

Then there’s science czar John Holdren, the unzipped Harvard professor who wants a “Planetary Regime” to control world population through compulsory sterilization and forced abortion.

And of course there’s the administration’s very own Dr. Dolittle: regulatory czar Cass Sunstien, who advocates that animals be allowed to sue people.

But perhaps the creepiest of Obama’s advisers is “safe schools” chief Kevin Jennings. Jennings – an open homosexual activist – is former director of GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), a highly controversial group of adult homosexual activists who promote sexual anarchy and tacitly work to normalize the criminal practice of pederasty.

GLSEN’s primary purpose is to push dangerous and even deadly homosexual and cross-dressing behaviors in our government schools on children as young as five. So bold is Jennings in his promotion of homosexual behavior among children that he even penned the foreword to a book entitled “Queering Elementary Education.” (I don’t know about you, but Jennings and his ilk will “queer” my elementary-age kids over my dead body.)

A number of Jennings past activities disqualify him from holding any position relating to children; but a recently revealed scandal involving an exchange between him and a former tenth-grade student leaves no doubt that he’s unfit to serve in his current capacity. Jennings has admitted that while he was a teacher, a boy –– whom he understood to be 15 years-old –– shared that he had been sodomized by an “older man” who lured him home from a bus stop toilet.

Of course any reasonable teacher would have immediately called police and notified the student’s parents. But Kevin Jennings –– an anti-Christian bigot who once said of Christians: “F – k ‘em! … Drop Dead!” [in a church]– is anything but reasonable. Instead, he affirmed both the man-boy homosexual encounter and the boy’s “gayness,” flippantly telling him, “I hope you knew to use a condom.” (Jennings recently admitted that he “should have handled this situation differently” but, as of yet, has arrogantly refused to step-down or even apologize).

Still, Jennings’ cavalier attitude toward adult-child sex should really come as no surprise. In a1997 speech he voiced his admiration for Harry Hay, longtime advocate of the homosexual/pedophile group NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association.)

According to NAMBLA’s website, Hay made the following statement in a 1983 address: “I also would like to say at this point that it seems to me that in the gay community the people who should be running interference for NAMBLA are the parents and friends of gays. Because if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world. And they would be welcoming this, and welcoming the opportunity for young gay kids to have the kind of experience that they would need.”

Sickening, right? Shocking, no? Well, not to Kevin Jennings. His take? He gushed, “One of the people that’s always inspired me is Harry Hay.”

But, again, this should come as no surprise. Homosexual/pedophile groups like NAMBLA and homosexual activist groups have long been brothers-in-arms. In many instances, members of both groups are one-in-the-same. According to the non-partisan homosexual activist watchdog organization Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, NAMBLA marched alongside “gay” activist groups in “gay pride” parades for years until it became politically burdensome for homosexual activists to continue allowing them to do so.

As with “gay” activist pioneer Harry Hay, legalizing adult-child sex has long been a goal of many homosexual activists (for years, overtly and today, covertly). Boys and teens utilized for homosex are referred to as “chicken” in “gay” lexicon.

In fact, part of homosexual activists “1972 Gay Rights Platform” called for the “repeal [of] all laws governing the age of sexual consent.” This should send a chill down the spine of any parent. Such a repeal would legally allow homosexuals and pedophiles to access your children and teens for their own predatory sexual gratification – so long as those children “consented” to having sex (like the boy who confided in Jennings).

To be sure, Jennings is no stranger to scandal. In a 2000 GLSEN sponsored event, adult homosexual activists were caught in an ACORN-style sting teaching children as young as 13 the horrific practice of “fisting.” (For a definition click here, it’s not fit to print). Jennings’ response? He defended the event and even filed suit in an attempt to cover-up the scandal.

But “cover-up” is at the very core of Jennings’ strategy. In 1995, while summarizing his political approach of manipulation and indoctrination, he warned fellow homosexual activists to hide their true motives and avoid using language about “promoting homosexuality.” Instead, he astutely observed that “the effective reframing of this issue” through the disingenuous use of propagandist euphemisms such as “safety” and “violence” was “the key to…success.”

It’s worked like a charm.

But rather than being appointed by Obama to such a position of power and prestige, both Kevin Jennings and GLSEN should be held liable for engaging in reckless educational malpractice. By promoting and facilitating homosexual behavior among children, they demonstrably place children at risk.

Multiple studies have established, for instance, that homosexual conduct, especially among males, is considerably more hazardous to one’s health than a lifetime of chain smoking.

One such study – conducted by pro-“gay” researchers in Canada – was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE) in 1997.  (see the study here: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/26/3/657.pdf)

While the medical consensus is that smoking knocks from two to 10 years off an individual’s life expectancy, the IJE study found that homosexual conduct shortens the lifespan of “gays” by an astounding “8 to 20 years” – more than twice that of smoking.

“[U]nder even the most liberal assumptions,” concluded the researchers, “gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871. … [L]ife expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men.”

The risks associated with homosexual conduct are so drastic, in fact, that U.S. health regulations prohibit men who have sex with men (MSM) and women who have had sex with MSM, from ever donating blood. (Yet Jennings and GLSEN encourage children to engage in the very behaviors that – for quantifiable health related reasons – would preclude them from giving blood … ever.)

Consider that, according to the Food and Drug Administration, MSM, “have  an HIV prevalence 60 times higher than the general population, 800 times higher than first time blood donors and 8,000 times higher than repeat blood donors.”

Adults and children who engage in homosexual conduct – especially males – are also susceptible – at an astronomical rate – to nearly all other forms of sexually transmitted disease (STD).  For example, the Hepatitis B virus is about five to six times more prevalent among “gays,” and Hepatitis C is twice as common.

Furthermore, a 2007 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that, although homosexuals make-up only a fraction of the population (one to two percent), they account for an epidemic 64 percent of all syphilis cases.

So, all of this begs the question: Why on God’s earth is this Kevin Jennings nut – whose entire life’s work has irrefutably placed children at risk – in charge of promoting “safe schools”? He’s even bragged in his personal memoirs about his own drug and alcohol abuse.

Indeed, Obama’s Jennings appointment was a gold medal blunder among a litany of Olympic-sized missteps. If his administration seeks to salvage any modicum of rapidly waning credibility, the President must force Jennings to step down and denounce his reckless behavior.

Every day Jennings remains in place is another day he hurts Obama; but more importantly, it’s another day he hurts children.

The real scandal is that Jennings was ever appointed in the first place. He must go and he must go now.

J. Matt Barber is Director of Cultural Affairs with Liberty Counsel and also serves as Associate Dean with Liberty University School of Law. He is also a Board Member of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality.

FRC’s Oct. 5 “Washington Update” follows:

“The totality of [GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings'] life has been the promotion of homosexuality, and much of it within education.” — Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)

King of the Hill Takes on Czar of the Schools
The Obama administration is spending precious capital protecting its Safe Schools “czar,” but many believe that loyalty carries more political risk than reward. Last week, Kevin Jennings’s “aw, shucks” response to covering up child sexual abuse should have sounded the alarm over at the Department of Education. Instead, Secretary Arne Duncan used the opportunity to praise Jennings as “uniquely qualified” to serve on the team. That may not be the consensus for much longer, since FRC has uncovered a series of op-eds that show Jennings’s incredible hostility toward Christianity.

In at least two Huffington Post columns, Jennings attacks people of faith with complete and utter disdain. When the former director of GLSEN tried to implement a series of Gay Straight Alliances in classrooms back in 2007, Jennings described a Christian who fought the idea as having “not-yet-fully evolved views maybe because of his proximity to the Everglades (from whose ooze he may have recently climbed), [but] I can’t dismiss them as the ravings of a single troglodyte. Instead, they represent a classic example of how right-wing extremists continually try to mislead the public about the nature and purpose of GSAs.”

In another article, “Recruit, Recruit, Recruit!” Jennings called Christian students “hypocrites” and mocked the members of Young Life for trying to evangelize their friends. At one point in the column, Jennings says, “…[T]hey want everyone to have to believe the way they do.” Ironically, that’s what Jennings’ movement has been pushing for all along: forced acceptance! He and his activist friends want tolerance, but not for others.

Maybe that’s why leaders like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) are calling for Jennings ’s head. “The totality of his life,” King says, “has been the promotion of homosexuality, and much of it within education.” His work, says Rep. King, is “a political movement… It’s not about protecting kids, it’s about promoting homosexuality and demanding public affirmation… President Obama should fire Kevin Jennings immediately.”

Obviously, the only “unique qualification” Jennings possesses is an ability to practice the same kind of intimidation his office is trying to prevent. As FRC has said for four months, a man charged with creating safe schools can’t possibly achieve it by turning America’s classrooms into a hostile environment for kids with religious beliefs. Otherwise, we’ve allowed the anti-bullying boss to become the biggest bully of all! For more information on what you can do to stop Jennings, visit our site.

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Here is the original Americans For Truth “Lambda Report” article reporting Kevin Jennings’ comment at a GLSEN conference in 1997 that he indeed looks forward to the day when “promoting homosexuality” in schools will be seen in a positive light:

“‘Gay’ Leader Kevin Jennings Says Dream Is to ‘Promote Homosexuality’ in Schools”

TAKE ACTION: Below are the main homosexual/trans activist bills that we urge you to stand against (call Congress at 202-224-3121; 202-225-3121; www.congress.org):

• Hate Crimes (”Thought Crimes”) — STATUS: passed House and Senate attached as amendment to DoD appropriations bill: HR 1913: www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-1913&tab=summary; now in House-Senate conference;
• Federal “Special Workplace Rights” Based on Homosexuality and Gender Confusion — ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act (HR 3017; S 1584) — 40 co-sponsors in Senate (all but 2 are Democrats): www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-1584; 181 co-sponsors in the House (all but 5 are Democrats): www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3017. More info on this Top Priority bill for “gay” activists: http://americansfortruth.com/news/obamas-homosexual-opm-chief-calls-enda-top-priority-keystone-that-will-propel-rest-of-gay-legislation.html
• Allowing Admitted Homosexuals in the Military — HR 1283, audaciously entitled, “Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2009″; 176 co-sponsors: all but one are Democrats: www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3017.
• Homosexuality Indoctrination in Schools via “Bullying”/”Safe Schools” Funding — HR 2262, innocuously titled, “Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act”: www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2262; 88 cosponsors (all but 1 Democrats); more info: www.illinoisfamily.org/news/contentview.asp?c=34545
• Federal Domestic Partner Benefits for Homosexuals: (HR 2517); sponsored by lesbian Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-WI); “Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act”; 110 co-sponsors, all but 1 are Democrats: www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2517
• Repeal of DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act); HR 3567: mischievously named the “Respect for Marriage Act”  it would repeal DOMA, which protects states from being forced to recognize out-of-state “gay marriages”; homosexual Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) opposes this bill due to timing. See: www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3567; “Gay” Blade account here: www.washblade.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=27207
• Homosexual “Couples” Immigration Expansion — “Reuniting Families Act” (HR 2709): “would allow homosexuals to sponsor their “permanent partners” for residency in the United States”;  www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2709; more info: www.cnsnews.com/public/Content/Article.aspx?rsrcid=49464

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“Homosexualists see nothing wrong in compelling other people’s children to be exposed to implicit and explicit theories on the nature and morality of homosexuality because they believe their theories are facts.” – Laurie Higgins
 

H.R. 2262, “The Safe Schools Improvement Act,” was introduced in May, and in June it was referred to the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. This bill would “amend the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act to include bullying and harassment prevention programs.” Anyone who has been paying attention knows that anti-bullying/safe schools curricula are now the central means by which pro-homosexual propaganda is secreted into public schools.

Joining bill sponsor Representative Linda Sánchez (D-CA) are 81 co-sponsors. Seventy-nine are Democrats, one is an independent, and two are Republicans. Co-sponsors from Illinois are Mark Kirk (R-10th District), Danny Davis (D-7th District), Luis Gutierrez (D-4th District), Mike Quigley (D-5th District) and Jan Schakowsky (D-9th District).

Background
A few months ago, a mother from Alameda County, CA called me for help in combating the new K-5 “Safe Schools” curriculum adopted by her local school board and implemented this month. It was this mother who directed me to H.R. 2262 and asked whether the passage of this bill would be accompanied by public money, perhaps even stimulus money.

The “safe schools” curriculum in Alameda,CA, like all other “safe schools” curricula, presents homosexuality, bisexuality, “transgenderism,” and “transsexuality,” (more properly known as gender identity disorder) positively and in ways that suggest that these disordered sexual practices are morally equivalent to heterosexuality.

What makes this situation worse — if that’s possible — is that the school district’s “attorneys say parents would not be allowed to keep their children from taking the courses because the lessons don’t include health or sexual education.” The school board formally announced in May that parents will neither be notified prior to students being exposed to pro-homosexual resources, nor will they be permitted to opt their children out of such presentations. In so doing, these activist ideologues betray their own pedagogical claims that they want parents to be advocates for their children and that they “honor diversity.” They reveal the deceit and Machiavellian machinations they are willing to employ in the service of using public education to advance their social and political vision.

A Massachusetts court came to a similar conclusion regarding parents’ rights — or the lack thereof. Judge Mark Wolf concluded that it is reasonable for K-5 teachers to teach other people’s children to respect homosexuality. He further stated that parents have two choices: either put their children in public schools or don’t. Once children are enrolled in public schools, however, there will be no requirement that schools notify parents prior to the presentation of pro-homosexual resources or offer parents an opt-out option.

We in Illinois should be troubled by this because it’s coming here. Organizations like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which endorsed H.R. 2262, are working feverishly to get pro-homosexual/safe schools curricula in all schools.

What is noteworthy about the efforts of activist “educators” like those in Alameda, CA is that they live and move as if their subversive theories about homosexuality and transgenderism are objective facts — despite the absence of proof:

• Homosexualists (i.e., homosexuals and those who support their moral beliefs and political agenda) arrogate to themselves the right to use public money and public resources (i.e., public education) to advance their subjective beliefs and values because they view their subjective beliefs and values as objectively true.
• Homosexualists believe that their subjective, unproven ontological theories and moral views grant to them rights that supersede parental rights, and therefore, they refuse even to allow parents to opt their own children out of presentations that affirm homosexuality. Homosexualists see nothing wrong in compelling other people’s children to be exposed to implicit and explicit theories on the nature and morality of homosexuality because they believe their theories are facts.
• Homosexualists believe they have the right to censor all resources in public schools that challenge the myth that homosexuality is ontologically analogous to race and the belief that homosexual acts are morally equivalent to heterosexual acts because they see their subjective beliefs and values as facts.
• Homosexualists believe they have the right to conceal from parents when their little ones will be exposed to radical, subversive ideas about homosexuality because homosexualists view their own unproven theories as facts.

This sounds scarily like propaganda to me. Apparently, when activist educators say that it takes an entire village to raise a child, they really mean it takes an entire village of likeminded “agents of change” and boatloads of public money to indoctrinate other people’s children.

If only people of faith would start to treat their own ontological and moral views as objective, universal, eternal, transcendent truths, maybe we could stem the tide of pro-homosexual activism in our public schools.

The California mother who contacted me comes to the issue with an unusual perspective: Kerry Cook is a former lesbian who identified as a “lesbian feminist” for ten years. Not only that but she was an Anti-Discrimination and Managing Diversity professional for the Australian government and a former board member of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby in Sydney, Australia. She turned from that life, embraced Christ, a husband, and motherhood.

It is unconscionable that pro-homosexual resources are making their way into our schools when there are so many people of faith who know that these resources promote deeply flawed and destructive ideas. Why are there not more faith leaders and their followers in communities all across this country willing to fight the well-financed, morally corrupt effort to propagandize children with abominable ideas?

Just as the legitimate concept of “civil rights” is cunningly manipulated to change the legal definition of marriage, and the phenomenon of race is exploited to convince the public that homosexuality is an immutable, biologically determined, 100% heritable, morally neutral condition like race, the very real problem of bullying is being exploited to convince the public that pro-homosexual proselytizing belongs in public schools. Don’t buy it.

Schools can address bullying without ever mentioning deviant sexual conduct. For example, no public school administrator would ever recommend an anti-bullying program that affirms polyamory even to end the bullying of those students who identify as polyamorous. As I’ve said before, the good ends of ending bullying do not justify the illegitimate means of using public funds to affirm homosexuality.

Not only are schools pushing pro-homosexual indoctrination under the guise of “anti-bullying” programs, but the hardcore proselytes are fighting tooth and nail to prevent parents from being allowed to opt their children out of these propaganda sessions.

We in Illinois must stop ignoring the educational abuses taking place in publicly funded schools in places like California and Massachusetts. There are activists both within and without our public schools working to bring the same kinds of resources, activities, programs, and policies to Illinois schools. Children are the immediate victims of these abuses, but we should remember that current students are our future culture-makers.

To be good stewards of our money, caretakers of our children, preservers of our culture, and protectors of our rights, we must vigorously and publicly oppose the promotion of ignorance and deceit in public schools.

TAKE ACTION: Contact your U.S. Representative (202-225-3121; www.congress.org) immediately to urge him or her to stop this dangerous bill.

Promoting Homosexuality: Kevin Jennings, Obama appointee and founder of the Gay, Lesbian Straight Education Network, said in 1997 that he looked forward to the day when parents would react to reports that schools are “promoting homosexuality” by saying, “Yeah, who cares?”

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GLSEN leaders contend that effective redefinition of the next generation’s attitude toward homosexuality requires the positive portrayals of homosexuality starting in kindergarten.  According to GLSEN activist Jaki Williams, children at that age are “developing their superego,” and “that’s when the saturation process needs to begin.”

Dear Readers,

AFTAH has been exposing the radical agenda of Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded –  the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) — for a long time. This article on a GLSEN conference in New York City was first published in the Lambda Report [the publication that preceded Americans For Truth About Homosexuality], in early 1998.

Brian Burt’s firsthand report reveals both the frankness of Jennings and fellow homosexual activists in expressing their revolutionary goals, and GLSEN’s agenda of manipulating very young minds to support homosexuality. The “saturation process” quotation above should give pause to even liberal-minded parents who might be wary of GLSEN’s utilitarian strategy of supplanting the parents’ role in guiding their children’s moral upbringing with teacher-activists intent on indoctrinating even kindergartners (!!) in the celebration of homosexuality.

Kevin Jennings has been appointed by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education for the Department of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. We will be loading all Lambda Report articles online, including others about GLSEN and Jennings. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.com
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‘Gay’ Leader Kevin Jennings Says Dream Is to ‘Promote Homosexuality’ in Schools
GLSEN Speakers Tout ‘Gay’ Lessons for Kindergartners

By Brian J. Burt

January/February 1998, Lambda Report, Americans For Truth

NEW YORK CITY—The head of a homosexual teachers group said he looks forward to the day when “promoting homosexuality” in schools will be seen in a positive light, while others at a recent conference sponsored by his organization advocated exposing kindergartners to pro-homosexual lessons.

“I can envision a day when straight people say, ‘So what if you’re promoting homosexuality,’” said Kevin Jennings, cofounder and executive director of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), at an October 25 conference here. “Or straight kids [will] say [to a male homosexual friend], ‘Hey, why don’t you and your boyfriend come over before you go to prom and try your tuxes on at my house?’

“[I]f we believe that can happen, we can make it happen,” Jennings said, making his comments at a “Looking to the Future” panel discussion that was part of GLSEN’s 4th Annual Mid-Atlantic Conference. Entitled “From Dirt Road to Cyberspace: LGBT Issues in Education for the 21st Century,” the all-day event featured over 40 separate workshops and a staged “town hall” for the media led by lesbian activist and tennis star Martina Navratilova.

Jennings acknowledged that his organization has vehemently denied the charge that it promote homosexuality in schools. He recalled that when GLSEN board member Ann Simon testified before Congress two years ago [1996], at hearings examining the “promotion of homosexuality in the schools,” GLSEN was “busy putting out press releases, and saying ‘We’re not promoting homosexuality, that’s not what our program’s about.’”

Jennings said that after the congressional hearing, his best friend wrote him asking, “So what if you are?” He said regretfully that he had gotten “wrapped up in…[his] own defensiveness and the day-to-day struggle.” Now, Jennings said he realizes that GLSEN’s work will be done when “most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality [in our schools], would say, ‘Yeah, who cares?’”

Before passing around collection plates, he submitted a final wish: “Right now, let’s face it. For large swells of people, they think of GLSEN and kids, and they think ‘GLSEN’ is bad for kids…I’d like five years from now for most Americans when they hear the word ‘GLSEN’ to think ‘Ooh, that’s good for kids.’”

Conflicting Messages
Since its founding in Boston three years ago, GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Teachers’ Network, or GLSTN) has publicly billed itself as an organization focused on addressing and ending “the destructive effects of anti-gay bias in schools across the country.” Asked whether its ultimate mission went beyond the “teaching of respect for all”—the title of a GLSEN instructional video featuring Jennings—and into the realm of promoting homosexuality, GLSEN has consistently responded with an emphatic “no.” At the conference, however, GLSEN leaders painted two different portraits of its vision for the coming millennium.

With cameras from ABC’s 20/20, MTV and other national media outlets rolling, lesbian activist Navratilova prompted the eight “town hall” panelists to relate their experiences with antihomosexual harassment in our nation’s schools. Speakers recounted their experiences as observers and victims of violence against “gay” students, and discussed the academic decline and suicidal tendencies allegedly resulting from those attacks. These students and parents cited “physical safety” as their main concern, and voiced shared goal of working with GLSEN to create “safe schools,” where “tolerance” would be universally practiced.

When asked to discuss the best approach for pursuing that objective, the panelists favored a low-key approach of incorporating homosexual issues into general classroom discussions of human diversity.

“[Homo]sexuality shouldn’t be such a dig deal in schools; it shouldn’t be brought up like ‘We’re gonna talk about being gay today,’ because that’s just showing…that like we have an agenda or something…[J]ust incorporate it,” explained panelists Cassandra Lewis, a high school senior from Southern California.

After the “town hall meeting” concluded and the media had left the building, the 210 attendees broke into private workshop groups, where GLSEN presenters expounded a markedly different vision for the future. Denouncing the quest for “tolerance” as a “condescending campaign for the second-class citizenry” —— as one speaker put it —— the presenters spoke frankly about their goal to have homosexuality open “affirmed” and celebrated” in American’s schools.

“I don’t want to be tolerated. I don’t want to be put up with. I want to be…celebrated,” said Stephen Glassman, a GLSEN chapter board member from New Oxford, Pennsylvania, Karen Kalteissen, host of a workshop on “Conversing with the Christian Community,” explained,

“Tolerance is the most minimalist virtue I can think of, and I’m not even sure I want to put it under the category of minimalist.”

Kindergarten “Tolerance” Lesson
Throughout these discussions, GLSEN’s “safe school” tolerance campaign was identified as a “stepping stone” to the goal of complete curriculum revision. Dialoguing about the legal liability that could be linked to incidents of antihomosexual violence was said to be a highly effective way to “get the ear” of administrators and board members. Once school leaders recognize the need for tolerant classrooms, activists can present their homosexual curriculum model as a means of accomplishing that objective.

“We might start with people who…say, ‘Well, I can go as far as tolerance,’ and then we build from there,” Kalteissen said. “And our job, I believe, is to move them down the scale…Tolerance is not enough, let’s keep going.”

During the workshop sessions, activists presented tools for changing curricula at all levels—from kindergarten through high school. Topics ranged from “Inclusive Kindergarten,” “Inclusive Elementary School Curriculum,” and “Re-envisioning High School Literature,” to “Stir Things Up: How to Start a Gay-Straight Alliance,” “Hey Faggot! Hey Dyke!,” and “Very Queer Kids.”

GLSEN leaders contend that effective redefinition of the next generation’s attitude toward homosexuality requires the positive portrayals of homosexuality starting in kindergarten.  According to Jaki Williams, a GLSEN activist and teacher at the Packer Collegiate School (in New York), children at that age are “developing their superego,” and “that’s when the saturation process needs to begin.”

In her “Inclusive Kindergarten” workshop, Williams explained that “five-year-olds really are very interested in the big questions. They’re very interested in sex, death, and love, and they ask those questions, and they talk about them. And we want to help them find the answers…on their level.” To initiate conversation, Williams said, she has her class read a variety of books which endorse homosexuality, including Asha’s Mums, My Two Uncles, Heather Has Two Mommies, Daddy’s Roommate, and One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads. She also hosts a viewing of the video Both of My Moms’ Names are Judy.

While kindergarteners were found to be “open” to discussions about the homosexual model, their limited intellectual developments made full comprehension of these concepts difficult. Group members suggested the solution was a careful reexamination of the language used in the classroom. Speakers advocated repeated use of the words “gay” and “lesbian,” and encouraged more explicit explanations of the homosexual behaviors.

A former teacher relayed her experience, arguing that it is not enough to say, “Oh well I do this umbrella anti-bias thing and therefore I’m talking about diversity.” She explained that children need constant exposure to homosexual words and images. “It’s really a conditioning process.”

Another workshop participant agreed, saying, “I think looking at language is so essential…I think we need to [being by] say[ing] this is the bedroom that Harriet and Susan sleep in.

A kindergarten teacher from Alexandria, Virginia in the audience agreed. She claimed such graphic descriptions force children to develop accurate images to go along with the “gay” vocabulary. She credited her success to the highly progressive paradigm her school district embraced, and the academic freedom which it provided her. Her only complain was that it had not yet acquiesced to classroom demonstrations of contraceptive use.

Addressing Parents
Throughout the conference, only a few participants directly addressed the issue of parental opposition to GLSEN’s vision. In her kindergarten workshop, Williams recounted how she answered the questions of one pupil’s parents who were concerned when their child arrived home with what she admitted was a provocative brochure on bias, produced by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

When the husband expressed concern during a parents’ night about the factual content of her unstructured diversity question-and-answer sessions, Williams said she reassured him by explaining that facts are a product of and vary according to one’s individual perspective. To avoid engaging in fruitless debate about the wisdom of promoting homosexuality, she sent the parents home with other handouts extolling the principles of diversity and equity in education.
Other GLSEN activists were less willing to engage in dialogue with concerned parents.

“There aren’t two sides to working toward ending homophobia,” said Imani Matthews, a teacher at Riverdale Country School in New York. “There isn’t a loving presenter of the other side.”

“[T]he nature of homosexuality [is]…not what we’re talking about…It’s about fighting homophobia and heterosexism,” Matthews said.

Some administrators said the best way to handle problems with parental opposition was simply to avoid them. Instead of sending home a letter alerting parents to the proposed curriculum, activists encourage ed teachers to move forward independently with the incorporation of pro-“gay” materials.

Redefining the Family
To bring together the day’s lessons, GLSEN sponsored a “Looking to the Future” panel discussion. Fielding questions and comments from the audience, the five activists and professionals explained that progress is sometimes “a slow process.” Tactics for change included “coming out” by teachers and school administrators, more effective use of the media, recapturing language necessary to frame the debate, developing better relationships with straight allies, direct confrontation of known anti-gay individuals, and engaging political leaders on the local level.

While “safe” learning environments were cited as a “critical objective,” the discussion echoed the workshops’ emphasis on a curriculum that promoted homosexuality.

“A child has…been screwed by the educational system if they are not actively…helped to see the glory of diversity as part of the classroom experience,” said Terry Boggis, cofounder and director of Center Kids, a lobbying group for “LGB” (lesbian, gay, bisexual) families.

Redefining the concept of family is a central component of the desired curriculum. Panelists explained that progress will only occur when educators recognize that “rigid” familial constructs are no longer viable—and that, instead, in the words of a popular homosexual activist slogan, “love makes a family.”

Panelists underscored the alleged decline of the nuclear family, which, in Boggis’ view, “hardly doesn’t exist anymore.”

She explained, “As we look at curriculum, we are looking for schools that include a more creative and broader definition of family. That people are…allowing children in their classrooms to claim whomever they define as their family members, and have that be OK…good friends, neighbors, or patron saints.”

Earlier, in her “Creating a Safe School Environment from an Administrator’s Point of View” workshop, panelist Elaine Winder, principal at the Little Red School House (in Manhattan), expounded on the changing family structure and the growing population of homosexual parents.

The issue of homosexuality is tearing apart youth culture, transforming schools and turning kids away from Christianity. Adults with a mind and a heart are needed! Have you ever wondered if you are called to serve in this area of public life? Come listen to a veteran who felt God’s call to this unique and challenging public policy and mission field over a decade ago.

Folks, lots of good things are happening at Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH). We are moving into our new offices in Carol Stream, Illinois, and are delighted to welcome Linda Harvey, founder of Mission America, as our first guest speaker. Please come to one or both of these talks if you are in the Chicagoland area, and pass this notice on to your pastor, co-workers, family and friends and invite them to attend. Linda is a good friend and a national treasure as a pro-family Christian advocate who doesn’t pull any punches in defending Truth. If only more American men had her guts and were as willing as she is to take a stand in saving our nation!

Linda is a leading Christian conservative authority on the issue of homosexuality/bisexuality/transsexual agendas and youth, and the growing “paganization” of America– so naturally we are asking her to speak on both topics. Here are her presentation titles:

Tuesday, June 2: “The Destructive Effects of ‘Gay’ Activism on America’s Youth”

Thursday, June 4: “How the Democratic Party and the Religious Left Are Constructing a New False Faith for America”

The evenings will go from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM, beginning with a simple dinner buffet. Donations will be accepted at the door to help cover costs. Please indicate if you plan to attend so we can get an idea of the numbers; e-mail americansfortruth@comcast.net. Our new address is at the Kingsland Ministry Center building on  Geneva Rd. just west of Gary Rd. in Carol Stream (near Wheaton, Illinois). Look for the “Kingsland Ministry Center” sign. The exact address is: Americans For Truth, 25W560 Geneva Rd., Suite 8-D, Carol Stream, IL 60187. Call Angela at 847-722-5330 or AFTAH at 630-717-7631 with any questions. Or e-mail us at: americansfortruth@comcast.net. We look forward to seeing some of you tonight and Thursday evening!

– Peter LaBarbera, www.americansfortruth.com.

News Release, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality

June 1, 2009; contact: Peter LaBarbera: (630)717-7631

Suburban CHICAGO, Ill. – Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) President Peter LaBarbera today urged President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to withdraw the nomination of longtime homosexual activist Kevin Jennings as Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Department of Education’s Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools, due to Jennings’ vicious anti-religious bigotry and his role with an extremist homosexual group that has recklessly endangered youth.

Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), presided over the 2000 Boston “Fistgate” scandal in which homosexual adults – at a GLSEN-sponsored youth workshop on “Queer Sex & Sexuality” — guided young teenagers on how to engage in perversions including the horrifying “gay” fetish known as “fisting,” in which a man inserts his arm up the anal cavity of another man.

(GLSEN and Jennings never issued an apology for “Fistgate,” but instead criticized Scott Whiteman, the parent who secretly taped it, for violating the students’ privacy. Americans For Truth’s LaBarbera had advised Whiteman to tape the workshop to prove to skeptics that GLSEN’s brand of recklessness involving young people actually occurs. Later, a Boston homosexual group sued Whiteman and MassResistance founder Brian Camenker to block the release of the Fistgate tape.)

“Kevin Jennings is one of the most hateful, anti-Christian ‘queer’ activists in America: he even said ‘[F—k] ‘em’ and ‘Drop dead!” to religious conservatives — while speaking at a church, of all places,” LaBarbera said. “Jennings should have been drummed out of public policy years ago for GLSEN’s role in the awful Fistgate scandal that corrupted Boston youth,” LaBarbera said, “but instead the GLSEN founder is now being elevated to one of the most important roles in U.S. education policy.

“Barack Obama’s homosexual agenda is beginning to take shape – but he has no election mandate to impose GLSEN’s radical vision of celebrating homosexuality, bisexuality and gender confusion (transsexuality) in U.S. schools,” LaBarbera said. “Anti-religious bigots should not be setting policy for schools — and promoting dangerous sex and gender identities to youth is the antithesis of ‘safety.’ (Men who have sex with other men (MSM) suffer from much higher rates of sexual diseases – including anal cancer, HIV, syphilis, and gonorrhea — than non-MSMs.)

He added that GLSEN’s ‘Safe Schools’ strategy “is a Trojan Horse designed to advance the normalization of harmful behaviors to impressionable children.”

“Americans For Truth will educate Americans on Jennings’ and GLSEN’s dangerous agenda, and we will work with other pro-family and parental rights groups across the country – and Obama voters who oppose pro-homosexual indoctrination in schools – to urge that the Jennings appointment be withdrawn,” LaBarbera said.

Folks, with President Obama’s appointment of homosexual activist and GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network) founder Kevin Jennings to head the “Safe Schools” efforts at the Department of Education, we will be rolling out Jennings’ long record of radical statements and writings, his personal nastiness toward religious conservatives, and his group’s promotion of unsafe behaviors (GLSEN sponsored the Tufts University conference that produced the infamous “Fistgate” scandal in which young teenagers were given how-to instruction on various ).

Americans For Truth About Homosexuality calls for the withdrawal of this divisive nomination — which is an affront to Christians,  parents’ rights and decent, moral citizens everywhere who oppose the indoctrination of students in a pro-homosexuality, pro-gender confusion agenda. The following comments by Jennings are from a paper I wrote for Concerned Women for America (CWA), titled, “When Silence Would Have Been Golden: Acts of Homosexual Promotion to Youth that We Wish Had Never Happened.”

Get ready for a political fight. Appointing Kevin Jennings, a vicious homosexual activist, to head up a “Safe Schools” project for American youth would be like appointing David Duke to head up a national panel on racial reconciliation. If we had anything even close to a fair media in this country, Jennings would have been discredited long ago for GLSEN’s role in “Fistgate.” Something tells me that Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, hasn’t heard of Fistgate. But he will now — and so will many more people. Much more coming on this breaking story. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.com

From the 2002 CWA paper:

GLSEN’S JENNINGS: !&%#! THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT!
Addressing a church audience on March 20, 2000 in New York City — just days before “Fistgate” — GLSEN Executive Director Kevin Jennings offered a stinging (and quite intolerant) assessment of how to deal with religious conservatives:

“Twenty percent of people are hard-core fair-minded [pro-homosexual] people. Twenty percent are hard-core [anti-homosexual] bigots. We need to ignore the hard-core bigots, get more of the hard-core fair-minded people to speak up, and we’ll pull that 60 percent [of people in the middle]   over to our side. That’s really what I think our strategy has to be. We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. We also have to quit — I’m trying to find a way to say this. I’m trying not to say, ‘[F---] ‘em!’ which is what I want to say, because I don’t care what they think! [audience laughter] Drop dead!” — Jennings speech to Marble Collegiate Church, March 20, 2000.

(It should be noted that GLSEN and Jennings make heavy use of the words “respect” and “tolerance” in their public rhetoric and in descriptions of their programs.) [GLSEN's also sponsors a "No Name Calling Week," which includes "No Dissing" in its advice to kids as part of a school-based program to "eliminate bullying."]

JENNINGS: OK TO PROMOTE HOMOSEXUALITY IN SCHOOLS
Although Jennings has employed manipulative methods that exaggerate homosexual victimhood to advance his pro-”gay” agenda in schools, he has occasionally been frank about GLSEN’s real agenda:

“I’d like five years from now for most Americans when they hear the word GLSEN to think, “Ooh, that’s good for kids.”   Sane people keep the world the same [sh---y] old way it is now. It’s the [crazy] people who think, “No, I can envision a day when straight people say, ‘So what if you’re promoting homosexuality?’ or [when] straight kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you and your boyfriend come over before you go to the prom and try your tuxes on at my house?’”   [I]f we believe that can happen, we can make it happen. The only thing that will stop us is our lack of faith that we can make it happen. That is our mission from this day forward.” — Jennings comments October 25, 1997 at GLSEN’s Mid-Atlantic conference in New York City, Lambda Report on Homosexuality [conservative publication published by Peter LaBarbera that preceded Americans For Truth About Homosexuality], January/February 1998, “GLSEN’s Jennings: ‘That Is Our Mission from this Day Forward,” page 5, Brian Burt, reporting.

Full CWA Paper at: http://www.cultureandfamily.org/articledisplay.asp?id=2580&department=CFI&categoryid=papers#ref

Kevin Jennings bio from Dep’t of Education release announcing his appointment:

Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary, Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools
Kevin Jennings is the founder and former executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), an organization that works to make schools safe for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Prior to his tenure at GLSEN, Jennings served as History Department chair and a history teacher at Concord Academy in Massachusetts and before that as a history teacher at Moses Brown School in Rhode Island. Jennings has also authored six books including Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir which was named a 2007 Book of Honor by the American Library Association and Telling Tales Out of School which was the winner of the 1998 Lambda Literary Award. Jennings received an A.B. in history from Harvard, an M.A. from the Columbia University Teachers College and an M.B.A. from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

“Recent court decisions in other states have similarly made clear that providing benefits to same-sex couples, no matter how minor and even if accompanied by statement of intent meant to protect marriage, will be treated as evidence that the legislature does not object to redefining marriage.

“In each of the State high court decisions mandating a redefinition of marriage (in Massachusetts, California and Connecticut), the majority opinions have pointed to the extension of benefits to same-sex couples in those States in support of its conclusion.[3] This was the case in Massachusetts even though the legislature had specified in one bill that “[n]othing in this act shall be construed so as to legitimize or validate a ‘homosexual marriage’, so-called.” – William Duncan, Marriage Law Foundation

TAKE ACTION:  “Civil unions” and “domestic partner” bills are used by activist judges to legalize “same-sex marriage,” as Bill Duncan of the Marriage Law Foundation shows below. Such bills are being considered in several states. “Sexual orientation/Gender Identity” bills create the foundation for artificial, homosexuality-based “rights,” culminating in homosexual “marriage.”  A “civil unions” bill just advanced in Illinois, and several pro-homosexual bills will be considered soon in Florida. Take action in the following states (this list is not comprehensive):

TO FIND OUT WHO YOUR STATE AND FEDERAL REPRESENTATIVES ARE, go to www.congress.org and plug in your zip code.

FLORIDA: OPPOSE the pro-homosexual/-transsexual “Civil Rights” bill (HB397); the “Domestic Partnership” bill (SB1642); and the pro-homosexual-adoption bills (SB500, HB413); also, OPPOSE the repeal of Abstinence Education (S268,  H0019); here is the Florida legislature website;

ILLINOIS: Oppose the “civil unions” bill, HB 2234, that just passed out of the Youth and Family Committee; urge House Speaker Mike Madigan to stop blocking the marriage amendment (HC002); for more information and an action letter template on HB2234, go to Illinois Family Institute’s website; here is the Illinois General Assembly website;

MICHIGAN: Gary Glenn, head of AFA-Michigan, reports that the following bills are under consideration in Michigan: state-level ENDA (HB 4192); state-level hate crimes; State-level bullying bill (SB 0159 and SB 0275); State-level authorization of homosexual couples being allowed to adopt children. All the bills include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” language. Click here for the Michigan legislature website;

NEW MEXICO: Americans For Truth provided crucial information that helped defeat SB12, a “civil unions” bill in New Mexico — read about the pro-family victory HERE. Thank the state senators who voted against SB 12; you can find a roll call at the end of this article; click here for the New Mexico legislature’s website;

NEW YORK: Urge your legislators to OPPOSE efforts to legalize counterfeit (”gay”) “marriage”; homosexual activists in New York hope to make it the first state to pass “gay marriage” legislation; read a homosexual magazine account HERE; and go here for the New York State Assembly website.

OHIO: OPPOSE SB 55 and 57, pro-homosexual “comprehensive” (anti-abstinence-based) sex-ed bills; here is the Ohio legislature website;

PENNSYLVANIA: Diane Gramley of AFA of Penn. reports that yesterday H.B. 300 was introduced – adding ‘sexual orientation and gender identity or expression’ to the PA Human Relations Act.  Also, one senator has indicated he will reintroduce a hate crimes bill in the near future. So OPPOSE HB300 and “Hate Crimes” legislation. Here’s the Pennsylvania General Assemby website;

UTAH:  Oppose “Common Ground InitiativeWe” legislation; for more information, go to the Southerland Institute website’s “Legislation” page; here is the Utah legislature’s website;

WEST VIRGINIA:  the West Virginia Family Foundation lists the “sexual orientation” bills (OPPOSE) and the state marriage amendment (SUPPORT) in the legislature; go here for the West Virginia legislature website.

 _________________________________________________

Here’s a very important article by Bill Duncan, who has put in many years of good work defending marriage:

Utah’s “Common Ground” Package a Trojan Horse

By William C. Duncan, Marriage Law Foundation

A group called Utah Equality has proposed a package of legislation meant to increase the rights of same-sex couples in Utah. The package has been presented against a backdrop of widespread intimidation directed towards supporters of marriage as the union of husband and wife, including churches.

One of the bills this group includes in its package (expanding eligibility for unmarried people to pursue wrongful death actions) is currently pending in the Utah Legislature. The most significant part of the package would repeal a provision of the Utah Constitution that prevents the creation of legal statuses—such as civil unions– equivalent to marriage that have been understood as a prelude to redefining marriage in California and Connecticut.

Supporters of the package have presented this legislation as the only way for supporters of marriage to show they are acting in good faith.

For instance, a recent article in the Los Angeles Times says: “If the LDS [Latter Day Saints] Church were to support McCoy [the legislative sponsor of the currently pending bill] it would show that it really does believe in love, compassion and equal rights. If it does not, the church’s supposedly conciliatory stance would simply be one more obfuscation in support of truly bigoted intentions.”[1]

While there may be a particular measure included in the package that may not be objectionable taken in isolation , the sponsors of this package have precluded individual consideration of the ideas by creating a package of “bundled” measures and declaring an intention of “incremental advances” on gay rights while the “marriage dialogue” is “set aside . . . for a while.”[2]

Don’t be Fooled

Recent court decisions in other states have similarly made clear that providing benefits to same-sex couples, no matter how minor and even if accompanied by statement of intent meant to protect marriage, will be treated as evidence that the legislature does not object to redefining marriage.

In each of the State high court decisions mandating a redefinition of marriage (in Massachusetts, California and Connecticut), the majority opinions have pointed to the extension of benefits to same-sex couples in those States in support of its conclusion.[3] This was the case in Massachusetts even though the legislature had specified in one bill that “[n]othing in this act shall be construed so as to legitimize or validate a ‘homosexual marriage’, so-called.”[4]

Sound legal and public policy does not require the Utah Legislature to support legislation as a way of rebutting attacks on the integrity of defenders of marriage. If a measure is necessary it should be accompanied not by accusations of bad faith but by evidence of a need for that measure, including a showing that the measure’s purposes cannot be accomplished in a way that provides no threat to marriage (such as by private contract).

Thus, Utah Equality describes the need for wrongful death legislation as “help[ing] families [of those killed as a result of negligence or malpractice] stay in their homes by removing existing barriers to inheritance and insurance.”[5] At a minimum, then, sponsors of the legislation should be able to show that:

1. people are losing their homes because of the absence of the legislation; and
2. these goals could not be achieved through joint ownership of a home, life insurance policies or other private arrangements including wills, that are currently accessible to any person.

These showings will require study and deliberation. It is neither necessary nor wise for the legislature to endorse a package of legislation meant to change the State’s sound public policy in regard to marriage.

Notes
1 Rick Jacobs, “Why We’re Mad at the Mormon Church,” Los Angeles Times , December 8, 2008 at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oew-jacobs8-2008dec08,0,3004487.story.

2 Steve Gehrke, “More Than Mischief: Are Recent Acts of Church Vandalism Tied to Bigotry?,” Salt Lake Tribune , November 24, 2008; Aaron Falk, “Gay Rights Battle Heads to Capitol,” Deseret News , December 10, 2008, B4; see also Kirk Johnson, “Gay Leaders in Utah Plan 5-Bill Attack in Legislature,” New York Times , November 11, 2008, A15.

3 Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941, 962 & 967 ( Mass. 2003); In re Marriage Cases, 183 P.3d 384, 428 ( Cal. 2008), Kerrigan v. Department of Public Health, 2008 WL 4530885, *15 ( Conn.
2008).

4 Mass. General Laws Ann. 151B §4; see Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941, 977 ( Mass. 2003) (Spina, J., dissenting).

5 Equality Utah , “Common Ground Initiative” at http://www.equalityutah.org/CommonGroundInitiative.html.

This article first appeared on the Illinos Family Institute’s website:

Intolerant “Progressive” Educators

10/30/2008 7:36:00 AM
By Laurie Higgins, DSA Director -Illinois Family Institute

“Propaganda Is To Democracy What A Bludgeon Is To A Totalitarian State.”
~Noam Chomsky

An alumnus of District 113, an affluent school district on the North Shore of Chicago, recently informed Illinois Family Institute that once again public money is being used to fund activities that articulate only one side of the cultural debate on homosexuality.

It’s fascinating to see our “progressive” public educators — our foes of conformity; devotees of diversity; teachers of tolerance; defenders of dissent; spurners of censorship — in action. And they are busy little beavers when it comes to propaganda. When it comes to the sacred cow of homosexuality, the “progressive” educators among us are intolerant, conformist censors, deeply committed to using public funds in the service of eliminating intellectual diversity and silencing dissent from their subversive dogma.

Students in District 113 cannot make it through their freshman year without being exposed to resources that affirm controversial, unproven, and bleakly deterministic theories on the nature and morality of homosexuality. And yet they make it through the entire four years of high school without ever being exposed to a single resource or activity that affirms or articulates conservative views.

For example, every year students from the gay and straight alliance pay a visit to all the mandatory Freshman Advisory classes to “share their stories” with freshmen. These presentations are intended to generate sympathy for what many consider to be immoral, volitional behavior. The students who self-identify as homosexual never share with freshmen the fact that there is no research proving that homosexuality is biologically determined. Nor do they share with freshmen that “queer” theorists believe that homosexuality is not biologically determined.

In 2006 at Deerfield High School, the Freshman Advisory curriculum included the whimsical “Terminology Match-Up” game wherein freshmen were given either cards with terms or cards with definitions, and then asked to “mill about and find their matches.”

The terms included the following: cross dressers; down low, which refers to married men having homosexual sex on the side; genderqueer; homophobia (complete with Freud’s idea about repressed homosexuality); MSM, which means men having sex with men; transphobia; pansexual; androgyny, and sex reassignment surgery.

The good news is the Freshman Advisory curriculum has been revised. The bad news is the administration placed all curricular and “supplementary” resources on a password-protected computer portal for which no parent or community member may have the password. When asked to make it accessible to all, the administration said that parents may make an appointment with the principal to come to her office to view resources. Of course, the beauty of having all resources on a secret password-protected portal is that documents can be added or dumped at a moment’s notice. Oh, if only we had an Orphan Annie decoder badge.

Both of District 113’s high schools, Deerfield and Highland Park, have taught the egregiously obscene, blasphemous, pro-gay screed entitled Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by homosexual playwright Tony Kushner.

The Pulitzer prize-winning play revolves around two couples: married Mormon couple Harper and Joe whose marriage is disintegrating in large measure due to Joe’s repressed homosexuality, which he eventually acts upon: and a homosexual couple, Louis and Prior.
Louis leaves Prior when he finds out Prior has AIDS, and then has a month-long affair with Harper’s husband Joe.

There’s also Roy Cohn, the unscrupulous, foul-mouthed, closeted, Jewish, Republican lawyer, who dies of AIDS; the black, homosexual, ex-drag queen nurse with the heart of gold, Belize; and the Angel with “eight vaginae” whose visits prompt sexual arousal and orgasm. The play is replete with references to orgasms, fellatio, semen, ejaculation, and f******. It includes the line “Suck my ****, Mother Theresa.” The teacher who taught this artistic masterpiece was also able to arrange a conference call between all of his students and the homosexual playwright Tony Kushner.

The historically inaccurate pro-homosexual play The Laramie Project has been taught for several years in English classes at Deerfield High School; the spring 2008 play at DHS was The Laramie Project; and the theater teacher arranged to have one of the original cast members, a lesbian, come to DHS to speak to students.

A U.S. History teacher taught a pro-homosexual essay entitled “American Things” by none other than the inestimable and ubiquitous Tony Kushner.

Another social studies teacher had her students read an article from the pinnacle of scholarly erudition, People Magazine, that was sympathetic to transgender teens.

Surely, you say, the librarians in such prestigious academic institutions would recoil at the very idea of censorship, but as of a year ago at Deerfield High School, though the library subscribes to the homosexual periodical The Advocate, and though it has over sixty books that espouse liberal views of homosexuality, it had nary a single book from a conservative perspective on homosexuality-zero, zilch, zippo.

The administration, leaving no stone unturned, offers pro-homosexual propaganda to staff and faculty through professional development activities like the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network’s film That’s a Family and Peggy McIntosh’s “Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity” (SEED) seminars-all of which are paid for by the public.

The alumnus mentioned at the start of this commentary informed IFI that this year Highland Park High School is performing both the pro-gay musical Rent and the pro-gay play The Laramie Project.

I have yet to find one piece of literature, one essay, one fine arts production, one speaker, one professional growth opportunity, one panel discussion, one newspaper article, one seminar or workshop, or one book in the library that embodies or articulates conservative views on homosexuality. What’s even more disturbing, and it should be disturbing to all who value the free exchange of ideas, is that District 113 is not alone.

Many, probably most, public schools suffer from the subversive efforts of activists whose intolerance, whose demands for ideological conformity, whose utter disregard for intellectual diversity, whose unfettered use of censorship, and whose palpable distaste for dissent threaten the legitimacy of public education and transform it into indoctrination and political advocacy.

Exactly how do schools purport to teach critical thinking in the absence of ideas?

The campaign for passing an anti-bullying law was stopped in its tracks by concerned citizens of North Carolina in the final days of the short session of the NC General Assembly last week.

Fayetteville-based Donna Miller, Americans For Truth’s Special Projects Director and a leader for CWA (Concerned Women for America)-NC, coordinated an effort in her county to alert members between CWA-NC and the NC Federation of Republican Women of the impending legislation.

“Rick Glazier, my representative from Cumberland County, was the primary sponsor of this bill, HB 1366,” Miller said. “In June, I visited Rep. Glazier in his office in Raleigh. At that time, he told me there was a good chance that the pro-homosexual bullying bill would pass. When I returned home, we mounted a tremendous effort between our local groups to halt this bill. Rep. Glazier is unopposed in the upcoming election, but he heard loud and clear from citizens from our district. We told him that all students should be treated equally in the fight against bullying — and that schools can protect children from abuse and harassment without promoting destructive sexual and gender agendas.”

Miller said there are additional “sexual orientation and gender identity” bills making their way through the NC Legislature — legislation that would advance the homosexual/transgender agenda in schools, threaten the religious freedoms of North Carolinians, and lay the foundation for homosexual “marriage” in our state.

“Rep. Glazier is a sponsor of these radical bills and he will continue to hear from us ,” she said. “The next session begins in January and we will be prepared to continue the fight against all bills that attempt to create special homosexual rights — at the expense of moral-minded citizens.”

Americans For Truth
www.americansfortruth.org
April 25, 2008

Contact: Peter LaBarbera: 630-717-7631; americansfortruth@comcast.net

NAPERVILLE, Illinois –– Americans For Truth (AFTAH) President Peter LaBarbera today called on schools, the media and opinion-makers to “break the silence” regarding the serious health risks of homosexual behavior, and said Americans deserve an official government investigation into the matter.

“Today, thousands of schools across the country are encouraging the homosexual activist ‘Day of Silence,’ and doing it in the name of protecting students’ safety,” LaBarbera said. “While schools can and must protect every child from harassment and abuse, it is contradictory to promote homosexuality in the name of ‘safety’ because the evidence is so overwhelming that same-sex behavior is a serious health risk –– especially for males.”

AFTAH has joined a coalition of pro-family organizations encouraging parents to pull their children out of schools that endorse the “Day of Silence” or allow students not to participate in classroom activities. [For a list of DOS-participating schools, see www.missionamerica.com.]

“How many government-funded studies have there been on the dangers of smoking?” LaBarbera said. “Yet homosexual men similarly are dying prematurely due to risky, unnatural same-sex practices –– but taxpayer-funded public schools are promoting this lifestyle to students through propagandistic exercises like the ‘Day of Silence.’”

LaBarbera pointed to the Food and Drug Administration’s explanation of why homosexual men are banned from donating blood as evidence of the dangers of homosexual sex. The FDA reports:

Men who have had sex with men since 1977 have an HIV prevalence … 60 times higher than the general population, 800 times higher than first time blood donors and 8,000 times higher than repeat blood donors …. Men who have sex with men also have an increased risk of having other infections that can be transmitted to others by blood transfusion. For example, infection with the Hepatitis B virus is about 5-6 times more common and Hepatitis C virus infections are about 2 times more common in men who have sex with other men than in the general population. Additionally, men who have sex with men have an increased incidence and prevalence of Human Herpes Virus-8 [which] causes a cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma in immunocompromised individuals.

“Educators profess to be concerned with guiding young people into making healthy choices,” LaBarbera said. “By celebrating homosexual, bisexual and ‘transgendered’ lifestyles in the guise of ‘safety,’ they are putting innocent children at risk instead.”

An important victory for free speech here. Who knew that the social leftists’ “Question Authority” mantra of yesteryear would be turned against them today as adults? Congratulations to ADF and Alex Nuxoll for not backing down to the PC Thought Police. — Peter LaBarbera

Illinois School Must Allow “Be Happy, Not Gay” T-shirt

Illinois Family Institute website, 4/24/2008 10:13:00 AM -Alliance Defense Fund

7th Circuit rules unanimously in favor of student represented by ADF attorneys in vital student free speech case.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reversed a lower court’s ruling against an Illinois student Wednesday, saying the district court must order a Naperville high school to suspend its ban on a T-shirt that reads “Be Happy, Not Gay” while the student’s lawsuit proceeds. School officials prohibited student Alex Nuxoll, who is represented by Alliance Defense Fund attorneys, from wearing the clothing.

“Christian students shouldn’t be discriminated against for expressing their beliefs,” said ADF Senior Counsel Nate Kellum. “Public school officials cannot censor a message expressing one viewpoint on homosexual behavior and then at the same time allow messages that express another viewpoint. The court’s ruling is a victory for all students seeking to protect their First Amendment rights on a school campus.”

Nuxoll, a student at Neuqua Valley High School, desires to express his perspective at various times throughout the year, including the next school day after the “Day of Silence.” Other students at the school are permitted to wear shirts with messages supporting homosexual behavior as part of the “Day of Silence,” which is sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network. The 7th Circuit ruling prevents school officials from singling out Nuxoll’s message for censorship.

ADF attorneys appealed to the 7th Circuit after the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, refused to stop school officials from silencing Nuxoll while the lawsuit proceeds (www.telladf.org/news/story.aspx?cid=4349). ADF attorneys had originally filed the lawsuit on behalf of another student, Heidi Zamecnik.

In its opinion, the 7th Circuit stated that “people do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or for that matter their way of life.” The court also said the school district does not appear to be justified in suppressing Nuxoll’s message on the grounds it might provoke “incidents of harassment.”

“It is highly speculative that allowing the plaintiff to wear a T-shirt that says ‘Be Happy, Not Gay’ would have even a slight tendency to provoke such incidents, or for that matter to poison the educational atmosphere,” the court wrote.

The full text of the opinion issued by the 7th Circuit in Nuxoll v. Indian Prairie School District #204 Board of Education granting the motion for preliminary injunction requested by ADF attorneys is available at www.telladf.org/UserDocs/NuxollPIWin.pdf.

It will be my privilege to stand tomorrow with Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern (R) at a grassroots “Rally for Sally” at the state capitol — to defend her against the vicious homosexual activist onslaught unleashed by those who confuse opinion with “hate speech”:

DATE: Wednesday, April 2
TIME: 12:00pm Noon
WHERE: Rotunda of the Oklahoma State Building
2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Oklahoma City Oklahoma

Dozens of pro-family groups and leaders outside of Oklahoma have come to Kern’s defense, and she has not backed down, while demonstrating grace toward those who seek to destroy her.

Incidentally, the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund — which launched the web campaign against Kern and alleged in a public letter that she is somehow partly responsible for the murders of homosexuals (“your words give aid and comfort to those who would hurt, maim and even kill people who are different from you”) — conveniently edited out the part of her speech where she said that, “the book that I base my life upon is God’s word. And it says to love everybody and I try to love everybody.”

You can see below in this portion from the full Kern speech transcript where the GLVF stripped out that phrase — highlighted in red — from the half-sentence (in blue) that followed it, and which was used in the online “hit-recording” against Kern:

Now, I don’t know about you, but the book that I base my life upon is God’s word. And it says to love everybody and I try to love everybody but not everybody’s lifestyle is equal. Just like not all religions are equal. Okay. All money isn’t equal. You know, we have this dumb idea now days, that tolerance means that everything is equal. Well, everything is not equal. We see that in many areas of our lives. You know, all things are not equal. All religions are not equal.

So, you blind-side a public official with charge that her speech is of the sort that leads to heinous murders, but you leave out the part where she tries to follow God’s command to love everyone? (Of course, the media engage in this type of selective editing all the time to make Christian conservatives and others look bad.)

Tomorrow’s “Rally for Sally” rally begins at noon; after that I will be addressing the Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee. Pray for Saly and the rally’s success. You can reach Rep. Kern at sallykern@okhouse.gov.

CWA Press Release, March 31, 2008

Free Speech Rally for Sally; over 50 Pastors organize rally to support besieged Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern

DATE: Wednesday, April 2
TIME: 12:00pm Noon
WHERE: Rotunda of the Oklahoma State Building
2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Oklahoma City Oklahoma

Washington, D.C. — On Wednesday, April 2, Concerned Women for America (CWA) will join over 50 pastors in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to rally support for State Representative Sally Kern (R-Oklahoma City) and her right to free speech. Recently, Rep. Kern has been under attack from radical homosexual activists and their followers over remarks she made regarding the homosexual agenda. Rep. Kern took a Biblical stand against homosexual activism and has refused to back down from her statements despite receiving death threats.

CWA applauds Rep. Kern for continuing to be steadfast and resolute in this fight against the homosexual agenda and for shedding light on the threat it poses to our nation. Rep. Kern has been quoted as saying that the homosexual agenda is dangerous “because it destroys the basic moral fiber of this nation, which is traditional marriage and the traditional family.” She couldn’t be more right.

Matt Barber, CWA’s Policy Director for Cultural Issues, said, “There are certainly those who hate Rep. Kern. They’ve made that perfectly clear with vicious personal attacks and even death threats. But millions of Americans proudly stand alongside Sally Kern and say, ‘Thank you. Thank you for boldly standing your ground and for unapologetically defending Biblical Truth.’ They intended to make an example of her. They have, but not in the way they had hoped. She has set an example for millions of believers around the world. Her courage and refusal to deviate from God’s unequivocal condemnation of sexual immorality is serving to galvanize and embolden others. People say, ‘Well Sally Kern wasn’t intimidated, why should I be?’”

CWA of Oklahoma State Director, Linda Caswell, said “Rep. Kern has exercised her right to free speech and has spoken boldly about the effects of homosexuality on our families and on our nation. We strongly encourage everyone to come to the rally and show your support for Rep. Kern. Let others know that we will not back down from taking a Biblical stand on the moral issues facing our state and our nation today.”

Concerned Women for America is the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.

–30–

News Release
American Family Association of Michigan
Friday, March 28, 2008
CONTACT: Gary Glenn: 989-835-7978
Sen. Randy Richardville 517-373-3543

Trojan Horse “Bullying” Bill in Michigan Loses 2nd GOP Sponsor

Richardville: “I will in no way support” bills as written; further blow to bill following homosexual activists’ “lobbying day”

LANSING — Two days after homosexual activist groups gathered at the state Capitol to pressure lawmakers to support a bill purported to protect public school students from bullying, a second Republican state senator who originally co-sponsored the legislation announced that he no longer supports the bill and would vote against it as written.

Click HERE for the SB 107 original co-sponsors.

Sen. Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, one of only four Republicans listed among twenty co-sponsors of Democratic Sen. Glenn Anderson’s Senate Bill 107, said Friday in an e-mail to the American Family Association of Michigan that while he supports protecting students from bullying, he no longer agrees with the legislation’s segregation of students into special “protected class” categories.

(See full text of Richardville e-mail below)

The loss of a second senator previously on record supporting the legislation came as a blow to the bill’s promoters after over a hundred homosexual activists and their allies gathered at the state Capitol Wednesday for a so-called “Safe Schools Lobbying Day,” specifically intended to pressure more state senators to support the bill. The original list of 20 cosponsors had itself constituted a majority of the 38-member Senate; with the loss of two of those cosponsors, the bill no longer has a sure majority.

Original cosponsor Sen. Valde Garcia, R-Howell, Wednesday was the first to withdraw his support, and AFA-Michigan President Gary Glenn, Midland, Friday predicted the bill may lose other original co-sponsors as well, and not just among the two remaining Republicans, Sen. Bruce Patterson, R-Canton, and Sen. Ron Jelinek, R-Three Oaks.

Glenn has characterized the bill as “Trojan Horse” legislation that would have no real effect on bullying but is being backed by homosexual activist groups who hope to use legitimate public concern about student safety as a ruse to establish — for the first time ever, anywhere in Michigan law — special “protected class” status based on homosexual behavior and cross-dressing.

Richardville, who Thursday evening discussed the legislation with Glenn by phone, Friday wrote that he had originally supported the bill’s approach but has since changed his mind.

“Per our conversation, let me reiterate I will in no way support the current version of Senate Bill 107 or (similar House-passed legislation),” Richardville wrote. “…First, I thought it best to delineate every potential cause of bullying, however I realize by segregating some I diminished the importance of others.”

Glenn noted that Richardville’s change of heart echoed Garcia’s objections to the bill.

“After being told that the goal was to prevent bullying in our public schools, a concept I support, I signed on as a co-sponsor of this legislation,” Garcia wrote Glenn Wednesday. “It was not until after the bill was introduced that I became aware of the exact definition of ‘harassment and bullying’ used in the bill, giving me serious concern about the bill’s intent. Because the bill gave special protection to certain groups of people, I immediately contacted the bill sponsor and told him that I could not support the bill as drafted and urged him to amend the bill so I could support it. …(S)hould this bill come before (the Senate) for consideration with no changes to the current definition of ‘harassment or bullying,’ I will not support the legislation.”

Glenn said the two senators’ experience “is proof of the deceptive nature of this Trojan Horse legislation and the way homosexual activist groups and their Democratic allies have tried to mislead not only state legislators but the general public.”

Glenn said SB 107 as written would require public schools to segregate students into special “protected” class categories, then dole out protection against bullying to students based on their membership in those categories — including, for the first time ever in Michigan law, categories based on “sexual orientation” (homosexual behavior) and “gender identity and expression” (cross-dressing). The precedent of those new segregated categories are the real agenda behind the legislation, he said, proven by the bill’s supporters’ opposition last year to AFA-Michigan-supported language that instead of creating segregated categories would have simply prohibited bullying against all students, no matter what the motivation.

Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, last year attempted to amend the House version of the legislation to strike the language segregating students into “protected class” categories and replace it with language simply and expressly prohibiting all bullying against all students for all reasons. House Democratic leaders refused to even allow a vote on Moolenaar’s amendment, and the legislation passed the House on a largely party-line vote. http://www.gophouse.com/readarticle.asp?id=4231&District=98

The Michigan Association of School Boards has in the past warned school districts against referring to “sexual orientation” in their anti-harassment policies.

As the Oakland Press reported: “Bill Scharffe, director of bylaw and policy services for the Michigan Association of School Boards, advises local districts not to include the term ’sexual orientation’ in their anti-harassment policies. ‘Schools need to be very careful with that,’ he said, noting that neither federal nor state civil rights laws consider people of a particular sexual orientation a protected class. He added that literal interpretation of ’sexual orientation’ could include people who gravitate toward any sort of sexual activity, including that with animals, children and corpses.”

Glenn said he has informed lawmakers and supporters of the legislation that if it is amended to protect all students from bullying without creating precedent-setting “protected class” status for the first time based on homosexual behavior and cross-dressing, AFA-Michigan will no longer urge lawmakers to oppose it.

He noted however, that some lawmakers and mainstream media have opposed the legislation on a broader basis. The Lansing State Journal and the Grand Rapids Press, for example, have editorially opposed the bills, arguing that public school safety is being competently handled by caring local parents, educators, school boards, and law enforcement personnel without mandates by the state Legislature.

# # #

____________________________________________________________________________

Full text of Sen. Richardville’s e-mail to AFA-Michigan:

—– Original Message —–
From: Scott Bean
To: AFAM@chartermi.net
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 4:22 PM
Subject: Re: Sen. Richardville’s actual position on controversial”bullying” bill?

Dear Gary,

Thank you for your time yesterday, I appreciated our conversation. Per our conversation, let me reiterate I will in no way support the current version of Senate Bill 107 or House Bills 4091 and 4162.

I co-sponsored Senate Bill 107 for two reasons. First, I thought it best to delineate every potential cause of bullying, however I realize by segregating some I diminished the importance of others. Second, I wished to remain relevant and involved as the language evolved through the legislative process. As you may know, bills change in substance and detail as they work there way through the legislative process. Since I do not sit on the Education Committee, I believe that by co-sponsoring the bill I was able to remain a part of the discussions on changes to this bill to ultimately make students safer.

Once again, I appreciate you speaking with me on the subject of school bullying and sharing with me your very serious concerns with the bills as written. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of any further service.

Sincerely,

Randy Richardville
State Senator
The 17th District

____________________________________________________________________________

Full text of Sen. Garcia’s e-mail to AFA-Michigan:

—– Original Message —–
From: sen22@senate.michigan.gov
To: afam@chartermi.net
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 10:05 AM
Subject: Re: Legislative Comment=COMMENT

Dear Mr. Glenn:

I have received several e-mails and phone calls about legislation pending in the Senate regarding bullying in our public schools. This legislation is better known as Matt’s Safe School Law, named for Matt Epling, a teenage boy who committed suicide after being continually harassed at school. This was truly a tragic situation which never should have happened.

I understand there is some confusion about my stance on this legislation. Senate Bill 107 was drafted by Senator Glenn Anderson who asked me to be a co-sponsor. After being told that the goal was to prevent bullying in our public schools, a concept I support, I signed on as a co-sponsor of this legislation. It was not until after the bill was introduced that I became aware of the exact definition of “harassment and bullying” used in the bill, giving me serious concern about the bill’s intent.

Because the bill gave special protection to certain groups of people, I immediately contacted the bill sponsor and told him that I could not support the bill as drafted and urged him to amend the bill so I could support it.

I feel strongly all of our students should feel safe while they are at school. Instead, the definition picks out certain characteristics and says these are the reasons people get harassed and bullied. That is simply not the case. Anyone can be bullied for any reason, not just those listed within the definition. I would like to reiterate, I am not opposed to protecting students from bullying and harassment, I simply feel we need to provide a definition that is in the best interest of ALL students not just some.

The bill is in the process of being significantly changed and I support the changes coming. However, should this bill come before me for consideration with no changes to the current definition of “harassment or bullying” I will not support the legislation. I would remove my name as co-sponsor at that time (due to the Senate rules, I am unable to do so sooner in the process). I am very willing to work with the sponsor of the Senate Bill 107 to find a more useful and all encompassing definition for “harassment and bullying” so ALL students feel safe.

I hope this helps explain my reason for originally co-sponsoring Senate Bill 107 and clearly indicates my intentions should this legislation be considered in the full Senate.

Sincerely,

VALDE GARCIA
State Senator
District 22

Whatever happened to “heartland” values? Concerned parents and citizens across the nation are aghast at the news that a teacher in Deerfield High School (north of Chicago) would assign a homosexual activist-authored play, “Angels in America,” with graphic depictions of sodomy, etc., to students in AP English class. District 213 Superintendent George Fornero (gfornero@dist113.org) — who apparently is a homosexual, based on his participation on “gay” websites — defends the use of the play. (AFTAH received information from several sources about Fornero’s postings on a “gay sports” website and another related to the homosexual group Dignity, which purports to serve homosexual “Catholics” but which defies Vatican teachings on homosexuality.)

Laurie Higgins has written before for Americans For Truth, including this review of “Angels in America.” She is a writing instructor at Deerfield High, where she is also a bold and eloquent critic of politically correct nonsense at the school. Below is Higgins’ take on Deerfield’s and Fornero’s folly in defending the use of Tony Kushner’s homo-pornographic and anti-religious play in a senior AP English class — Peter LaBarbera:

________________________

Click HERE to read excerpts of “Angels in America,” which cannot be read over the air but are supposedly OK for teenagers

Click HERE for contact information for Superintendent Fornero (gfornero@dist113.org) and other District 213 officials

________________________

By Laurie Higgins

The administration of District 113 has sent out what they call a “Fact Sheet” regarding the obscene play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes that is being taught at Deerfield High School. Below is the “fact sheet” with my responses in blue:

Dear ——-,

Here are the facts pertaining to the selection of this play:

Angels in America Facts

• Students studying the play are second semester seniors in Advanced Placement English. (Translation: “We save the most offensive tripe for the most intelligent.”)
• This play has been taught to similar classes in other high schools. (Translation: “Everyone else is doing it, and we’re lemmings and conformists who cannot think for ourselves.”)
• The College Board oversees all Advanced Placement testing; the class syllabus, including all readings was approved through the Board’s audit process. (Translation: “Of all the readings offered through the College Board, we’re including the most offensive.”)
• Parents received information about Angels in America that specifically addressed the mature content and potential for offense. (Translation: “We’re using the inaccurate euphemism ‘mature’ for the more accurate term “obscene.” Reality: The use of obscene language represents the very antithesis of maturity. It is intemperate, puerile language. In addition, the information given parents did not adequately convey exactly how obscene and perverted the material is. Moreover, there are different kinds of maturity that are being deliberately conflated. If by “mature,” one is referring to intellectual maturity, then it is irrelevant. No one objects to this play because the material is intellectually inaccessible. If educators are referring to emotional maturity, meaning that students are emotionally stable enough to discuss emotionally challenging material without being traumatized, then that too is irrelevant in that most people who object to Angels are not concerned about students being too immature to handle it, although some students will likely be deeply troubled by the language, images, and ideas.The concern many have is with moral maturity. Many people recognize that adolescents, including even bright, mature high school seniors, are not yet adults. They are still constructing a moral compass. They are impressionable, malleable, and much more vulnerable to external influences than are adults whose moral compasses are likely fixed and stable. For a teacher to contend that there are any eighteen-year-olds whose moral compass is fully developed and fixed represents an ignorant and hubristic assertion. Activist ideologues recognize this developmental fact and seek to influence the moral development of other people’s children using other people’s money to do it.)
• Parents were asked to make an informed decision about the text their child would read. Two viable choices were presented: Angels in America and Albert Camus’ The Plague. They were also given the option of having their students read both texts. Letter to parents requested that they provide permission for their student to read the selected text(s). (Reality: Many parents have neither the time nor interest in reading the entirety of Angels in America; This teacher is much beloved by students, and teens are rebellious, therefore, even parents who don’t want their children to read Angels may feel the force of social pressure, compelling them to allow their children to read the provocative, controversial text. The school has potentially set parents up for conflicts with their own children.”)
• The Pulitzer Prize-winning play is set in the 1980s at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in this country. It deals with social and political themes around that issue. In addition, the play won Tony and Emmy Awards (Translation: “Be impressed by prizes that are awarded by arrogant, elitist organizations that hold in disdain the traditional values of provincial, philistines regarding sexuality and language.” Reality: This is a common fallacy called “argument from authority” which relies on the word of an expert or authority rather than on evidence.)
• Excerpts taken out of context from the play by NSSA are being used to diminish the work’s social and political themes. (Reality: There is no context that can justify or render acceptable the teaching of the most extreme violations of decency and truth that occur in this play. Put another way, can the administration or school board imagine any text in which the sexual vulgarity, obscenity, profanity or sacrilege is so extreme or offensive that its very presence would render a text unsuitable for teaching, no matter what positive elements may also be present? Or will positive literary elements always trump issues of obscenity, profanity, and sacrilege? Are administrators saying they will never, under any circumstances take into account the nature and extent of obscenity, profanity, and sacrilege?)
• Although there is strong language and obscenity, the teacher raises questions for student discussion that include: How do we respond to the illness of a loved one? What does it mean to abandon that loved one? How do our personal beliefs clash or coincide with our politics? To what extent do we truly know ourselves? To what extent are we blind? What does it mean to be willfully blind? What is the role of forgiveness? (Translation: “We are able, in the midst of this odious miasma of a text, to extract something of value.” Reality: Another text could easily be found that explores these or other important questions, and does so without the features that assault religion, goodness, truth, and beauty, including the virtue of modesty.)
• This gifted teacher was recently named a Teacher of Distinction from Golden Apple. (Translation: “Once again, be impressed by prizes.” Reality: Once again, this represents the fallacy of appealing to authority. In essence the fallacy goes something like this: This teacher made the decision to teach this odious text, and he is a “Teacher of Distinction.” His intelligence or gifts as a teacher, however, do not serve as justifications for the decision to include this text. Really smart people can make really chuckleheaded decisions.)
• According to Lake County State’s Attorney Mike Waller, the reading and discussion of the material is not a violation of the obscenity laws, or any other laws, of the State of Illinois. (Reality: The fact that it may not technically violate obscenity laws does not mean it is not obscene. I guarantee that if I start using Kushner’s language in the writing center where I work, or if students start using it in their classrooms, faculty members and administrators will curtail it due to its obscene nature. And if I or students refuse to cease and desist, we will be disciplined.)
• It is the belief of this district that our teachers and parents, not an outside group such as NSSA [North Shore Student Advocacy], are best equipped to determine whether or not our students should read the text. (Reality: NSSA, some members of which are District 113 taxpayers, former parents or future parent, knows more about the inner workings of DHS than most parents in the community. Furthermore, the administration and faculty members, especially liberal activists, want little to no feedback from parents, unless it’s affirmation of and support for the curricular incarnations of their liberal dogmas. Liberal activists covet absolute autonomy and depend on parental ignorance and cowardice to maintain it.)

TAKE ACTION: First, check the two Mission America lists to see if your local schools are participating in the Day of Silence. The best way to ascertain whether YOUR children’s school is promoting or enabling DOS is to call the school and ask this question: “Are you allowing students to go silent in the classroom on the upcoming pro-homosexual “Day of Silence” (Friday, April 25)? (Some schools say they are NOT endorsing D.O.S., yet still allow students to not participate in class — which disrupts the learning process.) If the school administrator answers “yes” (or cannot say “no”), then yank your child out of the school on April 25th to protest their capitulation to homosexual activism. Of course, many committed Christians, and groups like Exodus Mandate, would advise you to pull them out of the public schools for good.

NOTE: Please notify AFTAH at americansfortruth@comcast.net with information about the response of your local school authorities to your DOS inquiries, and to tell us if you are pulling your children out of school on April 25th. Thank you!

By Peter LaBarbera

Folks, the politicization of America’s schools — both public and private — in favor of the the proud homosexuality (and now transsexuality) agenda is a crisis that continues to spiral downward. There was a time — back in the days when “Gay Power” was more a dream slogan for sexual radicals than the liberal establishment reality it is today — when homosexual activists disavowed any interest in our nation’s schools or recruiting youth. (Meanwhile, they had yet to kick out NAMBLA — the North American Man/Boy Love Association — from their coalition; in fact, the notorious pederasty group once marched in big-city “Gay Pride” parades.)

Fast-forward to today: homosexual activists and their liberal allies are all over the schools — even grade schools. In that respect, they are not unlike other nefarious ideological movements in their utilitarian misuse of schools to sway young minds. The result is that today’s young people are more pro-homosexual yet more pro-life at the same time — a curious mix and one that testifies to the effectiveness of pro-homosexuality marketing tactics. (Pop culture and media elites have decided that the “gay” debate is settled and we lost.)

In my experience, many of today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings are profoundly ignorant of the larger homosexual activist agenda, and even Christian youth are severely truth-challenged on this issue (to which the poll-driven church movement responds by scolding the larger Church for being too “anti-homosexual”).

Common is the story of a Christian kid who comes home from school (or college) to accuse his or her parents of being “homophobic.” Mom and dad are bigoted squares, it seems, if they fail to embrace the history-defying notion that people deserve legal rights (and respect) based on changeable sexual misbehavior. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), and He is helping men and women overcome homosexuality all the time, yet the American Church seems to grow more homosexuality-friendly with each passing day.

There is also a certain arrogance of youth that would claim a right — even a duty — to re-frame ancient Biblical truths — bending to our confused culture in the name of reaching it for Jesus. What a pity that the Christian Left and “Emerging Church” movement (emerging into what?) are indulging it.

I suppose that if adults are increasingly confused about homosexuality, and the Bible’s clear authority on the question, why would we expect clear thinking from the MTV set?

Make a Statement

The “Day of Silence” boycott attempts to call attention to the use of schools to promote the normalization of homosexuality — by asking parents to keep their kids home on the victim-mongering April 25 event known as the “Day of Silence” (DOS). Check HERE for a list of D.O.S.-sanctioning schools, with the proviso that some schools on the list are NOT really taking part in the Day of Silence, while others that ARE participating are not on the list. Linda Harvey of Mission America has also assembled a list of schools that have said they are NOT participating in D.O.S.

Harvey states regarding the DOS Boycott: “There’s also another benefit: the schools lose tax dollars for every child who stays home. If enough do so in any one school, it will send a clear message: school-sponsored corruption through promotion of homosexuality is unacceptable and there is a price to pay.”

P.S. For a ton of great information on the homosexual education agenda, please visit my good friend Linda Harvey’s websites www.missionamerica.com and www.truthatschool.org. Here is the pro-family coalition news release on the Day of Silence Boycott:

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National Coalition Urges Parents to Keep Kids Home on “Day of Silence”

Americans For Truth is part of a nationwide coalition of Christian and pro-family groups calling for parents to keep children out of schools on Friday, April 25, 2008 — the day when thousands of middle schools, junior highs, and high schools will observe the 12th annual “National Day of Silence.”

Buddy Smith of American Family Association asserts, “It’s outrageous that our neighborhood schools would allow homosexual activism to intrude into the classroom. ‘Day of Silence’ is about coercing students to repudiate traditional morality. It’s time for Christian parents to draw the line — if your children will be exposed to this DOS propaganda in their school, then keep them home for the day.”

“It amounts to educational malpractice for school officials to engage in one-sided homosexual activism,” said Matt Barber of Concerned Women for America. “Our schools are supposed to be places of learning, not places of political indoctrination. It is the height of impropriety and cynicism for “gay” activists and school officials to use children as pawns in their attempt to further a highly controversial and polarizing political agenda.”

“Day of Silence” is promoted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a homosexual activist group that targets schools. The event is typically organized by a school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) and is designed to pressure students to regard homosexual, bisexual, and transgender behavior as normal and worthy. Students and even some teachers remain silent throughout the school day, disrupting the teaching environment. Protesters wear t-shirts and hand out “speaking cards” protesting alleged injustice, harassment, prejudice, and discrimination toward “LGBT” people and their “allies.”

“Social activism does not belong in the classroom,” says Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth. “Students would be far better served by reading a good book at home – perhaps even the Bible – rather than being subjected to pro-’gay’ indoctrination.”

This year, GLSEN adds a special twist to “Day of Silence”: shameless exploitation of the recent tragic school shooting death of California 8th grade student Lawrence King. Los Angeles media report that although the boy had been entrusted to the care of Casa Pacifica, a residential center for “abused, neglected, and severely emotionally disturbed children,” he had been permitted for the last two weeks to attend school in feminine makeup, nail polish, and high-heeled boots. The adult guardians, school administrators, and teachers responsible for guiding and protecting this precious troubled child failed him miserably; GLSEN fails him again now by employing his violent death to manipulate and deceive millions of children.

What should parents do?

1. Call your local schools and ascertain whether they officially or passively allow students to observe “Day of Silence.” For a list of schools expected to participate, check www.missionamerica.com
2. Be sure to discover the date the event is planned for your school. (The national date is Friday, April 25, but some schools observe DOS on a different date).
3. Inform the school of your intention to keep your children home on that date and explain why. (A sample letter is also posted at Mission:America.)
4. Explain to your children why you’re taking a stand: Homosexual behavior is not an innate identity; it is sinful and unnatural. No school should advance a physically, emotionally, and spiritually destructive sexual lifestyle to students.
5. Pray with your children for sexual purity and for wisdom to lovingly counsel sexually confused teenagers in your own community. Grieve for the senseless loss of Lawrence King.
6. Encourage your church leadership to follow the bold example of Pastor Ken Hutcherson who is vocally opposing “Day of Silence” in his community in Redmond, Washington.
7. Let your light shine by spreading the word to your church and neighbors, and explain that most school districts lose money for every absence.

Linda Harvey of Mission America urges parents to understand that “Homosexual activism creates an explosive situation in schools. I encourage parents to keep their children home on ‘Day of Silence.’ Let’s pray that in the future, schools will offer hope to students who are sexually confused by first telling them the Truth.”

Gary Glenn of AFA Michigan, said, “The director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force broke homosexual activists’ code of silence on the threat homosexual behavior poses to young people’s health when he admitted this month that HIV ‘is a gay disease.’ GLSEN should cancel its celebration of that code of silence about the severe public health hazards of homosexual behavior, and any school administrator who continues to stand silent while enabling the promotion of such harmful behavior should be sued for criminal negligence.”

The coalition includes: Abiding Truth Ministries, American Family Association, AFA of MI, AFA of PA, Americans for Truth, Christian Information Service, Christian Civic League of Maine, Concerned Women for America, Culture Campaign, Defend the Family International, Exodus Mandate, Illinois Family Institute, Indiana Voice for the Family, Informing Christians, Liberty Counsel, MassResistance, Mission America, New Generation Christian Center, Parents’ Rights’ Coalition, Right March, Stephen Bennett Ministries, Values USA, Watchmen on the Walls.

Of course, the problem Paglia addresses below has only grown exponentially worse in the decade since she wrote this.– Peter LaBarbera

Emphasis is added below:

Dear Camille:

I am a black, conservative female. I am proud to say that you are one of my heroes. I would like your opinion of the following press release, which I am forwarding to you. It’s regarding the Gay Youth Pride Day. Now, according to some, I may have no right to have an opinion about this, because of my heterosexuality. However, I think some in the so-called “gay community” take this pride thing a bit too far. As a 19-year-old, openly straight female, I really don’t understand the need for the self-anointed leaders of the gay rights movement to draw gay youngsters into their self-indulgent politics. Am I misguided or insensitive in my approach to the “young gay dilemma”?

Your conservative admirer in Va.
Dear Conservative:

The psychological turmoil of adolescents at sexual awakening cannot be underestimated. Everything is in flux — impulses, fears, dreams, with simultaneous longings for independence and for protection by adults. What I dislike about the push of organized gay activism into high schools is that it imposes a rigid political paradigm on a stage of life that is in rapid, painful transition for everyone, gay or straight.

As an equity feminist, as well as an open lesbian, I oppose special protections for any group, including my own. Teachers and administrators should obviously not permit physical harassment of any kind on school property, but verbal epithets, however offensive or hurtful, have First Amendment protection. The PC thought police, having been defeated on college campuses after the court-ordered banning of the fascist speech codes, are now oozing their way into high schools. “Hate” cannot be stopped by authoritarian manipulation but by slow social change, which may take generations.

The Internet has been a boon to lonely gay teens in geographically remote areas — but, of course, computers still remain largely a white middle-class luxury. I find very suspicious the statistics about teen suicides with which gay activists badger the media. If gay teens are indeed attempting suicide at a higher rate than straight teens, perhaps more questions need to be asked about the genesis of homosexuality. The intolerable sense of isolation may precede the homosexuality, rather than vice versa.

I have written repeatedly about my theory that homosexuality is an adaptation, rather than an innate trait, and that it is reinforced by habit. With its cant terms of “oppression” and “bigotry,” gay activism, encouraged by the scientific illiteracy of academic postmodernism, wants to deny that there is a heterosexual norm. This is madness. We need more art and history and less politics in primary education. Art gives the young the psychological and spiritual tools for authentic self-discovery. And art is where sexual dissenters have contributed the most to the human record.

In short, I agree with your concern about the Trojan Horse of gay activism, which is being dragged into high schools under the false flag of compassion. Young people who oppose homosexuality for any reason have a constitutional right to express their views, in or out of the classroom. Whatever they may privately believe as individuals, educators have a professional obligation to remain ideologically neutral in their treatment of students.

Note that Joe’s life as a former homosexual gives the lie to the second tactical approach of the aggressive “gay Christian” movement, which he discusses below:

As the gay Christian movement continued finding allies in churches and secular circles, it also continued to follow the trends of the larger gay-rights movement. And the gay-rights movement’s most noticeable trend, from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, was aggression.

 

The AIDS epidemic, in full bloom by the mid ’80s, fueled a strident form of gay activism. Groups such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Queer Nation, and the Lesbian Avengers caught the public’s eye as they staged boisterous demonstrations and invaded churches and corporations they considered to be “enemies.”

 

The gay Christian movement did not take long to develop its own style of aggression. Fundamental to its identity were two beliefs: Homosexuality is not unbiblical; and homosexuals can’t change, even if they want to. … 

  

   – The Gay Gospel, Joe Dallas p. 88; To order The Gay Gospel ($14), go to www.joedallas.com. Dallas is founder of Genesis Counseling, which seeks to “Reclaim Godly Sexuality through the Saving Work of Jesus Christ, The Sanctifying Work of the Holy Spirit and the Body Ministry of the Christian Church.” See their “Frequently Asked Questions About Sexual Addiction and Recovery from a Biblical Perspective.”