LGBT

Mission America’s Linda Harvey says that comprehensive sex education is a means “to push homosexuality at school” and should be eliminated in order to fight HIV/AIDS. Harvey, who believes that the media use “demonic manipulation” to make children gay and that homosexuality is the cause of the country’s economic problems, writes that schools need to get rid of programs that teach safe-sex if they want to prevent the spread of the disease:

Why again are we promoting "gay" behavior to kids?

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Way too many of these cases occur among younger-aged men, those 24 and under. This trend has been rising in recent years, which is one more reason not to push homosexuality at school, or in any way to imply these practices can be done “safely.”

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This is the statistical face of deviance, out-of-control lust, and desperation. Most of the campaigns in this country to prevent HIV/AIDS do not take a strong stand against these unnecessary behaviors, but instead, talk around them and try to teach people to manage their misbehavior better. The numbers tell the story: it's not working.

What is that old definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We are throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars in HIV prevention that ignores the elephant in the room, or maybe throws him an occasional peanut.

If your son or daughter is learning standard sex education at school, chances are excellent that he or she has absorbed this idea: that HIV is “everyone’s disease” and that just about anyone can get it. It’s simply not true. If you wait until marriage for sex— the traditional, authentic kind with one man and one woman— and remain faithful in marriage, your chances for HIV in your lifetime will be virtually zero. It's the specific high risk practices popular among homosexuals, hook-up heterosexuals, and drug users, that put them at high risk. They simply don't need to happen, for many reasons. This is not that tough to figure out.

We need to be telling the truth to our young people, within the public health community and in our schools.

Last April the Media Research Council’s Culture and Media Institute attacked J. Crew for using “blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children” because one of its products advertised a designer who painted her son’s toenails. Fox News eventually picked up the story and warned of the ad’s perilous consequences for children. Now, the CMI is going after J. Crew once again, this time for featuring a gay employee as a model in its May catalog. Dubbing the clothing store “Gay Crew,” the CMI exhorts that “there’s more to company’s LGBT agenda than pink nail polish”:

When you're right, you're right. Last month, the Culture and Media Institute reported that internet marketing material from preppie clothing maker J. Crew featured a photo of the company's president painting the toenails of her young son hot pink.

"Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink," said the photo's caption. "Toenail painting is way more fun in neon."

CMI pointed out that the gender-bending ad was a nod to the gay agenda. Fox News picked up the story and a media storm ensued. Liberals scoffed at social conservatives' concerns that J. Crew was exploiting and normalizing the feminization of the boy with 'blatant propaganda.'

But according to ABC News.com, CMI was onto something. A May 2, 2011, online story places 'J. Crew at Center of Gay Economics With Openly Gay Model.' The company's May 2011 catalog 'features employees as models, including a gay designer with his boyfriend, who are described as 'Happy Together.''

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Now, J. Crew seems to have jumped on the bandwagon, according to advertising experts.

So J. Crew is consciously angling for the 'LGBT' market, but there's no agenda behind marketing materials featuring a little boy with hot pink toenails?

The Creation Studies Institute is warning members that, like the Nazis, gay-rights activists are using public schools to indoctrinate students. While many Religious Right groups have alleged that safe-school and anti-bullying programs lead to “homosexual indoctrination,” the Creationist Studies Institute claims that the “gay agenda” has taken over schools because schools have “fully embraced Darwinian Evolution.”

“Indeed, the rampant teaching of evolution in our schools that is effectively undermining belief in God and absolute moral standards is not only creating an atmosphere of ‘tolerance’ for homosexuality, but for just about anything,” writes Tom DeRosa, the organization’s founder and executive director, who adds: “Of course, in a purely evolutionary world, homosexuals would naturally be bred out of existence.” DeRosa goes on to compare homosexuality with polygamy and pedophilia, and asks members to purchase Focus on the Family’s Secure Daughters, Confident Sons booklet:

Those who hold godless ideologies have long understood that the best way to transform societies and change the way people traditionally think is by indoctrinating children from the earliest stages of education. In the last century, this methodology was effectively employed by those who held the atheistic ideologies of Nazism in Germany and Communism in countries such as the Soviet Union, where the state assumed total control of the educational system—even to the extent of turning children against parents. Of course, both of these worldviews fully embraced Darwinian evolution as a way to justify their actions and nullify the beliefs of their largely Christian populations. While U.S. federal government does not have that kind of authority in our school system (not yet, anyway), is it any wonder that those who lack a biblical worldview in our country, including those with a gay agenda, have seized upon our primary schools as the main vehicle of transforming our nation more to their liking?

In America, the adoption of evolution in our schools has paved the way for the introduction of the gay agenda. Those pushing it understand that nothing will more thoroughly and quickly undermine the traditional biblical foundations of our country than the normalization of homosexuality among our nation’s school children, regardless of their parents’ beliefs. Currently, under the banner of “tolerance” or “equal rights,” states like Massachusetts, New York, California, Wisconsin and Minnesota are actively implementing a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) curriculum in their public schools. But those behind the effort to legitimize LGBT lifestyles won’t be content until this kind of curricula is taught in all of our nation’s schools. So what is being taught, you might ask, that should concern those of us in the creationist community?

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From the patriarchal days of Sodom and Gomorrah to the Law of Moses to the New Testament, God’s Word consistently declares that homosexuality is sin and warns of the condemnation it brings to the individuals who practice it and to societies that promote it. Indeed, the rampant teaching of evolution in our schools that is effectively undermining belief in God and absolute moral standards is not only creating an atmosphere of “tolerance” for homosexuality, but for just about anything. As the truism goes, “Without God, everything is permissible.” So, in reality, there’s nothing to prevent the same rationale being used today to justify homosexuality and homosexual marriage from being used tomorrow to sanction polygamy or pedophilia or… As one very honest evolutionist wrote a while back (a piece that quickly disappeared from public view), if evolution is true, then rape is a very valid and/or efficient way for a man to spread his genes. After all, why not? It’s the survival of the fittest. Of course, in a purely evolutionary world, homosexuals would naturally be bred out of existence, as well. But you won’t hear that from pro-evolution advocates.

Linda Harvey of Mission America talked to Peter LaBarbera about Friday’s Day of Silence, a day for students to protest anti-gay bullying and harassment in schools. As detailed in People For the American Way’s report “Big Bullies: How the Religious Right is Trying to Make Schools Safe for Bullies and Dangerous for Gay Kids,” the Religious Right has been leading a campaign against anti-bullying programs, and Harvey is one of the most outspoken critics of bullying-prevention programs. Harvey, who co-hosted the rabidly anti-gay Americans for Truth Academy with LaBarbera, has urged parents to make sure their child doesn’t have gay friends, blamed gay-rights advocates for suicide among LGBT youth, and dubbed the Day of Silence a “Hitler Youth product.”

On LaBarbera’s radio show, Harvey concludes that the acceptance of gay youth will lead to “God’s judgment” and calls on parents to remove their children from public schools immediately. Harvey goes on to claim that gay-rights advocates are using “demonic manipulation” to turn children gay, and LaBarbera said Glee is also promoting homosexuality by featuring a kiss scene between two openly gay characters, asking, “how many young men and boys decided right there that they’re gay?”

LaBarbera: You’re promoting homosexuality to middle school boys. Now, if that can go on in America, without consequence, then it’s over. Then we as a country are going to go straight downhill because you’re getting to the point where you are promoting perversion to boys who should be so innocent still.

Harvey: Innocent and when you think about Scripture and you think about history, the male culture of any society is the backbone, the strength, the honor, the nobility, the future, the vitality of the society. What are we doing with our young males? It is a symptom, I think its part of God’s judgment on us that we’re doing this and that people are not ripping their kids out of these schools by the thousands daily, they should be. Because there’s no reason for people to be in these schools if you have any other choices at all, not everybody does, but I really recommend it if people have a choice, they get their kids out of these schools.

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Harvey: These people are masters at demonic manipulation; I mean I have to put it that way, because that is what the homosexual agenda directed to that age group does. Kids don’t know what they’re going to turn out to be, kids can be secretly wondering and doubting if they are homosexual without a parent ever knowing. Because of A) what they get in schools, and B) what they get on the Internet.

LaBarbera: And then Hollywood, I talked about at our conference about this Glee kiss which is just, as I said at the conference, it shocked my soul. This romantic Glee kiss between two teenage boys depicted on the show, popular characters, one of the most popular if not the most popular TV show that young people watch, and here they had a romantic kiss between two teenage boys, I thought, what, how many young men and boys decided right there that they’re gay?

During The Awakening’s panel on “Messaging and Mobilizing a New General of World Changers,” the fear of swelling youth support for marriage equality laws was widespread. Religious Right activists were particularly worried about the results of a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll that found that not only did 53 percent of Americans favor marriage equality, but that support was even stronger among younger Americans: “In an ABC/Post poll five and a half years ago, for example, under-30s were the sole age group to give majority support to gay marriage, at 57 percent. Today it's 68 percent in that group – but also 65 percent among people in their 30s, up a remarkable 23 points from the 2005 level; and 52 percent among those in their 40s, up 17 points.”

While the early morning panel was composed of young conservative leaders and Liberty University students, the audience was largely older and a number of questioners expressed fear over rising support for marriage equality among youth. Thomas Hall, a close aide to Lou Engle and a board member of the dominionist Oak Initiative, lamented the youth energy and support for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and Ryan Sorba admitted that even conservative students are not rallying behind the opposition to marriage equality.

William Estrada, a leader of the homeschoolers group Generation Joshua and the Home School Legal Defense Association, argued that conservative youth are organizing. Estrada mentioned a homeschoolers group in Hawaii, the Guardians of Liberty, who he said singlehandedly convinced former Governor Linda Lingle to veto a civil unions law. “We’re seeing young people standing up for the cause of traditional marriage,” Estrada said. What he failed to mention was that just a few months later, newly elected governor Neil Abercrombie signed the civil unions bill into law with little public outcry.

Marriage equality still faces immense political hurdles, with just five states and the District of Columbia adopting equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians, but the discouragement over the lack of anti-gay fervor among youth at The Awakening should not be taken as a sign that Religious Right activists have any intention of giving up. If their “Religious Liberty and the LGBT Agenda” panel demonstrated anything, it's that the Religious Right is unleashing even more venomous and blistering attacks against gays and lesbians. That is, when they aren't denying the existence of gay people.

Dejected, angered, and confused, last week’s poll by the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow shows the increasing desperation and panic of the Religious Right:

At the Freedom Federation’s The Awakening 2011, right-wing activists unleashed their venom at the gay community and supporters of gay rights at the “Religious Liberty and the LGBT Agenda” panel. Robert Knight, a columnist for the Washington Times who is the executive director of the far-right American Civil Rights Union, maintained that gay congressional staffers represent one of the most difficult hurdles for opponents of LGBT equality. According to Knight, who has also worked for a wide range of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Media Research Center, and Coral Ridge Ministries, gay staffers have “veto power” over legislation because they “work all hours and, I think, tend not to have family lives.” He went on to say that the “gay subculture” in D.C. “intimidates the overriding Washington culture” and that opponents of gay rights are “undermined from within”:

• I honestly cannot believe that NOM is actually quoting Virginia State Delegate Bob Marshall.
• Speaker John Boehner and the GOP will probably cave on defunding Planned Parenthood ... but apparently he is still an anti-choice hero.
• Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership is starting its own prayer alert network.
• FRC thinks its work was so vital to one anti-health care reform lawsuit that it is getting involved in another.
• Finally, Bryan Fischer says there are too many questions about repealing DADT that are being left unanswered: "And what about families who rely on on DoD schools for their children’s education? If LGBT personnel teach and pro-gay indoctrination is allowed in military-run classrooms, does the DoD have any way of determining how many families will choose not to re-enlist because of this? If pro-marriage service-members want educational alternatives because of LGBT curricula in DoD classrooms, will alternatives be provided, or will they be forced to suffer the brainwashing of their children as long as they serve?"

After taking over the Day of Truth from the ex-gay ministry Exodus International, Focus on the Family has been heavily publicizing the renamed event as the Day of Dialogue. The Day of Dialogue, which pushes students to confront those who are “messed up sexually” and encourages gay students to take “the road out of homosexuality,” will be held on April 18th, three days after the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network’s Day of Silence. According to GLSEN, the Day of Silence is “a day of action in which students across the country take some form of a vow of silence to call attention to the silencing effect of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools,” and “by taking a vow of silence, you’re making a powerful statement about the important issue of anti-LGBT bullying.” Focus on the Family strongly opposes any effort to address or prevent anti-LGBT bullying, and the group’s education analyst Candi Cushman told OneNewsNow that the Day of Silence is simply a “media opportunity” that contributes to the problem of the purportedly “stifled” views of students who oppose gay rights:

"The whole idea is to help embolden and encourage students to want to express their biblical viewpoint in a loving and grace-filled way, especially when controversial sexual topics are brought up in their school and they feel like maybe their viewpoint is being stifled. So this just gives them some tools for being able to be confident and loving in expressing their biblical viewpoint," Cushman explains.

The organizer says students can go to the event website to download conversation cards and hand them out to classmates before and after school on April 18. She adds that the Day of Dialogue serves as a contrast to homosexual-themed events such as the upcoming Day of Silence, where students are encouraged to remain silent in protest.

"The whole idea of silence seems more like a media opportunity -- but the idea of dialogue is that this is an actual learning opportunity for students and a free exchange of ideas among them," says Cushman.

The event will also feature a video contest with prizes awarded for the videos that best reflect the Day of Dialogue themes.

Yesterday, RWW reported on the Religious Right’s virulent opposition to a California bill that would make sure lesbian and gay historical figures are represented in the curriculum. Now, Focus on the Family’s political arm CitizenLink is linking the curriculum bill to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in its post “Indoctrination 101: From the Battlefield to the Ball Field.” Focus on the Family has consistently railed against “homosexual indoctrination” in schools and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, demanding its reinstatement. CitizenLink looks to traditionally anti-gay groups such as the Center for Military Readiness and the Pacific Justice Institute, along with its affiliated California Family Council, to blast the purported “indoctrination”:

The California Senate Education Committee passed legislation Wednesday that would mandate public schools teach U.S. history, California history and social science with a deliberate emphasis on the roles and contributions of gay- and lesbian-identified individuals, as well as those of transsexuals and bisexuals.

“It seems a bit like a quota system,” said Ron Prentice, executive director of the California Family Council. “It’s based less on the level of contribution and more on one’s sexual orientation.”

Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, said: “Our Legislature just doesn’t get it — with thousands of teachers getting pink slips, this is not the time to place more expensive, politically correct mandates on our schools. This bill also undermines parental rights and is insensitive to those whose cultures and belief systems are at odds with the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) agenda.”

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Meanwhile, the military has been ordered to “re-educate” its members on similar issues. The U.S. House Armed Services Committee soon will hold hearings on the repeal of the law known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which prevented open homosexuality in the military.

In 1993, the House and Senate conducted 12 hearings and field trips before passing the policy. Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, said the committee needs to hold a similar number before any repeal is made permanent.

“Imposition of LGBT law and policies on our military would be enormously complicated and anything but simple,” she said. “Members of Congress must ask questions and insist on honest answers.”

Among the issues Donnelly wants addressed: sexual privacy violations; “zero tolerance” of dissent; impact of sexual misconduct on unit cohesion and trust in leadership; infringements on religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith; plans to accommodate same-sex couples in military family housing; LGBT “sensitivity” training in all Defense Department training programs, academies and schools; and personal dress and behavior.