View homosexual film, or school faces lawsuit, ACLU tells (school) district

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:

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 openly/out of the closet gay director or Anthony D. Romero is the driving force behind the ACLU's gay agenda.

What is interesting since I started linking his official bios from ACLU, where he admitted that he was gay on FR. Those bios are now not bragging about him being openingly gay.

So I have to do a little search each time I post that fact to find it elsewhere. Here is another link re Anthony D Romero being openingly gay:

http://www.tampabaycoalition.com/files/GayACLUjob.htm

The Washington Blade www.washingtonblade.com

Gay man tapped for top ACLU job
Romero becomes first Latino director of prominent civil rights organization

Anthony Romero: "I can take our issues to every community and every constituency."

by Peter Freiberg

Anthony D. Romero, a 35-year-old openly Gay Latino man, was named Tuesday to head the American Civil Liberties Union as its new national executive director.

Romero, currently a Ford Foundation executive, will assume the ACLU position in September. He will take over from Ira Glasser, who has resigned after leading the organization for 23 years.

Romero will be the first openly Gay person and the first Latino to head the New York-based ACLU, which has become a crucial organization in the legal and political battles for Gay equality.

"With all appropriate modesty," said Matt Coles, director of the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, "I think [the ACLU] is the country’s premier constitutional rights and civil liberties organization. To have an openly Gay man as executive director is just a marvelous statement of how far we’ve come.

"… If you put aside the public sector and the entertainment industry," Coles said, "I’m not sure I can think of an openly Gay person in a more prominent and important position."

Romero was notified of his appointment last Saturday night, when ACLU board president Nadine Strossen called him to say the 83-member board had unanimously ratified his selection by a 14-member screening committee.

Romero said he was "thrilled" at being chosen. With its 300,000 members and 53 affiliates in every state and the District of Columbia, Romero said, the ACLU "has a power and a strength that goes beyond some of the single-issue or single constituency organizations" as it works to defend Americans’ "basic civil rights."

"I am thrilled also," Romero told the Blade, "about being the first openly Gay leader, not just at the ACLU but at almost every other mainstream civil rights organization.

"… I can take our agenda and our issues — the rights of Gay, Lesbian, transgender and bisexual people … through the organization to every community and every constituency across the country."

Strossen said that, when the ACLU began its nationwide search last September, it had "this incredibly demanding job description with 50 qualifications that no human being could possibly match."

But Romero, she said, "came exceedingly close to matching them," winning the job after the initial scores of applicants were winnowed down to fewer than 20, then to eight semi-finalists and eventually to three finalists.

"I think we have found an absolutely perfect new leader," Strossen said, "to succeed somebody who I thought was absolutely just irreplaceable." She said Romero is "one of those rare individuals" who combines "knowledge, commitment, passion and vision on constitutional liberties, civil rights, and social justice" with a talent for administrative and managerial work.

"He is going to be equally dazzling on all those fronts," Strossen said. And it is also, she said, "so wonderfully eloquent and symbolic of our [ACLU] issues to have someone who is young, the son of two immigrant parents, and an openly Gay man and a Latino who grew up in a public housing project in the Bronx."

The ACLU’s choice was hailed by Martín Ornelas-Quintero, executive director of LLEGÓ, the National Latina/o LGBT Organization, who said he was confident Romero was not appointed because he is Gay and Latino.

"That only adds to the expertise and sensitivity he brings," said Ornelas-Quintero. "What [his selection] does show, though, is that, as openly Gay or openly Latino … people, we can now be considered for such mainstream positions. That’s the importance of Anthony’s appointment."

The object of all this praise, whose parents emigrated from Puerto Rico, is currently director of human rights and international cooperation at the Ford Foundation, where he has worked since 1992. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Stanford Law School.

At Ford, said Romero, one of his priorities was to "strengthen and broaden the foundation’s definition of human rights to be much more explicit about reaching out to Gay and Lesbian civil rights organizations."

Matt Coles: "To have an openly Gay man as executive director is just a marvelous statement."
(by Clint Steib)

Although Ford and most other major mainstream foundations gave only minimal funding, if any, to Gay groups even a few years ago, Romero said he was able "to make a case that underscored the importance of having a focus on Gay and Lesbian equality as part and parcel of our work on human rights."

That success has not only resulted in Gay-related funding from his own human rights program — to the tune of almost $1.4 million in grants this fiscal year — but has also led to Gay-related funding from a half-dozen other Ford programs in such areas as youth development and media.

When he takes the ACLU’s helm, Romero will inherit an organization that grew markedly during Glasser’s 23-year tenure but now faces what it believes are major threats to American civil liberties — some of which also threaten Gay civil rights.

One such threat, Romero said, stems from President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, which would provide federal funds directly to religious organizations, some of which may be anti-Gay.

Asked for his position on hate crimes laws — which most major Gay groups support but which critics charge raise free speech questions — Romero said he wants to study the issue more.

"The fact is," he said, "I haven’t yet begun, my feet haven’t even hit the ground." In the past, the ACLU has backed some of these laws and opposed others, according to Coles.

Romero said that, from his days as a school kid in the Bronx, he has always been a defender of free speech — his own as well as others’, even when that speech was directed at him.

He recalls being taunted and teased because he was "very studious, nerdy" or perceived as a sissy. But he asserted, "I was always outspoken," so much so that he constantly came home with his glasses broken.

"My mom would say, ‘Can’t you just learn to be quiet, those glasses are costing me a fortune,’ Romero remembered. "I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t."

Romero related this story to the full ACLU board prior to his selection.

"It gives … a sense of how I’ve always valued the importance of speaking your mind," he said. "The best response to speech we don’t like, the best response to speech that offends us, is more speech."

His goals for the ACLU include diversifying its membership by race, ethnicity, and age and increasing its appeal "across the ideological spectrum."

He said he hopes to organize members as a "nonpartisan political force" that will "stand for the ACLU, rather than merely allowing the ACLU to stand for them." And he will seek to provide more financial and other resources to the ACLU’s state affiliates, which he calls the "backbone of the organization."

Romero, who now lives in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood with his partner of five years, was born in New York City into a working-class home.

"Growing up," he said, "I certainly saw firsthand the impact of discrimination and of poverty, and felt firsthand the effects of homophobia."

His father, Demetrio Romero, had finished fourth grade in Puerto Rico and, after immigrating, worked at Manhattan’s Warwick Hotel. A biography of Romero, contained in a chapter in a 1997 book, We Won’t Go Back, which makes the case for affirmative action, said his father’s hoped-for promotion to banquet waiter was delayed many years because of anti-Latino discrimination.

Before Romero entered high school, the family moved to a small town in New Jersey because of deterioration and crime in their Bronx neighborhood.

"Ultimately," Romero said, "it got to the point where my mom was very fearful for the family’s safety and for her kids. That’s why we moved away."

Romero experienced racist jokes and hazing in their new home but also made friends with a range of working-class kids of different ethnic backgrounds. He always remained close with his immediate and extended family, which helped when he later came out.

Asked if his coming out was difficult, Romero said, "Over time, no." His mother, a deeply religious person, "has always been very supportive, very loving;" his father, who died nine years ago, "was someone who adored his children, no matter what."

"It always takes an adjustment [when a child comes out]," he said. "For Gay people, it sometimes takes us many years to come out, and we’re the ones struggling with our emotions. We’ve got to give the family a time to adjust to some of these issues as well."

Before going to the Ford Foundation, Romero worked for two years at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he led a review of future directions in civil rights advocacy.

At Ford, the human rights program became the foundation’s largest under his leadership, giving $90 million in grants last year. Romero paved the way for groundbreaking grants not only in Gay civil rights but in such areas as affirmative action, voting rights and redistricting, and the rights of minority women and those with low incomes.

In a statement, Ford Foundation president Susan Berresford called Romero "an outstanding leader and valued colleague throughout the time we have worked together."

Romero has attended LLEGÓ functions over the years but was especially active for awhile in Hispanic Gay Men of New York. He serves on the boards of several mainstream nonprofit organizations. In March, LeGal, New York’s Lesbian and Gay Lawyers Association, presented him with an award for public service.

Romero will begin working part-time at the ACLU in June and then become executive director in September. He expressed eagerness about the challenges awaiting him — and the organization.

"Most of our cases," he said, "come to us from ordinary people who need the ACLU because they have been denied basic rights. … They need our help to fight back."

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