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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Actually, the ACLU itself it not a non-profit. There is the ACLU Foundation which is the non-profit branch of the organization. The ACLU is a lobbying organization and therefore cannot be tax-exempt.
Your arguments have degenerated into straw man stuff. I can't argue with someone who doesn't follow the regular rules of debate.
As one example you state:
"Then why do you need to work so hard to convince girls to become stay-at-home moms? Why are you afraid they will choose professional careers over raising large families, or choose lesbianism?"
You're the one who brought up the theoretical future homemakers' club, not me.
You're nuts. Find a fellow fantasy believer to play act with. I like nothing better than to sensibly discuss differing points of view.
What you're doing is presenting an argument that I DIDN'T MAKE and then "defeating" it.
Another thing you did was use my "natural law" phrase and then turn it into "common law" which are entirely different.
You basically say that any viewpoint is equal to every other viewpoint. If you really held that view, you wouldn't argue with me.
Well, I don't say that every viewpoint is equal. Mine is right, and yours is wrong.
And until you grow up and learn how to debate like an adult, I'm not going to waste my precious time with you. I've got a lot more interesting people to debate with.
It was big news here when the ACLU opened an office. And the only reaction I heard ANYwhere was, "Geez, oh GREAT..."
Well, I don't say that every viewpoint is equal. Mine is right, and yours is wrong.
That's not what I've said. Views are not all equal--of course your views are worse than mine, which you fail to comprehend. There is a difference between individuals making speech and government suppressing it, that is what you fail to see.
Free speech (which students do have some minimal right to) can only be suppressed by viewpoint-neutral tests (such as: "all speech is allowed unless it is defamatory, fraudulent, obscene, incitement to a crime, or in a time/place/manner that is inappropriate"). Schools can obviously impose greater restrictions on speech than exist for adults in the "real world," but the additional restrictions must be viewpoint-neutral.
If Texas decides it wants to tell young people that homosexuality is bad and wrong that's fine--but Texas can't stop young people from spreading the opposite idea. If Texas wants to tell young people that we took the territory from Mexico fair and square, that's fine--but Texas can't stop young people from spreading the opposite idea.
If liberals want to tell young people that evolution is the best explanation for the world around us (and it is), that's fine--but the schools can't stop young people from spreading ignorant ideas about creationism. If liberals want to tell young people that it's wrong to look down on homosexuality and homosexuals (and it is), that's fine--but schools can't stop hateful young people from spreading the opposite opinion.
See, that's the difference: individuals get to have political opinions, governments can have political opinions, but governments cannot suppress speech on a political basis.
tolerance for the intolerant is suicide
Just one more post on the dictionary.... I found Merriam-Webster Online http://www.m-w.com/ The definition there was identical to the one you posted (and alot faster than thumbing through a 3-inch thick volume :)
The fact that you think that the ACLU + "gay" radicals (but I repeat myself) forcing an entire school district full of kids to watch a pro-homosexual video is free speech, proves you're worse off than I can even imagine.
agreed.
Considering the source of this, I have to wonder. I have almost decided not to trust any media at all, ESPECIALLY if it is biased one way or the other.
Them are *fighting* words...
I wasn't referring at all to the video, I was referring to the formation of a pro-gay club at the school. Whether or not the video should be shown is more complex.
The school district agreed to present the video when it settled the case. The school district itself agreed to show the film. So the question is whether the settlement is in fact binding. Why would a legal settlement (agreed to by both parties) not be? This seems to me to be a matter of contract law or whatever, not free speech.
The question here is whether the school district has the right to go back on its word. A radical Muslim would agree with you, because us infidels are subhuman and can be lied to/cheated/etc. But I'm not seeing support for breaking contracts in Christian or Jewish traditions. What sort of a "conservative" are you? The idea that any party should be able to break a contract just for the heck of it is not conservative, it's radical.
I thought the question was whether children could be forced to view the film.
Ping
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