Americans for Truth

Homosexual superintendent defends disgusting play

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:

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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

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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.)

Pastor Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, Washington, is speaking out strongly against the pro-homosexual “Day of Silence” on Friday, April 25. A growing coalition of pro-family groups is calling for parents to keep their children home from school on that day.

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”).

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This is an oldie but a goodie from the brilliant, politically incorrect (lesbian) feminist Camille Paglia, from her 1998 online Salon Q&A column “Ask Camille.” Now, before you think we’ve sold our conservative souls and are ready to join the Wayne Besen Homosexual Hysteria Club so we can start smearing ex-gays, ridiculing common sense, and destroying traditional marriage – no, we are not sanctioning lesbianism by posting this piece. (Personally, my hope would be that Paglia would outgrow lesbianism, but that’s another essay.) She just makes some refreshing observations that, frankly, we wish more traditionalists would make. (And Paglia has always opposed the Gay Left’s totalitarian impulse by defending the free speech righs of opponents of homosexuality.) 

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.

 From the book, The Gay Gospel: How Pro-Gay Advocates Misread the Bible, by Joe Dallas (Harvest House Publishers, 2007). To order The Gay Gospel ($14) or other Biblically-oriented resources by Joe revolving around sexual purity, go to his website at www.joedallas.com.

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.”  

 University of Pennsylvania History Professor Alan Kors defends freedom against the camps Left.

Click this link: http://www.isi.org/lectures/flvplayer/lectureplayer.aspx?file=v000114_cicero_050807.flv, or go to this Intercollegiate Studies Institute web page and chose the video (or audio MP3), “Have Universities Become the Enemy of a Free Society?” The debate is between Alan C. Kors, Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, and William Galston, Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland. It occurred at the University of Delaware, Trabant Theater, on May 8, 2007.

Kors is brilliant. Our condolences to Professor Galston. 

Click HERE to listen to WYLL-Chicago talk show host and Culture Campaign President Sandy Rios’ interview with Bob Knight of the Culture and Media Institute. The two discuss the City of Philadelphia’s decision — spurred on by homosexual City Solicitor Romulo Diaz Jr. — to evict the Philadelphia Scouts “Cradle of Liberty Council” unless the Scouts came up with $200,000 rent money for an historic city building that THEY donated to the city. Homosexual activists have pressured the city’s leaders to force the Scouts to submit to the city’s pro-homosexual “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination law, or lose their symbolic $1 per year lease to the city. 

The pro-family Lifesite news reports:

The famous Beaux Arts style building was built and paid for by the Scouts, and turned over to the city with the understanding that the Scouts would be allowed to remain in it rent-free “in perpetuity.”

 

City solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. gave Philadelphia’s “Cradle of Liberty Council” of the Scouts until Monday this week to renounce their policy. The Cradle of Liberty Council is the largest Scouts council in Pennsylvania, and is the third largest in the entire Boy Scouts of America. The “City of Brotherly Love” has told the Scouts they have until June 1 to vacate their historic building.

 

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2000 said the Boy Scouts were a private organisation who had the right to bar anyone they chose from their ranks. But the city of Philadelphia has a policy that no organisation that “discriminates” may receive public subsidies and City Council is backing Diaz’s interpretation of the law.

 

Diaz, an open and practising homosexual, told a local radio interviewer he would begin looking for a new tenant for the building immediately.

 

The pressure started in 2003 when then, mayor of Philadelphia, John F. Street, started coming under pressure from homosexual activists, powerful in local politics, to force the Scouts to accept homosexuality, claiming that their refusal violated the city’s 1982 “fair practices” law.

 

Mark Chilutti, a member of the Cradle of Liberty Council executive board said, “We’re ignoring the deadline. It was the least bad option we have.”

Click HERE to read the entire Lifesite article, “Philadelphia Boy Scouts to Lose Historic Building for Not Accepting Homosexuality,” and HERE to listen to Sandy Rios’ interview with Bob Knight on Philadelphia’s treacherous act against the Scouts.

BOLDNESS: Courage; bravery; intrepidity; without timidity or fear; with confidence … 3. Freedom from timidity; liberty;
SODOMY: a crime against nature;
SODOMITE: … one guilty of sodomy
LIBERTY: … Religious liberty, is the free right of adopting and enjoying opinions on religious subjects, and of worshiping the Supreme Being according to the dictates of conscience, without external control.
– Definitions found in Noah Webster’s 1828 “American Dictionary of the English Language, republished by the Foundation for American Christian Education; Webster is regarded as the “Founding Father of American Scholarship and Education.”

 People like Yvette Schneider who overcame homosexuality through Christ call into question the idea of creating civil rights based on changeable “gayness,” so why are some Christians retreating in the battle against homosexual activism?

By Peter LaBarbera, www.americansfortruth.org

Bruce Thornton’s City Journal essay (excerpted at bottom), “Epistle to the Muslims: Christian Leaders Abase Themselves Before Islam,” is an excellent and highly informative piece on the battle between aggressive Islam and enfeebled, appeasing (small-’c') christianity.

In reading it, I cannot help but draw the parallels between that georeligious battle and modern Western Christians’ emasculated, guilt-ridden tone on homosexuality — even as homosexuals and their liberal allies move to indoctrinate young schoolchildren with their destructive ideology. Why are Christians and conservatives constantly apologizing for their past and current “sins” on homosexuality — as if WE are responsible for the transformation of a once-taboo perversion into a civil right? 

Why do we continue to promote the fiction that hordes of Christians “hate” homosexuals when the greater tendency (by far) among believers these days is apathy or, worse, to “tolerate” and even approve of changeable homosexual/gender BEHAVIORS when God doesn’t?

This terrific sentence from Thornton’s essay is directly applicable to America’s internal culture wars (dhimmis are non-Muslims living as second-class citizens in Islamic-conquered lands, allowed to practice their religion if they pay special taxes and acknowledge Muslim supremacy; emphasis added):

This appeasing tone of the traditional dhimmi — an unreciprocated solicitude typical of the inferior when dealing with his superior –– suggests once again that the West is spiritually dead, its Christian faith in the hands of those who will not defend it, even in print.

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Matt Barber lost his job at Allstate due to pro-homosexual activism. He says it’s a canard that Christians are “focusing too much” on this issue. Why do some Christians feel guilty about opposing a homosexual lobby that is so brazen it now openly promotes homosexual activity as normal to innocent, young children? (See page from “King and King” children’s book below.)

Folks, my good friend Matt Barber, policy director for cultural issues at Concerned Women for America and Americans For Truth Board Member, is right on in this excellent essay rebutting the increasingly common complaint that Christians are focusing too much on homosexuality. 

I find it curious at this juncture in American history when the homosexual lobby is at the zenith of its power — and on the verge of passing an oppressive, sweeping federal bill creating special workplace privileges based on people’s inclination toward aberrant sex — that Christians of all people would urge a de facto public policy and cultural retreat in opposing that movement.

Why are so many people of faith riddled with guilt in opposing a sin-based movement that threatens everybody’s religious and First Amendment freedoms? Perhaps it’s because many Christians, far from “hating gays,” as the trendy accusation goes, are intimidated by the liberal media and no longer agree with their Creator  that homosexual acts are an egregiously sexual sin.

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