Posted on 11/28/2004 12:21:56 AM PST by JohnHuang2
Sunday, November 28, 2004
If administrators of Kentucky's Boyd County school district can't find a way to force all students to attend sexual orientation and gender identity "tolerance training," the American Civil Liberties Union is threatening to take them to court – again.
Ten months ago, the district settled a lawsuit with the ACLU over the right of a student group, the Gay-Straight Alliance, to meet on campus. The year-long litigation strained relations in the conservative northeast portion of the state. In addition to allowing the group to meet on campus after school, district officials agreed that all students, staff and teachers would be required to receive "tolerance training."
The agreement stipulated all would attend "mandatory anti-harassment workshops," including the viewing of an hour-long "training" video covering sexual orientation and gender identity issues for middle and high school students.
But ten months on, one-third of Boyd County students have failed to see the video, and that has the ACLU threatening court action.
"It sounds like the training can't possibly be done," James Esseks, litigation director for the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, tells the Louisville Courier-Journal.
District figures show 105 of 730 middle school students opted out of the training video and 145 of 971 high school students did likewise. On the day scheduled for training, 324 students didn't show up for school.
The current legal snag arises from the fact the original consent decree had no provision for parents exempting their children.
"The schools have great latitude in what they want to teach, including what's in training programs, and the training is now part of the school curriculum," Esseks says. "Parents don't get to say I don't want you to teach evolution or this, that or whatever else. If parents don't like it they can homeschool, they can go to a private school, they can go to a religious school."
"Where are the parental rights in this whole thing?" asks Rev. Tim York, president of the Boyd County Ministerial Alliance and head of Defenders Voice, a community group formed to contest the decree.
According to the group's website, Defenders Voice "incorporated due to the need for protection of both the physical and mental health of our students and citizens." Its members place blame for their current distress squarely on the ACLU:
"We have seen an onslaught of aggressive homosexual activism sweep across our country. In many cases, these activists are supported by the ACLU in their attempts. ... Defenders Voice believes that an organization like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) should not be allowed to tell parents what their children must learn."
The Alliance Defense Fund, a religious-liberties public-interest legal group, has signed on to help Defenders Voice, pledging to sue the school district unless it adopts an opt-out policy for parents this week. Alliance was formed in 1993 with the guidance of several well-known Christian conservatives, including the late Dr. Bill Bright, the late Larry Burkett, Dr. James Dobson, Dr. D. James Kennedy, and the late Marlin Maddoux.
Joe Platt, a Cincinnati attorney representing Alliance, says mandatory training on tolerance for homosexuals violates the right of conscience of parents and students who believe such behavior immoral.
But school district attorney, Winter Huff, insists to the Courier-Journal the decree does not violate parental rights: "Students certainly have the right to believe in what they want to believe, but they don't have the right to act out in inappropriate ways. The point is you don't treat people disrespectfully, you don't pick on people, you don't bully them, you don't make them afraid to come to school."
Meanwhile, only one of the seven plaintiffs in the 2003 lawsuit still remain in school. Six have graduated, and the teacher-adviser for the Gay-Straight Alliance club asked to transfer to another campus.
The ACLU's Esseks is now questioning whether the mandatory video meets the decree's required hour of anti-harassment training. Like one-third of the students in Boyd County schools, he has yet to view it.
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The ACLU's view of freedom of speech is to coerce the government to FORCE students to watch something they don't agree with. The ACLU's interpretation of the First Amendment has come down to banning Christianity from the schools on the one hand and compelling the joys of the gay agenda to be shoved down the throats of a captive audience on the other hand. In a perverse kind of way, it makes twisted sense. This view of freedom of expression ACLU-style says more about the degenerate state of the civil liberties organization than it does about its critics. Maybe Nat Hentoff could offer some thoughts here.
I'd be right tempted to tell them to take their film and put up there with their gerbil or hampster, or whatever...
How can students be held to a district lawsuit to see a film?
Yeah and the ACLU tells parents to go take a flying leap off a bridge. With their liberal arrogance, they assume they know what's best for the chilrun better than the folks who raise them and love them do. We hear a lot about people not being exposed to religious indoctrination but by Licorice, we'll make sure people know all about gay sex they'd rather shun. To these Libertine prigs, its all about making sure the sheeple don't ever escape their thumbs.
That's exactly what they should be doing -- with vouchers sufficient to off-set the taxes they pay to support the homosexual indoctrination centers known as public schools.
Thanks, ACLU, for driving parents closer to the correct solution.
The ACLU's view of freedom of speech is to coerce the government to FORCE students to watch something they don't agree with.
I have absolutely had it up to Green River! Every day somewhere in the country these f***s are getting away with another outrage. I can understand that maybe an underfunded school district is afraid to take them on but the Pentagon? How are they finding so easy to push institutions and branches of government around? Are there any conservative legal scholars out there who can do more than whine and bellyache in the best republican fashion? From what little I know I suspect that in the majority of such cases the district or town, or bureau in question is in fact in cahoots with the ACLU and "loses" on purpose (then pays their legal fees). But there has got to be some kind of pro-active strategy that can carry the war to them for a change. I am just so sick of the all whining and impotent teeth-gnashing I hear day-in, day-out on this subject. Can't we actually DO something?
I noticed its Kentucky. Now we know why liberals are so loathed in Flyover Country. I hope the ACLU keeps this up. They'll help the Bluegrass State turn even Redder.
Bump!
But they have to continue to pay for public schools, of course, while also paying for the alternative. Ya gotta love liberal "fairness".
Qwinn
A lot of parents will take the ACLU's advice to heart and start homeschooling their kids. Or save money to send them to private school. In a way, the ACLU's ham-handedness may be the best thing to happen in Kentucky in decades.
Oh, they have a fincanical interest as well.
New CD Marry Me Supports the ACLU’s Efforts to Win Marriage for Same-Sex Couples
http://www.aclu.org/LesbianGayRights/LesbianGayRights.cfm?ID=17009&c=23
"The ACLU’s Lesbian & Gay Rights and AIDS Projects will receive 50 percent of proceeds from the wholesale price of the Marry Me compilation"
Hardly disinterested promoters of civil liberty... If they don't push the gay agenda over the objections of the public, that's oodles of money they don't get. Common sense and fairness has been pushed aside by that oldest of motives, the need to make a profit. Why the ACLU is allowed then to retain its non-profit status is utterly beyond me.
Yeah, well I want my property tax reassessed. So the ACLU tells me to take a hike? I'll take my taxes too!
Looking at it from the other end, I see this a blessing in disguise. The ACLU is helping to hasten the end of the public school monopoly as we've known it in this country by subverting it from within. Like that's a bad thing.
Sign the petition to stop taxpayer funding of the ACLU.
http://www.ipetitions.com/campaigns/ACLU/
Christian Freepers:
If you don't pray to Jesus Christ about this, you better!
Atheist Freepers:
If you don't write your senators about this, you ain't gonna write them about anything.
Intolerant of intolerance?
Where do these anti-Christs get so much money that they can sue everyone?
This is yet another great reason to home school children.
This would get a resounding FU in my neck of the woods. It's time to get thee out of her folks. The public school system is a whore of the socialist left.
I can bet you bubkes that if the school district wanted to show a film about Christmas, the ACLU would sue to prevent it from seeing the light of day.
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