Should ‘The Laramie Project’ Play Be Taught in Schools?

This article by my friend, Laurie Higgins, Director of School Advocacy at the Illinois Family Institute, deserves wide circulation. Kids are being propagandized relentlessly in our nation’s schools — public and private — and what’s the evangelical church’s response? Soften your approach toward homosexuality — deal with the Church’s “antigay” image problem. We suggest the guilt-ridden Church would be wiser to get back to the life-changing Gospel, stop obsessing about “image,” and deal with the pro-homosexual indoctrination problem among young people. That certainly includes many who identify as Christians but, due to agitprop like The Laramie Project, have drifted away from a Biblical worldview on homosexuality — to the point where they now view “homophobia” as a bigger sin than the homosexual behavior itself. — Peter LaBarbera

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?