By Fran Eaton, Illinois Review

At the risk of sounding like a real ogre and with all pause, I’m going to have to give a thumbs down to this weekend’s box office hit, “Shrek the Third.”

The lovable Shrek debuted the third in a series this weekend, and while the big guy is taking unfair hits for American children’s skyrocketing obesity problem, there was another issue raised in the movie that I’ve seen no one yet address.

For me, it wasn’t the monstrous size of the lead character Shrek that was the problem with this newest release. Shrek and his sweet wife Fiona are what’s right with the story. They are large positive role models of common sense, compassion and honesty in a bizarre world of revengeful, evil fairy tale characters.

Shrek’s personal dilemma of overcoming the fears of becoming a father for the first time endears us all the more to the big guy. The ending is happy and prolife, which is great for kids and their fathers to see.

Shrek’s not the problem. It’s the awkward inclusion of a travestite and the uselessness of the character himself (herself?) in the story that is troubling.

Right in the midst of a warm “traditional family” setting, the film writers place a man dressed as a woman in with Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White (the good gals). The crossdressing character simply doesn’t make sense, except as a ploy to desensitize children and parents to transgenders.

Homosexual activists now are careful to not only use the term “LGBTs” as a unit, they are more boldly now declaring lesbians-gays-bisexuals-transgenders as a unit pushing together as one for civil rights. Those confused about their sexual roles are pushing for equal rights to be free to publicly demonstrate their odd sexual behavior. For transgenders, appearing to be a different sex in public is their particular turn on. We need to understand that acceptance of this sexual behavior is just another step moving our world toward sexual chaos.

It’s disturbing there’s not more outcry about this sly tactic being used in a movie made for children. But I suppose after being reminded recently of Jerry Falwell’s concern about the Teletubbies characters’ sexual orientations and the post-heaven going ridicule and hatred those who dare to question LGBTs tactics are likely to endure in the mainstream media after their passing, some have shyed away from publicly tackling the topic. That’s understandable.

But well-meaning parents who plan to take their kids to see a movie that grossed $122 million in the opening weekend should be aware . . . it’s the subtlety of the movie makers’ agenda to desensitize that could be more harmful to your children than encouraging them to eat sugary cereals in the morning.

Fran Eaton is editor of Illinois Review, a conservative blog.

Americans For Truth Exclusive 

Editor’s note: the following firsthand report tells of an invasion of women’s privacy by a male “transgender” activist using the ladies restroom in Maryland — as the state’s pro-family movement was fighting legislation granting rights based on homosexuality. Neither Galladora nor Fortlage can recall the year of the incident, but it was between 1999 and 2001, when Maryland’s legislature passed a “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination bill, later signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor, Parris Glendening.

When a society raises gender confusion (men in dresses) and its cousin, homosexuality, to the level of “civil rights,” it’s time to recognize that this nation is in a state of moral decline unheard of in our history. –– Peter LaBarbera

TAKE ACTION:  If enacted into law, The Employment NonDiscrimination Act (ENDA, H.R. 2015) and the federal “hate crimes” bill, H.R. 1592 (recently passed by the House), would be the first time that “gender identity rights” are recognized in federal law. This would usher in a new wave of persecution for people opposed to homosexuality and gender confusion of the sort described below. Call your senators (202-224-3121; www.congress.org/) – and the White House (202-456-1111) –– to oppose H.R. 1592, and call all of your federal elected officials to oppose the ENDA bill.
 
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By Bunny Galladora

The hearing room of the Judicial Committee in Annapolis, Maryland, was overflowing with all sorts of unusual looking people hours before the hearing on a bill to add “sexual orientation” to the list of protected categories was to begin. It would be a very long day. After many people had testified giving their various positions on the issue, the Judicial Committee took a break.

Conrae Fortlage and I left the hearing room to “freshen up” in the ladies’ restroom.  When it came time to wash our hands, I finished quickly and waited for Conrae inside the bathroom by the door, a few steps away. Conrae lingered slowly, applying lipstick and fiddling with her hair. She seemed to be staring in the mirror for an unusual amount of time. I paid little attention to the person dressed in a purple ladies pants suit with a white blouse standing next to Conrae — or to Conrae’s behavior which was out of character for her, but instead my thoughts were on the testimony I would be giving soon.

As we left the ladies’ room, the door shutting behind us, Conrae began to tell me that the person standing beside her in the bathroom was actually a man. Conrae said she first noticed that the person was unusually tall for a woman, then, while looking in the mirror, she had focused on his unusually large Adam’s apple — and other features normally found in a male. She noticed that the person was wearing a woman’s wig.

THIS ARTICLE IS OBSOLETE: there is no reliable published list of schools participating in the Day of Silence in 2009. For more information, go to Illinois Family Institute’s website at www.illinoisfamily.org.

My friend Linda Harvey of Mission America has done so much over the years to educate parents across America about the homosexual (GLBT: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) activist agenda in schools. Below is Linda’s compilation of potential (likely?) middle and high schools participating in the GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) “Day of Silence” on Wed., April 18th.

Check the list below or check Mission America’s updated online list of schools, understanding that it is NOT a comprehensive list because the other side no longer widely publicizes which schools are taking part, as it did in years past.– Peter LaBarbera

Linda writes:

Parents: Here’s something you can do about the pro-homosexual Day of Silence

Protect your kids — keep them at home!

Boycott the DAY of SILENCE!

Parents: Keep your kids home if your school is officially holding, or benignly allowing, this pro-homosexual event.

Scheduled for April 18, some schools are observing it on other days, so check with your local school. Ask your child also–they probably know!

From the information we have based on current homosexual clubs as well as past Day of Silence participation and school homosexual activism, the following schools are those participating.

(Note: If we have listed a school in error, we apologize, and will issue a correction immediately. Please e-mail us with your correction, at editor@missionamerica.com.)

This is the list as of late afternoon, Tuesday, March 28. GO TO MISSION AMERICA’s WEBSITE (www.missionamerica.com) TO SEE THE UPDATED LIST.

Schools removed from this 2007 posting …

From the “Queer Texas” website:

The Queer Texas Conference is an action-oriented, 3 day-long educational gathering of youth and students from across Texas…The conference will be held at the University of Texas at Austin April 13-15.

Workshops include:

The Drag King Workshop — Curious about drag kings? Who isn’t? Come and learn a little about the drag king community, our performance, and our politics. Then we’ll demo the basics of binding, packing, applying facial hair, and strutting your stuff – and you’ll have a chance to try it yourself! All genders welcome.

The Gender, Race, and Hip-Hop Workshop will screen segments of Byron Hurt’s new documentary film Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes that explores the director’s love of hip-hop culture and his simultaneous conflict with its marketing of hyper-masculine images of men of color, violence, materialism, homophobia, and misogyny. Using an intersectional approach,the workshop highlights the complicated connections between race, class, and gender in media and the larger American culture. Interactive role playing and skits challenge workshop participants to explore their own racialized and gendered stereotypes, followed by an open dialogue about ways to challenge these structures through petitions, targeted letter writing campaigns, and public education.

Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Caucus — This workshop will be an exploration of participants’ experiences with the language they use to talk about their gender experience, the longings in their lives, and their search and successes in finding legitimacy. Language is a powerful force in our lives. Finding the language that accurately describes our gender experiences can be difficult. Longing is a natural part of life. Giving voice to those longings can be a compelling way to find the means to fulfill them. Legitimacy is something many of us strive for in our families, in our communities, and in the world-at-large.

Among the speakers:  Tyrone Hanley of the Nov 2006 “Creating Change” panel on sex workers…which is probably fitting since, sadly, many “transgender” young people are relegated to prostitution in order to survive.  Is this the life into which our schools ought to direct confused and vulnerable young people?

When you read this post, ask yourself: If “transsexuality” is a healthy lifestyle option, why is it necessary for the government (taxpayers) to extend grants for disease treatment and mental health counseling?

Excerpted from UCSF to Close Trans Programs, by Heather Cassell, published Mar 8, 2007, in Bay Area Reporter:

The University of California at San Francisco’s Transitions and Transgender Resource and Neighborhood Space projects are scheduled to close July 1 because grants that fund the programs are ending.

The only projects of their kind in the Bay Area, the closures will leave an estimated 1,300 transgender and gender variant people who have used the services during the past four years without anywhere to go.

The Transitions Project, housed under the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at UCSF, has an annual budget of $450,000…

But on July 1, the three major grants that fund the programs – including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Drug Abuse – will end, according to Susan Kegeles, co-director of CAPS.

Continue reading in Bay Area Reporter…

Note: We have a suggestion as to where these 1300 precious human beings should go: to a Bible-believing church where they can hear the gospel of Jesus Christ and be healed emotionally and spiritually.

Excerpted from Girls Will Be Boys, by Mary Roach, published Mar 18, 2007, by The New York Times:

Michael Dillon wanted nothing more than to be invisible, to be one of the guys. Problem: he was born with a woman’s body. Everything he did toward realizing his humble dream — the cross-dressing, the hormones and surgeries and the chimera that resulted — pushed it further from his grasp. He went through life as the most visible sort of human being: a physical anomaly. He was the first person on record to undergo surgery (13 operations between 1946 and 1949) to change his gender…

Happiness eluded Michael Dillon. Isolated, depressed, hounded by the press, he traveled to India and, bizarrely, to a series of ever more remote Tibetan monasteries. He could not speak the language of his fellow novices, but with his shaved head and robes, he felt he fit in someplace. Sadly, he faced prejudice in the monasteries too, and his visa ran out before he was allowed to become a full-fledged monk. In 1962, he died impoverished near the border of Ladakh. He was 47, and had been trying to get back to the monastery where he’d felt at home.

Continue reading in The New York Times… 

The deconstruction of the biblical God and biblical sexuality as a philosophical and ideological program is already deeply embedded in our collective unconscious. Some powerful leaders see the future as the brave new global world of sexual and spiritual pluralism, where liberty of self-expression in these areas is the essence of human progress. One could even imagine a society of pagan religious syncretism where bi-sexuality and homosexual androgyny would be the spiritual and social ideal, the sexuality of choice for those in power, while heterosexuality would be tolerated, considered inferior, and strictly controlled — for it has happened before. — Dr. Peter R. Jones

This is a long, but scholarly and informative, article that we encourage you to read in its entirety.

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Excerpted from Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal, by Dr. Peter R. Jones, published Jan 2000 by Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society:

1 Introduction

Like the ancient pagan Sodomites pounding on the door of Lot’s house millennia ago, the modern gay movement is gathering at the doors of our churches, our academies and our once traditionally “Christian” culture, demanding entrance and full recognition. Notable scholar, David A. J. Clines, professor of Old Testament at Sheffield University, for one, appears ready to lay down the welcome mat. He wrote in 1998: “…[though] queer theory has yet to show its face at the SBL [Society of Biblical Literature], gayness is challenging…all that we hold dear. When we begin to redraw the alterity map, the boundaries between same and different…we find ourselves having to think through everything, and not just sexuality, from scratch.” Clines, who not long ago was known for his conservative theological position, illustrates how far acceptance of the gay movement has come in recent years, even among those from strongly biblical backgrounds.

This movement has come a long way fast. It will not go away soon, I believe, because it is so intimately tied to deep changes in modern society, in particular, those associated philosophical Postmodernism. Because in the Postmodern hermeneutic all meaning is socially generated, queer commentary has little methodological difficulty finding a place in the contemporary religious and theological debate. In cooperation with feminist biblical interpretation, which has “destabilized normative heterosexuality” by alleging “sexist” bias, queer readings merely seek to take one more step in the hermeneutics of suspicion and expose the “heterosexist bias” of the Bible and Bible interpreters. Identifying exegesis as an exercise in social power, queer theorists reject the oppressive narrowness of the Bible’s male/female binary vision, and boldly generate textual meaning on the basis of the “inner erotic power” of the gay interpreter. What could be more Postmodern? Employing such a widely accepted methodology, and with “straight” Bible scholars now ready “to redraw the alterity map,” gay theology appears to have a bright future everywhere.

The theoretical progress is mirrored in popular society where resistance to the gay life-style is more and more impugned as anti-democratic and un-American. But the urgency of the situation for Bible-believing scholars is not merely the pressing need for a scholarly ethical response to an unfortunate moral aberration. The contemporary appearance of a homosexual movement says something about the particular times in which we live, granted both that pagan spirituality is enjoying a popular revival, and that throughout the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah have always served as the symbol for endtime pagan idolatry, ultimate moral disintegration and eschatological divine judgment. The subject, in its spiritual, religious and even eschatological dimensions, needs to be treated and debated among us, not simply as an unfortunate social deviation or ephemeral social fad, but as a cutting-edge component of a rising, all-encompassing, religious world view that is diametrically opposed to the world view of Christian theism.

One fruitful way to approach this pressing issue is to consider the religious roots of homosexuality. The recent radical changes in our society, include, simultaneously, both the liberation of sex and the rediscovery of pagan mystical spirituality. Is such a pairing pure coincidence or is it the result of a necessary organic relationship? Has there always existed an ineluctable connection between pagan religion and pagan sex? For instance, while radical pagan feminists speak of the need of a “change of [religious] consciousness,” such spiritual transformation is always proposed by way of a radical recalibration of our perceptions of sexuality. In other words, sexuality appears central not peripheral to the spiritual quest. This, I believe, will become more and more evident in the homosexual movement, namely, that this particular sexual life style will be the promoter of a particular kind of religion. Thus, while sexual liberation in its popular, successful, government-financed versions, strategically associates itself with “civil rights,” with pro-choice civic values and with politically-correct tolerance, often studiously avoiding any obvious religious dimension, its ultimate legitimization [since all human beings are religious] proceeds from the age-old dogmas of paganism, which, unlike their modern equivalent, never tried to hide behind a thin veil of temple/state separation. If everything is indeed political, as the radicals often proclaim, everything is also spiritual, and thus the spiritual is also sexual. Charles Pickstone, a pagan believer in Anglican orders, affirms this in his recent book The Divinity of Sex: “…sex is the spirituality that reveals the sacramental richness of matter.”

The thesis of this paper is that to understand the contemporary sexual revolution, we need to see the “new sexuality,” [particularly in this paper in its homosexual expression], as an integral expression of age-old religious paganism. In our response, we cannot follow Lot, who would have sacrificed his daughters to placate the aggressors. Nor can we claim personal moral superiority. We must always hear, in the clamor for acceptance and recognition, the cry of divine image-bearers, however marred and broken. However, we must not shrink back from seeking to do justice to the whole Christian, biblical dimension of the problem. In a time of moral confusion and politically correct intimidating “tolerance,” we owe such clarity to our culture, to our sons and daughters, and to God, Creator and Redeemer, for whom all things exist.

The following was written about “male to female” “transgendered” teenagers and predicts a heart-breaking future for the children who are encouraged (as they often are by homosexual activists in our public schools) to pursue gender confusion…

Excerpted from Book Review – Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T With Transgender Teenagers by Cris Beam, by Damian Penny, published Mar 8, 2007, by Blog Critics Magazine:

…Needless to say, they don’t have it easy – largely rejected by their families, the girls (as Beam, and most transgender advocates, would insist on calling them) bounce between group homes, roommates, short-term romantic relationships and — all too often — prostitution, drugs and prison. Some are able to procure female hormones or even cosmetic surgery to feminize their appearance, but others attend “pumping parties” where silicone (often, industrial-grade silicone) is injected into their bodies. One of her young friends, Domineque, ends up in a male prison, and ultimately winds up in a special unit with informers and sexual offenders – partly for her own protection, and partly because no one knows exactly what to do with her.

Beam [the lesbian author] and her girlfriend become especially close to Christina, a former gang member (still sporting her tattoo, which leads to some extremely awkward and dangerous moments) who rollercoasters between meaningful employment and the squalor of prostitution and drugs. She lives off and on with her mother, who remains deeply uncomfortable with what her son (born Eduardo) has done with his life and body.

Continue reading at Blog Critics Magazine…