Parents of first-grade girl angered by children's book about gay princes

Star Tribune ^ | March 18, 2004 | Associated Press

[wallcrawlr]

WILMINGTON, N.C. -- The parents of a first-grader are fuming over the book their daughter brought home from the school library: a children's story about a prince whose true love turns out to be another prince.

Michael Hartsell said he and his wife, Tonya, couldn't believe it when Prince Bertie, the leading character in ``King & King,'' waves off a bevy of eligible princes before falling for Prince Lee.

The book ends with the princes marrying and sharing a kiss.

``I was flabbergasted,'' Hartsell said. ``My child is not old enough to understand something like that, especially when it is not in our beliefs.''

The 32-page book by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland was published in March 2002 by Tricycle Press, the children's division of Ten Speed Press of Berkeley, Calif. A follow-up, ``King & King & Family,'' was recently published.

The publisher's Web site lists the books as intended for readers age 6 and up.

Barbara Hawley, librarian and media coordinator at Freeman Elementary School, said the book has been on the library's shelves since early last year.

``What might be inappropriate for one family, in another family is a totally acceptable thing,'' said Elizabeth Miars, Freeman's principal.

Hawley said she couldn't comment on the book because she hadn't seen it. She declined to say whether she knowingly selected a book on gay marriage.

The Hartsells said they are keeping the book until they get assurances it won't be circulated. But Hawley said all county schools have a committee that reviews books after their appropriateness is questioned, and the Hartsells must make a written complaint and return the book for review.

The Hartsells said they intend to file such a complaint and are considering transferring their daughter.

[mrs tiggywinkle]

**I've been saying for years that Freepers ought to stop ridiculing Massachusetts and pay attention to your own states, because this perversion is headed your way. Honest to God, what is this country coming to? **

Very true, cloud. Our school district is a testing ground for alternative education...ie: alternative lifestyle indoctrination.

We homeschool.

[little jeremiah]

Homosexual Agenda Ping + Screwels are the locus of all evil Alert.

There are already many comments and probably links - parents (and grandparents), you NEED to read this article.

And regarding someone's advice not to run away from public schools but stay to fix them, that's worse than wishful thinking. It's child sacrifice. The schools are not fixable short term, only maybe longterm.

GET YOUR KIDS OUT NOW - and tell the administration and media why. If parents can get together - maybe friends, or families, or church members - and pull your kids out on the same day, informing the media why - you can get publicity and inspire other parents to save their kids from the "gay" agenda.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the radical homosexuals have targeted schoolchildren for indoctrination. Anyone who doesn't know this either doesn't want to know it, or has been in a coma.

There is nothing as important as your children's well being.

let me know if anyone wants on/off this ping list.

[Stone Mountain]

People should simply check books like this out of the library, then "keep" them for a very long time.

Besides the legal aspects of this, it won't work. Libraries buy copies of books to replace those that have not been returned. All this will do is increase the sales of these books...

[little jeremiah]

More rightminded people should have kids. The future of the world depends on children being raised properly.

You just need to homeschool them or send them to a good private school.

[zook]

I think it usually takes school libraries a long time to replace lost books. First they have to contact you, give you a chance to find the book, blah, blah, blah. By the time the library biddy is ready to replace it, there'll be too much heat for her to do so. So, I'd say it's a good short term solution.

[Travis McGee]

Here's my letter to the principal:

Dear Ms. Miers,

I find it totally inappropriate and disgusting that your school is involved in attempting to brainwash vulnerable young children into the homosexual lifestyle.

This is totally unacceptable, and you should be deeply ashamed. This is no better than hanging around a playground giving children candy, and then showing them your private parts with a big wink. In fact, it's worse, because you are using the power of the government for the purposes of homosexual recruitment and seduction.

I hope you examine your soul and your conscience, and reconsider the damage you are wreaking on young impressionable minds.

[sasafras]

This is a good first step - but these parents are probably (I said probabably not definitely) not unlike most who will just think that little jhonny can just move on to another school where it got to be better. And there is no way that they could ever sacrifice not having two or three brand new cars and eating out every night in order to have one parent stay home or sending their child to a good christian school. Sorry if I sound pessimistic but I see it every day and it is pretty disgusting how people make the decision to have kids and then fail accept the responsibility of raising them with discipline and character.

[Travis McGee]

Simply put, they're desperate to feel normal and are willing to destroy society in an attempt to make that happen.

You reply #121 nails it. I wish you would expand on that entire reply in the form of an essay or column, and post it here as a vanity, as a starting point.

[EdReform]

Your reply #121 nails it...

121 posted on 03/18/2004 8:29:18 AM PST by MississippiMan:

The vast majority of them know full well that what they're doing is wrong, gross, unnatural. They bury that knowledge, but it's still there, embedded in the human psyche just as surely as a tendency to swim is embedded in a fish. Simply put, they're desperate to feel normal and are willing to destroy society in an attempt to make that happen. And they, or their allies, now control the information flow to the masses, from around five years old to the grave.

Yes it does nail it - good post, MM. Also consider this excerpt from Culture of Vice:

"The homosexual cause has moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. As Robert Reilly notes a society can withstand any number of person who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts the justifications for whose moral disorders as its own. This is what is at stake in the culture war...

For any individual, moral failure is hard to live with because of the rebuke of conscience. Habitual moral failure, what used to be called vice, can be lived with only by obliterating conscience through rationalization. When we rationalize, we convince ourselves that heretofore forbidden desires are permissible. We advance the reality of the desires over the reality of the moral order to which the desires should be subordinated. In our minds we replace the reality of moral order with something more congenial to the activity we are excusing. In short, we assert that bad is good...

It is often difficult to detect rationalizations when one is living directly under their influence, and so historical examples are useful. One of the clearest was offered at the Nuremberg trials by Dr. Karl Brandt, who had been in charge of the Nazi regime's Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. He said in his defense: “...when I said `yes' to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death can mean deliverance. Death is life.”

Unlike Dr. Brandt, most people recover from their rationalizations when remorse and reality set back in. But when morally disordered acts become the defining centerpiece of one's life, vice can permanently pervert reason. Entrenched moral aberrations then impel people to rationalize vice not only to themselves but to others as well. Thus rationalizations become an engine for revolutionary change that will affect society as a whole.

The power of rationalization drives the culture war, gives it its particular revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. It may draw its energy from desperation, but it is all the more powerful for that. Since failed rationalization means self-recrimination, it must be avoided at all cost. For this reason, the differences over which the culture war is being fought are not subject to reasoned discourse. Persons protecting themselves by rationalizing are interested not in finding the truth, but in maintaining the illusion that allows them to continue their behavior. For them to succeed in this, everyone must accede to their rationalization. This is why revolutionary change is required. The necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture. Holdouts cannot be tolerated because they are potential rebukes. The self-hatred, anger, and guilt that a person possessed of a functioning conscience would normally feel from doing wrong are redirected by the rationalization and projected upon society as a whole (if the society is healthy), or upon those in society who do not accept the rationalization.

The homosexual movement's rationalization is far more widely advanced in its claims. According to Jeffrey Levi, former executive director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “We (homosexuals)_ are no longer seeking just a right to privacy and a right to protection from wrong. We have a right - as heterosexuals have already - to see government and society affirm our lives.” Since only the act of sodomy differentiates an active homosexual from a heterosexual, homosexuals want “government and society” to affirm that sodomy is morally equivalent to the marital act. “Coming out of the closet” can only mean an assent on the level of moral principle to what would otherwise be considered morally disordered.

And so it must be. If you are going to center your public life on the private act of sodomy, you had better transform sodomy into a highly moral act. If sodomy is a moral disorder, it cannot be legitimately advanced on the legal or civil level. On the other hand, if it is a highly moral act, it should serve as the basis for marriage, family (adoption), and community. As a moral act, sodomy should be normative. If it is normative, it should be taught in our schools as a standard. In fact, homosexuality should be hieratic: active homosexuals should be ordained as priests. All of this is happening. It was predictable. The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. How successful that conquest has been can be seen in the poverty of the rhetoric of its opponents. In supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, the best one congressman could do was to say, “America is not yet ready for homosexual marriage,” as if we simply need a decent interval to adjust ourselves to its inevitable arrival.

The homosexual rationalization is so successful that even the campaign against AIDS is part of it, with its message that “everyone is at risk.” If everyone is at risk, the disease cannot be related to specific behavior. Yet homosexual acts are the single greatest risk factor in catching AIDS. This unpleasant fact invites unwelcome attention to the nature of homosexual acts, so it must be ignored."

[spodefly]

GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY

I am sick of everything GAY.

[TaxRelief]

What do you know about this Kinsey test that they are planning on using to force kids to become homosexual?

[MD_Willington_1976]

They need to rename that book to
"Big gay Al's swan lake adventure boat ride"

BARF

[Ciexyz]

"Daddy's Roommate" has a plot line, if I remember correctly, of Daddy divorcing Mommy to go off with his gay lover. Mommy however accepts this as No Problemo, and the three blissfully get along together just swell, and the kid gets to spend alternate weekends with each household.

[Travis McGee]

America continues it's death plunge into the cesspit. I'm not optimistic.

[Slings and Arrows]

Thanks for posting this list - I was more than a little skeptical of it when I first saw it, and wanted to talk about it.

I used to live in Chicago, and now live in Myrtle Beach, and if the latter has the worst crime in the nation I'm a liberal Democrat. I wonder how much of that violent and property crime is just barfights between drunk Spring Breakers and the like, and how many of the other ratings are similarly skewed.

I'd take that list with a grain of salt, if not the whole shaker.

[Law]

The Hartsells said they...are considering transferring their daughter

They should consider removing their daughter, not transferring her.

Education is not, and cannot be, neutral: Someone's political/religious/philosophical agenda and worldview will always dominate. In the government schools today the dominant worldview conflicts with conservative principles. That's the unavoidable reality.

Protesting one book won't change that. Neither will transferring one's child to another government school. What is required is exodus from the system.

[Quix]

Hmmmm.

I don't know anything about that.

But no paper and pencil test can force anyone to become homosexual.

The most any paper and pencil test could do would be to trigger doubt or attract someone to the idea of experimentation etc.

If you find out, I'd love to have your info.

Thanks.

I think Kinsey was a perverted donkey himself.

What his institution is up to now can't be overly orthodox but probably has to appear somewhat kosher 'scientifically.'

[MississippiMan]

Thanks, Travis. I've thought about penning a brief series of columns on "The State of the Union's Culture," set up as capsules that take a past-present-future look at our society. I have a couple of big article deadlines bearing down on me right now, but in a couple weeks I should be able to get started.

We had a former homosexual speaker at our church a couple of years ago who presented an insider's view of the homosexual community. Amazing but very disturbing presentation.

MM

[Travis McGee]

Thanks, take your time, it will be worth it!

[L.N. Smithee]

Swear to my soul, I was talking to my son one night when he blurted out "Suzie's dad is a woman". I about swallowed my teeth. Sure enough, my wife saw Suzie in the Walmart and her dad dresses like a woman. The beard gave him away.

I had a similar experience with a grade-school boy in my church. I asked him if they were talking about the same-sex marriage nonsense in class, and he said they weren't -- he didn't even know much about the controversy. I thought that was a good thing.

Then he asked me why people of the same gender couldn't get married. My heart sank.