Schools

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.

Towards the very end of the televised portion of David Barton’s interview on The Daily Show, Barton said that one of the cases he “did at the US Supreme Court was rabbi Leslie Gutterman was asked in Providence Rhode Island to give a prayer at a graduation, and he wasn’t allowed to, now tell me how “Congress should make no law’ means that a rabbi cant say the word ‘God’ at a prayer.” He claims that this poses that the first Amendment is misused by putting a restriction on individuals, rather than government.

He referred to the case of a Rhode Island rabbi who was invited to deliver a prayer at a public school graduation to demonstrate that the Constitution is being misapplied to stifle religious expression. But it was the public school, not the rabbi (Gutterman), that was the defendant in the Supreme Court case Lee v. Weisman. Robert Lee was the principal of the school who invited the rabbi and Daniel Weisman’s daughter was the graduating student at the school who objected to the prayer service.

In the following section, that was posted only online, Barton dismisses fears that people could be coerced into prayer in schools, saying, “there’s coercion, you have to pull on your big boy pants and do something” and “look at all the pressure that goes to school anyway, there’s drugs and everything else and we don’t rule that unconstitutional.”

Barton misconstrues the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which is incorporated to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment (see Everson and Cantwell), and calls the ruling a “pretty strange parsing of the Constitution” and places a “restriction on the rights of people to say the word God in public.”

As Justice Kennedy writes in the majority opinion, which decided that the school is barred from holding a prayer service during the graduation ceremony, the First Amendment has been interpreted to prevent the government from sanctioning or endorsing religion:

The First Amendment’s Religion Clauses mean that religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the State. The design of the Constitution is that preservation and transmission of religious beliefs and worship is a responsibility and a choice committed to the private sphere, which itself is promised freedom to pursue that mission. It must not be forgotten, then, that, while concern must be given to define the protection granted to an objector or a dissenting nonbeliever, these same Clauses exist to protect religion from government interference.

As Stewart notes, Barton completely neglects the rights of the students whose beliefs are compromised by the school-sanctioned prayer by putting the burden on the student to just put up with it. Kennedy writes that such thinking “turns conventional First Amendment analysis on its head. It is a tenet of the First Amendment that the State cannot require one of its citizens to forfeit his or her rights and benefits as the price of resisting conformance to state-sponsored religious practice.”

Barton grounds his beliefs that the majority should trump the rights of the minority in his view that the First Amendment actually doesn’t prevent the state from endorsing religion. Lauri Lebo writes in The Devil in Dover that in Barton’s book The Myth of Separation,

Barton argues in his book that the First Amendment only refers to the establishment of a specific Protestant denomination. In other words, Barton claims that Christian founders were saying they couldn’t endorse Lutheranism, for instance, over Presbyterianism. But in Barton’s view, forcing Christian beliefs on the nation’s citizens has always been fair game.

But the drafters actually rejected proposed amendments that only stopped governmental recognition of denominations or sects. Warren Throckmorton, a professor at Grove City College, a Christian school, pointed to James Madison’s speech during the debate over the First Amendment where he makes clear that “Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law” for otherwise they could pass laws that “might infringe the rights of conscience and establish a national religion.”

By ignoring the meaning behind the First Amendment and opposing the First Amendment’s incorporation to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment, Barton pushes a radical version of the Constitution. If “taken to logical conclusion,” Throckmorton notes, “this argument would establish Christianity as the religion of the nation, something the Founders specifically did not do.”

Google Chrome featured the anti-bullying “It Gets Better Project” in its new ad, and now the ex-gay ministry Exodus International is outraged. Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus, is upset that Woody from Toy Story is featured in Google’s ad sending an anti-suicide message to bullied LGBT youth, with Woody saying, “you’ll be fine, partner.” Chambers condemns the ad, which also includes stories from celebrities, a police officer and gay parents, in The Christian Post, saying that the answer to anti-gay bullying is for gay youth to become “ex-gays” like him:

Children all over the world, including my two children are fans of ‘Toy Story’ and to see a character like that endorsing something that at this point children have no need to know about, it’s disappointing,” he told The Christian Post.

Chambers, who overcame homosexuality and is now a father of two, suspects that if the commercial airs while he and his children are watching a show and “if they happen to see that and ask questions and if they get the full understanding of what the commercial is actually about, we will have to have the conversation. It’s not something I plan to talk to my kids, 5 and 6, about.”

“For organizations like Exodus International, which has thousands of men and women like me who have lived a gay life, it obviously didn’t get better living a gay life for them. I would say that today it has become radically better,” he said.

“I think that we have to promote the stories of people who have found an alternative to homosexuality but I think that at the same time the church has to do a better job at addressing issues related to bullying and violence and how kids have been treated at public schools.”

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.

On Monday, Focus on the Family kicked off their first Day of Dialogue, which replaced the Day of Truth that had been sponsored by the “ex-gay” group Exodus International. Brad Clark, the executive director of One Colorado, wrote an open letter to Focus on the Family calling for them to work towards building “a true dialogue about what it means to be LGBT—instead of encouraging young people to spread harmful rhetoric to vulnerable youth in our schools.”

Focus on the Family has consistently claimed that anti-bullying programs send students a “homosexual message” and are part of a “pro-homosexual curriculum” made by “gay activists” who are “infiltrating classrooms under the cover of ‘anti-bullying’ or ‘safe schools’ initiatives.” Candi Cushman is the point person in their campaign against bullying-prevention programs, and heads their True Tolerance program and Day of Dialogue, which heavily propagates the view that gay people can change their sexual orientation through “reparative therapy.”

Unsurprisingly, Cushman accused Clark of promoting censorship and attacked the anti-bullying Day of Silence, where students remain silent throughout the school day to show solidarity with bullied and closeted LGBT students:

However, Clark's suggestion that kids merely expressing their faith-based viewpoints in a loving and peaceful way in their own schools is the moral equivalent of practicing sexual violence and physical harm is a rather frightening stance. Carried out to its full and logical conclusion, such reasoning becomes a convenient tool for censorship, an idea not only contrary to the tenets of academia, but contrary to the principles of free speech and thought that have not only made this country great - but that have made this country possible.

Consider, as an example, what occurred Monday: Thousands of Christian students in public high schools and colleges across 42 states and some foreign countries participated in a new, Focus on the Family-sponsored event called the Day of Dialogue. This event was designed to create a safe space and equal access for different viewpoints, including faith-based ones, partially in response to the Day of Silence, which has been celebrated in thousands of public schools nationwide for the past 15 years.

Sponsored by one of the nation's largest homosexual advocacy groups, Day of Silence is a day when educators are encouraged to have materials in their classroom addressing homosexual, bisexual and transgender topics from the sole perspective of that sponsoring group. What Day of Dialogue is meant to help facilitate is a true, free exchange of ideas and open conversations, rather than the silencing of certain viewpoints.

As Cody J. Sanders, a Baptist minister, notes in Religion Dispatches, by constantly playing the victim and attacking gays, Focus on the Family does not promote genuine dialogue at all:

Supposed “threats to religious freedom” and the language of “all-out, full-scale attack” produce war-like images that serve only to demonize those with whom one is to dialogue. It becomes a bit clearer why the Day of Dialogue site offers no assistance to students who wish to listen to the views of their dialogue partners. When the (LGBT) dialogue partner is constructed as the “enemy” whose way of being in the world is fundamentally evil, corrupt, pathological or anti-Christian, there is really no need to dialogue.

Since the language of “threat to freedom in America,” the corrosion of “constitutionally protected rights,” and “full-scale attack” is the language typically used when trying to justify engaging in the violence of war, one wonders if “dialogue” is just a polite cover for a more insidious intention.

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When one dialogue partner defines gay marriage as a “controversial sexual topic” contrary to “God’s truth” prior to engaging the views of the other, what possibilities exist for dialogue? An a priori assumption about what constitutes the “true view” of the Divine (which is, of course, the view one already holds) disallows the necessity of actually listening to and engaging the views of other dialogue partners.

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?

While the American Family Association and Liberty Counsel are calling on parents to prevent their children from attending school today and Concerned Women for America is encouraging a “Day of Silence Walk Out,” other Religious Right groups are trying to add anti-gay “balance” to today’s Day of Silence. Focus on the Family’s Day of Dialogue, which will take place on Monday in order to directly follow the Day of Silence, wants to help students they believe are “messed up sexually.” The “Day of Dialogue” is the successor to the ex-gay ministry Exodus International’s Day of Truth, and continues to employ the same anti-gay rhetoric as the group urges students to use stories like one from Rochelle, about the deleterious consequences of “embracing a lesbian lifestyle”:

Yet the further I plunged into lesbianism, the greater the void in my soul grew. I found girlfriends and guy friends; went to social events, gay bookstores and clubs; wore the clothes, talked the talk, and tried to become the person I thought I was, but deep inside I still was unsatisfied. What appeared to be a wonderful, enriching lifestyle turned out to be an illusion. It looked thrilling and exciting, but in reality, there was backbiting and selfishness, much as I’d already experienced in heterosexuality. People I encountered weren’t satisfied and confident; they were depressed, empty, and anxious, just like I was. What I thought would bring me life and community left only brokenness and bitterness in its wake.

Jeff Johnston, the group’s “gender and homosexuality analyst,” discussed his “road out of homosexuality,” which he blames on his early exposure to pornography, and his experience attending a conference called “Hope and Healing for the Homosexual”:

I learned at this event that I wasn’t alone – there were others in the church who wrestled with same-sex attractions. Some of them had walked away from homosexuality. I also learned that there might be some influencing factors in my life that had steered me toward homosexual thoughts and feelings, my early sexual experiences, for example. And I began talking to people about my struggle.

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I wouldn’t trade any of my life now for “gay pride” or for “being gay.” There is such freedom in living a life without trying to push down all those secrets, dark thoughts and feelings. There is joy in being a father and a husband. And there is peace in being forgiven.

Like Focus on the Family, the group Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) wants students to learn about “former homosexuals” and accuses the Day of Silence of “intolerance of ex-homosexuals”:

Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), says homosexual activists are censoring her group's point of view. "We would love people to make the decision to leave homosexuality, but they can't make a decision when they don't even know former homosexuals exist," she contends.

Pro-homosexual groups are promoting today's Day of Silence to encourage students to remain silent for a day at school to protest society's intolerance of homosexuals and cross-dressers. But Griggs wonders if they are concerned about the intolerance of ex-homosexuals.

"If you're going to worry about sexual orientation non-discrimination and pick a day every year to host it, shouldn't that include all sexual orientations, such as former homosexuals," the PFOX executive director questions. "Where are their rights?"

So she is encouraging students to distribute her organization's literature in schools today so that the message of hope will reach a hurting community.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins joined David Barton and his co-host Rick Green on WallBuilders Live to discuss the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). After the Justice Department decided to stop defending the discriminatory law, finding it unconstitutional, opponents of marriage equality immediately went on the attack. Perkins said that Barton’s Christian nationalist view of history proves that more fundamentalist Christians need to become involved in politics because “we were the voice in the process as this nation was founded,” and if the courts find DOMA unconstitutional then “religious freedom will be lost.” Barton, who previously maintained that “homosexual indoctrination” is already taking place in schools, later added that a defeat for DOMA in the courts will lead to “the indoctrination of kids.”

Perkins: We’re not new to this game, this is not something we just discovered, that all the sudden we have a voice in the process. We were the voice in this process as this nation was founded. And if we don’t once again exercise that voice, I think, I know David has said it and I know you have as well and I see it, if we don’t exercise that voice now as Christians we’re gonna lose it in the very near future.

This is a prime example, because if DOMA falls, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, that’s the only thing protecting these twenty-nine states that have marriage amendments, thirty-one states have voted on it, twenty-nine have amendments, and if this falls those amendments are in jeopardy. And we have already seen that when this agenda goes forward and same-sex marriage gets taught in our schools, our children would be taught that homosexual marriage is the same as traditional heterosexual marriage and homosexuality being on par with heterosexuality, and religious freedom will be lost.

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Barton: Tony’s right on what’s at stake here. If DOMA goes down, this thing affects not just marriage, but it also affects preachers in the pulpit, it affects education, it affects schools, it affects our children, it affects religious freedom. This is a big deal in what it impacts, it’s not just ‘oh that’s alright I’m gonna stay married’ no this is gonna change the whole culture and the indoctrination of kids and everything else, so it really is a big deal.

As seen in the new Right Wing Watch: In Focus “Big Bullies: How the Religious Right is Trying to Make Schools Safe for Bullies and Dangerous for Gay Kids,” Religious Right groups are consistently trying to tarnish anti-bullying initiatives as “homosexual indoctrination” and “special rights,” among other absurd claims. A Religious Right group led by Virginia politician Eugene Delgaudio, the Public Advocate, now launched the “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” petition to protest the Student Nondiscrimination Act, which it labels the “Homosexual Classrooms Act”:

Whereas: Schools should be institutions of learning, dedicated to the unbiased and unpoliticized pursuit of knowledge equally for all students; and

Whereas: The mis-named "Student Non-Discrimination Act" actually DOES discriminate by creating special protected classes of students; and

Whereas: More accurately-named the "Homosexual Classrooms Act," the "Student Non-Discrimination Act" targets children with homosexual propaganda far over their heads in an attempt to sexually confuse and corrupt; and

Whereas: Government should have NO AUTHORITY to force the Homosexual Agenda on the American people, much less their children;

Therefore: As your constituent and a concerned pro-family voter, I strongly insist you oppose the so-called "Student Non-Discrimination Act," and make every attempt to see it defeated.