Posted on 05/30/2004 8:20:56 PM PDT by VRWCer
Right-thinking, God-fearing Americans should be outraged…enough to call their U.S. Representative and U.S. Senators. The word on Capitol Hill is that not enough calls have been coming into congressional offices urging Congress to vote to send the Federal Marriage Amendment to the states for ratification. If Congress says it can't hear us, Congress won't feel pressured to act. The word has to start coming from the grassroots with an intensity that will make it an unmistakable message: "We demand action to defend the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. We are watching this issue closely. What you do on this issue will be remembered in November!"
Plenty of Christians outside the Beltway know they do not want homosexual marriage to become legal. The problem is that they must let Congress know. Our complacency, our silence - if we do not become more vocal on this issue - runs the danger of becoming the homosexual rights lobby's victory. This is an issue that Christians in the states should be speaking out on in an unmistakable roar loud enough to be heard by Congress.
Nor is it the only issue. Committed Christians need to exercise vigilance over the curriculum and textbooks used in the public schools. The homosexual rights lobby is using the schools to condition children to accept the Gay Way as a lifestyle - rather than God's Way. So many wrongs are becoming right due to the influence of this lobby that soon there will be no real moral wrongs left in the mind of too many young Americans.
Christians everywhere throughout our country need to get outraged, stand up, and speak out to demand this wrong be stopped!
A little-known but increasingly powerful group called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is exercising influence over the curriculum and literature used in public schools. This organization has developed strong alliances with educators, particularly the National Education Association. What kind of literature will your child be reading if GLSEN and its ally, the NEA, have their way?
GLSEN believes that it is beneficial to have children exposed to sexualization at an early age as they learn to accept homosexual relationships as normal. A conservative organization, Mission America, has collected quotations from GLSEN-recommended literature advocating this goal and much more.
One book aimed at influencing educators is called Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling, edited by William J. Letts, IV and James T. Sears. Kevin Jennings, the founder and president of GLSEN, wrote the forward to the book, complimenting the editors for leading the pro-homosexual lifestyle movement toward "a brighter tomorrow."
Former SDS leader and Weathermen member turned education professor William Ayers wrote an endorsement. [It was Ayers, ironically enough, who was quoted in an article that appeared in the September 11, 2001 edition of The New York Times: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough" during the Vietnam War era. Now, Ayers and allies in groups such as GLSEN have found a new stealth weapon to destroy our nation's institutions and the character of the American people.]
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. Not surprisingly, the book's publisher describes "queering education" as an educational philosophy that "happens when we look at schooling upside down and view childhood from the inside out."
Then, there is the film, intended for adults, called It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues In School, that is described in a paper by the Family Research Council's Peter Sprigg. This film shows a so-called "Gay Pride Assembly" being held in school in which a homosexual activist-teacher discusses his sexual predilections, manipulating the sympathies of the children.
True-believing Christians do not sanction provocative violence against homosexuals or anyone else and they make sure their children understand that too. But the GLSEN agenda to promote safe schools for children who have been led to believe that they are homosexual has aims that extend well beyond its supposedly pacific packaging. For as FRC's Sprigg notes, GLSEN's own October 1, 2000 article on "Beyond the Safety Zone" stated, "The pursuit of safety and affirmation are one and the same goal…"
Indeed, GLSEN's own profile on its web page makes clear that one of its strategic objectives is to enlist teachers and school administrators as "partners" of the pro-homosexual lifestyle lobby. Furthermore, GLSEN wants to "[e]nsure that the national agenda to create effective schools includes LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) issues."
What can we expect?
CNSNews.com's Robert Bluey has reported GLSEN's curriculum on same-sex marriage suggests teachers should "help students to move past preoccupations with the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of same-sex coupling or homosexuality in general." Instead, the debate over marriage needs to be addressed "within the context of human rights, thereby expanding the dialogue beyond the realm of morality."
The NEA is not the only national organization that sanctions the homosexual lifestyle. Either officially or by their actions the American Federation of Teachers, the American School Health Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, the American Association of School Administrators, and the National School Board Association have been helping to steamroller acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle in public schools.
Christians have to make clear to our local school boards and state legislators and to Congress that we will not permit our children to fall for the kid-glove cloaked, iron-fisted bullying tactics of GLSEN and its accomplices within the educational establishment.
Linda Harvey, President of Mission America, stated earlier this year in a CNS News.com commentary that the efforts of this pro-homosexual tolerance campaign that is aimed at young Americans has not enjoyed widespread success…yet. But she agrees with other conservative and Christian leaders such as the Religious Freedom Coalition's Bill Murray that with legalization of homosexual marriage, the curriculum and literature used by public schools, including the elementary level, will indeed be subject to widespread changes along the lines advocated by GLSEN-recommended literature.
The sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman serves as the cement for the wall that ensures our nation's traditional Judeo-Christian values remain intact. If we lose those standards, we will have lost our ability to remain a strong and free nation.
Break down that wall and American children will be subjected to an educational juggernaut powered by GLSEN that promotes widespread acceptance of homosexuality in American society, starting with impressionable young children in elementary schools. Lose the battle to have Congress refer the Federal Marriage Amendment to the states and our nation's moral foundation will come tumbling down.
If that's not enough to make you want to pick up the phone to make a few calls to Capitol Hill, then I'd like to know, just what will it take?
Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation
I have already written to my representatives, and even got a lovely response back from one of them, promising to do his best to get the amendment passed. I wish an amendment were not necessary, but with judges increasingly legislating from the bench and blurring the lines between the branches of government, I believe we have precious little choice if we wish to preserve a strong society for our children.
I was listening to Dennis Prager online a couple of weeks back, and he echoed Weyrich. He had actually addressed an audience of conservative pols on the importance of maintaining marriage as we know it, and they said they couldn't step out public and back any proposed Amendment without previous assurance that they wouldn't be standing alone.
He said that as much as he doesn't like the idea of amending the Constitution, an amendment is the last stand of the traditional family. Activist judges will not stop until they have created the right to same-sex marriage out of whole cloth.
The problem is "the public" is being convinced that an amendment is not necessary. The conventional wisdom out there right now is that the amendment is overkill. Of course, the media is trumpeting that loud and clear.
Conservatives have to do a better job of making their case to the public.
Love in any form is in short comodity these days ,so if two people ,regardless of what sex they are fall in love,I believe they have the right to be married and have the government acknowledge it as a true marrige
Welcome to Free Republic, angelisa. Apparently, you just signed up today (5/30/04, PDT). Read this response carefully, because it may save you a lot of rough lessons around here.
As you may have noticed, FR is a conservative news forum. Participation from liberals is not prohibited, but us Freepers have a pretty low tolerance for people who comment on issues when they clearly don't know their stuff.
If the above post is indicative of your regular thinking process, you, angelisa, don't know your stuff. You aren't even in sniffing distance of your stuff. For your sake, I hope you are a child, because an adult should have a more informed opinion on thorny issues like same-sex marriage.
Your statement's naivete is stunning. "Love in any form is in short comodity (sic) these days..."? What in the world does THAT mean? Who is in charge of measuring the average daily volume of love? Who determines whether someone is "in love" or not? And what are the different forms of love that you make reference to?
You go on to say you believe "two people, regardless of what sex they are...have the right to be married and have the government acknowledge it as a true marrige (sic)" What do you think marriage is for, angelisa? Do you really have any idea? Here's a hint: no matter how much two men or two women express their "love" for each other physically, they will NEVER create a family by themselves. NEVER.
I invite you to quit thinking in little bumper-sticker slogans and examine the real issues in the controversy about same-sex marriage, such as:
Yes, angelisa, it's a lot scarier than talking about 'falling in love.' You may not want to make the effort to understand. But that's the way things are around here, sweetie. You can be a Freeper, or you can be sheeple. The choice is yours.
Which reps? You can FReepMail me if you like.
Well, well, well. Looks like angelisa brought in some reinforcements. Welcome to Free Republic, kiah. You may want to read my comments to angelisa.
Apparently, whoever you are, you haven't been paying attention to what has just transpired in the California Supreme Court this past week. According to nearly all experts, the tone of the justices' questioning of the pro-gay attorneys indicate they are sure to be defeated.
S.F. mayor Gavin Newsom is not a judge, he is an executive office holder. He had an obligation to challenge the law in court if he believed it is un-Constitutional (which I contend he doesn't and never did), but he does NOT have the authority to order city officials to flaunt the same law that he solemnly swore to uphold a couple of weeks before at his inauguration.
Besides, this is not a case of the U.S. Constitution that the People's Republic of Sin Freaksicko has run afoul of, it is a case of the laws of the state of California. Newsom knew -- or should have known, since his wife is an attorney -- that the state of California would reject the altered marriage licenses that the city issued, since they were not in accord with California Family Law.
The city's stance is hypocritical in that it challenged the validity of the Federal marijuana ban on the basis of an approved California proposition decriminalizing marijuana for "medical" use. Funny how a proposition that changed California pot laws should be good enough for S.F. to thumb its nose at the Feds, but the measure that made marriage in California only between one man and one woman is not even good enough to uphold within the city.
What punishment, exactly, do you speak of? How does issuing licenses for same-sex marriage punish those who do not approve of same-sex marriage?
At this moment, if two homosexuals want to move in together and have their little "civil union" or "domestic partner" ceremony, I couldn't care less. But when the government is demanded to award their relationships legal status that is solely reserved for traditional marriage, they are demanding that I -- if I am a business owner or a contractor or even the operator of a church charity -- acknowledge their relationship as the equivalent of normal, scripturally-approved marriage. Potentially, if I refuse to do so, I could be accused of discrimination, and sued by the same Gay-stapo attorneys that foster suits like the one in Massachusetts. All this despite the fact that the votes of people like me were supposed to guarantee that I would not have to be concerned about such a possibility.
This is not even to mention the multiple strategies that are used to get pro-gay lessons taught to children, which are specifically designed to bypass and negate any traditional lessons about sexuality taught by parents. I happen to own a copy of that exquisite slice of propaganda called It's Elementary (the uncut version, not the version the filmmakers edited for debate on PBS) and also have read the book Queering Elementary Education. The examples cited in the editorial above are not anomalous.
San Francisco's State Assemblyman Mark Leno tried to get the tax-exempt status of the Church of Latter-Day Saints revoked because financial support of the Knight Amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman was mentioned at one Mormon service. And there has already been talk of S.F. businesses being required to give spousal discounts at retail places to gay couples with those outlaw marriage licenses if the California Supremes don't rule all of the same-sex ceremonies invalid.
Don't think it's a coincidence that the language of the Civil Rights movement is repeated by the Gay-stapo -- their goal is to ostracize people who believe that homosexuality is abnormal out of mainstream society in the same way that racists (rightfully) were. (At this point let me interject that I am black). This battle is not about treating "different" people with the respect they deserve as human beings, this is about one group of people fighting to deliver the last crushing blow to the nuclear family as a cornerstone of American society.
Please let me or little jeremiah know if anybody would like to be added or removed from the homosexual agenda ping list.
Hi script, my days are few here on FR, but, I still try to BUMP when I can.
It's always a pleasure to hear from you, GrandMoM. Thanks for bumping when you can.
Is that actually in the book? It totally blows my mind that would be in a book about educating children.
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":
[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."
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.
..."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."
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."
...A "queerly raised" child can "travel" between these "worlds" and inhabit more than one of these worlds at the very same time.
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."
...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...
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.
...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...
Special note to angelisa: If you haven't been scared away from FR, the above citations from an advocate of the destruction of the nuclear family are a perfect example of what I meant in my response to your post about 'people who fall in love.' When you scratch the surface and the Barney the Dinosaur world of "I love you, you love me" flakes off, what you get are hardcore, seriously subversive people who have a grand strategy of social re-engineering, even to the point that they will send their children as "agents" to influence the rest of ours.
The sex positive agenda strikes again. Not just content with teaching the mechanics of reproduction or even birth control/STDs, the sex positive agenda seeks to celebrate sex acts at all ages of youth, from child to adolescent to teen. There are no moral judgements (just against rape, although rape fantasy is considered perfectly fine).
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."
The bold faced lines are also BALD FACED LIES.
How can someone make a moral decision to say that polygamy is wrong if homosexual relations are "normal"?
Also, at the tender age of these kids, there is no "steady" relationships. This is why some advise against sexual relations with someone who is just a passing fling. It unleashes a whole lot of emotional distress that some people just aren't able to handle.
And how can you love "just one person"? Do you only love one of your parents? Only your immediate family? Only the people you go to school with??? Must there be a sexual component to love? Can't you love someone (friend, family, God, pet...) without getting sexual?
You know Mr. Smithee, your words and the words of your secular and religious bretheren are going to be the deciding blow in this battle.
We have to protect marriage together, but your words carry much more weight than most others. I hear on a regular basis that marriage defenders are like "Nazis" and are akin to the Taliban. They claim that it's about intolerance.
But isn't it intolerant to take a strong cultural value and force its redefinition on the grounds of a new morality that not even most citizens agree is valid? That argument is compared to the supposed majority opposition to the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Please explain to us why you don't think that argument is valid. I think it is because racial discrimination is easily denied by our fundamental values, the ones spelled out in our constitution. No where in our constitution or declaration of independence does it say that society is obligated to offer moral and financial rewards to a particular pairing (or other multiples of union). We choose from culture and our longstanding traditions to bless married men and women.
I would take all blessings away from all unions before I would change it. And that isn't going to happen as long as we want our country to go on existing in posterity.
| What We Can Do To Help Defeat the "Gay" Agenda |
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| Homosexual Agenda: Categorical Index of Links (Version 1.1) |
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| Myth and Reality about Homosexuality--Sexual Orientation Section, Guide to Family Issues" |
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