[EdReform]

Posting an excerpt from "Queering the Schools" here. At the end of this excerpt is a letter to the editor from Kevin Jennings of GLSEN. Following Jennings' letter is an interesting response from the editors:

An excerpt from "Queering the Schools"

This movement to “queer” the public schools, as activists put it, originated with a shift in the elite understanding of homosexuality. During the eighties, when gay activism first became a major cultural force, homosexual leaders launched a campaign that mirrored the civil rights movement. To claim their rights, homosexuals argued (without scientific evidence) that their orientation was a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus deserved the same kind of civil protections the nation had guaranteed to blacks. An inborn, unchangeable fact, after all, could not be subject to moral disapproval. There ensued a successful effort to normalize homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, gays in the military, and other signs of civic equality...

Underlying this militant stance was a radical new academic ideology called “queer theory.” A mixture of the neo-Freudianism of counterculture gurus Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse and French deconstruction, queer theory takes to its extreme limit the idea that all sexual difference and behavior is a product of social conditioning, not nature. It is, in their jargon, “socially constructed.” For the queer theorist, all unambiguous and permanent notions of a natural sexual or gender identity are coercive impositions on our individual autonomy—our freedom to reinvent our sexual selves whenever we like. Sexuality is androgynous, fluid, polymorphous—and therefore a laudably subversive and even revolutionary force...

It would be tempting to dismiss queer theory as just another intellectual fad, with little influence beyond the campus, if not for gay activists’ aggressive effort to introduce the theory’s radical view of sexuality into the public schools. Leading the effort is the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN, pronounced “glisten”), an advocacy group founded a decade ago to promote homosexual issues in the public schools. It now boasts 85 chapters, four regional offices, and some 1,700 student clubs, called “gay/straight alliances,” that it has helped form in schools across the country.

GLSEN often presents itself as a civil rights organization, saying that it is only after “tolerance” and “understanding” for a victim group. Sometimes, therefore, it still speaks the old gay-rights language of unchangeable homosexual “identity” and “orientation.” But it is, in fact, a radical organization that has clearly embraced the queer-theory worldview. It seeks to transform the culture and instruction of every public school, so that children will learn to equate “heterosexism”—the favoring of heterosexuality as normal—with other evils like racism and sexism and will grow up pondering their sexual orientation and the fluidity of their sexual identity.

That GLSEN embraces queer theory is clear from the addition of transgendered students to the gays and lesbians the group claims to represent. By definition, the transgendered are those who choose to change their gender identity by demeanor, dress, hormones, or surgery. Nothing could be more profoundly opposed to the notion of a natural sexual identity. Consider as evidence of queer theory’s influence, too, the GLSEN teachers’ manual that says that middle-schoolers “should have the freedom to explore [their] sexual orientation and find [their] own unique expression of lesbian, bisexual, gay, straight, or any combination of these.” What is this but Michael Warner’s appeal to pansexual experimentation?

One of the major goals of GLSEN and similar groups is to reform public school curricula and teaching so that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender—or LGBT—themes are always central and always presented in the approved light. GLSEN holds regular conferences for educators and activists with workshops bearing titles such as “Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls: Creating a Safe, Supportive School Environment for Trans, Intersex, Gender Variant and Gender Questioning Youth” and “Developing and Implementing a Transgender Inclusive Curriculum.” Every course in every public school should focus on LGBT issues, GLSEN believes. A workshop at GLSEN’s annual conference in Chicago in 2000 complained that “most LGBT curricula are in English, history and health” and sought ways of introducing its agenda into math and science classes, as well. (As an example of how to queer geometry, GLSEN recommends using gay symbols such as the pink triangle to study shapes.)

Nor is it ever too early to begin stamping out heterosexism. A 2002 GLSEN conference in Boston held a seminar on “Gender in the Early Childhood Classroom” that examined ways of setting “the tone for nontraditional gender role play” for preschoolers. To help get the LGBT message across to younger children, teachers can turn to an array of educational products, many of them available from GLSEN. Early readers include One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads; King and King; and Asha’s Mums.

As for teaching aids, a 1999 book, Queering Elementary Education, with a foreword by GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings, offers essays on “Locating a Place for Gay and Lesbian Themes in Elementary Reading, Writing and Talking” and “How to Make ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ in the Classroom”—the scare quotes showing the queer theorist’s ever present belief that categorizing gender is a political act.

For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K–12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include “role playing” exercises to “counter harassment,” where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; testing students to see where their attitudes lie toward sexual “difference” (mere tolerance is unacceptable; much better is “admiration” and, best of all, “nurturance”); getting students to take a “Sexual Orientation Quiz”; and having heterosexual students learn 37 ways that heterosexuals are privileged in society. In turn, principals should make an “ongoing PA announcement”—once a week, the manual says—telling students about confidential support programs for LGBT students.

Teachers, the manual suggests, should demand that public school students memorize the approved meanings of important LGBT words and terms, from “bigenderist” to “exotophobia.” Sometimes, these approved meanings require Orwellian redefinitions: “Family: Two or more persons who share resources, share responsibility for decisions, share values and goals, and have commitments to one another over a period of time . . . regardless of blood, or adoption, or marriage.”

Two videos come particularly highly rated by gay activists and educators as tools for making primary school queer-friendly. Both films strive to present homosexuality in a favorable light, without saying what it actually is. It’s Elementary, intended for parents, educators, and policymakers, shows how classroom teachers can lead kindergartners through carefully circumscribed discussions of the evils of prejudice, portrayed as visited to an unusual degree on gays and lesbians. In That’s a Family, designed for classroom use, children speak directly into the camera, explaining to other kids how having gay and lesbian parents is no different from, for example, having parents of different national backgrounds.

GLSEN even provides lesson plans for the promotion of cross-dressing in elementary school classes. A school resource book containing such lesson plans, Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers, has already been used in second-grade classrooms in California. A children’s play in the book features a little boy singing of the exhilaration of striding about “In Mommy’s High Heels,” in angry defiance of the criticism of his intolerant peers:

They are the swine, I am the pearl. . . .
They’ll be beheaded when I’m queen!
When I rule the world! When I rule the world!
When I rule the world in my mommy’s high heels!

Some of the LGBT-friendly curricular material aimed at older children is quite sexually explicit. The GLSEN-recommended reading list for grades 7–12 is dominated by such material, depicting the queer sexuality spectrum. In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth features a 17-year-old who writes, “I identify as bisexual and have since I was about six or seven. . . . I sort of experimented when I was young.” Another GLSEN recommendation, Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, has a 16-year-old contributor who explains, “My sexuality is as fluid, indefinable and ever-changing as the north flowing river.”

Some of the most explicit homosexual material has shown up in classrooms. An Ohio teacher encouraged her freshman students to read Entries From a Hot Pink Notebook, a teen coming-out story that includes a graphic depiction of sex between two 14-year-old boys. In Newton, Massachusetts, a public school teacher assigned his 15-year-old students The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a farrago of sexual confusion, featuring an episode of bestiality as one of its highlights. Such books represent a growth industry for publishers, including mainstream firms.

As part of its effort to make the public schools into an arena of homosexual and transgender advocacy, GLSEN works assiduously to build a wide network of student organizers. It looks for recruits as young as 14, who in turn are to bring on board other students to form gay/straight alliances or other homosexual-themed student clubs at their schools. Glancing over the biographies of 2002’s student organizers reveals a uniform faith among them that experimenting with a range of homosexual behaviors serves the cause of civil rights.

The behavior in question involves some practices that the Marquis de Sade would welcome. A GLSEN-sponsored, taxpayer-funded “teach out” for activists, educators, and students to brainstorm ways of creating schools and communities that “are truly inclusive and safe,” held at Tufts University a while back, is a case in point. The daylong conference, with Massachusetts Department of Education and other state employees as workshop leaders and drawing many high school students and teachers (who received professional development credits for attending), featured a “youth only, ages 14–21” session that offered a lesson in “fisting”—the potentially dangerous act, called by some the first new sexual invention in 1,000 years, of inserting one’s fist into a partner’s anus or vagina.

Thanks to two members of the local Parents’ Rights Coalition, who secretly taped the session, we know that the fisting lesson did not arouse universal enthusiasm among the teens present. A boy asks why anyone would want to do such a thing. Other teens reportedly winced. But the self-identified gay and lesbian state employees turned aside doubts. One—a woman—explained that, though fisting “often gets a really bad rap,” it usually isn’t about the pain—“not that we’re putting that down.” Rather, she assured, it is “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be close and intimate with.”

And so the workshop proceeded, marketing the polymorphously perverse to the sexually naive and emotionally immature. The etiquette of swallowing versus spitting after oral sex came up, as did the question of whether a tongue ring makes oral sex more pleasurable. Other topics included: how to use dildos, the mechanics of lesbian sexual gratification, and whether celery makes semen taste sweeter. The workshop leaders were sophisticated, yet breezy and colloquial, using street language and referring quite openly to their own sexual experiences—a Department of Public Health worker making his homosexual promiscuity obvious. The workshop initiated adolescents into a forbidden world that their parents likely knew nothing about.

In the winter of 2001, Tufts hosted another GLSEN-sponsored conference, entitled “Creating Safety—Teaching Respect.” This time, most of the 650 people present were teenagers, rounded up by gay activists or coming on their own to receive instruction in queer sexuality. Planned Parenthood representatives handed out special kits, containing latex gloves and lubricants, for “safe” fisting.

GLSEN and other activist homosexual groups have effectively used “safe school” campaigns to further their agenda. The federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program—Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—provides millions of dollars to state education departments to combat drugs and violence in the public schools. Using some of these funds, gay activists have helped design and promote public school “tolerance” programs. One of the mildest of such programs, “Healing the Hate,” released in 1997 under Department of Justice sposorship, implicitly likens disapproval of homosexual behavior with the prejudices that in the past have led to lynchings, church burnings, and the Holocaust. Gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country.

GLSEN is quite explicit about using the safety issue to silence opponents. As GLSEN chief Kevin Jennings puts it, “We knew that, confronted with the real-life stories of youth who had suffered from homophobia, our opponents would automatically be on the defensive. . . . This allowed us to set the terms of the debate.”

At the urging of gay/straight alliances, schools across the U.S. have also created “safe” rooms for homosexual or sexually confused students, as if they might not be safe from “hate” and “intolerance” elsewhere in the school. In these rooms, identified by inverted pink triangles, students can discuss same-sex attraction or anxiety about sexual orientation with teachers or counselors, who promise a nonjudgmental and sympathetic hearing. Students who drop by for private discussion about their sexual confusion will often be referred—without parental knowledge—to local chapters of gay and lesbian organizations. If queer theorists are correct that homosexuality is a free choice, then parents might be forgiven for thinking such advocacy a kind of recruitment.

Without doubt, most parents would look at the subversive agenda on offer at GLSEN conferences and in LGBT-friendly curricula and find it bizarre and offensive. What sense, they might ask, does it make to “queer” math or science or other classes—whatever that might mean—when so many public schools fail even to produce minimally literate and numerate graduates?

Especially when all the evidence suggests that the incidence of self-labeled homosexuality and bisexuality in the population is in fact minuscule—just 1.4 percent of female subjects and 2.8 percent of male subjects, according to one of the largest and most scientific surveys by the National Opinion Research Center. Even Kinsey, with a very distorted sample population of volunteers, prison inmates (including sex offenders), and deliberately solicited homosexual respondents, only came up with a 4 percent figure for exclusive homosexual behavior, still far below the 10 percent frequently cited by homosexual activists. Should we revolutionize the schools for such a tiny minority?

Even more to the point, how many parents, even those not just tolerant of homosexuality but actively sympathetic toward homosexual rights, would really want their teenage children to be seeking out a “unique expression” of sexuality (let alone with their school’s help) or learning how to “fist”? How many would want their kindergartners—just figuring out their identities and desperately needing clear-cut categories like “boy” and “girl” to make sense of them—to engage in “non-traditional role play,” so that they grow up with warm feelings about transgendered people? Or their elementary school boys and girls exposed to sexual themes that they aren’t old enough to understand and that are likely to fill them with anxiety? Parents might well brush off an old-fashioned word and describe it all as, well . . . perverse.

As for bullying, the real problem is not anti-gay prejudice but the overall breakdown of school discipline. No child should have to put up with verbal or physical intimidation at school. Making schools safer, however, does not require importing a broader LGBT agenda that offends the values of many students and parents.

Nevertheless, though many parents aren’t aware of it yet, the agenda has moved far beyond the wishful thinking of activists. The keynote speaker at GLSEN’s 2000 conference was Robert Chase, president of the 2.7 million-member National Education Association, the nation’s biggest, most powerful teachers’ union. The program booklet for the event featured greetings not only from Chase but from then-president Clinton, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-biggest U.S. teachers’ union. The celebratory notes expressed the kind of praise once reserved for groups like the Boy Scouts. A long list of well-known organizations has backed LGBT programs in the classroom, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Library Association, and the National Association of Social Workers.

No organization has been more steadfast in its support of GLSEN than the NEA. During the NEA’s annual convention in July 2001, many observers expected the teachers’ union to pass an official resolution incorporating GLSEN’s sweeping educational goals into K–12 curricula nationwide. As it turns out, the NEA, clearly trying to minimize public awareness of an unprecedented infringement on parental prerogatives, tabled the resolution and announced a task force to study how best to approach LGBT issues in the schools. But in February 2002, the NEA board of directors approved the task force’s report—a pure emanation of the GLSEN worldview, as is clear both from its numerous citations of GLSEN documents in the footnotes and from its recommendations.

Following the task force’s lead, the NEA will now struggle to expunge “heterosexism” from the consciousness of children in the classroom. The union has encouraged schools to integrate LGBT themes into curricula, instructional material, and programs; to emphasize the legitimacy of different “family structures,” including domestic partner arrangements; and to offer counseling services for students struggling with their “sexual/gender orientation.” Small wonder that GLSEN greeted the NEA task force’s report, and its endorsement by the union, with hosannas. “These powerful new recommendations signal that help is on the way for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students and staff who experience day-to-day abuse in America’s schools,” enthused GLSEN head Jennings.

The queering of the public schools has perhaps advanced furthest in California, where a new state law requires public schools to teach all K–12 students (and K means five-year-olds) “to appreciate various sexual orientations.” What the new law might mean in practice, warned a state assemblyman, was on display at Santa Rosa High School, where invited homosexual activists “talked about using cellophane during group sex and said that ‘clear is best because you can see what you want to lick,’ ” or at Hale Middle School in Los Angeles, where during an AIDS education course, “12-year-olds were subjected to graphic descriptions of anal sex and tips on how to dispose of used condoms so parents don’t find out.” As the assemblyman noted, sex ed courses throughout California public schools, influenced heavily by national sex education advocates SEICUS and Planned Parenthood, have already enthusiastically endorsed the GLSEN worldview.

But California is only the cutting edge: efforts to queer the schools are under way in many other locales, from Massachusetts to Oregon. The co-chair of the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, for example, informs the Boston Globe that teachers across that state are increasingly integrating LGBT themes into lessons—discussing the sexual orientation of authors as an interpretive tool in literature classes, she says, or comparing gay and bisexual with straight student mental health data in order to study percentages. After a ferocious battle, the Broward School Board in Florida recently voted to rely on GLSEN to train teachers in LGBT “sensitivity.” In Gresham, Oregon, in early 2002, school officials at Centennial High School brought in gay and lesbian speakers in English, drama, and health classes during the school’s annual “diversity” week, neither telling students about it beforehand nor letting them opt out of the classes if they wanted. Parental anger forced school officials to issue a public apology.

GLSEN constantly emphasizes the need for tolerance for homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism, but if someone bucks the LGBT party line in a school that follows it, watch out. Consider the experience of Elliott Chambers, formerly a student at Woodbury High School in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Woodbury High had posted pink triangles on 48 of its 60-odd classrooms and offices (what made the other rooms “unsafe” isn’t clear). Belonging to a conservative family, Chambers decided one day to express his values and wore to school a sweatshirt with the words STRAIGHT PRIDE emblazoned across the front and an image of a man and woman holding hands on the back.

Parents or other concerned citizens who complain about any aspect of the queering of public education can face withering attacks, not just from gay activists but from cultural elites in general. When the two members of the Parents’ Rights Coalition released their tape of the GLSEN-sponsored fisting workshop to the public, to take one typical example, the Boston Globe didn’t condemn the use of public funds and state employees to instruct schoolchildren in an arcane and dangerous “sexual” practice; instead, it denounced the whistleblowers as fomenters of “intolerance.”

School districts that refuse to go along with the homosexual agenda now must contend with the American Civil Liberties Union, too. The ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project has launched a national effort, called “Every Student, Every School,” that plans to sue on First Amendment grounds any school that refuses gay/straight student clubs on its premises. Already, schools in Kentucky and Texas face legal action.

No compulsory public school system can be justified unless what it teaches is a worldview that the taxpayers who fund it can support. The “common schools” came into existence, after all, to acculturate immigrants to American values. For schools to try to indoctrinate children in a radical, minority worldview like that promoted by GLSEN and its allies—a vision that will form those children’s values and shape their sense of selfhood—is a kind of tyranny, one that, in addition, intentionally drives a wedge between parents and children and, as queer theorist Michael Warner boasts, “opposes society itself.” We must not let an appeal to our belief in tolerance and decency blind us to indecency—and to the individual and social damage that will result from it.

GLSEN Responds

To the editor:
Marjorie King’s “Queering the Schools” [Spring 2003] does not fairly or factually represent the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network [GLSEN]. King’s article poses as a well-researched critique, but she interviewed no one at GLSEN before writing this grossly inaccurate, misleading piece. And her irresponsible, salacious claims are given credibility by appearing in City Journal—not usually an outlet for half-baked journalism.

Among King’s egregious misrepresentations is her description of a workshop conducted by a Massachusetts Department of Education employee at a GLSEN conference in 2000, which she calls “typical” of the “GLSEN agenda.” In fact, upon learning of the workshop’s content, GLSEN issued a statement that the workshop leader had been inappropriate, and took steps to ensure that such incidents wouldn’t be repeated. This incident was isolated, not part of a pattern, and no similar incident has occurred since.

King cites as examples of GLSEN’s “recommended curriculum” a series of books that are not recommended in our BookLink catalog.

She attacks students working to end school violence, saying they bear “a uniform faith . . . that experimenting with a range of homosexual behaviors serves the cause of civil rights.” These students include a Special Olympics board member, an anti-smoking advocate, and an aspiring special-ed teacher; they exhibit a civic engagement that should be applauded, not denigrated with glib and inaccurate characterizations.

King dismisses the need for anti-bullying and anti-violence programs for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT] students: “gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country.” King should ask the families of Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo, or Sakia Gunn—students murdered partly because of their sexual orientation—how dubious this contention is.

The facts are clear: harassment is the rule, not the exception, for LGBT students. The Centers for Disease Control have found that LGBT students are more than twice as likely to be threatened or injured with a weapon as non-LGBT students (18.6 percent vs. 7.6 percent, respectively) and to miss school out of fear for their safety (16.4 percent vs. 7.6 percent). If you’re too afraid to go to school, you’re not going to get an education.

GLSEN’s mission is to ensure that schools are safe, effective environments for all students to learn, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. All claims to the contrary are mere distractions that force our organization to turn our attention to debating distorted half-truths. To mischaracterize and attack an organization whose sole mission is to end harassment is contemptible.

Kevin Jennings
Executive Director, GLSEN

The editors respond:
GLSEN’s Kevin Jennings hurls many insults at “Queering the Schools”: “misleading,” “distorted,” “salacious,” and “contemptible,” among them. But Mr. Jennings never substantiates his baseless charges—and he makes some highly misleading comments in the course of his name-calling.

The first concerns a workshop for “youth only—ages 14-21” held in 2000 at Tufts University, which (among other things) instructed teens in the dangerous practice of “fisting”: inserting a fist into a sexual partner’s anus or vagina. Mr. Jennings admits the event was “inappropriate” and claims that GLSEN has taken steps to ensure it won’t happen again. We’re glad GLSEN agrees that the workshop was wrong—though “inappropriate” is a tame word to describe teaching such practices to kids not old enough to drink legally. But Mr. Jennings seems to forget that parents’ groups criticized GLSEN for its 2001 Tufts conference, as well—where, for instance, Planned Parenthood reportedly handed out kits to teenagers for “safe” fisting.

Moreover, Mr. Jennings says nothing about workshops for teachers, featured at these and other GLSEN conferences, exploring themes like “Addressing GLBT Issues in Preschools, Daycare and Kindergartens” and “Gender in the Early Child Classroom.” He remains silent because GLSEN does think it appropriate to have schools plan activities in which second-grade boys dress up in high heels—as one GLSEN-recommended teachers’ resource book suggests—to fight bigotry against transsexuals. We don’t agree, and it’s a safe bet that most other parents don’t, either.

Next, Mr. Jennings protests that GLSEN doesn’t endorse the books cited in “Queering the Schools,” like Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which features homosexual teen sex and bestiality. Apparently, he hasn’t seen the “Selected Bibliography of Books for Children and Young Adults” on his own website, which describes that book as “incredibly compelling.”

Third, Mr. Jennings complains that, in describing GLSEN student activists as loyal to GLSEN’s belief that experimentation with homosexual behavior serves the cause of civil rights, we don’t also mention their other activities: stamping out smoking, volunteering for the Special Olympics, etc. It’s great that these kids have interests other than GLSEN. Yet Mr. Jennings doesn’t reject our characterization of GLSEN’s worldview or their student activists’ commitment to it.

Finally, Mr. Jennings argues that “Queering the Schools” ignores the harassment that LGBT students face daily in schools, which in turn necessitates GLSEN’s radical remaking of school (even pre-school) curricula to emphasize LGBT themes and endorse LGBT behaviors. This agenda runs counter to the most deeply held values of many parents.

No one wants to see any child bullied or harmed, for any reason—as our article says. But unsafe schools result from a breakdown of school discipline generally, as Mr. Jennings’s own numbers underscore. If 18.6 percent of LGBT students have been threatened or injured with a weapon, so have 7.6 percent of all students. Since LGBT students are a tiny fraction of all students, that 7.6 percent represents a much bigger problem. Make schools safe for everybody; forbid all examples of intimidation and abuse—that’s our commonsensical view. There’s no need to revolutionize school curricula in ways that seek to transform tolerance for homosexuals and the transgendered into full-fledged approval.

GLSEN’s project is so radical that it risks undermining public toleration of homosexuality. A recent Gallup poll shows that 46 percent of Americans think homosexual relations should be illegal, while 49 percent say homosexuality “should not be an acceptable alternative lifestyle”—a much more anti-homosexual result than previous polls. These stark numbers mark a powerful public backlash against homosexuality in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision invalidating anti-sodomy laws. Elites using public schools to indoctrinate children—even very young children—into a minority worldview at odds with their parents’ values is a kind of tyranny that will also call forth an inevitable backlash.

Remember GLSEN Encourages Teens In Anal SEX "Don't give up."?

An excerpt from "Queering the Schools"

This movement to “queer” the public schools, as activists put it, originated with a shift in the elite understanding of homosexuality. During the eighties, when gay activism first became a major cultural force, homosexual leaders launched a campaign that mirrored the civil rights movement. To claim their rights, homosexuals argued (without scientific evidence) that their orientation was a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus deserved the same kind of civil protections the nation had guaranteed to blacks. An inborn, unchangeable fact, after all, could not be subject to moral disapproval. There ensued a successful effort to normalize homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, gays in the military, and other signs of civic equality...

Underlying this militant stance was a radical new academic ideology called “queer theory.” A mixture of the neo-Freudianism of counterculture gurus Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse and French deconstruction, queer theory takes to its extreme limit the idea that all sexual difference and behavior is a product of social conditioning, not nature. It is, in their jargon, “socially constructed.” For the queer theorist, all unambiguous and permanent notions of a natural sexual or gender identity are coercive impositions on our individual autonomy—our freedom to reinvent our sexual selves whenever we like. Sexuality is androgynous, fluid, polymorphous—and therefore a laudably subversive and even revolutionary force...

It would be tempting to dismiss queer theory as just another intellectual fad, with little influence beyond the campus, if not for gay activists’ aggressive effort to introduce the theory’s radical view of sexuality into the public schools. Leading the effort is the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN, pronounced “glisten”), an advocacy group founded a decade ago to promote homosexual issues in the public schools. It now boasts 85 chapters, four regional offices, and some 1,700 student clubs, called “gay/straight alliances,” that it has helped form in schools across the country.

GLSEN often presents itself as a civil rights organization, saying that it is only after “tolerance” and “understanding” for a victim group. Sometimes, therefore, it still speaks the old gay-rights language of unchangeable homosexual “identity” and “orientation.” But it is, in fact, a radical organization that has clearly embraced the queer-theory worldview. It seeks to transform the culture and instruction of every public school, so that children will learn to equate “heterosexism”—the favoring of heterosexuality as normal—with other evils like racism and sexism and will grow up pondering their sexual orientation and the fluidity of their sexual identity.

That GLSEN embraces queer theory is clear from the addition of transgendered students to the gays and lesbians the group claims to represent. By definition, the transgendered are those who choose to change their gender identity by demeanor, dress, hormones, or surgery. Nothing could be more profoundly opposed to the notion of a natural sexual identity. Consider as evidence of queer theory’s influence, too, the GLSEN teachers’ manual that says that middle-schoolers “should have the freedom to explore [their] sexual orientation and find [their] own unique expression of lesbian, bisexual, gay, straight, or any combination of these.” What is this but Michael Warner’s appeal to pansexual experimentation?

One of the major goals of GLSEN and similar groups is to reform public school curricula and teaching so that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender—or LGBT—themes are always central and always presented in the approved light. GLSEN holds regular conferences for educators and activists with workshops bearing titles such as “Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls: Creating a Safe, Supportive School Environment for Trans, Intersex, Gender Variant and Gender Questioning Youth” and “Developing and Implementing a Transgender Inclusive Curriculum.” Every course in every public school should focus on LGBT issues, GLSEN believes. A workshop at GLSEN’s annual conference in Chicago in 2000 complained that “most LGBT curricula are in English, history and health” and sought ways of introducing its agenda into math and science classes, as well. (As an example of how to queer geometry, GLSEN recommends using gay symbols such as the pink triangle to study shapes.)

Nor is it ever too early to begin stamping out heterosexism. A 2002 GLSEN conference in Boston held a seminar on “Gender in the Early Childhood Classroom” that examined ways of setting “the tone for nontraditional gender role play” for preschoolers. To help get the LGBT message across to younger children, teachers can turn to an array of educational products, many of them available from GLSEN. Early readers include One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads; King and King; and Asha’s Mums.

As for teaching aids, a 1999 book, Queering Elementary Education, with a foreword by GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings, offers essays on “Locating a Place for Gay and Lesbian Themes in Elementary Reading, Writing and Talking” and “How to Make ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ in the Classroom”—the scare quotes showing the queer theorist’s ever present belief that categorizing gender is a political act.

For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K–12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include “role playing” exercises to “counter harassment,” where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; testing students to see where their attitudes lie toward sexual “difference” (mere tolerance is unacceptable; much better is “admiration” and, best of all, “nurturance”); getting students to take a “Sexual Orientation Quiz”; and having heterosexual students learn 37 ways that heterosexuals are privileged in society. In turn, principals should make an “ongoing PA announcement”—once a week, the manual says—telling students about confidential support programs for LGBT students.

Teachers, the manual suggests, should demand that public school students memorize the approved meanings of important LGBT words and terms, from “bigenderist” to “exotophobia.” Sometimes, these approved meanings require Orwellian redefinitions: “Family: Two or more persons who share resources, share responsibility for decisions, share values and goals, and have commitments to one another over a period of time . . . regardless of blood, or adoption, or marriage.”

Two videos come particularly highly rated by gay activists and educators as tools for making primary school queer-friendly. Both films strive to present homosexuality in a favorable light, without saying what it actually is. It’s Elementary, intended for parents, educators, and policymakers, shows how classroom teachers can lead kindergartners through carefully circumscribed discussions of the evils of prejudice, portrayed as visited to an unusual degree on gays and lesbians. In That’s a Family, designed for classroom use, children speak directly into the camera, explaining to other kids how having gay and lesbian parents is no different from, for example, having parents of different national backgrounds.

GLSEN even provides lesson plans for the promotion of cross-dressing in elementary school classes. A school resource book containing such lesson plans, Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers, has already been used in second-grade classrooms in California. A children’s play in the book features a little boy singing of the exhilaration of striding about “In Mommy’s High Heels,” in angry defiance of the criticism of his intolerant peers:

They are the swine, I am the pearl. . . .
They’ll be beheaded when I’m queen!
When I rule the world! When I rule the world!
When I rule the world in my mommy’s high heels!

Some of the LGBT-friendly curricular material aimed at older children is quite sexually explicit. The GLSEN-recommended reading list for grades 7–12 is dominated by such material, depicting the queer sexuality spectrum. In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth features a 17-year-old who writes, “I identify as bisexual and have since I was about six or seven. . . . I sort of experimented when I was young.” Another GLSEN recommendation, Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, has a 16-year-old contributor who explains, “My sexuality is as fluid, indefinable and ever-changing as the north flowing river.”

Some of the most explicit homosexual material has shown up in classrooms. An Ohio teacher encouraged her freshman students to read Entries From a Hot Pink Notebook, a teen coming-out story that includes a graphic depiction of sex between two 14-year-old boys. In Newton, Massachusetts, a public school teacher assigned his 15-year-old students The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a farrago of sexual confusion, featuring an episode of bestiality as one of its highlights. Such books represent a growth industry for publishers, including mainstream firms.

As part of its effort to make the public schools into an arena of homosexual and transgender advocacy, GLSEN works assiduously to build a wide network of student organizers. It looks for recruits as young as 14, who in turn are to bring on board other students to form gay/straight alliances or other homosexual-themed student clubs at their schools. Glancing over the biographies of 2002’s student organizers reveals a uniform faith among them that experimenting with a range of homosexual behaviors serves the cause of civil rights.

The behavior in question involves some practices that the Marquis de Sade would welcome. A GLSEN-sponsored, taxpayer-funded “teach out” for activists, educators, and students to brainstorm ways of creating schools and communities that “are truly inclusive and safe,” held at Tufts University a while back, is a case in point. The daylong conference, with Massachusetts Department of Education and other state employees as workshop leaders and drawing many high school students and teachers (who received professional development credits for attending), featured a “youth only, ages 14–21” session that offered a lesson in “fisting”—the potentially dangerous act, called by some the first new sexual invention in 1,000 years, of inserting one’s fist into a partner’s anus or vagina.

Thanks to two members of the local Parents’ Rights Coalition, who secretly taped the session, we know that the fisting lesson did not arouse universal enthusiasm among the teens present. A boy asks why anyone would want to do such a thing. Other teens reportedly winced. But the self-identified gay and lesbian state employees turned aside doubts. One—a woman—explained that, though fisting “often gets a really bad rap,” it usually isn’t about the pain—“not that we’re putting that down.” Rather, she assured, it is “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be close and intimate with.”

And so the workshop proceeded, marketing the polymorphously perverse to the sexually naive and emotionally immature. The etiquette of swallowing versus spitting after oral sex came up, as did the question of whether a tongue ring makes oral sex more pleasurable. Other topics included: how to use dildos, the mechanics of lesbian sexual gratification, and whether celery makes semen taste sweeter. The workshop leaders were sophisticated, yet breezy and colloquial, using street language and referring quite openly to their own sexual experiences—a Department of Public Health worker making his homosexual promiscuity obvious. The workshop initiated adolescents into a forbidden world that their parents likely knew nothing about.

In the winter of 2001, Tufts hosted another GLSEN-sponsored conference, entitled “Creating Safety—Teaching Respect.” This time, most of the 650 people present were teenagers, rounded up by gay activists or coming on their own to receive instruction in queer sexuality. Planned Parenthood representatives handed out special kits, containing latex gloves and lubricants, for “safe” fisting.

GLSEN and other activist homosexual groups have effectively used “safe school” campaigns to further their agenda. The federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program—Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—provides millions of dollars to state education departments to combat drugs and violence in the public schools. Using some of these funds, gay activists have helped design and promote public school “tolerance” programs. One of the mildest of such programs, “Healing the Hate,” released in 1997 under Department of Justice sposorship, implicitly likens disapproval of homosexual behavior with the prejudices that in the past have led to lynchings, church burnings, and the Holocaust. Gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country.

GLSEN is quite explicit about using the safety issue to silence opponents. As GLSEN chief Kevin Jennings puts it, “We knew that, confronted with the real-life stories of youth who had suffered from homophobia, our opponents would automatically be on the defensive. . . . This allowed us to set the terms of the debate.”

At the urging of gay/straight alliances, schools across the U.S. have also created “safe” rooms for homosexual or sexually confused students, as if they might not be safe from “hate” and “intolerance” elsewhere in the school. In these rooms, identified by inverted pink triangles, students can discuss same-sex attraction or anxiety about sexual orientation with teachers or counselors, who promise a nonjudgmental and sympathetic hearing. Students who drop by for private discussion about their sexual confusion will often be referred—without parental knowledge—to local chapters of gay and lesbian organizations. If queer theorists are correct that homosexuality is a free choice, then parents might be forgiven for thinking such advocacy a kind of recruitment.

Without doubt, most parents would look at the subversive agenda on offer at GLSEN conferences and in LGBT-friendly curricula and find it bizarre and offensive. What sense, they might ask, does it make to “queer” math or science or other classes—whatever that might mean—when so many public schools fail even to produce minimally literate and numerate graduates?

Especially when all the evidence suggests that the incidence of self-labeled homosexuality and bisexuality in the population is in fact minuscule—just 1.4 percent of female subjects and 2.8 percent of male subjects, according to one of the largest and most scientific surveys by the National Opinion Research Center. Even Kinsey, with a very distorted sample population of volunteers, prison inmates (including sex offenders), and deliberately solicited homosexual respondents, only came up with a 4 percent figure for exclusive homosexual behavior, still far below the 10 percent frequently cited by homosexual activists. Should we revolutionize the schools for such a tiny minority?

Even more to the point, how many parents, even those not just tolerant of homosexuality but actively sympathetic toward homosexual rights, would really want their teenage children to be seeking out a “unique expression” of sexuality (let alone with their school’s help) or learning how to “fist”? How many would want their kindergartners—just figuring out their identities and desperately needing clear-cut categories like “boy” and “girl” to make sense of them—to engage in “non-traditional role play,” so that they grow up with warm feelings about transgendered people? Or their elementary school boys and girls exposed to sexual themes that they aren’t old enough to understand and that are likely to fill them with anxiety? Parents might well brush off an old-fashioned word and describe it all as, well . . . perverse.

As for bullying, the real problem is not anti-gay prejudice but the overall breakdown of school discipline. No child should have to put up with verbal or physical intimidation at school. Making schools safer, however, does not require importing a broader LGBT agenda that offends the values of many students and parents.

Nevertheless, though many parents aren’t aware of it yet, the agenda has moved far beyond the wishful thinking of activists. The keynote speaker at GLSEN’s 2000 conference was Robert Chase, president of the 2.7 million-member National Education Association, the nation’s biggest, most powerful teachers’ union. The program booklet for the event featured greetings not only from Chase but from then-president Clinton, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-biggest U.S. teachers’ union. The celebratory notes expressed the kind of praise once reserved for groups like the Boy Scouts. A long list of well-known organizations has backed LGBT programs in the classroom, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Library Association, and the National Association of Social Workers.

No organization has been more steadfast in its support of GLSEN than the NEA. During the NEA’s annual convention in July 2001, many observers expected the teachers’ union to pass an official resolution incorporating GLSEN’s sweeping educational goals into K–12 curricula nationwide. As it turns out, the NEA, clearly trying to minimize public awareness of an unprecedented infringement on parental prerogatives, tabled the resolution and announced a task force to study how best to approach LGBT issues in the schools. But in February 2002, the NEA board of directors approved the task force’s report—a pure emanation of the GLSEN worldview, as is clear both from its numerous citations of GLSEN documents in the footnotes and from its recommendations.

Following the task force’s lead, the NEA will now struggle to expunge “heterosexism” from the consciousness of children in the classroom. The union has encouraged schools to integrate LGBT themes into curricula, instructional material, and programs; to emphasize the legitimacy of different “family structures,” including domestic partner arrangements; and to offer counseling services for students struggling with their “sexual/gender orientation.” Small wonder that GLSEN greeted the NEA task force’s report, and its endorsement by the union, with hosannas. “These powerful new recommendations signal that help is on the way for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students and staff who experience day-to-day abuse in America’s schools,” enthused GLSEN head Jennings.

The queering of the public schools has perhaps advanced furthest in California, where a new state law requires public schools to teach all K–12 students (and K means five-year-olds) “to appreciate various sexual orientations.” What the new law might mean in practice, warned a state assemblyman, was on display at Santa Rosa High School, where invited homosexual activists “talked about using cellophane during group sex and said that ‘clear is best because you can see what you want to lick,’ ” or at Hale Middle School in Los Angeles, where during an AIDS education course, “12-year-olds were subjected to graphic descriptions of anal sex and tips on how to dispose of used condoms so parents don’t find out.” As the assemblyman noted, sex ed courses throughout California public schools, influenced heavily by national sex education advocates SEICUS and Planned Parenthood, have already enthusiastically endorsed the GLSEN worldview.

But California is only the cutting edge: efforts to queer the schools are under way in many other locales, from Massachusetts to Oregon. The co-chair of the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, for example, informs the Boston Globe that teachers across that state are increasingly integrating LGBT themes into lessons—discussing the sexual orientation of authors as an interpretive tool in literature classes, she says, or comparing gay and bisexual with straight student mental health data in order to study percentages. After a ferocious battle, the Broward School Board in Florida recently voted to rely on GLSEN to train teachers in LGBT “sensitivity.” In Gresham, Oregon, in early 2002, school officials at Centennial High School brought in gay and lesbian speakers in English, drama, and health classes during the school’s annual “diversity” week, neither telling students about it beforehand nor letting them opt out of the classes if they wanted. Parental anger forced school officials to issue a public apology.

GLSEN constantly emphasizes the need for tolerance for homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism, but if someone bucks the LGBT party line in a school that follows it, watch out. Consider the experience of Elliott Chambers, formerly a student at Woodbury High School in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Woodbury High had posted pink triangles on 48 of its 60-odd classrooms and offices (what made the other rooms “unsafe” isn’t clear). Belonging to a conservative family, Chambers decided one day to express his values and wore to school a sweatshirt with the words STRAIGHT PRIDE emblazoned across the front and an image of a man and woman holding hands on the back.

Parents or other concerned citizens who complain about any aspect of the queering of public education can face withering attacks, not just from gay activists but from cultural elites in general. When the two members of the Parents’ Rights Coalition released their tape of the GLSEN-sponsored fisting workshop to the public, to take one typical example, the Boston Globe didn’t condemn the use of public funds and state employees to instruct schoolchildren in an arcane and dangerous “sexual” practice; instead, it denounced the whistleblowers as fomenters of “intolerance.”

School districts that refuse to go along with the homosexual agenda now must contend with the American Civil Liberties Union, too. The ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project has launched a national effort, called “Every Student, Every School,” that plans to sue on First Amendment grounds any school that refuses gay/straight student clubs on its premises. Already, schools in Kentucky and Texas face legal action.

No compulsory public school system can be justified unless what it teaches is a worldview that the taxpayers who fund it can support. The “common schools” came into existence, after all, to acculturate immigrants to American values. For schools to try to indoctrinate children in a radical, minority worldview like that promoted by GLSEN and its allies—a vision that will form those children’s values and shape their sense of selfhood—is a kind of tyranny, one that, in addition, intentionally drives a wedge between parents and children and, as queer theorist Michael Warner boasts, “opposes society itself.” We must not let an appeal to our belief in tolerance and decency blind us to indecency—and to the individual and social damage that will result from it.

[EdReform]

Hurricane GLSEN by Marc Fey, TownHall.com, September 28, 2003

About the time Hurricane Isabel reached landfall on Thursday, September 18, 2003, a group of activists, educators, and junior high and senior high school students gathered in Washington, D.C. for the annual GLSEN (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) National Conference. Like the havoc that Isabel wrought on communities in North Carolina, GLSEN threatens to produce far greater

What I witnessed during these brief 72 hours left me with the conviction that GLSEN is a cultural hurricane that’s hitting our schools with the kind of force and devastation that may take years to fully assess. Let me try to paint the picture.

GLSEN is a self-styled pro-gay education network targeting our kids in public schools.

The danger is in how they seek to accomplish this mission. In effect, GLSEN’s objective is to cut out parents and adult leaders in the child’s life who don’t agree with the LGBT agenda. Every speaker at the national conference made this message very clear.

On Friday night founder and co-director Kevin Jennings defiantly declared, “Neither rain, nor wind, not even a hurricane will stop us from bringing justice to our schools!”

A clinic earlier that day was entitled “Strategies for Responding to Homophobic Bigotry: Everybody’s Business!” The title accurately set forth this point in their agenda-- to make the GLBT agenda everyone’s agenda, yours and mine included. And the strategy is to get to our kids.

It’s not just that they are generously funded, though they certainly are. Revenues for 2001 were $3.35 million, and this year’s conference was liberally supported by Kodak, Levi Strauss, Microsoft, and IBM whose logos were emblazoned on banners, brochures, and conference freebies. For the close to 500 people in attendance, including about 100 junior high and senior high students, the companies hoped to capture this powerful purchasing sector—gays and youth—arguably two of the most powerful buying sectors in America today.

No, GLSEN’s success comes from a carefully planned message that homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity issues represent the next human rights and civil rights battle, on par with Martin Luther King, Jr and other reformers great work of the last 200 years. Again, this message is targeted at our kids. Today, GLSEN sponsors about 1700 campus student clubs, called GSA’s (Gay Straight Alliances) promoting LGBT issues.

The opening plenary included Washington, D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes. “Homophobia,” announced Holmes-Norton, “is alive and well in the House of Representatives.” She ranted on, “They are a group of fools who should know better. What you [the GLSEN crowd] are doing has more to do with leaving no child behind than what Congress is doing.” Speaking for a moment directly to the students in the audience, she summed up her philosophy this way, “I believe that every one of you should be left alone to be who you are.” The comment embodied the conference message: do whatever you want with your sexuality. It’s a message our kids are hearing on many public school campuses across the nation.

Candace Gingrich, famous gay activist sister of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, led the workshop entitled “Everyday Heroes: How Openly GLBT Faculty, Administration, Students, and their Allies Help to Facilitate Safety, Support, and Respect in Our Schools.” As the manager of the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project, she used the 90 minutes as a bully pulpit to rouse the forty or so of us in attendance to “work to include anti-discrimination language in your school district policies and support GLBT staff to come out.” At one point, suddenly aware of the steep political pitch of her comments, she said, “Forgive me if I’m being too political.”

Never mind she was supposed to be addressing a group of public school educators.

Most importantly, you need to know that there is, coming to a school near you on April 21, 2004, GLSEN’s “Day of Silence.” This is their latest plan to impact high school and junior high students. The promotion is intended to impose a campus-wide silence in observance of LGBT issues. In 1999 300 high schools sponsored the Day of Silence. In 2001, over 1900 schools and 100,000 students participated in the event. In the words of their web site, “The possibilities are endless.” Their giddy confidence that the sky’s the limit is understandable when you consider that they’ve seen over 300% growth in attendance in just four short years.

The hurricane that GLSEN represents is hitting our schools. Unlike Isabel, this hurricane doesn’t threaten homes, businesses, and lands. Instead, this force threatens our most precious resources—our kids.

Marc Fey brings ten years of teaching experience in California public schools and seven years of pastoral ministry to his work as Education Analyst at Focus on the Family.

Hurricane GLSEN by Marc Fey, TownHall.com, September 28, 2003

About the time Hurricane Isabel reached landfall on Thursday, September 18, 2003, a group of activists, educators, and junior high and senior high school students gathered in Washington, D.C. for the annual GLSEN (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) National Conference. Like the havoc that Isabel wrought on communities in North Carolina, GLSEN threatens to produce far greater

What I witnessed during these brief 72 hours left me with the conviction that GLSEN is a cultural hurricane that’s hitting our schools with the kind of force and devastation that may take years to fully assess. Let me try to paint the picture.

GLSEN is a self-styled pro-gay education network targeting our kids in public schools.

The danger is in how they seek to accomplish this mission. In effect, GLSEN’s objective is to cut out parents and adult leaders in the child’s life who don’t agree with the LGBT agenda. Every speaker at the national conference made this message very clear.

On Friday night founder and co-director Kevin Jennings defiantly declared, “Neither rain, nor wind, not even a hurricane will stop us from bringing justice to our schools!”

A clinic earlier that day was entitled “Strategies for Responding to Homophobic Bigotry: Everybody’s Business!” The title accurately set forth this point in their agenda-- to make the GLBT agenda everyone’s agenda, yours and mine included. And the strategy is to get to our kids.

It’s not just that they are generously funded, though they certainly are. Revenues for 2001 were $3.35 million, and this year’s conference was liberally supported by Kodak, Levi Strauss, Microsoft, and IBM whose logos were emblazoned on banners, brochures, and conference freebies. For the close to 500 people in attendance, including about 100 junior high and senior high students, the companies hoped to capture this powerful purchasing sector—gays and youth—arguably two of the most powerful buying sectors in America today.

No, GLSEN’s success comes from a carefully planned message that homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity issues represent the next human rights and civil rights battle, on par with Martin Luther King, Jr and other reformers great work of the last 200 years. Again, this message is targeted at our kids. Today, GLSEN sponsors about 1700 campus student clubs, called GSA’s (Gay Straight Alliances) promoting LGBT issues.

The opening plenary included Washington, D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes. “Homophobia,” announced Holmes-Norton, “is alive and well in the House of Representatives.” She ranted on, “They are a group of fools who should know better. What you [the GLSEN crowd] are doing has more to do with leaving no child behind than what Congress is doing.” Speaking for a moment directly to the students in the audience, she summed up her philosophy this way, “I believe that every one of you should be left alone to be who you are.” The comment embodied the conference message: do whatever you want with your sexuality. It’s a message our kids are hearing on many public school campuses across the nation.

Candace Gingrich, famous gay activist sister of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, led the workshop entitled “Everyday Heroes: How Openly GLBT Faculty, Administration, Students, and their Allies Help to Facilitate Safety, Support, and Respect in Our Schools.” As the manager of the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project, she used the 90 minutes as a bully pulpit to rouse the forty or so of us in attendance to “work to include anti-discrimination language in your school district policies and support GLBT staff to come out.” At one point, suddenly aware of the steep political pitch of her comments, she said, “Forgive me if I’m being too political.”

Never mind she was supposed to be addressing a group of public school educators.

Most importantly, you need to know that there is, coming to a school near you on April 21, 2004, GLSEN’s “Day of Silence.” This is their latest plan to impact high school and junior high students. The promotion is intended to impose a campus-wide silence in observance of LGBT issues. In 1999 300 high schools sponsored the Day of Silence. In 2001, over 1900 schools and 100,000 students participated in the event. In the words of their web site, “The possibilities are endless.” Their giddy confidence that the sky’s the limit is understandable when you consider that they’ve seen over 300% growth in attendance in just four short years.

The hurricane that GLSEN represents is hitting our schools. Unlike Isabel, this hurricane doesn’t threaten homes, businesses, and lands. Instead, this force threatens our most precious resources—our kids.

Marc Fey brings ten years of teaching experience in California public schools and seven years of pastoral ministry to his work as Education Analyst at Focus on the Family.

[EdReform]

A review of the video "It’s Elementary: Talking about Gay and Lesbian Issues in School."

Homosexuality Propaganda: COMING TO A SCHOOL NEAR YOU

It’s Elementary

A Video Review

Children are our future. What we invest and instill in them will determine the cultural values of generations to come. Homosexual activists understand this principle all too clearly. As a result, they released a video designed to reshape the way American children understand homosexuality.

The video, entitled, It’s Elementary: Talking about Gay and Lesbian Issues in School, is a masterful work of propaganda. It is vital for people to understand that this video is not for adults. The target audience is children. Activists are after the heart and minds of the next generation

It’s Elementary opens with pro-family Sen. Robert Smith (R-New Hampshire) arguing that Congress should withhold federal funds from school districts which promote homosexuality.

The senator’s comments are interspersed with schoolchildren’s thoughts on homosexuality, such as "homosexuals are not bad people." Then the video cuts to the senator saying, "We must protect taxpayers by keeping this trash out of schools . . . and it is trash."1

At this point, the heavily slanted tone of the video is set to endorse homosexuality and disparage anyone who holds reasonable objections. It takes viewers on a tour of classes where teachers address the issue of homosexuality.

No Wrong Answers?

The first stop is New York Public School 87. In this elementary school, teacher Cora Sangra leads her fourth grade class in a discussion of homosexuality. "There are no right or wrong answers," she says.

But by the clever way in which she directs the class discussion, it’s clear she really doesn’t mean that. By simply asking questions, she steers the class discussion toward the conclusion that homosexuality is normal and natural.

These young children absorb this message like a sponge.

The next stop is Hawthorne Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. Here, Daithi Wolfe leads his third grade class in an exercise dealing with homosexuality. Wolfe draws a circle on the chalk board and writes "Gay and Lesbian" in the center.

Then he has the class brainstorm about this subject, and he writes their ideas on the board. All negative ideas are written on the right side.

All positive words, he writes on the left. One girl self consciously suggests the word "weird." Up on the right side it goes. Later someone says: "Nazi." Again, it goes on the right alongside "weird." What message is sent?

Wolfe continues his lesson by telling his students that Michelangelo was a gay man. He plays a section of "Circle of Life," the theme song from the popular movie The Lion King and asks the children if they know who sings the song.

"Elton John!" the children respond with excitement. Wolfe informs them that Elton John is a gay man. Many of the children are astonished.

When he notes that Melissa Etheridge is a lesbian, the girl who suggested the word "weird" sinks back into her seat mouthing the words "a lesbian" as a glazed look comes over her eyes.

"Give Us the Facts?"

The video then takes its viewers to an independent school in New York City, known as Manhattan Country School. Junior high students discuss the appropriateness of teaching about homosexuality in schools. "Schools need to give us all the facts and let us decide," one eighth grader commented. But what kind of "facts" are the teachers providing?

No one ever seems to share the "facts" about how homosexuality places people at a higher risk for sexually transmitted diseases.

One girl complains about how some material has an "in your face" approach.She disagrees with it because it tends to "freak kids out."

But a fellow student soon chastises her, saying, "The reason they freak out is because they haven’t seen it before . . . It needs to be thrown at them."

Next, at Luther Burbank Middle School in San Francisco, California, teachers brought homosexuals into the classroom to talk to the kids. The young teens tended to be opposed to homosexuality at first, but they soften toward it by the end of the presentation.

One teacher at Burbank comments on why he believes it is important to cover such topics in class. "If the educational system does not deal with these issues early on, then there’s bashing in the streets."

The principal of Luther Burbank Middle School agrees, saying, "[Homosexual education] should be mandatory. [The students] need to understand it so they can move on to learning." He is suggesting that without accepting the homosexual lifestyle, children are hindered from learning.

Early in the film, producers strive to discredit those who would oppose such teachings—particularly on the basis of faith and religion. Spliced in between children’s musings are strategically selected clips from "Donahue" and "The Ricki Lake Show" in which "Christians" say such things as: "God hates faggots!" and "The Bible I read says homosexuals should be put to death."

Never is any time given to a genuine Christian perspective which focuses on issues of sin, forgiveness, deliverance and reconciliation.

A Healthy Education?

The last school visit is to Cambridge Friends School in Massachusetts. This elementary school annually celebrates Gay and Lesbian Pride Day. The day before Pride Day, teachers gather for a faculty meeting to discuss how they plan to celebrate it in their classrooms.

One teacher poses a very interesting question: "What if a child comes from a family that believes homosexuality is wrong? Are we supposed to tell them that homosexuality is right and their family is wrong?"

Several teachers try to hedge their way around this question with comments on diversity and tolerance. Then finally one teacher says what the others have only been brave enough to infer: "We are asking kids to believe this is right—not as a matter of moral principle, but as a matter of educating them, and this is a part of what we consider to be a healthy education."

The following day at the school assembly, children cheerfully—and ironically—sing "This Little Light of Mine." Teachers and children alike wear pink triangle pins in support of homosexuality. And a male teacher "comes out" to the children.

He is both dynamic and eloquent, and the children react with wild applause. A teacher then speaks to the children with "tears of joy" in her eyes, sharing how proud she is of them and their acceptance of homosexuality—"they give her hope for a better future."

The video concludes with a series of bogus statistics regarding hate crimes and gay teen suicide in an effort to emphasize the importance of homosexual education in the schools.

The hour and a half long video is a Debra Chasnoff/Helen Cohen film produced by Women’s Education Media (WEM). Debra Chasnoff, an Academy Award winning director, used her Oscar for a previous film to "come out" as a lesbian.

Chasnoff’s purpose in creating the film is two-fold: to counter the "hysteria of the Religious Right" and to capture the hearts and minds of the next generation.

In a recent interview, Chasnoff openly states, "What’s clear in the film is that, the younger the kids, the more open they were . . . If we could start doing this kind of education in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, we’d have a better generation."

Co-producer Helen Cohen echoed this sentiment when she said the film is, "another medium to affect social change."4 Chasnoff is currently working on another film which explores different kinds of families, including gay and lesbian couples with children. The intended audience for this film is students—our children.

Distribution, Awards and Endorsements

It’s Elementary received widespread support and distribution at the National Education Association’s (NEA) 1997 national convention held in Atlanta. A lesbian caucus used the video as its big feature, and the NEA Peace and Justice Caucus promoted the video, labeling it "masterful." The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network

(GLSEN) was on hand to advertise books, video lists and Internet resources.

Targeted to state departments of education, local school boards, parents and teachers, the video has been screened in at least six states.California Assemblyman Sheila J. Huehl, an professed lesbian, intends to have it shown in all 50 states and has hosted a special screening for state education policymakers.

Endorsements include the Minnesota Parent-Teacher Association and the American Library Association, who called it "a sterling production" and "highly recommended."

The American School Counselor Association is making copies of the video available to schools across the nation. It’s Elementary has won several awards, including the C.I.N.E. Golden Eagle for the Best Teacher Education film of 1996. There are high expectations it will be nominated for a 1998 Oscar.

The video has done "phenomenally well" according to Ariella Ben-Dov, an associate producer with WEM. "We’ve sold approximately 1,200 video tapes . . . most of those sales are to educational organizations: elementary schools, middle schools and high schools.

They are being used for teacher training." Currently, WEM is soliciting financial support for national distribution, and various local PBS stations are airing the film in 1999.5

Stellar reviews have come from national mainstream media. The San Francisco Chronicle praised it as an "unabashedly biased, upbeat look at a subject that most parents would probably rather see disappear."

The Boston Globe review was quite frank when it said, "The filmmakers’ agenda is so clear, so unapologetic, the final result is refreshing."Sympathetic reviews such as these bolster support for the video and help gain approval for its distribution.

What Can We Do?

The video is clearly propaganda designed to change the next generation’s perspective on homosexuality. Larger than this is the fact that it was funded in part by your tax dollars through a National Endowment for the Arts grant to Portland Art Museum Northwest Film Center. But, most important, is the toll exacted on our kids.

What is the real cost of It’s Elementary? Do we want a generation that advocates an unnatural, immoral and harmful lifestyle and behavior? Will our children become the generation which legislates and compels acceptance of homosexuality?

Moral obligation to Godly truth demands that we protect the minds of our children. Children today hold the public opinions of tomorrow.

Abraham Lincoln understood the importance of education when he stated, " The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."

At the heart of this cultural war lies the hopes and dreams of our children. One cannot help but fear the legacy we leave! Should we not speak out? Let’s give our children an education that teaches them how to reason, not what to think.

America does not need more false and damaging propaganda pumped into the schools. Children are our future. The values we teach them will determine what tomorrow looks like. It is up to parents, teachers and others to make sure children do not become prey to such cleverly crafted propaganda campaigns.

Children deserve the truth, and the truth is that homosexuality is a profoundly unhealthy and immoral lifestyle. For the sake of future generations, let’s teach the real facts in our schools.

Concerned Women for America

http://www.cwfa.org/

[EdReform]

6th Grader Discovers His Gay Teacher's Webpage -- And Is Disciplined

[EdReform]

An excerpt from "Elementary school students witness gay marriages"

"A different sort of educational experience for a group of fourth- through sixth-graders in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The students from the Solomon Schechter Day School went to Town Hall today to witness the first day of legal gay and lesbian marriages in Massachusetts.

The students have been studying the civil rights movement. One of their teachers said today's proceedings offered a chance to see a bit of history in the making..."

[EdReform]

Documenting the Queering of Elementary Education:

"Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling, Edited by William J. Letts IV and James T. Sears, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999, 291 pages"

An excerpt from:

Book Review - Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities in Schooling

Progressive Perspectives
Vol. 4, No. 1, John Dewey Project on Progressive Education, Spring 2002
College of Education and Social Services, University of Vermont

"Queering Elementary Education is unique because as it's title suggests it does not apologize for the stance that it takes, nor does it wallow in the problems of being homosexual in a heterosexist society. It is a book all educators should read whether they are elementary school teachers, administrators, or college professors. It challenges assumptions about how we view education and how we view caring for children. Edited by William J. Letts IV and James T. Sears, it offers many perspectives on the various aspects of elementary education and the myriad ways it is heterosexist.

In the first chapter James T. Sears proposes several ideas that appear throughout the book: speaking the unspoken by teaching about queer issues in elementary school, homosexuality as part of the human condition, and asserting that heterosexism and homophobia are acquired or learned beliefs. Bickmore asks, "why discuss sexuality in elementary school?” and answers “given the amount of (mis)information about gender relations and sexuality that flows freely these days in public spaces, media and peer groups, elementary educators could not prevent children from acquiring sexual information even if they wanted to do so"(p. 15). These concepts as well as others are discussed in various ways throughout the book..."

An excerpt from:

Queering Elementary Education - Book Review By Jack Nichols, GayToday.com

"Probably no other title in the pantheon of liberationist literature will evoke more controversy than Queering Elementary Education. If there was an unseemly uproar over Daddy's Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies, just wait till the Religious Reich spies this august tome on some thoughtful teacher's shelf.

Its editors, both educators, have provided what some see as a companion volume to the award-winning film, It's Elementary. They take it for granted that children in the earliest grades have already been introduced "through schoolyard and media" to the concept of same sex love and affection, that most remain confused about it and that it is best to begin demystification processes early in life rather than allowing mistaken perceptions to take root.

It's Elementary's producer, Debra Chasnof, exults: "What a relief to finally have such a thoughtful collection of essays and research to back up what we've found in schools across the nation... an examination of the ways children's lives are hurt by homophobia and an inspiring array of strategies educators can use to turn this problem around."...

The American Pediatric Association recently called for the teaching of sexuality to begin by the middle of elementary school. Dr. Sears requests that Queering readers remember that "by the time boys and girls have become teenagers they have well-developed gender and sexual scripts: how boys and girls should behave, who makes up a family, and so on. These become our cultural straightjackets that cultivate the homophobia and sexism we see in the adult world."

( EdReform's note: the pro-homosexual activism in the American Academy of Pediatrics is documented in reply 284 in this thread )

"Rather than focussing on reducing such prejudices, shouldn't we consider how not to instill, foster, or intensify these prejudices in the first place?" he asks. Queering Elementary Education begins with "Foundational Issues" answering queries such as "Why Discuss Sexuality in Elementary School?".

The book's second section deals with children's sexual and social development, including supposed effects of being taught by openly gay teachers. Part three looks at possible curriculums, examining and critiquing the "heteronormative nature of elementary school science." Part four deals with family ties while the final section examines educators and their allies..."

Here are some excerpts from Queering Elementary Education that were posted in reply 16 in the thread Congress Needs to Hear From Public re:Marriage Amendment:

In one chapter, a woman describes how she and her male lover have raised their daughter "queerly" by taking her to "gay pride" parades and teaching her the intricacies of masturbation while she is still a young child.

tuesday afternoon: Is that actually in the book? It totally blows my mind that would be in a book about educating children.

It is indeed in the book, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the way that daughter has been raised. However, I have to tell you, the stories that unmarried, 'identified as heterosexual' Australian sociologist Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli tells about her biological daughter Stephanie are difficult to believe. Even if the essence of the accounts are true, I have never heard of a 1st grade child who was so well-versed in psychosocial pretzel logic.

Nevertheless, here are excerpts from chapter 7 (page 71) of Queering Elementary Education, "My Moving Days": A Child's Negotiation of Multiple Lifeworlds in Relation to Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality." (Bold and bracketed text is mine; Italics apparently are from Pallotta-Chiarolli's previously published works.)

---

...[O]ur child is "queerly raised." She travels within and between multicultural and multisexual world as well as undertaking geographical journeys: to and from Adelaide, where she was born, raised principally by Italian migrant grandparents while we worked full time,...to and from Sydney, where her father lived for two years while she was three and four and where she attends queer events with her parents' friends; and to and from Melbourne, where her father is now primary care-giver supported by a network of multicultural and multisexual friends as my work takes her away at regular intervals.

...To be "queerly raised" is to interrogate the taken-for-grantedness of such fixed categories and the way society divides people into "normal" and "abnormal," "natural" and "unnatural," according to their locations in these categories...[it is] to thrive in the destabilization and disruption of normalizing discourses of family, gender, and compulsory heterosexuality. It is an upbringing that encourages stability in mobility, security in change, clarity in ambiguity.

...this chapter explores the kinds of understandings, negotiations, and dilemmas "queerly raised" children experience...For example...How does a child respond to AIDS phobia at school when HIV-positive persons, and griveing over AIDS-related deaths, have been a part of one's life since birth?

Here is an excerpt from Steph's story [for show-and-tell] entitled "My Moving Days":

---

I go to Sydney sometimes especially at Mardi Gras time and have fun with Mum and her friends. We go to interesting shops and restaurants. I was in the Mardi Gras one year pretending to be Alan and Malcolm's daughter. I wore my purple fairy costume and waved a wand and the gay flag. Lots of people took pictures and I was on the news...I love my life. It's exciting.

---

[Stephanie] interrogates defintions of Truth, Reality, Purity, and Identity constructed by dominant social discourses, thereby revealing the Truths, Realities, Impurities, and Identities that these discourses say do not exist at all or exist only in forms they can control and distort as being "wrong" or "strange."

---

Getting ready for school one morning, seven-year old Steph asks, "What's artificial insemination?"

I ask, "Were you interested in what Uncle Matteo was saying last night?" I had been chatting to a gay Italian friend, Matteo about his daughter, a baby he'd had with a lesbian and his plans to have another. Steph had been sitting with us silently listening.

Steph nods. "If they don't have sex, how can they have babies, that's all I wanted to know, really. At school we learned that it takes a man and woman who are married to each other to have a baby, but Uncle Matteo is gay and he isn't married. But I know he's had a baby."

I explain how many gays and lesbians are now becoming parents without having sex with each other. And this leads to a chat about women's decisions about having sex and babies, and that leads on to how women should never let anyone explain their sexuality. And this leads to a conversation about what else was missing from the "sex education" lessons in school -- the clitoris! We talk about the book Steph has at home showing where the clitoris is. The question comes: "But why didn't they show it in the book at school? I looked for it but the teacher acted like nothing was there. I know it's there." Steph has been taught that it is the clitoris that gives her pleasure when she masturbates.

Steph picks up her schoolbag. She's ready for another day at school, and as we head out the door, she says with a scornful snort, "They don't say all the truth at school but I know it anyway."

---

..."Queerly raised" children are agents. People are, and always have been, active agents in the constitution of their unfolding social worlds...Their personal world is "an emergent, situated, negotiated one where considerable variation becomes possible."

---

When Steph [was] three, I am tucking her into bed one evening and am about to read her a children's version of The Swiss Family Robinson. "No, I'll read it to you," Steph says, which means she'll tell the story through the pictures.

There is one picture where the parents stand in the middle of their sons, one son next to his father, and two, with arms around each other's shoulders, next to their mother. Steph describes the family, pointing to the people as she goes: "This is the father. This is the first son," pointing to the boy on his own. "This is the second son" -- and then to the third son next to his brother -- "and this is the second son's boyfriend."

---

...A "queerly raised" child can "travel" between these "worlds" and inhabit more than one of these worlds at the very same time.

---

One evening, as we wait for [now ten year old] Steph's computing class to begin, three girls around twelve years old come cheerily in to collect some material for their next class. They look confident and speak assertively, arms and hair swinging. I notice Steph has taken my hand and is squeezing it.

I look across and notice a faint shy blush on her ace. "What's up, Steph?"

Steph is still staring at the girls. She whispers, "Which one do you like?"

"All of them. They look like nice, smart young women."

Steph persist (sic). "No! I mean, which one do you like?"

"Which one do you like, sweetie?"

Steph nods her head toward the long-haired girl in jeans and T-shirt who's doing most of the questioning in articulate computer-speak. "Do you like her too?"

"Yes, I do," I reply.

Steph smiles slightly, pleased, still not taking her eyes off the girl.

"What're you feeling, Steph?"

Steph smiles shyly. She shrugs and looks at me with embarrassment. I squeeze her hand. "It's okay, Steph. She's gorgeous, and if you think that, that's fine. Enjoy those feelings, there's nothing wrong with them."

In the meantime, Steph also has crushes on two boys. Getting out of the car one afternoon with a friend who's come to play, she looks at the houses across the street and declares, "I wish Peter and Anthony lived there. Then I could see both of them."

Her friend looks scornfully at her. "You can only love one person."

"Who says?"

"That's the way it is. Unless you're a lesbian."

"If I was a lesbian, I'd want Peter and Anthony to be girls. Anyway, maybe I'll love no one. Maybe I'll love girls or boys, or both. Maybe lots of both!" And she laughs cheekily as her friend remonstrates.

---

...Steph's writing and experiences of agency exemplify children's great potential to demonstrate and transcend categorical limitations, oppressions, and the splitting of concurrent realities inherent in the heteronormative, Anglocentric, and phallocentric need to homogenize, categorize, and simplify...

...As I write this chapter...[o]ne of Steph's friends, a girl in her early teens, has now confieded to Steph and to us that she thinks she is a lesbian. She can't tell her own parents, she says. She can't tell anyone else at school. Steph has now become her confidante, and we can hear them chat into the night during sleepovers...

---

An excerpt from 'Queering the Schools':

"... As for teaching aids, a 1999 book, Queering Elementary Education, with a foreword by GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings, offers essays on “Locating a Place for Gay and Lesbian Themes in Elementary Reading, Writing and Talking” and “How to Make ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ in the Classroom”—the scare quotes showing the queer theorist’s ever present belief that categorizing gender is a political act...

Two videos come particularly highly rated by gay activists and educators as tools for making primary school queer-friendly. Both films strive to present homosexuality in a favorable light, without saying what it actually is. It’s Elementary, intended for parents, educators, and policymakers, shows how classroom teachers can lead kindergartners through carefully circumscribed discussions of the evils of prejudice, portrayed as visited to an unusual degree on gays and lesbians. In That’s a Family, designed for classroom use, children speak directly into the camera, explaining to other kids how having gay and lesbian parents is no different from, for example, having parents of different national backgrounds.

GLSEN even provides lesson plans for the promotion of cross-dressing in elementary school classes. A school resource book containing such lesson plans, Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers, has already been used in second-grade classrooms in California. A children’s play in the book features a little boy singing of the exhilaration of striding about “In Mommy’s High Heels,” in angry defiance of the criticism of his intolerant peers:

They are the swine, I am the pearl. . . .
They’ll be beheaded when I’m queen!
When I rule the world! When I rule the world!
When I rule the world in my mommy’s high heels!..."

Related replies posted in this thread: 55, 141, 147, 152, 155, 161, 163, 188, 216, 256, 266, and 271.

In one chapter, a woman describes how she and her male lover have raised their daughter "queerly" by taking her to "gay pride" parades and teaching her the intricacies of masturbation while she is still a young child.

[EdReform]

BTTT

[EdReform]

BTTT

[EdReform]

Why gay thought police fear debate

[EdReform]

Mom ousted for taping gay acceptance `lies' (Forced off property at High School Gay Awareness Day)

[EdReform]

(Rainbow) Flag stirs flap at Howell High

[EdReform]

Gay Agenda In Schools Riles Parents

[EdReform]

Debate on gays embroils school

[EdReform]

Schools Official Assails 'Gay Lifestyle'