Gay Rights Straightjacket

Public schools are spending so much time on gay rights issues that about the only way left for reformers to bring Algebra back to classrooms would be to set up algebraic word problems involving cast members of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

“Just this week, police arrested a middle-school drama teacher in Waltham, Massachusetts for allegedly staging an elaborate production designed to molest male teens by offering them massages from prostitutes, then blindfolding them, donning a wig, and pretending to be the female masseuse,” author Dan Flynn notes on his web site. “On August 10, police arrested another middle-school teacher, in New Jersey, for allegedly attempting to lure children into his car.”

“On Tuesday, Jacksonville, Florida police arrested a teacher in a 13-year-old’s house he had chatted with over the internet after a relative, wondering why the boy hadn’t gone to school, arrived at the house to find the teen in his underwear and a strange man locked in the bathroom.” Flynn, the author of Intellectual Morons, is the former executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

“Surely the teachers’ union will be outraged when they learn that one of their own helped a student play hookey, no?,” Flynn asks wryly. Well, no.

“For the past dozen years, [National Education Association] NEA resolutions have each year adopted more of the gay rights agenda,” according to the August 2006 Education Reporter. “Whereas, gay rights goals such as same-sex marriage are steadily losing at the polls (20 states have passed state constitutional amendments restricting marriage to a man and a woman), the gay rights agenda is moving ahead full speed in the public schools, with assistance from the NEA.”

“Among the other resolutions passed in Orlando that advance the gay agenda were the following: A-14: ‘Funds must be provided for programs to alleviate race, gender and sexual orientation discrimination and to eliminate…sexual orientation and gender identification stereotypes in the public schools.”

The Education Reporter is published by Eagle Forum, the conservative group founded by attorney and author Phyllis Schlafly. “The NEA denied a press pass to a reporter for the Education Reporter after first putting us on the list to receive one,” according to the editor of the ER. “An NEA official phoned our Washington office and said our press pass was revoked because we are a ‘special interest group.’”

“But our reporters were creative enough to gain admittance anyway.” Their reporters must have been home-schooled.

As is so often the case, California leads the way in this latest progressive push in education. “AB 2510 would require the Attorney General’s office, working with the State Department of Education, to survey students on bias-related discrimination and harassment incidents in public schools,” Karen England of the Capitol Resource Institute reports of a bill making its way through the California Assembly. “Seventh, 9th and 11th graders in public schools will be forced to fill out questionnaires asking whether they have experienced bullying, discrimination or harassment based on sexual orientation or gender (actual or perceived).”

“The results of this survey will then be compiled into a biennial report by the Attorney General’s office.” CRI is based in Sacramento, the state capital. In the state of Washington, the Safe Schools Coalition bills itself as “a public-private partnership in support of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.”

“Families come in all different shapes and sizes, including, among many others, two-mommy and two-daddy families and families with no kids at all (just grown ups),” according to the Coalition which advertises itself as sponsored by, among others, the Greater Seattle Business Association. “There aren’t any ‘girl colors and boy colors’ or ‘girl games and boy games,’” according to the Coalition. “Those are stereotypes of what you have to like to be a girl or a boy.”

“It’s OK to be different.” It’s OK, unless, of course, you don’t want to wind up on Brokeback Mountain.

“A group of distinguished psychology professors and practitioners has petitioned the leadership of the American Psychological Association (APA) in behalf of reparative therapy for homosexuals who seek to change,” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council reports. “The petition, predictably, has led to outrage on the part of the homosexual lobby.”

“Entrenched as they have been in the APA leadership since 1974, homosexuals and their allies are denouncing the very idea that people can change their homosexual orientation.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.