Reading, writing and radical indoctrination

The homosexual movement makes inroads in schools

By Christina Quick

Last October, a group of first-graders at a San Francisco charter school took a field trip to City Hall to participate in their teacher’s lesbian wedding.

In November, kindergarteners in Hayward, Calif., were asked to sign “pledge cards” in support of homosexuals.

In December, more than two dozen teachers in Philadelphia took a day off in the middle of the school week to protest the passage of California’s marriage amendment and to discuss ways to introduce gay issues to their students.

While some dismiss such stories as examples of poor judgment among a few educators, others say they illustrate the growing influence of the homosexual movement in America’s schools.

“Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents,” says Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a conservative legal organization based in Orlando, Fla. “They’re becoming more and more frequent. The schools have become a battlefront for social agendas.”

When social agendas in classrooms clash with values instilled at home, parents often face a difficult dilemma.

Michelle Turner of Silver Spring, Md., never thought of herself as an instigator. The Christian mother of six had been a longtime supporter of Montgomery County Public Schools, serving as PTA president, room mom and fundraising organizer. In 2004, she volunteered to serve on a committee that had the task of reviewing curriculum for eighth- and 10th-grade sex education. Then the trouble started.

The material was filled with references to homosexuality, which the authors claimed was no more abnormal than being left-handed. Turner later learned much of the text had been written by homosexual advocacy organizations, including the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

“I was dumbfounded,” Turner says. “It had a very pro-homosexual and pro-bisexual slant.”

As one of the few dissenting members on the committee, Turner was unsuccessful in her attempts to block the curriculum’s approval. She continued to protest it, however, spreading the word to other concerned parents and organizing an opposition group, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum. She also sought legal help from Liberty Counsel, which filed a lawsuit against the school district.

In 2005, a federal court blocked the school from using the curriculum. However, Turner says new curriculum implemented this school year contains similar statements about homosexuality. Her organization continues to petition the school district to reconsider its approach to sex education.

Turner says Christians have a responsibility to investigate what’s being taught in the public schools, especially parents who have children attending classes.

“Parents need to wake up and find out what is going on in their child’s school,” she says. “If more parents who are opposed to this instruction would find out what’s going on and speak out against it, we would see far less of it.”

Studies show most parents do not support pro-homosexual curricula. In a 2004 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, just 8 percent of high school parents and 4 percent of middle school parents said schools should teach “that homosexuality is acceptable.”

Turner is hopeful that concerned parents will take more of an interest in the issue.

“When more and more parents realize what’s going on and that this is really an indoctrination, we’ll see more parents taking a stand and saying, ‘No, this is enough. You’ve gone too far,’ ” she says.

However, some radical programs fly under parents’ radar by masquerading behind agreeable ideals such as acceptance and tolerance.

Welcoming Schools, an anti-bullying program for elementary kids, was created by the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based homosexual rights organization.

The program teaches vocabulary words such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. It uses books such as The Sissy Duckling and King and King, a story about two men who fall in love and marry.

It also employs a puzzle in which students are asked to arrange pictures of children and adults into seven families. The catch, as students are meant to discover, is that the puzzle doesn’t form seven traditional families. Placing same-gender adults together is the only way to complete it.

The program, introduced this school year in three Minneapolis schools, “will move toward broader distribution … after the completion of the pilot phase in summer of 2008,” according to the Human Rights Campaign’s Web site.

An organization based in Seattle called The Safe Schools Coalition also promotes homosexual causes under the guise of an anti-bullying program. The group’s Web site even addresses spiritual issues, providing information about books and religious organizations that assure students homosexuality is not a sin.

Though the organization claims to promote schools “where every educator can teach and where every child can learn,” a blog sponsored by the organization recently called for the “weeding out” of educators who disagree with the homosexual agenda.

“It doesn’t hurt to put pressure on homophobes and transphobes to get out and stay out,” the writer said. “People who are unwilling to self-educate and open their eyes to ever-growing worlds of sexuality and gender should be made to feel unwelcome.”

Turner says she and her children have been harassed and threatened by people who disagree with their views. Yet she says the experience hasn’t been completely void of educational value.

“My kids have come to realize the importance of taking a stand and that you cannot always be the winner of the popularity contest,” Turner says. “If you’re really going to profess a belief in God and His teachings, you need to be able to express that — not just on Sunday morning, but in everyday situations.”

CHRISTINA QUICK is staff writer for Today’s Pentecostal Evangel.

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